Opinion | Trump Is the Real RINO

You might have heard that Ron DeSantis is a RINO.

Of course, the former congressman and Florida governor hasn’t departed from Republican orthodoxy in any significant way during his career (and, in fact, now he’s helping to define it); he’s loyally supported the party’s candidates across the spectrum, and, as his fame and power have grown, campaigned for them; and he’s been a determined party-builder in Florida.

In any rational world, the pejorative “Republican In Name Only” shouldn’t show up within hailing distance of DeSantis, but former President Donald Trump is trying to make it stick.

Records aren’t kept on such things, but Trump is clearly the most promiscuous user of “RINO” in Republican Party history. He applies it to everyone from Republicans who now have a genuinely strained connection to the party, like Liz Cheney, to stand-out governors like DeSantis and Brian Kemp of Georgia.

It’s not as though RINO, an insult and not the most subtle one, was ever a precise term. Once upon a time, it was an acronym applied to moderate Republicans who accommodated the other side on substance and process. In recent years, though, Trump has appropriated it as completely as the phrase “fake news.”

In a sign of the personalization of the Republican Party, one doesn’t get deemed a RINO for showing disloyalty to the party as an institution, or to its political principles and policy commitments, but for crossing one man, who himself, as it happens, has little loyalty to the party.

On top of everything else, Trump’s use of the term is a case study in projection.

Trump called Kemp, one of the most stalwart Republicans in the country, “a horrendous RINO who has betrayed the people of Georgia, and betrayed Republican voters.”

He’s inveighed against “RINO former Attorney General Bill Barr.”

He endorsed Kari Lake in last year’s Arizona gubernatorial race by saying she “will do a far better job than RINO Governor Doug Ducey.”

These, and many other Republicans, earned the sobriquet by not acquiescing in Trump’s schemes to overturn the 2020 election, or endorse his conspiracy theories about it. The 2022 midterms proved that an obsession with the 2020 election is electoral poison, such that a true RINO scheming to destroy the party from within would want as many Republicans to share this fixation as possible.

Of course, that’s exactly what Trump has sought. It’s not that he is trying to deliberately to undermine the party, but that his own personal interests and psychological needs take precedence. He’d no more sacrifice anything he truly cares about for the sake of the party than he’d jump off the Verrazano bridge.

Pretty much everyone he calls a RINO has devoted his or her adult life to the Republican Party. Trump is different. Prior to 2012, he ping-ponged back and forth among various party affiliations. So attenuated was his connection to the party in 2016, RNC chairman Reince Priebus famously fashioned a loyalty pledge to get him to commit to supporting the eventual nominee.

This makes Trump an odd arbiter of who’s a genuine Republican or not. It’s not the zeal of the convert, because his own conversion is still tenuous and situational. A fear that haunts Republicans about 2024 is that someone will beat Trump in the primary campaign, and the former president will turn around and try to sabotage the nominee out of spite.

This isn’t a far-fetched worry. When Brian Kemp wouldn’t do his bidding after 2020, Trump issued forth with arguably the most RINO-worthy sentiment of any major Republican in recent memory. “Stacey, would you like to take his place? It’s OK with me,” he said of Stacey Abrams at a rally. “Of course having her, I think, might be better than having your existing governor, if you want to know what I think. Might very well be better.”

It’s hard to see any other Republican living that down, but Trump can’t himself be a RINO by definition. If he decides to try to blow up the GOP in 2024, bizarrely, the supposed RINOs will be the ones who decide to stick with the Republicans.

The level of personal deference required to pass the Trump RINO test is extraordinary, and apparently escalating. Days ago, his loyalists were braying for DeSantis to speak out about the possibility of a Trump indictment. DeSantis ended up making a cogent and pointed critique of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, while stipulating that he doesn’t know about paying hush money to porn stars.

This set off the likes of Steve Bannon and Mike Lindell who can’t bear the slightest criticism of Trump, as if he were St. Francis of Assisi instead of Donald J. Trump of Mar-a-Lago. When DeSantis doubled down by talking about the importance of truth and character in an interview with Piers Morgan, Donald Trump Jr. lashed out by slamming the governor for — what else? — acting “on orders from his RINO establishment owners.”

Yes, truth and character are now RINO values.

Obviously, the label itself has outlived its usefulness, although it’s not going away until Trump goes away. For that to happen Republicans will have to become, in Trump terms, a RINO party — not any less conservative, less fierce, or less Republican, but no longer beholden to the man who has successfully made himself the measure of all things.

Trump’s definition of a RINO is a travesty, and it’s used to abuse Republicans in good standing whose commitment to the party is deeper and more principled than his will ever be.