AUBURN, Alabama: President Donald Trump on Monday strongly endorsed Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for a US seat here, prompting the Republican National Committee to restore its support for a candidate accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls.
Trump’s endorsement strengthened what had been his subdued, if symbolically significant, embrace of Moore’s campaign. At Trump’s direct urging, and to the surprise of some Republican Party officials, the national committee, which severed ties to Moore weeks ago, opened a financial spigot that could help Moore with voter turnout in the contest’s closing days.
“Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive tax cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama,” Trump posted on Twitter on Monday, before he formally endorsed Moore during a telephone call. “We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more.”
Trump’s endorsement and the party’s reversal hours later came a day after Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, had stepped back from his earlier criticism of Moore, saying Alabama voters should “make the call” on whether to send Moore to the Senate. Taken together, the week’s developments suggested that Republicans were increasingly confident that Moore is well positioned to defeat Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee, in next week’s special election.
But even as senior Republicans again coalesced around Moore, there were reminders that the party’s internal divide over its nominee remained. Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential nominee in 2012, warned that Moore’s presence in Congress would be “a stain” on Republicans and the country.
“No vote, no majority is worth losing our honour, our integrity,” Romney wrote on Twitter.
Although Moore appeared to be regaining important support in his party, some of his accusers pushed back at recent remarks in which he said he did not even know them, let alone behave inappropriately.
Many party officials believe that Moore has steadied his candidacy and that they should back — or at least avoid further antagonising — someone who could soon be in the Senate.
West Wing officials said Trump simply wants Republicans to retain control of the seat that Attorney-General Jeff Sessions held for 20 years, and he is willing to avert his gaze from the allegations to stop Jones.
Speaking to a group of Republican senators last week, the president said he was not particularly enthused about Moore’s candidacy, but he felt like his victory would represent a better outcome than the election of a Democrat who would often oppose their agenda, according to a Republican official in the room for the conversation.
Yet Trump disregarded, and irritated, some of his more cautious advisers on Monday in prompting the RNC to restore get-out-the-vote funds to Moore, according to one Republican in contact with the president. The Senate Republican campaign arm, which is controlled by McConnell, had no plans to offer financial help to Moore, officials said.
Even to some of his allies, Trump’s decision to link the party to someone accused of preying on teenagers marked another example of his impulsive style and penchant for creating new controversies when he is under fire.
Two factors appear to have moved Trump. He likes to associate with winners, and Moore has apparently stabilised in the polls. Further, no other women have come forward recently to level additional accusations against Moore.
But Moore, who was twice effectively removed as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, has been unable to outrun the accusations that became public last month.
Debbie Wesson Gibson, who has said she dated Moore for about two months when she was 17 and he was twice her age, showed The Washington Post a graduation card she said he had written to her. In scrawling script, it wished her a happy graduation and said, “I wanted to give you this card myself. I know that you’ll be a success in anything you do. Roy.”
In a text message on Monday night, a spokeswoman for the Moore campaign said that The Post was “reaching” and argued that the newspaper was “trying to write yet another story to distract from Doug Jones’ extremist liberal record”.
So far, the president’s preferred form of support for Moore has been to go after Jones, whom he criticised as a “puppet” of Democratic leaders in Congress. Electing Jones, he wrote on Twitter, “would hurt our great Republican Agenda of low on taxes, tough crime, strong on military and borders …& so much more.”
Yet in Alabama, where the state’s senior Republican lawmaker, Senator Richard C. Shelby, cast a write-in vote for a Republican other than Moore, the ultimate value of Trump’s endorsement is unclear and perhaps even negligible. Although Trump easily carried Alabama when he was on the ballot, the candidate he preferred over Moore lost the primary runoff by nine percentage points.
