Source: Politics<\/p>\n
WISCONSIN DELLS, Wis. \u2014 It could have upended the Wisconsin Republican Party\u2019s annual convention, given Donald Trump\u2019s hold on the GOP. Just as the state party gathered this past weekend, Trump issued a statement tearing into the state Assembly speaker, Robin Vos, and two other Republican lawmakers for doing too little to promote his election conspiracies.<\/p>\n
But in a rare setback for his post-presidential interventions in the GOP, Trump in Wisconsin appeared to shoot a blank. When Vos and Devin LeMahieu, the state\u2019s Senate majority leader, took the stage on Saturday in front of some of the party\u2019s most fervent pro-Trump activists, it was as though Trump had said nothing at all. There were no boos. Vos drew applause. Convention-goers dismissed an effort to censure him.<\/p>\n
In Wisconsin at least, Trump failed to set off the same intra-party chaos that has marked his efforts elsewhere. Worse for him, despite the former president\u2019s harsh personal criticism, there were signs his comments were dismissed with a roll of the eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just think it\u2019s been going on for so long that people are kind of tired of it,\u201d said Tony Kurtz, a GOP assemblyman from rural Juneau County, which went for Trump last year by nearly 30 percentage points<\/a>.<\/p>\n For more than seven months since he lost the election, Trump has engaged in a crusade against Republicans who crossed him, an effort he invigorated with a rally in Ohio on Saturday, where he traveled to campaign against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez<\/a>, who voted to impeach him earlier this year. In most cases, the Republican base has responded zealously. But here, at a convention center attached to a water park, the lack of interest from the rank-and-file suggested some of the first, tentative signs of weariness of Trump\u2019s smash-mouth political act.<\/p>\n Even Sen. Ron Johnson, an unfailing Trump ally, broke with the former president\u2019s criticism of Johnson\u2019s home-state lawmakers, dismissing Trump\u2019s suggestion that they could be primaried.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that represents much of a threat, quite honestly,\u201d Johnson said, describing Vos and his colleagues as \u201cdoing a pretty good job.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump remains wildly popular among Wisconsin Republicans \u2014 no less than in other states \u2014 and the belief in his false claim that the election was rigged is widespread, underpinning a raft of elections-related legislation passed by Republican lawmakers in the state this month<\/a>. At the state convention, activists cheered for Trump when organizers played a recorded message in which Trump repeated his falsehood that he carried the state in November. The convention included a panel on election law changes, the state party homepage<\/a> prominently features an \u201celection integrity dashboard\u201d and delegates carried tote bags that read \u201cDefend secure elections.\u201d<\/p>\n Brian Jennings, chair of the GOP in Florence County, a sparsely populated Trump stronghold in northern Wisconsin, said \u201cTrump is the Republican Party right now,\u201d and on the sidelines of the convention, several delegates said Trump was right that Vos hadn\u2019t done enough to overturn the results of the election.<\/p>\n But unlike in states like Georgia and Arizona, there wasn\u2019t widespread interest in purging the state\u2019s Assembly speaker for it \u2014 a departure from Trump\u2019s dominion over the Republican Party\u2019s apparatus in the states.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s Wisconsin for you,\u201d said Helmut Fritz, a delegate from Milwaukee who sits on the state party\u2019s credentials committee. \u201cTrump isn\u2019t the dictator.\u201d<\/p>\n In part, Vos\u2019s avoidance of punishment is the result of shrewd politics. Though he has frustrated Republicans who want Wisconsin to pursue an Arizona-style review of the election, Vos is neither a Trump critic nor a defender of the November election\u2019s integrity in the mold of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp or Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. He has infuriated Democrats by hiring three retired police officers to investigate \u201cpotential irregularities and\/or illegalities<\/a>\u201d in the November election. And at the convention, he announced that a conservative former state Supreme Court justice, Michael Gableman, will oversee the effort.<\/p>\n Following that news \u2014 which an operative familiar with the arrangement said was in the works for weeks \u2014 Trump said at his rally in Ohio that \u201cI hear now that Wisconsin is looking very, very seriously\u201d into the election \u201cand I respect Wisconsin so much.\u201d<\/p>\n But for the purposes of the Wisconsin state convention, he had all but invited attendees to engage in a pile-on. In his statement issued the night before Vos spoke, Trump, seeking to stoke grassroots outrage, accused Vos, LeMahieu and state Sen. Chris Kapenga of \u201cworking hard to cover up election corruption \u2026 actively trying to prevent a Forensic Audit.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t fall for their lies!\u201d Trump wrote. \u201cThese REPUBLICAN \u2018leaders\u2019 need to step up and support the people who elected them by providing them a full forensic investigation. If they don\u2019t, I have little doubt that they will be primaried and quickly run out of office.\u201d<\/p>\n On Sunday, a Trump adviser said the former president remains \u201cadamant about doing audits\u201d and \u201cis going to keep up pressure on Republicans to have the courage to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n So far this year and in other states, Trump\u2019s broadsides against Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal to him have been met with enthusiasm from activists. Utah Republicans heckled Romney<\/a>, an outspoken Trump critic, at their state convention in May. Republicans in Georgia booed Kemp<\/a>. The GOP governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, was censured by his party<\/a> for his lack of fealty to Trump.<\/p>\n At the convention in Wisconsin, it was a different story. One delegate deleted Trump\u2019s statement from his phone, saying he wished Trump would \u201cshut up, and I\u2019m a big Trump supporter.\u201d Another delegate said he hadn\u2019t even bothered to read it.<\/p>\n David Blaska, a former Dane County supervisor who worked as a speechwriter for former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson, said \u201ca lot of people still believe the election was stolen.\u201d But the fact they weren\u2019t jeering Vos, he said, was a \u201cgood sign.\u201d<\/p>\n Standing at the back of the convention hall, Blaska said the party is \u201chopefully moving on.\u201d<\/p>\n Vos said he wasn\u2019t surprised by the reception, citing his relationship with activists dating back to before Act 10, the explosive legislation advanced by then-Gov. Scott Walker in 2011 that limited public employee collective bargaining rights. Trump, he said, was \u201cmisinformed.\u201d<\/p>\n