"The media wants you to think you are wrong for embracing President Trump. But remember – he won Ohio by 8 points in back-to-back elections. Ohioans are for Trump."
– former Ohio Republican Party chair Jane Timken
Following GOP Sen. Rob Portman's announcement that he would not seek re-election, Ohio’s soon-to-be-open Senate seat has prompted a rush to embrace Donald Trump among top Republicans interested in the job, in a state Trump won twice.
Jane Timken, who recently resigned as chair of the state party to prepare a campaign, said, “I’m running for the United States Senate to stand up for you, just like when I stood next to President Trump and supported his America First agenda.”
“For the last four years, I've traveled around the state, put 150,000 miles on my car talking to grassroots supporters and electing Republicans up and down the ticket, advancing the America First agenda. And proudly, I delivered Ohio for President Trump by more than eight points,” Timken told Spectrum News
Timken's new campaign website includes one photo of her next to a beaming Trump giving a thumbs-up, and another with her arm wrapped around Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, who’s been mentioned as a potential Senate candidate in North Carolina.
Timken called the recent impeachment of Trump a “sham” and doesn’t blame Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol or condemn him for falsely claiming the election was stolen.
Josh Mandel, the former state treasurer entered the senate race with a vow that he, too, would “fight for President Trump’s America First agenda.” A self-described "Trump warrior," Mandel told Breitbart that "the key is keeping the Trump coalition together."
In an interview with NBC News' Cleveland affiliate, WKYC, Mandel also echoed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from the former president – a baseless claim embraced by the pro-Trump rioters who last month stormed the Capitol where Mandel seeks to work.
Mandel, 43, is a Marine Corps veteran who served two terms as state treasurer and lost a 2012 bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. He was prepared for a rematch with Brown in 2018 but dropped out, citing his then-wife’s health. Since then, Mandel has sat on more than $4 million in unused campaign funds – a sum that along with his statewide name recognition makes him a front-runner but also rankled other Ohio Republicans who wished he’d have shared it with other campaigns in the intervening years.
(Henry J. Gomez. “Competition for 'Trump lane' heats up in Ohio Senate race.” NBC News. February 18, 2021.)
Normally, a political party would move on from a losing presidential candidate. Party leaders already have shown some subtle signs of doing so – the state GOP removed images of Trump from the front page of its website in January, and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told the Associated Press the party would remain neutral if Trump runs again in 2024.
Trump has claimed he only lost the election because of widespread fraud, a claim his own Justice Department, dozens of courts and senior Republican leaders have rebuked as unsupported or false.
Still, in December, Ohio joined other Republican-led states backing Trump’s effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden. For this, they are complicit in the destruction and death of January 6.
In an amicus brief, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost urged the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the lawsuit led by his GOP counterpart in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, which seeks to invalidate Electoral College votes in battleground states that Trump lost.
Even after weeks of Trump making baseless claims that the election had been “stolen” from him, and his subsequent pressuring of Georgia’s attorney general to “find” the votes that would give him a win in that state, these Republicans still supported him.
And, after Trump organized and led the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, these Republican politicians still praise and support him. Ohio Republicans’ eager support for Donald Trump’s divisive, authoritarian leadership that trafficked in lies and conspiracy theories and labeled those who dared to lift up the truth about a host of issues as “enemies of the people” is more than troubling. It is unfathomable.
The truth is Republican rank-and-file members didn’t support impeachment, don’t want Trump punished, and prefer him over any other potential candidate for president in 2024.
David A. Graham of The Atlantic says …
“Republicans are backing Trump not in spite of the insurrection but because of it. Many Republican voters supported Trump in 2016 and 2020 not out of particular policy affinities but because they saw him as someone who would actually fight for their vision of American culture, doing whatever it took to win. Trump’s frantic attempt to overturn the election didn’t work, but it was just the sort of furious effort his supporters wanted. Why would they object now?”
(David A. Graham. “Republicans Back Trump Because of the Insurrection, Not Despite It.” The Atlantic. February 17, 2021.)
Republican politicians are surely motivated by fear. They have good reason to worry about their personal safety and their political future. Trump has shown he can excite the mob and they would be likely victims of future attacks, just as Republican officeholders in Georgia faced death threats after resisting Trump’s pressure to alter election results.
In electoral terms, convicting Trump was almost certainly a sure “loser” for Republicans. As Axios reports, “State and county Republican apparatuses throughout the country are punishing those in their own party who want to hold the former president accountable, signaling that Trump’s grasp on the GOP remains unfaded.”
Supporting Trump's lies, conspiracies, and crimes out of White fragility and fear is both bigoted and gutless. The continued efforts to uphold Trump and his “America First” nationalism is defined by race and rooted in disdain for foreigners. It’s anchored by policies like the Muslim ban, the border wall, and family separation … not to mention embracing quackery like QAnon and far-right, neo-fascist organizations like Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Pencenters.
In February 2021 – when the Ohio Republicans could make a clear break from Trump, his divisive policies, and his active anti-government militia groups – they instead, once again, put politics over reason. Timken and Mandel have chosen to carry the torch of Trumpism into the state politics of the future. And that future is a vision of discord, mismanagement, and conspiracies.
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