Connecticut Republicans who want to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal were given a direct Trump test in this week’s debate in the party’s primary.

I say that because it is increasingly obvious that no one suggesting even one iota of support for the former president has a prayer of winning statewide office in blue Connecticut.

Here we are, with the calendar page yet to turn to sultry August, and the once Teflon-coated Donald Trump is already beginning to melt away in the summer heat of 2022.

The Jan. 6 House committee has laid out plainly how Trump rejected the clear truth delivered unanimously from all his presidential and campaign advisers that he had lost the 2020 election. And yet he continued to solicit donations based on the clear lie that victory had been stolen from him.

He participated in a scheme he knew to be illegal, to create false electors for states he lost, and then he summoned and waved on to the U.S. Capitol an angry mob he knew to be armed to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

He tweeted a rebuke and put a bull’s-eye on the back of his loyal vice president, while watching television coverage of the rioting mob building a gallows to hang him.

The Department of Justice has already turned its huge investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, the largest prosecution in department history, toward the former president’s role.

The department, in the interest of not appearing to wield partisan political interference, might be expected to pull some prosecution punches, not pursuing allegations of tax irregularities in Trump businesses, for instance.

But it is not going to turn away from someone who much public evidence already suggests was the leader of an armed insurrection meant to stop the nation’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power.

Good money says the indictments of the Trump power elite will already be flying by the time Connecticut voters go to the polls in the fall.

It will be pretty hard by then for Connecticut Republicans to explain away a summertime defense of Donald Trump, in a state already reeling from the abortion-denying decision made possible by his rabidly conservative Supreme Court picks.

Indeed, Republicans everywhere are running out of time to run from Trump.

Surely I am not the only Connecticut observer amused this week as Trump attacked his old sycophantic pals on the morning Fox News show “Fox & Friends,” as they reported his sagging poll numbers. It’s going to get a lot uglier as the hot summer rolls on.

Two of the Republicans in the primary of hopefuls seeking to oust Blumenthal, a Connecticut political institution all his own, are unapologetic Trumpists who would sink like stones in November if they made it on to the ballot.

The moderate in the race, former House Republican leader Themis Klarides, has already burnished her anti-Trump credentials, admitting she didn’t vote for him in 2020 but wrote in a Connecticut GOP leader instead.

But in this week’s debate, Klarides flunked the will-you-vote-for-Trump test, saying she would have to know who else was on the ballot before deciding whether to vote for him in 2024.

The answer to that question in Connecticut should be an emphatic no. After all, this is a candidate who claims to know how to write in a name that doesn’t appear on the ballot.

Her summer of 2022 deference to a melting Trump may be just one of the things Blumenthal might enjoy hanging around Klarides’ neck, if she manages to beat the enthusiastic Trumpists she will be running against in the August primary.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

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