Westneat: Trump’s support cracking

As recently as February 2022, he donated $5,000 to a support group aimed at resurrecting Trump’s political career, a committee called “Make America Great Again, Again.” (This is the same fund that last week was revealed to have paid Melania Trump $155,000 for consulting on tableware and floral arrangements.)

But after Republicans bombed in the 2022 midterm elections, and especially after the criminal indictments started piling up for the ex-president this spring, Khorram says it hit him.

“Trump’s time has come and gone,” he says he realized.

In late May, Khorram maxed out instead to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, new federal disclosure forms show. He also signed on to be DeSantis’ rainmaker in Washington state.

“I switched horses,” he told me. “In politics, it’s winner take all, loser take none. And the fact is for me: I no longer think Trump can win.”

Wow. I’ve been speculating for years when the GOP’s Trump fever might break. I’m not saying it has yet, and I’m definitely not forecasting Trump won’t be the 2024 Republican nominee. But here is the first real evidence I’ve seen, from inside the party locally, of the temperature cooling.

For the first six months of this year, Trump was still the leading GOP presidential money-raiser in Washington — but only barely. His campaign brought in $217,000 from 4,239 Washington donations. (These figures don’t include the political action committees that support the candidates, because those reports haven’t been submitted yet.)

Surprisingly, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley ran a close second here to Trump, raising $209,000 from 1,542 listed local donations. Khorram said the fundraising numbers give a pretty accurate peek at what’s going on inside the party in Washington. Namely, the base is still a MAGA rock. But others may be slip-sliding away.

“Trump is way ahead in the polls, and is the candidate of the most emotion and the grassroots,” he said. “But I would say the part of the GOP that is more keen on winning an election is kind of walking away.”

Khorram said people close to the party commissioned an after-election “autopsy” from the 2022 midterm vote, to explore why the local GOP’s hoped-for red wave was less than a ripple. But his takeaway was that independents and moderates in our state “are just not comfortable with the hot red rhetoric.”

“The word ‘afraid’ came up in the report,” Khorram said. “It said independents have become afraid of us. We’ll be dead as a party if we don’t address that.”

DeSantis is hardly a candidate seeking to tone things down, it seems to me. But Khorram said he came away impressed, after having dinner with the governor, about his competence and “executive experience running a state as big as Florida.”

Khorram said he would support whomever Republicans nominate, but added “the indictments (against Trump) are having a bigger impact inside the party than you in the media may know. They’re seriously hurting him.”

Did Trump call to try to talk you out of it, I asked?

“He didn’t call personally, but his campaign did,” Khorram says. “I apologized to them for switching. I still love Trump, but I told them I have to move on. It was a very difficult conversation.”

Breaking up is hard to do, as the old song says. But it’s oh-so-necessary in the unhealthy relationship between this political party and this man.

Now we wait and watch. The story of Trump’s local rainmaker might just be an outlier. But it feels like a harbinger of many more breakup talks in the months to come.