WASHINGTON — Eight years ago there was a peculiar migration of Hoosiers into the first Trump presidency.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence and Director of National Intelligåence Dan Coats were the headliners. Neither supported Donald J. Trump when he won the pivotal Indiana primary in May 2016 with 53% of the vote, coming with virtually no “establishment” support.
After Trump fired his first transition team director, Chris Christie, and replaced him with Pence, almost 40 Hoosiers followed the Indiana governor into the fledgling Trump45 administration. These were institutional or establishment Republicans: Alex Azar of Eli Lilly, Dr. Jerome Adams, Seema Verma, Ted McKinney, Anne Hazlett, Marc Short, Brad Rateike, Nick Ayers, Fred Klipsch, Jen Pavlik and Josh Pitcock.
In the Dec. 15, 2016, edition of Howey Politics Indiana, I observed, “As the Trump cabinet unfolds, there is a significant rightward bent and it has Pence’s fingerprints and world view all over it.”
It’s impossible to know how many of these Trump45 Hoosiers voted for him in the 2016 Indiana primary. Of the 40, my guess is you could have counted them with one hand.
As we all know, Vice President Pence was able to stay on President Trump’s positive side for 206 of his 208 weeks in power, until the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection. He is now persona non grata in the MAGA world and, perhaps, subject to prosecution. We also know that all of the cabinet level Hoosiers and Pence did not endorse him for a second term citing his willingness to pervert the Constitution and his role in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection.
Now with the second Trump presidency taking shape, the headlines are dominated by those who fit Steve Bannon’s self-described “Leninist” tendencies — those determined to dismantle federal institutions and pursue a path of “retribution.”
There is hard-drinkin’ Fox News personality Pete Hegseth for defense secretary; vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr., headed to Azar’s old post at Health & Human Services; Putin apologist Tulsi Gabbard for the Coats DNI slot; and Kash Patel as the incoming FBI director, where he has vowed to prosecute those deemed the “enemies within,” be they DOJ prosecutors, judges, intel leaders, RINOs or journalists. There had been former Congressman Matt Gaetz, whose nomination for attorney general became so toxic that he withdrew.
When Trump passed on Kosciusko County farmer Kip Tom as secretary of agriculture (the only Hoosier who appeared to have Trump47 cabinet capital), the most conspicuous Indiana man involved with the current Trump transition appears to be longtime GOP operative Marty Obst.
A couple of weeks after President Trump was sworn in in 2017, I had a conversation with JD Vance, the bestselling author and current veep-elect, at Purdue University. Vance chalked up Trump’s stunning upset to the notion he was willing to “slaughter a lot of Republican sacred cows.”
“If you think about what Trump really ran on, he made that the centerpiece of his campaign,” Vance said. “He talked about immigration and primarily talked about it through the lens of wages and wage competition, another Republican sacred cow to be sacrificed. He was very critical of the foreign policy that exists on the right and the left, especially on the right.
“He framed the whole host of issues as a pretty radical departure from George W. Bush in 2004 and very few people seemed to really appreciate that fact,” Vance continued. “More money from Wall Street went to Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump for the first time since the post-World War II era.”
Another writer for The Atlantic, George Packer, added, “This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate — in some cases, celebrate — Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself.
So Trump45 was populated with establishment Republicans who became his “guardrails” until they were gradually jettisoned.
Here in Indiana, the Pence wing is being replaced by Trumpists such as U.S. Sen.-elect Jim Banks, Attorney General Todd Rokita (who ran his 2018 U.S. Senate campaign with the motto “Defeat the elite”), Secretary of State Diego Morales and Lt. Gov.-elect Micah Beckwith (who is encouraging legislation forbidding the FBI from making arrests in Indiana).
Establishment Hoosier Republicans I’ve talked with since Trump won a second term dismiss some of his most contentious statements, impulses and controversial cabinet picks as just “bluster.” They acknowledge the “crazy talk” like deporting 10 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants.
But this wing of the Indiana GOP is receding.
Banks is calling the deportation of 15 million undocumented immigrants as doable, and he embraced the Gaetz nomination (“very talented” and “I’m going to vote to confirm”), as well as that of Hegseth (“an anti-woke warrior and I look forward to helping him clean up the mess at the Pentagon in the US Senate!”), RFK Jr. (“Good chance [he] will get bipartisan Senate support”) and Gabbard (“a patriot who has served our country for decades”).
While some see Hoosier farmers and blue-collar autoworkers returning oligarchs like Trump, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to power, others see it as an inevitable political realignment fueled by MAGA and not the receding establishment GOP that took power in 1980 during the Reagan revolution.
Brian Howey is a senior writer for Howey Politics Indiana and State Affairs.Find Howey on X @hwypol.
