GOP Civil War: McConnell Allies Take Aim at Bannon

President Donald Trump on Thursday declared the Republican Party unified, but the broiling civil war is real and getting worse.

Exhibit A is a Washington Post story this week detailing plans by loyalists of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to try to discredit former White House strategist Stephen Bannon. The move escalates infighting that predates Trump’s election and — in some ways — traps the president in the middle.

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Both Bannon and representatives of the Senate Leadership Fund — a super PAC with ties to McConnell — claim to be acting in Trump’s best interests.

“Our goal is to advance the president’s agenda, and one of the things that we want to do is elect more Republicans to the Senate who will do that,” Senate Leadership Fund President and CEO Steven Law said Thursday in an interview with CNN.

The Senate Leadership Fund took its first shot at Bannon this week, using the president’s favorite medium — Twitter. The super PAC highlighted a New York Daily News headline — “Anti-Semitic Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon not a big fan of ‘whiny brat’ Jews, ex-wife says” — and invited Nevada Republican Senate hopeful Danny Tarkanian to agree.

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Tarkanian, who is challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Dean Heller, responded by saying he is “proud to stand with my friend Steve Bannon against Heller/McConnell hatchet man’s smear attacks.” He separately tweeted his own pledge — the “McConnell Opposition Pledge,” which included his signature and a line for Heller’s.

For the record, Bannon has denied using the “whiny brat” Jews slur, which comes from a deposition related to his divorce.

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The super PAC also took a shot Kelli Ward, who is running for the Senate in Arizona, and whose candidacy is supported by Laura Ingraham and Steve Bannon. The only bright spot of Sen. Jeff Flake’s decision not to run for re-election, Law wrote in a statement, is that “conspiracy-theorist Kelli Ward will not be the Republican nominee for this Senate seat in 2018.”

Law told CNN’s John Berman that claims of a Republican civil war are “wildly blown out of proportion.” But his aggressive anti-Bannon posture is the latest sign that the 2018 Republican primary season is likely to be bloody.

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Law said the super PAC’s motivation is to prevent the nomination of Republican candidates who will be tied to Bannon by Democratic opponents.

“Candidates who get wrapped around him will have to answer for his toxic views, things that he’s said, his associations with the Alt-Right, when Democrats make him the star of their attack ads next fall. That’s our concern,” he said. “And that’s simply what we want to make sure that Republican candidates know what they are getting if they sign up with him or get closely too aligned with him.”

Law added: “He’s got a long record of saying things that are very troubling. He has publicly attacked the integrity of the Catholic Church.”

Noel Fritsch, a Republican consultant who has worked with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Republican primary challenger, Paul Nehlen, said the anti-Bannon campaign is a “futile effort” that will only divert resources that could and should be put toward knocking off Democrats.

“They might as well burn their money,” he said.

Fritsch questioned why the Senate Leadership Fund was willing to spend a reported $30 million in a failed effort to prop up “fake incumbent” Sen. Luther Strange in Alabama — who got his seat by way of a gubernatorial appointment. The party and its elected leaders should stay neutral in primaries and let Republican voters decide, he said.

McConnell this month defended his approach to candidate recruitment by arguing that Republicans cannot keep their majority unless they can find candidates who can actually win general elections. He pointed to a pair of conservative winners of GOP primaries in 2010 — Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana — who went on to lose to Democrats.

Fritsch ridiculed that argument.

“That entire premise is just a trope,” he said. “Mitch McConnell would literally rather have Claire McCaskill in Missouri and some Democrat [Joe Donnelly] in Indiana than Mourdock or Todd Akin.”

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU), said he works every day to unify the diverse parts of the conservative movement.

“That being said, primaries are needed and necessary,” he said. “I’ve got no problem with wanting to hold people accountable.”

But Schlapp added that he disagrees with an indiscriminate approach advocated by Bannon of targeting nearly all incumbents.

“ACU would come down on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to discard everyone just because they’re an incumbent.”

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Schlapp, who served as George W. Bush’s political director in the White House, attributed the internecine warfare to a split over how to respond to Barack Obama’s presidency. He said the former president eschewed the strategy for previous Democratic presidents such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to occupy the center-left in American politics.

“We’ve never seen a left-wing president be as aggressive as Obama,” he said. “Obama was just shocking … Combine that with Republican leaders who don’t seem equipped to respond to that kind of radical leadership.”

That is why Trump blasted through the Republican primaries and won the nomination and election, Schlapp said. Republican voters clearly want leaders to fight and not methodically review Obama’s legacy step by step.

“That is not going to work for conservatives, who expect a wholesale discarding of that agenda,” he said. “This is not the time for incrementalism. This is a time for boldness.”

(photo credit, homepage image: Mitch McConnell, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Steve Bannon, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore; photo credit, article image: Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Mitch McConnell, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)