As Trump Mulls Future, GOP Moves On – By Susan Milligan (US News) / July 8, 2022
With Trump out of power and under investigation, the fear factor is diminishing. And GOP presidential wannabes aren’t waiting around for him to decide about ‘24.
Donald Trump, as his foe-turned-supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham recently noted, flourished with an uncompromising policy: Don’t cross him or you’ll get burned. Republican candidates who were seen as insufficiently loyal to their leader? Trump would endorse their primary opponents, forcing the Trump-skeptical candidates to step aside or be defeated. And administration officials who didn’t toe the Trump line? They’d get pink-slipped – in the case of former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, hours before he was to retire voluntarily with a pension.
But with Trump out of power for a year and a half, and under investigation by a select House committee that is unearthing damning evidence about the former president’s role in the insurrection at the Capitol, the fear factor is diminishing.
Republicans who served in Trump’s White House or on his campaign have been testifying before the Jan. 6 committee, in many cases defying their former boss in colorful language and brutal terms.
Trump’s own daughter acknowledged to the committee that she respected former Attorney General Bill Barr’s assessment that the 2020 election was not “stolen” from Trump, as the defeated former president insists. And Trump’s own lawyer, Pat Cipollone, is set to testify behind closed doors before the committee Friday after rejecting requests by the panel to talk.
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