Former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney is “hoping to rebuild the Republican Party” after Donald Trump left the political scene. Mitt Romney, the retiring senator from Utah and former presidential candidate, reportedly hopes so too.
Among other prominent Republicans refusing to bend the knee, former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan is running for a U.S. Senate seat in a Trump-led party but insists he could be part of a post- Trump Republican Party.
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“I think there are a lot of people who are very frustrated with the direction of the party and some of them are giving up,” Hogan told the Guardian. “I think we need to stand up and try to win back the Republican Party and ultimately get us back on track, to a bigger tent. [Ronald] Reagan’s party, which can win elections again.”
Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and now host of MSNBC, argued for more dramatic action: “We have to blow up this crazy party and make it come back to its senses or something else will come out of it. There are only two options here. Hogan will play a key role in whatever happens. Liz Cheney [former congressmen] Adam Kinzinger and Joe Walsh – all of us who have been pushed aside and fortunately not infected with Maga, we will have a say in what happens on November 6.”
That’s the day after Election Day, when Trump will face Kamala Harris. If Trump wins, all bets are off. If he loses, the never-Trumpers can try to win back their party. Few have illusions about the magnitude of the task.
“It will take somewhere between six, eight, 10 years before the Maga faction of the party can be defeated in a resounding and definitive manner,” said Reed Galen, son of the late Republican Rich Galen. Galen is an advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain, co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, and now leads Join the Union, a coalition of pro-democracy groups.
“If you think about it, 85% of Republican primary voters voted for Trump this year. Is that bad for someone who owns the party and is a former president? Yes, electorally that could be possible. But it also says that the people who actually choose nominees are Maga, right?
“Do I think there will be some erosion if Trump loses? Yes, but I don’t think it will be below 50% and I don’t think anyone who considers themselves a diehard Republican or a Maga Republican wants to go back to the days of George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney , or even Nikki Haley.
“If the establishment, as it is now, wants its party back, it will have to do some pretty serious work to destroy the parts of it that are anti-democratic and fundamentally dangerous to the country. Based on their track record, I don’t know if they are willing to do that. To be honest, I don’t think they are. I think they’re going to try to figure out how to survive long enough for the thing to maybe burn itself out.”
Among elected or previously elected Republicans with national profiles, Cheney has gone the furthest in campaigning for Harris in battleground states. Romney has remained silent. So he may seem better positioned to shape a post-Trump party, but Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist turned publisher of the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, recently called his position “truly insane.” .
She said, “I can’t support Kamala Harris because I need to save some money to help rebuild the Republican party?” No.”
Trump and the Trumpists’ hold on Romney’s party is too strong, according to Longwell, to allow such inaction.
Cheney has hinted at interest in building a new right-wing party, telling an audience in Wisconsin that “that might be the case [necessary] because… much of the Republican Party today has allowed itself to become a tool for this truly unstable man.” But starting over would be enormously difficult, not least because right-wing donors and interest groups have so successfully capitalized on Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party, delivering landmark policy victories, not least the abolition of the federal right to abortion.
Galen said, “All the people who built all these front groups, whether it’s the Heritage Foundation [originator of the controversial Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term] or the Conservative Partnership Institute, or [the dark money impresario] Leonard Leo, all these people spent decades and billions of dollars building this stuff. It’s not like they just put up their tent and say, ‘You in the establishment, take back your company.’ These people are true believers.”
That includes the younger donors, strategists and elected officials now led by JD Vance, the 40-year-old Ohio senator who once opposed Trump but became his vice presidential pick with the backing of billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
“The worst kept secret in the world is that JD Vance or [Texas senator] Ted Cruz or [Missouri senator] Josh Hawley all desperately want Trump to lose because they want their chance,” Galen said. “Trump does [nearly] 80. They are in their 40s, maybe early 50s, and they want him to go away.
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“But even if he loses, they can’t completely separate themselves from him. They may try, but the truth is we’re not just talking about the Republican Party, we’re talking about the American political party. This is at least a ten year program to get this thing back into some sort of healthy state.
“Defeating Donald Trump is like surviving a car crash. It doesn’t mean you’re not in the hospital, and it doesn’t mean you’re okay. It just means they pulled out the jaws of life and ripped you out of the car.
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For Galen, the question of whether the Republican establishment can take back his party is ultimately a waste of time—emphasis on “time.” Cheney is 58, Hogan 68, Romney will be 78 next year. Mike Pence, the vice president whom Trump abandoned to the mafia on January 6 but who has kept quiet, is himself 65.
“They are the dinosaurs of the Republican Party,” Galen said. “The comet has hit, the cloud is covered, it’s just a matter of accepting your fate.”
Galen, in his late forties, claims he has energy for the battle ahead. Nevertheless, he describes a sobering recent experience in London when he sat with “Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera and assaulted a Trump spokesperson in a debate.” That was fun, but Galen had his own confrontation. One of the panelists, a younger Trump supporter, leaned over and told him, “You know, we killed your party, and we couldn’t be happier about it.”
“The Republican Party is a nationalist, nativist party,” Galen said. “All these things that I grew up with as far as the party goes, the idea of a moral and muscular foreign policy, fiscal responsibility, individual freedom?
“All that stuff is gone. It’s gone.”
