GOP primary election lesson: Don't cross the president

WASHINGTON -- Don't cross President Donald Trump.

That's the lesson many Republicans are drawing from Rep. Mark Sanford's surprise defeat Tuesday in his primary election in South Carolina. The victor, state Rep. Katie Arrington, repeatedly highlighted Sanford's criticism of the president.

The outcome is a cautionary tale for Republicans in Congress who try to work with Trump while also maintaining their independence. One wrong turn -- or in Sanford's case, many -- and they could face the wrath of a president who is quick to attack detractors as enemies, even in his own party.

"That's ultimately what the race devolved down to, which was, was I Trump enough?" Sanford told reporters on Capitol Hill.

"It's a very tribal environment right now," he said. "Are you for or against Trump?"

He said he hoped his defeat would not dissuade other members from speaking out against Trump. Agreeing to disagree is "a sign of health in our political system."

Sanford is the second incumbent House Republican to lose a primary this year, though the defeat of Rep. Robert Pittenger in North Carolina came despite his staunch support for the president.

Still, Sanford is only the latest casualty in the intra-party conflict roiling the GOP in the Trump era. Trump is known to remember slights from lawmakers.

Rep. Martha Roby, for example, was forced into a runoff last week in Alabama after her opponents seized on her own rift with the president. In 2016, after the release of a tape in which candidate Trump bragged about grabbing women, Roby said she wouldn't vote for him for president.

Recent results have a message, said Rep. Barry Loudermilk in neighboring Georgia. Be a team player or Trump will support someone who will be.

"It doesn't make me nervous, but it probably gives pause to some who want to openly criticize the president," he said.

Trump celebrated Sanford's defeat on Twitter, claiming success in ousting a foe. In a highly unusual move for a president, he had tweeted an endorsement of Arrington on Tuesday afternoon when polls were still open in South Carolina.

"My political representatives didn't want me to get involved in the Mark Sanford primary thinking that Sanford would easily win -- but with a few hours left I felt that Katie was such a good candidate, and Sanford was so bad, I had to give it a shot," he said.

The transformation of the GOP under Trump makes some lawmakers uneasy.

It's "becoming a cultish thing, isn't it?" said retiring Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who has an on-off relationship with Trump.

To be sure, the president's track record of picking winners and losers in elections is not perfect. He also backed Gov. Henry McMaster, who replaced Nikki Haley in South Carolina, but McMaster was forced into a primary runoff with Greenville businessman John Warren.

And Trump famously backed Roy Moore, the former Alabama judge accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls, in a special election earlier this year delivering the state's first Democrat to the U.S. Senate in a generation.

But Trump's preference for populist candidates such as Corey Stewart, the Confederate-statue-supporting Republican who won the GOP nomination for Senate in Virginia, increasingly seems to be remaking the GOP, if not Congress, in his image. Stewart will face Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democratic Party's 2016 vice presidential nominee, in the fall.

As former Speaker John Boehner said recently, "There is no Republican Party. There's a Trump Party."

Recent polls have found more than 80 percent of Republican voters approve of the job Trump is doing, and that makes GOP lawmakers hesitant to criticize him.

"Yes, of course it's his party," said Doug Heye, a former top House GOP leadership aide who is now a party strategist. "That's only more true today, given his high popularity among Republican voters."

He said lawmakers would be wise to keep their differences with the president low-key and within the range of policy, not personality, so as not to alienate Republican primary voters protective of the commander in chief. "What they will not support is someone they view as going after the president personally," Heye said.

Sanford, the former South Carolina governor, had never lost an election before Tuesday, even after a high-profile extramarital affair with a woman in Argentina. But he was never a strong Trump fan.

He demurred during the run-up to the 2016 election when asked if he'd support Trump and spoke out against the president after the election on issues such as limiting Muslim immigrants. He also voted against a border wall proposal, called Trump's proposed tariffs on aluminum and steel "an experiment with stupidity" and was unrelenting in calling for Trump to release his tax returns.

Arrington, the first-term state lawmaker who defeated him Tuesday, aired ads that featured clips of Sanford speaking critically about Trump's actions.