As 2023 got under way, there was no great mystery as to how the race for the Republican presidential nomination was poised to unfold. Donald Trump, of course, would soon launch a comeback bid, but a variety of other GOP contenders made no secret of their plans to take on the former president in party primaries.
It was against this backdrop that the Club for Growth, an influential far-right group, hosted a retreat in early March 2023, offering some of the leading Republican donors an opportunity to get to know some of the unannounced Republican presidential contenders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, among others.
Trump wasn’t invited.
The former president turned to his social media platform to call the organization the “Club For NO Growth,” adding that he believes the organization is “an assemblage of political misfits, globalists, and losers.”
The Club for Growth nevertheless moved forward with plans to try to prevent Trump from winning the GOP nomination. In June, The Des Moines Register reported that the group appeared to be “laying the groundwork in Iowa” to oppose the former president, and a month later, Politico reported that a group called the Win it Back PAC, with ties to Club for Growth, filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission with plans to undermine Trump’s candidacy.
There’s reason to believe those efforts have run their course. The Washington Post reported:
In a sign of Trump’s growing dominance in the primary, the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group once bent on preventing Trump from becoming the nominee, has contacted Trump advisers looking for a détente, according to people familiar with the overtures. The organization shelved its efforts to try to stop him in the fall.
The Post’s article, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the Club spent $4 million in Iowa in the hopes of slowing Trump down. The results were discouraging. The Post’s report went on to say that the organization, left with little choice, “initiated outreach to broker a truce with Trump,” letting the GOP favorite and his team know that the Club “would no longer be attacking him and suggested they might even help.”All of this struck me as interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that the Club for Growth’s apparent willingness to wave the white flag is emblematic of a larger truth: For much of the Republican Party and its allies, the race for the GOP nomination is effectively over. The party’s voters have not cast any primary ballots or attended any caucuses, but when the presumptive nominee’s lead grows to 50 points, it’s understandable when his detractors throw in the towel.
The second is that I’m not altogether sure whether Trump will tolerate a détente with the organization or not. Eight years ago, the Club for Growth was deeply skeptical of the then-candidate, but after Trump won the party’s nomination — and soon after, the presidency — they forged an alliance of sorts. The Club helped champion the Republican’s regressive tax breaks for the wealthy, while Trump welcomed the group’s work on behalf of allied far-right candidates. But after the former president’s 2020 defeat, the Club saw an opportunity to elevate a more reliable ally, who’d be more doctrinaire on economic issues (avoiding a trade war, for example). The organization, however, quickly discovered that convincing the GOP base to move away from Trump was easier said than done. Will the former president let bygones be bygones? I doubt it. There was a time in which Republican leaders saw groups such as the Club for Growth as indispensable allies, but by all appearances, Trump seems to believe he can get ahead without them.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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