‘I Can’t Wait for This Guy to Die’: Atlantic Writer Relays GOP Insiders’ Lack of Strategy to Purge Trump

Atlantic writer McKay Coppins appeared on Monday’s OutFront on CNN to discuss his latest piece, in which he describes a Republican Party desperate to be rid of Donald Trump.

As the article notes, however, no one seems to have a plan to do that.

“Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem,” he writes before noting Republicans have underwhelmed in three straight elections since Trump was elected in 2016.

“Are they just hoping he gets indicted and that just magically makes him disappear?” host Erin Burnett asked Coppins.

“Well, literally, yes,” he replied. “That was one of the scenarios that I heard repeatedly. It was striking how consistently I heard, ‘The party needs to move on from Trump. We need to find a way to get rid of Trump.’”

The problem, Coppins noted, is that few want to challenge Trump directly.

“There’s just this fear that if they go after him or if they try to rally around somebody else, they’ll spark a backlash from his base,” he said. “And so everybody is kind of waiting on the sidelines just hoping something will change.”

Burnett turned to a “morbid” passage from the article where some Republicans suggest Trump isn’t long for the world and that this is their “plan”:

In my conversations with Republicans, I heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to getting rid of Trump, grim as it sounds, might be to wait for his expiration. Their rationale was straightforward: The former president is 76 years old, overweight, appears to maintain the diet of a college freshman, and believes, contrary to all known science, that exercise is bad for you. Why risk alienating his supporters when nature will take its course sooner or later?

Coppins responded by noting Trump’s parents lived to their late eighties and early nineties.

“One former Republican congressman described this strategy to me as actuarial arbitrage, and literally said he has spoken to many Republicans who will put on the red hat and campaign for Trump and go up on stage with him, and then the next day say, ‘I can’t wait for this guy to die.’ That’s a direct quote,” he added.

“I thought it was kind of a morbid, dark joke at first,” Coppins said. “But I heard it so often that it started to become clear this was actually what a lot of Republicans believe. And it just speaks to the desperation in the party right now.

Earlier in the day, CNN’s Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist, reacted to Coppins’ piece.

“There’s only one strategy for getting rid of Trump: it’s to beat his ass,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know what else to say. Ron DeSantis is gonna have to get in this race and beat him.”