Republican senators quickly rushed to defend former former President Donald Trump after he was indicted for his handling of classified documents last week — or at least most of them did.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri claimed the indictment put the country’s rule of law at risk. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri said it looked like a banana republic. Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas said “lady justice has taken off her blindfold.”
Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, stayed quiet.
“Jerry Moran won’t say much about anything,” said John Pyle, an Ellis County Republican who led an effort to censure Moran last year for supporting a bipartisan spending bill. “He doesn’t like to get in the middle of any kind of confrontation.”
While others defended or criticized Trump, Moran joined a small group of Republican lawmakers who have been reticent about the former president after an historic indictment by a Miami grand jury for allegedly refusing to return classified documents to the National Archives.
His office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trumps will appear in court Tuesday for his arraignment.
Trump endorsed Moran early for reelection in 2022, effectively preventing any efforts to challenge Moran from the right in the primary. But while he voted to acquit Trump on impeachment charges for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Moran has kept Trump at an arms length.
During the campaign, Moran was asked if he would support Trump for reelection in 2024 and instead said he was more likely to support former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a Kansas Republican who announced he isn’t running, or Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who launched his campaign last month.
“We know Trump non-supporters in the Republican Party, not from those who chastise him, from those who don’t openly laud him,” said Bob Beatty, a political science professor at Washburn University in Topeka.
Moran wasn’t alone in largely ignoring the indictment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is no longer on speaking terms with Trump and rarely publicly acknowledges him. McConnell has not commented on the indictment and avoided the topic in his floor speech Tuesday, instead discussing inflation and national security.
Others who have been pushed on the issue, like Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, have acknowledged the severity of the allegations against Trump. In comments to CNN, Thune said the allegations were serious but “the burden of proof of the Justice Department will be high.”
Liz Mair, a Republican consultant who worked on campaigns for former presidential candidate Scott Walker and former Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, said lawmakers who defended Trump before the indictment was unsealed “got out over their skis,” because it was much stronger than many expected.
“I actually think this is one where people are best served saying, ‘I have my own opinions, but you know what justice needs to play out’ and kind of leaving it alone,” Mair said. “Because I think otherwise, no matter what they do, they look like they’re politicizing it.”
But the indictment has already been politicized. Trump has called the investigation political since the FBI searched his resort, looking for boxes of documents he didn’t return to the National Archives. His supporters have compared his handling of classified documents to the fact that both President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence found classified documents among those they took with them when they left office.
Prosecutors have not brought charges for the 197 classified documents Trump returned to the National Archives. Instead, the focus has been on the 140 documents that were obtained through a grand jury subpoena and a search of his property.
“When he was president, every investigation was a so-called witch hunt,” Beatty said. “Everything was political. From the impeachment to everything else. He’s given the Republican base an explanation, if they want to take it. And so far they have.”
Trump remains popular with Republican voters — recent polling has him as the front-runner in the Republican primary. A Quinnipiac poll released May 24 found that 86% of Republicans had favorable views of Trump.
His continued popularity after losing a presidential election defies traditional political norms, Beatty said, making it more difficult for Republican lawmakers to figure out how to handle his many controversies.
“There’s just been no other former losing candidates that engender such incredibly strong support in their party, years after their loss,” Beatty said. “We’d laugh about it for people clamoring for Al Gore to run again. It didn’t happen.”
Mair said staying quiet on Trump may be more of a long-term strategy. She supports Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the primary and thinks in a few years Trump won’t still have the political control over the Republican Party that he currently enjoys.
“Republican politicians and, more to the point, their consultants, are perpetually terrified of the base because the perception is that the base is way farther to the right than they are,” Mair said. “So they constantly feel this pressure that they’ve got to show off whatever their conservative bona fides are, because instinctively the base should hate them.”
After Jan. 6, 2021, as the Senate was considering whether to convict Trump following his impeachment in the House, Trump supporters at the state party level censured some of the representatives and senators who voted to convict or impeach Trump. Before his vote to acquit Trump, Moran was censured by the Clay County Republican Party for not voting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Pyle said he wasn’t considering whether to censure Moran again for not supporting Trump. Pyle said it’s a different situation then when he brought the censure for Moran’s support of the spending bill, saying before Moran had ignored Republicans in the 1st Congressional District.
“He needs to take his place along with the other Republican senators and stand up for Trump and come out against Biden,” Pyle said. “He just doesn’t do that enough.”
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