Why Trump Stands by Roy Moore, Even as It Fractures His Party
By the time Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, made the last of his repeated pleas to President Trump to keep his distance from the Senate candidacy of Roy S. Moore, it was too late.
To Mr. McConnell, only the president could extinguish a fire that he sees as endangering Republicans’ Senate majority. But Mr. Trump, speaking by phone last Tuesday with Mr. McConnell, responded with the same argument he had been making for days inside the White House.
The women who have called Mr. Moore a sexual predator, the president believes, may not be telling the truth.
“Forty years is a long time. He’s run eight races, and this has never come up,” Mr. Trump said to the television cameras on the South Lawn hours after his conversation with Mr. McConnell, effectively endorsing Mr. Moore before boarding Marine One. “He says it didn’t happen,” the president added. “You have to listen to him, also.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to reject every long-shot plan to save the Senate seat reflects the imperative that an unpopular president faces to retain his political base, a determination that he should follow his own instincts after having felt steered into a disastrous earlier endorsement in the Alabama race, and even his insistence that he himself has been the victim of false accusations of sexual misconduct.
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