Many Republican officials don’t want Donald Trump around — but they’re also too afraid to challenge him, according to Atlantic reporter McKay Coppins.
“Everybody wants him gone, but nobody wants to face him directly,” Coppins said Monday on CNN. “There is only fear that if they follow him or if they try to surround others, they will make a counterattack from their base.”
But there is also another secret hope among muted anti-Trump Republicans.
“You have a lot of people who just want to [Trump’s] dead dead,” former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) told Coppins, according to a report in The Atlantic. “I want to be clear: I’m not in that camp. But I’ve heard from a lot of people who will go on stage and wear a red hat, then call me the next day and say, ‘I can’t wait for this guy to die.’
Asked about it on CNN, Coppins said he wasn’t the only one hearing that sentiment.
“I was surprised to hear this so often,” he said. “I thought it was a dirty, dark joke at first. But I heard it so often that it became clear that this was actually what many Republicans believed and it was just talking about the desperation of the party.