Corey Lewandowski walks off stage as preparations take place for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.Carol Guzy/ZUMA Press Wire
The last official anti-Trump resistance within the GOP went out with a whisper in Milwaukee on Monday night at the Republican convention.
During the official roll call, representatives from every state from California to Vermont sent a representative to the stage to enthusiastically pledge all their delegates to nominate former President Donald Trump, often calling him the greatest president of all time. And then at the very end, after all 50 states and some territories, came the District of Columbia’s turn.
When DC GOP chairman Patrick Mara took the stage before thousands of cheering Republicans, he didn’t promote the city or laud President Trump. Instead, he quickly and uncomfortably announced that DC would be pledging its 19 delegates “in accordance with the rules.” And then he fled without further elaboration—as any sane person would under the circumstances.
The opening day of the Republican convention in Milwaukee featured a party dominated by Trump and his most fervent supporters. But in its GOP primary, DC voters had overwhelmingly chosen former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley over the former president, 63 percent to 33 percent, giving her one of only two state victories before she dropped out of the race.
Earlier this month, Haley had released her delegates so that they were free to vote for Trump if they wanted to. In every other state—including Vermont, where she’d won the most delegates outside of DC—they did just that.
But DC party rules required the city’s delegates to go to Haley. And if any group was poised to make a last-ditch protest vote against a twice-indicted former president who refused to accede to the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and paid hush money to a porn star, it was the DC delegation. The former president has referred to the Nation’s Capital as a city of “filth and decay” and campaigned on a “federal takeover of this filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.”
With nearly 700,000 residents, DC is taxed without representation, and relegated to the same stateless status as Guam and Puerto Rico, with only a non-voting delegate to represent its residents in Congress. It’s also overwhelmingly Democratic. More than 92 percent of the voters chose Joe Biden in 2020. The city has never supported a Republican for president since winning the right to vote in 1961. The Republicans who do live in DC tend to be Never Trumpers.
But a lot has changed in the past week. On the convention floor, I caught up with Mara, who told me that after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the assassination attempt on Trump, the DC Republicans had “pretty much solidified” around the former president. In fact, he said, most of the delegates would probably have gone to Trump after Haley released them if the party had not changed its rules last year. It did so to prevent a repeat of the potentially fractured delegation of 2016 or 2020, where people were threatening to write in other candidates. The new winner-takes-all rules ended up constraining the delegates once Haley released them. “We over-corrected,” Mara confessed, noting that the party will probably take another look at the rules before the next election.
In the meantime, now that DC has fallen into line, in spirit if not in delegate votes, Trump will come out of the convention with a fully united party behind him as he faces off with President Joe Biden in November—a feat Democrats will be hard pressed to match.
