Former President Donald Trump is having a tough week. On Tuesday, his preferred candidate in a special House election in Texas lost to another Republican who was likely boosted by some protest votes against the former president. And on Wednesday, 17 Senate Republicans voted to advance a bipartisan infrastructure deal that Trump spent weeks railing against.
Now Republicans fear he may sink the party’s chances to retake the House in 2022.
While Trump remains an important figure in the GOP, the back-to-back blows have led some to question whether his influence may have started to wane since he left office.
“Trump has not had a big win in quite a while,” Alex Conant, a Republican strategist, said, according to The Hill. “I think without wins, his political capital is depleted.”
“Donald Trump does not have a post-presidential strategy,” he added. “He is overexposed at the same time that he’s not getting enough attention. He’s giving lots of speeches and traveling the country, but other than his narrow base no one’s really paying attention and I think that limits his influence.”
Trump suffered a major defeat this week when Susan Wright, his candidate-of-choice in a runoff election for Texas’s 6th Congressional District, lost to fellow Republican Jake Ellzey.
One former Trump adviser dismissed the idea that Wright’s loss on Tuesday and the Senate’s infrastructure vote had dealt a blow to the former president’s influence over the GOP, blaming the upsets on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
Republicans are already worried that could be the case in Georgia, where Trump has thrown his weight behind former NFL player Herschel Walker, and have expressed similar concerns in North Carolina, where Trump has endorsed Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) in a hotly contested GOP Senate primary.
Now, Senate Republicans appear to be moving on from the former president.
A Wednesday vote by the Senate to advance a sweeping infrastructure package only served to deepen questions about Trump’s influence. The former president had lobbied against the deal for weeks, issuing half-a-dozen statements urging Republicans to abandon negotiations with Democrats.
It wasn’t just Trump’s Republican detractors that broke with him on the infrastructure deal. Among the 17 Republicans who voted to take up debate on the proposal were some of his most ardent allies, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). Several GOP incumbents facing reelection next year also voted to advance the proposal.
The Wednesday infrastructure vote was also seen as a major win for President Biden, bringing him one step closer to fulfilling a crucial piece of his agenda. That in itself is a knock against Trump, who has openly teased he may run for president in 2024.
Cramer told reporters on Thursday that Trump’s frustration may stem from his inability to get a similar agreement during his four years in office. Asked what effect Trump’s efforts to derail the deal seems to have had, Cramer indicated it didn’t move the needle much.
“I think it’s on the minds of some people, particularly people in cycle thinking about primaries, I suppose,” said Cramer, who is up for reelection in 2024. “But this is one where I think people know intuitively and by research that the American public, including the majority of Republicans, really do support a reasonable, robust infrastructure package.”