Kevin Stitt vs. Donald Trump: Senate opening another chance for governor to keep pushing
Breathlessly, everybody’s waiting to see who Kevin Stitt, lame duck governor, chooses to serve out Markwayne Mullin’s U.S. Senate term, and why not?
Kristi Noem is out as secretary of homeland security. Donald Trump wants Mullin to leave the Senate to replace her and when does such political intrigue ever occur in our state?
“This, in Oklahoma, hear me now,” long-time-ago state attorney general Mike Turpen told KFOR-4 in Oklahoma City, “is a political revolution.”
A political revolution?
Too bad he didn’t keep talking.
Still, the machinations of the process are the undercard.
They’re surface, not sentiment.
The main event is what Stitt is thinking.
What does he really want for himself, his state and the nation, perhaps not quite in that order?
Because have you noticed? Lately he’s quit sounding like the old Stitt who once laughed at an education department exodus and begun sounding like an old-school, small-government, states’ rights, federalist Reaganite.
If you don’t believe it, check out this, this and this.
Now, for a moment, let’s put some facts and inferences on the table so we’re looking at the same canvas.
• Stitt has 30 days to appoint somebody as Mullin’s successor once he resigns from the Senate. Though it’s not exactly enforceable law, that appointee is supposed to sign an affidavit agreeing not to run for Mullin’s seat in the coming election cycle.
• While Stitt claims to have made no decision, there’s been reporting he’s considering five possibilities:
Nathan Dahm, a state senator from 2012–24 and chair of the state GOP from 2023–25; David Ostrowe, the chief operating officer of the governor’s office; John O’Connor, the former state attorney general who never met an investigation he couldn’t dodge; Dustin Hilliary, a Stitt senior adviser, regent in the Oklahoma State system and Lawton-area businessman; Harold Hamm, founder of Continental Resources, the state’s wealthiest individual and a political mega-donor to Republican causes, who actually called Stitt to express interest.
• Kevin Hern, who represents Oklahoma’s 1st District in the U.S. House, and Stephanie Bice, who represents the 5th, have both expressed interest in running for Mullin’s seat.
There’s also nothing preventing those who’ve announced gubernatorial ambitions from changing course and running for Mullin’s seat instead.
• Because non-incumbents are easier to beat than incumbents, Democrats could have a piece of the action, too. If Hern and Bice both run for Mullin’s seat, their House seats would become easier to flip. That could matter for Jena Nelson in the 5th and whoever wins the Democratic nomination in the 1st.
• Should a horrendous Christian Nationalist like, say, Ryan Walters secure the Republican nomination for Mullin’s seat, perhaps a Democrat could steal that one, too.
• The filing period to run for Mullin’s seat is April 1–3.
Back to Stitt.
“We have to get back to integrity,” he told National Public Radio recently, before pivoting to a wind power project the Trump administration killed in Rhode Island.
“They did everything right. They’ve been working on it for eight years,” Stitt said. “They have all their permits. They’re 90% complete, and they just get the plug pulled on them … That’s un-American.”
Trump had called Stitt a RINO — Republican in name only — only a couple of weeks earlier when Stitt, in his role as chairman of the National Governors Association, insisted every governor, not just Republicans, be invited to the White House for an annual and previously bipartisan event.
That means Stitt knew exactly what he was doing when he called the Trump administration’s action in Rhode Island “un-American.”
He was asking for another row with the president.
Could Stitt be the Republican we’ve all been waiting for?
Did he reinvented himself while nobody was looking?
He’s bad on education tax credits, terrible with the tribes despite being a citizen of one of them and wrongheaded on taxes, looking out first for people like himself rather than the masses.
Is that just conservatism?
Because he’s not Trump.
Not that he doesn’t have his moments, but his default settings aren’t absolute division, dickishness and owning the libs over getting things done.
What he appears to have done is excavate an unoccupied lane and fill it with himself.
He wants off the Trump train. He wants Oklahoma and the nation off the Trump train. Just how boldly he’s prepared to pursue that is the real question.
He hinted at it when describing the type of senator he wants to appoint.
“I will be looking to appoint a strong, small-government conservative voice to support President Trump and protect Oklahomans’ way of life,” Stitt posted on Twitter.
Perfect.
Stitt knows congressional Republicans have surrendered their power to Trump.
He knows small-government conservatism is the last thing Trump represents and that everybody else knows it, too.
“… to support President Trump” is window dressing.
“… to protect Oklahomans’ way of life,” as he sees it, of course, is the real point.
So the ball’s in his court.
He’s got an open U.S. Senate seat to fill temporarily and, soon after, an open U.S. Senate seat he could run for himself.
Maybe Stitt wants to reshape American politics from the ground up, into something disagreement isn’t to be defeated but faced and occasionally solved by negotiation.
Maybe he wants to do that.
He’s found the lane.
Is he willing to race?