Trump tried to blow up a top state lawmaker for failing to vigorously pursue his false election claims. But the attack was a dud.
WISCONSIN DELLS, Wis. — It could have upended the Wisconsin Republican Party’s annual convention, given Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP. Just as the state party gathered this past weekend, Trump issued a statement tearing into the state Assembly speaker, Robin Vos, and two other Republican lawmakers for doing too little to promote his election conspiracies.
But in a rare setback for his post-presidential interventions in the GOP, Trump in Wisconsin appeared to shoot a blank. When Vos and Devin LeMahieu, the state’s Senate majority leader, took the stage on Saturday in front of some of the party’s most fervent pro-Trump activists, it was as though Trump had said nothing at all. There were no boos. Vos drew applause. Convention-goers dismissed an effort to censure him.
In Wisconsin at least, Trump failed to set off the same intra-party chaos that has marked his efforts elsewhere. Worse for him, despite the former president’s harsh personal criticism, there were signs his comments were dismissed with a roll of the eyes.
“I just think it’s been going on for so long that people are kind of tired of it,” said Tony Kurtz, a GOP assemblyman from rural Juneau County, which went for Trump last year by nearly 30 percentage points.
For more than seven months since he lost the election, Trump has engaged in a crusade against Republicans who crossed him, an effort he invigorated with a rally in Ohio on Saturday, where he traveled to campaign against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who voted to impeach him earlier this year. In most cases, the Republican base has responded zealously. But here, at a convention center attached to a water park, the lack of interest from the rank-and-file suggested some of the first, tentative signs of weariness of Trump’s smash-mouth political act.
Even Sen. Ron Johnson, an unfailing Trump ally, broke with the former president’s criticism of Johnson’s home-state lawmakers, dismissing Trump’s suggestion that they could be primaried.
“I don’t think that represents much of a threat, quite honestly,” Johnson said, describing Vos and his colleagues as “doing a pretty good job.”
Trump remains wildly popular among Wisconsin Republicans — no less than in other states — and the belief in his false claim that the election was rigged is widespread, underpinning a raft of elections-related legislation passed by Republican lawmakers in the state this month. At the state convention, activists cheered for Trump when organizers played a recorded message in which Trump repeated his falsehood that he carried the state in November. The convention included a panel on election law changes, the state party homepage prominently features an “election integrity dashboard” and delegates carried tote bags that read “Defend secure elections.”
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For more than seven months since he lost the election, Trump has engaged in a crusade against Republicans who crossed him.
But in Wisconsin, he has failed to spark intra-party chaos. https://t.co/4ITmr7kplO
— POLITICO (@politico) June 28, 2021
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