Chasing the big prize

The headline on the magazine article: “Is MAGA Losing Popularity? Republicans Seem to

Steve Barnes

Steve BarnesBe Looking Elsewhere for 2024,” … a question followed by a statement, the latter not necessarily answering satisfactorily the former.

But to the matter of “looking elsewhere?” In other words, looking to someone other than Donald J. Trump as the GOP presidential nominee next year.

Look no farther than Arkansas. More precisely, look no farther than two of its most prominent citizens: the incumbent governor and her immediate predecessor.

Sarah Huckabee-Sanders is keeping her options open, no matter that the man who MAGA-fied a substantial portion of the nation also gave her the ticket to stardom. The latter, Asa Hutchinson, is undisguisedly looking elsewhere — to mean, the mirror.

The more the merrier, Hutchinson told a CNN interviewer a couple Sundays ago, the reporter having observed that the Arkansan already was among the “more,” even if he had yet to decide, or formally announce, his intentions regarding the 2024 Republican presidential campaign. A week later, Hutchinson ramped up his criticism of Donald Trump, declaring on national television that an indictment of the former president would be cause sufficient for him to be eliminated from consideration.

An indictment, under study by grand juries in both New York and Georgia for different alleged offenses, “doesn’t mean that he’s guilty … or he should be charged,” Hutchinson said. “But it’s just such a distraction that would be unnecessary for somebody who’s seeking the highest office in the land.

“When you’re looking at Trump, it’s going to be a circus,” said Hutchinson, who sometimes indulges himself in understatement.

Ms. Huckabee- Sanders? She is not known to have challenged a recent New York Times report that she declined Trump’s telephoned request to endorse his re-election effort “at this time.”

Unsurprisingly, her patron flatly denied the newspaper’s account, though he spared his former press secretary the venom that might have been expected after a rejection. As it was, Trump couldn’t resist stating that “nobody has done more for her than I have, with the possible exception of her great father, Mike.” (You may recall that “Mike” once held the job his daughter now occupies.)

As to whether Trump’s forever theme, MAGA (“Make America Great Again”), has lost its luster as an operational philosophy, bear in mind that it never captured a majority of the electorate nationally. Twice it failed to give Trump the popular vote even though the Electoral College awarded him the prize in 2016.

But in Arkansas? Alive and thriving. Ms. Huckabee-Sanders captured more than three of every five votes in the gubernatorial sweepstakes last year. Her party holds supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, and with such ease and such zeal are Republican lawmakers passing MAGA-inspired legislation that even Ms. Huckabee-Sanders’ Florida counterpart, a slightly better- mannered and rather more articulate clone of Trump, might be envious.

The enthusiasm among the General Assembly’s Republican majority for chain-pulling, button- pushing cultural bills is hardly surprising given that such phantom issues helped propel many of the members into office, just as the emotions behind them (logic isn’t a factor in these times) gave Trump just under 61 percent of Arkansas’s vote in 2016. Four years later, those same instincts made Arkansas one of only eight states to award him an even larger share — more than 62 percent.

Ms. Huckabee-Sanders got her initial exposure to national politics via the two presidential campaigns of her father, neither successful. Her profile owes to her association with Trump. Hutchinson made one of the nominating speeches for Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, presumably confident that the nomination would fail in November. Then endured four years of presidential policies and rhetoric that made his governorship immeasurably more difficult.

The governor’s immediate reluctance to side with her former employer and her predecessor’s open disdain for him are among the gentler demonstrations of distance.

There was former Vice President Pence’s declaration recently, regarding the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, that “President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Then, the contemptible but entirely predictable assigning of blame by Trump to, yes, Pence: “Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6.”

Trump may be old news, yesterday’s sensation, increasingly the crazy aunt. But MAGA — Trumpism? Alive and thriving.