Rep. Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican who lost in his primary last week, said on Sunday that Democrats’ plan to support Republican candidates who have received the backing of former President Donald Trump could backfire in a “dramatic fashion” come general election time in November.
“While I think there was certainly a cynical calculus at play with the Democrats meddling, this is a risky strategy. It’s a dangerous strategy,” Meijer told “Face the Nation.” “Where President Biden is in his approval is so in the gutter, that it is easy to see that strategy backfiring in a spectacular way, which is all the more reason why we should not be embracing the zero-sum idea of politics.”
- Transcript: Rep. Peter Meijer on “Face the Nation”
Meijer was one of the ten House Republicans who voted last year to remove Trump from office for his part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. John Gibbs, Meijer’s opponent in the Republican primary, prevailed over the sitting congressman thanks to the former president’s support. His defeat came as a result of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) spending over $400,000 on a television commercial that emphasized Gibbs’ backing for Trump and agreement with his views.
Republicans and Democrats both criticized the advertisement, and Meijer mocked the DCCC’s attempt as a “rare display of bipartisan cooperation.”
“We had a scenario where not only did I have the former president aligned against me, but in a rare showing of bipartisan unity, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic Campaign Committee, also united to try to knock me off the ballot,” he said. “Now, this just highlights the cynicism and hypocrisy of our politics today. And frankly, it’ll be unknowable what that ultimate impact was, but the fact that we have the establishment left and the extreme right locking arms in common cause paints a very telling picture of where our politics are in 2022.”
Meijer acknowledged that while he accepts blame for his defeat, the Democratic Party’s campaign arm targeted Republican supporters in the commercial before the closely contested election.
“We are dealing with a politics that does not reward substance that does not reward, you know, reality,” he said.
Only three of the 10 Republicans who voted to remove Trump from office have moved on to the general election in November, and four others have chosen to leave Congress. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the most vocal Republican critic of Trump, will compete against rival Harriet Hageman in the Republican primary the following week.
Like Gibbs, Hageman enjoys the support of the late president.
Before the election on Tuesday, Cheney aired an advertisement in which her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, attacked the outgoing president and referred to him as a “coward” and “danger” to the nation.
When questioned about the advertisement, Meijer stated that Trump wants to keep a strong hold on the Republican Party and that he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want the midterm elections in November to be a vote on the outgoing president.
“The common cause between the extremes on the right, and the establishment left. Nancy Pelosi, I think she’s waking up every day crossing her fingers that Donald Trump runs in 2024, that he announces well ahead of the midterms, because right now, the midterms are set to be a referendum on President Biden’s leadership and Speaker Pelosi and many of my house Democratic colleagues do not want that,” he said. “They want it to be a referendum on former President Trump and I think former President Trump wants that as well.”