Politico
Trump’s ‘circular firing squad’ threatens GOP midterm gains

Rick Bowmer/AP Photo
David Siders and Natalie Allison
Sat, February 5, 2022, 5:00 AM
SALT LAKE CITY — Nine months before the midterm elections, nearly everything is falling the Republican Party’s way, from President Joe Biden’sdismal approval ratings to rising gas prices and a seemingly never-ending pandemic.

Yet as the Republican National Committee concluded its winter meeting here on Friday, it was censuring two of its own, Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), and decrying the House’s Jan. 6 select committee for what Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, called the “persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

In a year in which even many Democrats acknowledge the GOP will likely win the House — and despite Republican lawmakers and strategists pleading with Republicans to keep their focus on pocketbook issues and on Biden — the RNC is still recasting the events of Jan. 6 and chasing down enemies of the defeated former president, Donald Trump.

For all the energy he creates at the party’s grassroots, his stranglehold on the party is emerging as one of the biggest threats to the GOP’s otherwise bright prospects in November.

He has already singled out 10 House Republicans for extinction. He is attacking GOP governors and backing their primary challengers, while meddling in Senate races where it may lead to the nomination of flawed candidates who are ill-suited for a general election. He is fomenting a rebellion against the party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. And this week, in Salt Lake City, it was David Bossie, the former Trump deputy