There are two figures in the Republican Party who best represent the state of the GOP in the Trump era. The first, of course, is Donald Trump. The second is Roy Moore. By the time Moore defeated Jeff Sessions’s replacement, Luther Strange, in the Republican primary for Alabama’s special election in 2017, he had already been a minor celebrity on the right-wing fringe for nearly 20 years. He had been removed from the Alabama Supreme Court twice for refusing to comply with federal rulings. He regularly made statements disparaging Islam and homosexuality. He had been a proponent of the theory that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and had led an organization that celebrated pro-Confederate holidays. True to form, Moore would go on to make comments suggesting an ambivalence about American slavery during his campaign—America was last great, he had said in response to a question at a rally that September, “when families were united—even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.”
In the months leading up to the election, the Republican National Committee seemed entirely willing to swallow that record and more to keep Sessions’s seat in the party’s hands. But that November, The Washington Post went public with startling allegations. Moore, a fervent public tribune of conservative family values, was credibly accused of sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl and pursuing several other teenagers. This, obviously, was a bridge too far for the party. Quickly, the RNC pulled its money and field support from the campaign. “The allegations were obviously very concerning, and concerning to the degree that we pulled our resources,” committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel explained to conservative talk show host John Catsimatidis. “The Alabama voters are going to have to be the judge and jury on this.” Her uncle, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was among the voices urging the party to abandon Moore. “Roy Moore in the U.S. Senate would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation,” he tweeted. “No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity.” At a press conference earlier in the month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called on Moore to step aside. “He’s obviously not fit to be in the United States Senate,” McConnell told reporters, “and we’ve looked at all the options to try to prevent that from happening.” By early December, Moore had few open supporters within the party infrastructure beyond the Alabama Republican Party, which had secured Moore’s place on the election ballot.
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