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An Early Trump Backer's Message to the Republican Party: Dump Him

The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party has always come from the ranks of his own supporters, rather than those who disliked him all along. So it’s significant that one of his earliest backers is coming out swinging against him.

In February 2016, when Rep. Tom Marino became one of the first Republican members of Congress to endorse Trump, he called the decision “one of my life-changing moments” and hailed the presidential candidate as a fresh voice who was not beholden to Wall Street.

At the time, Trump was still locked in a tight nomination battle with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and he was struggling to attract support from elected officials. Marino, a former prosecutor who represented a rural district in northern Pennsylvania, didn’t just endorse him. He was a loud and proud Trump booster who helped steer his campaign in the state and joined his presidential transition team after he won.

Trump expressed fondness for Marino and Lou Barletta, a fellow member of Congress and co-chair of the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, calling them “thunder and lightning.”

As president, Trump tapped Marino to be director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, though Marino withdrew after questions about his record on opioids. He resigned from Congress in 2019 soon after beginning his fifth term, citing recurring kidney problems.

During this year’s Republican primary for governor in Pennsylvania, Marino sharply criticized Trump for refusing to endorse Barletta, who lost that race to Doug Mastriano. Now, he is urging his fellow Republicans to move on.

“I think the Republican Party has to do whatever it has to do to get away from Trump,” Marino said in an interview. “He certainly, I think, has cost the party losses in this election that we had in November. I’m deeply disappointed in him.”

In an unpublished letter that he shared with The New York Times, Marino castigated Trump for “acting like a childish bully” by attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom the former president ripped as “Ron DeSanctimonious” as Republicans began to coalesce around a possible alternative for 2024.

To secure his support, Marino wrote, Trump would have had to “grow up and act presidential and refrain from calling potential candidates derogatory names.”

 

Trump, he added, “has thrown several people that were close to him under the bus”; “has no idea what loyalty means”; and “severely lacks character and integrity.”

“I will not support Trump, in fact, I will campaign against him,” Marino’s letter concluded. “Our country deserves a person who is mature, respects others and is honest to lead our nation.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Did Jan. 6 Hearings Hurt Him?

Democrats tend to view Republicans’ attitude toward Trump as cynical rather than principled in nature, remembering how a good chunk of the party rallied to his side in early 2021 — then eagerly sought his endorsement in 2022.

"If the GOP had won the House by a large margin and taken the Senate on the backs of Trump’s candidates, the reaction to these recent troubles would be very, very different,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama, wrote Tuesday in his Substack newsletter.

What this misses, though, is that the Jan. 6 committee — especially its slickly produced prime-time hearings over the summer, which riveted millions of viewers — does seem to have been at least a minor factor in Republicans’ losses this year.

One of the few polls to try to isolate the question came out this week. In surveys commissioned by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan watchdog group, 46% of voters in five battleground states said that the Jan. 6 hearings were a factor in their decision. And a larger group — 57% — said they had been at least some exposure to the hearings.

The poll zeroed in on so-called ticket-splitters — Republicans and independents who voted for a Democrat in one race and a Republican in another. In Arizona, 20.9% of those ticket-splitters said that Jan. 6 was a top factor in their vote. In Pennsylvania, that number was just 8.5%. Those numbers are pretty modest, but every vote counts.

 

When I recently asked Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who worked to defeat election deniers in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, to assess the role democracy played in the midterms, she was cautious.

“I do think we’ve just won an important battle and sent a message to Republicans that election denialism and extremism is a loser with swing/independent voters in states that hold the keys to political power,” she said in an email. But it was too soon, she said, to say that American democracy was “out of the woods.”

The most potent argument within the base of the Republican Party has not been Trump’s behavior in office, but the increasingly dominant view that his obsession with the 2020 election cost the GOP crucial seats this year.

That could be the most powerful anti-Trump argument of all, said John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University: that election denial is a political loser.

“All that matters is the interpretation,” Sides said. “If that perception takes root, then it really doesn’t matter what the real reason is.”