That seems to be what’s happened to the MAGA contingent of the Indiana Republican Party. For the past 10 years, the members of that know-nothing caucus have swaggered around searching for scraps like high-school bullies let loose in a cafeteria or hallway left unmonitored by adults.
The issues didn’t matter much to them.
One minute, they hated tariffs and trade restrictions. Then they loved them. After that, they loved them and hated them, depending upon the momentary whims and fancies of their impulsive north star, President Donald Trump.
The same pattern applied to foreign wars. Originally, the MAGA crowd was against them, but once Trump began bombing other nations as if he were handing out party favors, they did one of the fastest about-faces in history.
For them, the issue never was the point.
What mattered to them was giving voice to their assorted resentments. They scrapped and scraped to demonstrate their contempt for “libs” and “know-it-alls,” the folks who fought not as performance art but because—to the MAGA way of thinking—they made the mistake of actually believing in something and taking stands on principle.
Here in Indiana, that meant that much of the MAGA crowd’s fussing and feuding was directed at the wing of the state GOP led by the late Richard Lugar, Mitch Daniels, John Mutz and the late William Hudnut. That wing believed in limited government intrusion in both economic and cultural matters. The solution to most problems, those leaders believed, was to find a way to apply market principles to the task.
That wing dominated both the Indiana GOP and the state itself for much of the last half of the 20th century and early years of the 21st.
But the cultural forces that shook the nation at large and thrust forth Trump left their marks on Indiana, too.
Former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb was a product of the Lugar-Daniels tribe. The MAGA minions housed in the Indiana General Assembly did their best to make his second term miserable.
They asserted that, even if they’d struggled with biology classes in high school, they knew more about public health challenges associated with a global pandemic than the medical scholars who’d spent decades studying infectious diseases. And they insisted that adhering to constitutional scruples was for sissies.
Through it all, they labeled anyone who disagreed with them as a RINO—Republican in Name Only—even if the person so labeled had been part of the GOP longer than the name-caller had been alive.
They did it because they liked pushing people around. They thought no one would ever push back.
Looks like they were wrong.
Late last year, Indiana Senate Republicans defeated the Trump-led and MAGA-driven push to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts in the middle of a decade. When it became clear that the power grab was in trouble, Trump whined that Mitch Daniels was thwarting him.
Daniels never acknowledged as much.
Then again, he never denied it, either.
Flash forward a few months. Former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, the last Republican to occupy that office, announced that he’s running for secretary of state and establishing a new political party—the Lincoln Party—to do so.
Ballard all but issued engraved invitations to the disaffected members of the Lugar-Daniels wing of the GOP to come join him.
Then Daniels delivered a quasi-endorsement of Ballard in an interview with a television reporter.
“Greg is well known, very admirable fella, and I think part of his rationale for making this step and part of his opportunity is the incumbent has a lot of scandal,” Daniels said, referring to Republican Secretary of State Diego Morales, a scandal-plagued MAGA darling.
“It’s clear that the way we’re selecting candidates these days in which the most devoted partisans of each party generally pick the nominees in primaries has clearly led to a number of situations where people say, ‘Are those my choices?’ More and more people (are) indicating when asked that they consider themselves an independent. I think there is some opportunity there.”
Mitch Daniels doesn’t use words carelessly.
He was sending a message.
That message?
Those MAGA folks who have been looking for a fight?
They’re going to get their wish.
