And there also are concerns that a near-term announcement could hurt Republicans going into the final stretch of a midterm congressional campaign that appears increasingly favorable to the party. A Trump candidacy could unite otherwise despondent Democratic voters, reviving the energy that lifted the party in the 2018 and 2020 campaigns.
Republicans want the November election to be framed as a referendum on the first two years of Biden’s presidency. They don’t want anything, including Trump, to throw them off that trajectory.
Regardless of his decision, the aura of inevitability that Trump sought to create from the moment he left the White House has been punctured. A long list of other Republicans have been laying the groundwork for their own potential campaigns and some have made clear that a Trump candidacy would have little influence on their own decisions.
They include Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who has been hailed by the Jan. 6 committee as someone who put the national interest ahead of his own political considerations.
Eyeing a White House bid, Pence is maintaining a brisk political schedule focused on drawing attention to Democratic vulnerabilities. But his challenges were put into stark relief Friday, as Trump continued to blast him for failing to go along with his scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
While he denied ever calling Pence a wimp, Trump railed against his former vice president Friday, saying, “Mike did not have the courage to act.” That drew applause from a crowd that Pence, himself an Evangelical Christian, has spoken before numerous times.
Reed, who described himself as “a dear friend” of Pence, declined to comment on the rift, but said Pence had been invited to the appear at the conference. “If Mike Pence wanted to come and wanted to offer a rejoinder to these folks, he could have done it,” he said.
Beyond Pence, other possible candidates including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have also indicated their decisions do not rest on Trump’s. And others are making moves, including Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Florida Sen. Rick Scott and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who were all appearing at the conference, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is seen by many loyal Trump supporters as the future of his movement.
Though it’s increasingly clear that Trump wouldn’t march to the GOP nomination unchallenged, a large field of candidates could still work to his advantage. The dynamic is beginning to resemble the 2016 campaign, when Trump faced a large and unwieldy group of candidates who split the anti-Trump vote.
“We’re going to be in pretty uncharted waters,” said Reed. “So I would tend to think that that will not be the same kind of primary as, say, ‘16 was. It would seem to me that he’d be potentially stronger in that primary by having been a former president and having had this record. … On the other hand, it is not 2020. He’s going to have a primary. And he won’t be the incumbent president. And depending on who chooses to run, it’s going to be different for him, too. He’s going to have to make case to those voters.”
Indeed, despite the audience cheers, many of those attending the conference voiced skepticism about a third Trump run.
“I don’t know. The jury’s still out with me,” said Jonathan Goodwin, a minister who works as a Faith and Freedom organizer in South Carolina. “I like him, but I think he shot himself in the foot too many times.”
