Ex-RNC Chair Michael Steele tore into President Donald Trump this week, asserting that his struggling endorsements are a sign that his influence is collapsing as his MAGA base grows “fractured and dissipated.”
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Trump has long boasted of his “kingmaker” status within the GOP, claiming that his endorsements are bulletproof in Republican primaries and using them to threaten lawmakers who step out of line. The current midterm cycle, however, has provided numerous examples of his waning influence, as it did on Tuesday, when his endorsed candidates fell short in Minnesota and South Carolina. Pillow salesman and election fraud conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell suffered a bruising loss in the GOP primary for the Minnesota gubernatorial race, while Sen. Darline Graham Nordone, who selected to finish her brother Lindsey Graham’s final term, fell short of a definitive win in her primary, sending the race to a runoff.
During a panel segment on MS NOW’s “On the Line” Wednesday, host Alicia Menendez noted how Trump seemed to try to obscure the failure of his South Carolina endorsement in particular, claiming to like all of the candidates, a move that signaled his growing insecurity.
“He knows that this question of whether or not he can be a kingmaker is now in the ether,” Menendez suggested.
“It’s very, very much in the ether,” Steele responded. “The MAGA base has fractured and dissipated in a number of ways for a number of reasons. And… the bigger reasons are twofold. One is the downward pressure of the economy on them. You know, it didn’t just hit democrats. It hit them to imagine that. And two, the Epstein files still play [as] a big, big narrative in that space. And so, you know that Trump tries to cloud the airwaves and create the noise around elections and voting and getting people riled up about something.”
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He continued: “But at the end of the day, you know, as he said, they’re all trumpers, and he doesn’t really care one way or the other who the nominee is to be. To be rather frank about it, this is the least… exciting and important thing in Donald Trump’s universe, because it’s not an art, it’s not a ballroom. It’s not something he can build and construct. He has to actually deal with human beings. And he doesn’t really like that so much. So the reality for him, for those candidates, is you’re out there swimming on your own.”
Elsewhere in the segment, Steele also tore into Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor in Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany, who won the party’s nomination on Tuesday, saying it would be the “ultimate corruption” to put a known election denier in that office.
“It is the ultimate corruption of the process in the system,” Steele said. “It is profoundly antithetical to what the citizens of that state decided. And that then becomes a problem for that governor. I mean, you know, these things don’t happen in a vacuum. You know, if… in 2020, [Georgia Gov. Brad] Raffensperger and others decided, okay, we’ll play with Donald Trump. You cannot discount the outrage from the citizenry and the voters out there when hearing that text or hearing those tapes, then realizing that their governor cheated, stole the votes from them.”
He continued: “That’s going to be a real impact on the state. And so what you’re seeing here… is the party now is all about feeding that chaos. If it doesn’t get its way, it’s all about feeding that beast. That beast is Donald Trump, at the end of the day, giving him what he wants. But there are consequences for that. We see some of that play out already.”
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