Mike Rogers, a Republican former congressman from Michigan, is a snapshot of what his party looked like before the Donald Trump circus arrived. He is a free-market conservative, and a former FBI agent with strong national-security experience from his years running the House Intelligence Committee.Even if Rogers doesn't know it, you and I know that he's never going to be the Republican presidential nominee. A Bush-era hawk at a time when Republican voters have decided they're isolationists? A former FBI agent at a time when the Republican base blames the FBI for everything from January 6 to the Colorado Springs mass shooting?
This brand of mainstream conservatism has seemed on its way to extinction. But maybe it has a second life, with Trump newly vulnerable and Republicans increasingly worrying that they won’t win without a broader, steadier image.
It’s a sign of the ferment in the Republican Party these days that Rogers has been spending time recently in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — giving speeches and meeting activists. He’s not running for president; he’s not even formally exploring a bid yet. As Iowa Republican public affairs strategist John Stineman, who’s advising a Rogers policy group, puts it: “He’s exploring whether to explore.”
... Rogers told me this week that, as he visits early primary states, “I’m getting a lot of encouragement from people to turn that into something for 2024.”
But every new entry in the race divides the anti-Trump vote a little bit more. Rogers won't go far if he gets in, but he'll get a few votes, and that it will make it just a little bit harder for Ron DeSantis, the one candidate who could possibly beat Trump, to prevail.
I blame the mainstream media. Most of these wannabes are considering a 2024 run because they believe the mainstream narrative that there's a large Republican voting bloc that opposes Trump and Trumpism and would love to turn the clock back to 2004. Rogers is a pure product of mainstream media greenrooms -- a 2014 Media Matters report said that he was the fourth most frequent guest on Sunday talk shows that year, behind Senators John McCain and Rand Paul, and ahead of John Kerry, who was then the secretary of state. When you've got David Ignatius of The Washington Post floating your presidential trial balloon, it's because still live in a world where the mainstream media is central.
How many more Republicans will fall for the mainstream media's delusions about Trump's unpopularity among the GOP electorate? Enough to guarantee another Trump primary victory, apparently.
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