Republicans have intensified public criticism of former U.S. President Donald Trump, saying it was time for the party to move forward after a disappointing mid-term election performance.
Virginia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, a former Trump supporter, said on Thursday that voters had sent, through the vote, “a very clear message” that “enough is enough.”
“Voters have spoken out and said they want a different leader and a true leader understands when he becomes an obstacle,” Earle-Sears told Fox Business television. “A true leader understands when it’s time to step off stage. It’s time to move on.”
Earle-Sears, who was co-chair of a group of African Americans that supported Trump’s 2020 re-election, also said she “just couldn’t” support another campaign by the former president.
John Thune, the number two Republican in the Senate, the upper house of the US parliament, highlighted Trump’s role in choosing, during the primaries, earlier this year, some inexperienced and controversial candidates who ended up losing in the elections of Tuesday.
In an interview, Thune said that “there is no substitute for good quality candidates”.
“We’ve had some very hot and competitive primaries this year,” said Thune, who was easily re-elected. “And in some cases, there were a lot of forces at work, including outsiders making recommendations at some of those races.”
Thune said he hoped the party would begin to see younger leaders emerge. “You can’t have a party built around one person’s personality,” he stressed.
Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the US parliament, who clashed with Trump during his first two years in office, called Trump “a brake on our candidacy”.
“We want to win. We want to win the White House and we know that with Trump we have a much better chance of losing,” Ryan said in an interview with WISN 12 News. “If we have a candidate other than Trump, we are much more likely to win the White House,” he added.
Former Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey also blamed Trump’s intervention for the Republican Party’s losses in the state of Pennsylvania and noted that Trump-backed candidates fared worse than other Republicans.
“I think my party needs to face the fact that if loyalty to Donald Trump is the main criterion for selecting candidates, we probably won’t do very well,” Toomey told CNN television.
“Across the country there is a very high correlation between MAGA candidates [‘Make America Great Again’, Donald Trump’s iconic campaign slogan meaning ‘Make America Great Again’] and big losses or at least , dramatically underperforming,” he added.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump admitted that the party’s results were “somewhat disappointing” for not producing the “red wave” (the color of Republicans) in Congress that some polls predicted.
However, the former president added, in a message on his social network, Truth Social, that, according to his “personal” point of view, they were a triumph.
The day before, Trump, who has been mentioning the possibility of a new candidacy for the White House, had promised to make “a big announcement” on November 15.
With the vote count for the US midterm elections on day two, Republicans are just nine seats away from achieving a majority in the House of Representatives and control of the Senate is still open.
According to projections by the Politico newspaper, Republicans lead the way in winning seats in the Senate with 49 seats, compared to 48 secured by Democrats, out of a total of 100 seats up for grabs.
In Arizona and Nevada everything remains open, with hundreds of thousands of votes yet to be counted.
However, Georgia will be responsible for dragging the electoral process until December, when the state will again vote to nominate a senator to Congress, after none of the candidates has reached the 50% mark.