Supporters of President Donald Trump attend a pro-Trump march on Nov. 14 in Washington. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
MAGA figureheads and pro-Trump activists are vowing to excommunicate Republicans who vigorously oppose the doomed effort to keep President Donald Trump in power.
The threats have played out in recent days with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was once seen as a possible ally in Trump’s efforts to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the swing state. But Raffensperger has consistently refused to validate Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims, and on Saturday, he bluntly told the president the rigged-election theories were simply wrong. After a recording of the Saturday call leaked to the press, the MAGA world erupted with incandescent range.
“A national security threat,” proclaimed Charlie Kirk, MAGA youth leader and Turning Point USA co-founder. “Brad Raffensperger should immediately be investigated.”
In the coming days, that MAGA revenge complex could target everyone from low-level members of Congress to Vice President Mike Pence, as Congress meets on Jan. 6 to formally certify Biden’s victory. “Republicans,” Trump warned on Twitter, “NEVER FORGET!” speaking to lawmakers who have said they will not oppose Biden’s certification. And Trump allies are plotting to fund potential pro-MAGA primary challengers to oust those disloyal Republicans.
“We’ll put some money behind” trying to oust these Republicans, said Alex Bruesewitz, one of the organizers of Stop the Steal, an organization linked to high-profile MAGA personalities that is helping organize a major Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally in Washington.
The swift move to vengeance offers a preview of how Trump and his MAGA community plan to reshape the GOP in the coming months — creating Trump loyalty tests for Republicans, then working to evict anyone who doesn’t fall in line. The goal is to identify those who are most worthy of inheriting the MAGA base with Trump out of office. But the result may be that no one except Trump can rally the MAGA coalition.
“I think that Trump and his supporters in the base, or his supporters in the Republican Party, are going to continue to be a big part of the party for the foreseeable future, including in 2022,” said Alex Conant, a GOP political consultant and the former communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Most congressmen don't wake up in the morning worried about their general election. They worry about their primary.”
At the moment, Trump is focused on eviscerating Raffensperger, who has rebuffed Trump’s attempts to subvert the Georgia election results — and so, too, is his base.
While Trump’s allies launched a normal fusillade of personal attacks against Raffensperger — former House Speaker and Trump ally Newt Gingrich called him “anti-Republican” — they also called for criminal charges. Some suggested it had been illegal for the call to be recorded, even though Georgia law only requires one party in a conversation to consent to an audio recording. Others went further.
“Traitors in our midst,” tweeted Chanel Rion, White House correspondent at the pro-Trump outlet OAN, along with the hashtag “#InvestigateRaffensperger.”
Next, MAGA attention will focus on Capitol Hill, where Congress will meet on Jan. 6 in a joint session to formally certify November’s presidential election. Pence will oversee the proceedings as vice president. Historically, the gathering is an afterthought, a noncontroversial rubber stamp on an already settled outcome.
But in the Trump era, the president, scores of Republicans and throngs of his supporters are insisting that lawmakers should refuse to sign off on the results, incorrectly arguing that the election was rigged.
Trump-supporting entities are trying to concoct novel constitutional powers that Pence could wield at the last minute from his largely ministerial perch, which mostly involves opening the envelopes with each state’s Electoral College votes, and then handing them to a secretary for recording. Alexander Macris, a video game writer who became known for his role in Gamergate, the online harassment campaign targeting women, suggested in a viral essay that Pence could re-interpret the 1877 Electoral Count Act in a way that would allow him to simply not count the votes.
Edward Foley, the director of the Election Law Project at Ohio State University, flatly rejected the interpretation.
“I mean, it was raised in the 19th century, but it’s never been accepted in the sense that the Supreme Court's never adopted it. It's never even prevailed at Congress,” he said.
That hasn’t stopped pro-Trump outlets like The Gateway Pundit from making tantalizing offers directed at Pence.“Pence can place himself in the history books alongside Thomas Jefferson or he can sign off on the destruction of the United States as we know it,” read an op-ed on the site.
Others have traded carrots for sticks: Prominent conspiratorial-minded figures, such as pro-Trump Georgia lawyer Lin Wood, claimed that Pence could be arrested, tried for treason and executed by firing squad if he did not act on Trump’s behalf. And out in the wilds of the QAnon conspiracy community, the process might not even matter: Pence, some argued, might be a body double, put in place by a Satanic cabal to further its plots.
Lawmakers in Congress, meanwhile, have different concerns on their hands: Many will soon seek reelection. And for a certain brand of politician, going MAGA is the safest bet.
“Most of these people that won during the [2020] primaries, they said, ‘I'm the most like Trump.’ And that's why most of them won their primaries,” said Breusewitz, the Stop the Steal organizer. “And so if they go back, the voters will hold them accountable.”
Perhaps conscious of this, several newly-minted representatives have vowed to keep resisting even after Biden is sworn in. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) pledged to push for a commission to investigate the election. Others are planning to be among those protesting in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who both gained notoriety for promoting QAnon conspiracies earlier in their political careers, are scheduled to speak at the rally.
As for those who don’t sufficiently fight against Biden’s inauguration, Bruesewitz has promised they will be punished.
“When we say every Republican that does not stand strong with the president will get a primary challenger, that does not mean we believe that we can beat every single one of them,” he said. “But what it means is we will make them spend their money. And we will urge their donors to not support them.”
Even with at least 140 House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans vowing to oppose certification on Wednesday, Congress will still sign off on Biden’s win. Only a simple congressional majority is needed to formalize the results, which is all but guaranteed given the current makeup of Congress. And Pence himself has remained chilly on the topic, with a spokesperson saying that while the vice president backed the lawmaker’s right to object, it was up to them to actually prove fraud.
For the majority of Republicans, Conant argued, “This effort to undermine the integrity of the election will only help Joe Biden. And I say that because it'll leave Biden's opposition in Congress divided and many Republicans defending a very unpopular position.”
Still, for the right type of Republican, a vast MAGA empire is within reach: Trump’s fundraising numbers skyrocketed after the election, as his campaign solicited donations to fight nebulous voter-fraud allegations. Tapping into that energy could give the most fervent MAGA Republicans a boost in the coming years.
But, as Conant noted, that only works if Trump stays involved in Republican races around the country — far from a certainty once he leaves the White House.
“I suppose if Trump made his life mission to defeat everyone that wasn't loyal with him until the very end, maybe it could have an impact,” Conant said. “Just count me skeptical that he's going to spend the next two years playing in Republican primary politics, when he never showed that much of an interest in doing that when he was president.”
Still, Breusewitz, the Stop the Steal organizer, argued Republican voters are now solidly aligned with Trump.
“Republican voters want to see the party grow in a direction towards the president’s, and continue with the ‘America First’ and the MAGA movement,” he said.
