A second Republican on Sunday declared himself the party's primary candidate against Donald Trump for the US presidential election of November 2020, a candidacy that does not threaten the outgoing president but shows that pockets of resistance remain in his party.
Joe Walsh and Bill Weld in the starting blocks
The new candidate is Joe Walsh and was elected to Congress in 2010 for a single term, at the beginning of the ultra-conservative Tea Party wave, viscerally opposed to Barack Obama. "I'm a candidate because he's incompetent, someone has to be dedicated," said Walsh in an interview on ABC Sunday. "He's cruel, he's racist, and he's narcissistic." Before him, a moderate Republican, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, had entered this strange race where Donald Trump had started as a winner in advance.
But in the United States, the rule is that the reinvesting of the outgoing presidents by their parties goes through primaries, as advanced as they may be. Even Barack Obama was formally reinvested in 2012 by polls, which certainly had seen only symbolic opposition and participation.
Former Trump support on the ranks
In some cases, the party is divided and the outgoing presidents have to really fight. Such was the case of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who was very seriously threatened until the inauguration convention by Senator Ted Kennedy in 1980. In 1992, Republican President George HW Bush had to fight on his right against Pat Buchanan. The leavers were reinvested, but not re-elected. This year, the few Republicans who never resigned themselves to supporting Donald Trump hoped to recruit heavyweights to, if not to deprive him of investiture, at least to signify to him that his dominion over the party was not total.
Sunday's candidate, Joe Walsh, is an amazing rookie for this fight. He himself admitted to having "helped to create Trump". He was a soldier of the 2010 Tea Party Revolution, which catalyzed the advent of Donald Trump six years later by pushing the Republican party in a more radical, more populist and anti-immigrant direction. Joe Walsh said at the time that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a "traitor".
"The beauty of President Trump's work is that it has led me to think about things I've said in the past," said Joe Walsh on Sunday. "Dirty politics, I regret it, I'm sorry." The Republicans "want Trump to leave, but they are afraid to say he is incapable," he says.
Little real opposition
In fact, the support given in 2016 to Donald Trump by the top Republican elected officials, especially in Congress, was the fruit of a very pragmatic calculation even more valid for 2020. With Donald Trump at the White House, they are better off than they are. with a democrat. The president appointed two Conservative judges to the Supreme Court and signed laws and decrees long desired by the Conservatives. His dominance is such that his former 2016 primary rivals have, at this stage, given up the challenge for 2020.
Even Utah Senator Mitt Romney, a former presidential candidate in 2012 and one of Donald Trump's most notable domestic critics, seems to have concluded that the case was futile. "My Republican party audience these days is big like that," he said recently, bringing his two hands closer, according to the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper. The political world, however, is still waiting to hear the final intentions of some other critical Republicans, including John Kasich, who was the last candidate in the primary race against Donald Trump in 2016 and plays the moderate card.