Is the Republican Party an operation dedicated to smaller government and conservative victories? Or is it now a subsidiary of the Trump Organization? This is worth pondering, given that Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee’s new co-chair, is suggesting she might pull the party’s support for its own Senate nominee in Maryland, Larry Hogan.
When news came last Thursday that a New York jury had reached a verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, Mr. Hogan called for calm. “Regardless of the result,” he wrote online, minutes before the conviction was announced, “I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process. At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship.”
Mr. Hogan, who was Maryland’s popular Governor from 2015 to 2023, might be the only man in America who could potentially win this Senate seat for the GOP.
His state in 2020 picked President Biden over Mr. Trump by more than 2 to 1.
Mr. Hogan is pitching himself as a centrist fed up with “partisan B.S.” If he can deliver an unexpected win in November, that could give Republicans control of the Senate, along with the power in 2025 and 2026 to either block Mr. Biden’s agenda or pass Mr. Trump’s.
The head of the Republican National Committee ought to understand this. But what Mr. Trump always puts first is blind personal loyalty to himself. He has now made the RNC into a family fief, and his daughter-in-law Lara is of the same mind. Hence her reply when asked about Mr. Hogan’s mild plea not to fuel partisan fires, which was perhaps the minimum he needed to say to satisfy Maryland voters.
“He doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point, and quite frankly, anybody in America,” Ms. Trump told CNN. Is she willing to expend GOP resources to help Mr. Hogan win? “I’ll get back to you on all the specifics, monetarily, but what I can tell you is that, as the Republican Party co-chair, I think he should never have said something like that. I think that’s ridiculous.”
A national party needs to be a big tent to secure a majority. Ms. Trump, the GOP’s co-chair, sounds as if she’d choose a Democratic Senate over a Republican Senate that includes the likes of Larry Hogan. This kind of thing is one reason that even if Mr. Trump wins this fall, he will find it hard to govern.
