The House's most staunch backers of former president Donald Trump have launched a targeted campaign ahead of next year’s elections to increase their ranks in Congress, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
The endeavor is backed by Trump and is part of an overall drive by "Make America Great Again" supporters to get rid of those in the Republican Party not considered loyal enough to Trump and his claims that President Joe Biden won the White House due to electoral fraud.
The campaign's organizers say the goal is to significantly bolster the House’s MAGA group from its current unofficial membership of a half-dozen so it will be able to have major influence if the GOP takes control of the House in the midterms.
A major component of this strategy is to consolidate support around certain candidates participating in GOP primaries in solid pro-Trump districts, where the winner is virtually guaranteed to win the general election in November.
A prime example is in Washington state, where GOP candidate Joe Kent is running for a seat held by a Republican, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump over his role in the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol.
"A lot of it will be shaming Republicans," said Kent, who demands the GOP back impeachment against Biden and a congressional probe into the 2020 presidential election. "I need to be going after the people in the Republican Party who want to go back to go-along-to-get-along. It’s put up or shut up."
Trump critics within the GOP warn that this MAGA campaign threatens democracy, with Republican strategist Rick Wilson saying "we’re looking at a nihilistic Mad Max hellscape. It will be all about the show of 2024 to bring Donald Trump back into power."
As part of his effort in the campaign, Trump has already endorsed more than two dozen Republicans in the midterms, including five who are opposing GOP incumbents.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz told Vanity Fair in August that he considers himself and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be the former president’s "advance team" and said Trump blessed their plan to be "out there in the early-primary states keeping the band in tune, if you will."
Some of the MAGA candidates are also openly contemptuous of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose goal is to use the Republican Party machinery to flip the few seats the GOP needs to win back the House rather than taking sides in an intra-party struggle, The Washington Post reported.
A spokesman for North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, one of the leaders of the MAGA effort, said there is a rigorous process to choose candidates to support.
Cawthorn’s team reviews the candidate’s "declared values, past statements, current policy stances, and electability" and then a campaign official grills the candidate on immigration, social issues, and election integrity.
Only after passing these tests does the candidate meet with Cawthorn.
"Any candidate I endorse must be willing to go on offense when it comes to messaging, advancing the America First MAGA agenda in the U.S. House of Representatives," Cawthorn said. "They can’t allow the left to run roughshod over us and our narrative."
Kent appears to fit that mold, saying, "I think for the first two years our job is to be the resistance. We’re going to be fighting the Republican Party a lot. I think for your average Republican voter, what comes out of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mouth is what they want to hear. That’s what Trump did; he brought the average American into the room."