There’s nothing quite like watching people who spent years kissing the ring suddenly realize that the man wearing it might be bad for business.
According to a recent POLITICO poll, one in four Trump voters now say Republican candidates should break with the president to win in November. Apparently, there is a limit to how much economic misery, international chaos, and political embarrassment people are willing to endure before they start questioning the man they helped put in the White House.
But this isn’t new. Republicans and their voters have been lockstep with the president for years, and then when elections come around, they try to distance themselves from the stench coming out of the White House.
That’s because Donald Trump has always been the political equivalent of a gas station bathroom that hasn’t been cleaned since the Reagan administration, and the smell is becoming increasingly difficult to cover up.
Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers is calling for an end to Trump’s trade war with Canada. Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar has criticized the administration’s immigration crackdown. Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson wants the Iran war to end. And Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton has reportedly been privately complaining about the president and the national party.
These are not profiles in courage. These are politicians looking at the polls, smelling smoke and suddenly remembering they have constituents who pay for groceries and fill up their cars.
For years, Republicans treated Trump’s excesses as the price of admission to political power. His racism was excused. His misogyny was overlooked. His attacks on democratic institutions were dismissed as just another Tuesday. Every fresh outrage was met with the same exhausted explanation: That’s just Trump being Trump.
But now the bills are coming due, and they aren’t just financial.
Inflation, rising gas prices, expensive mortgages, and a war with Iran have made it harder for Republicans to pretend that Trump’s promises are translating into a better life for ordinary Americans. It turns out that telling people the economy is booming doesn’t work when they are standing at the grocery store wondering why everything costs so damn much.
And suddenly, the same Republicans who spent years telling us Trump was a political genius are discovering their moral compass has been pointing towards Hell this whole time.
Of course, nobody should confuse political self-preservation with a moral awakening. These candidates aren’t necessarily having second thoughts about Trump’s behavior. They’re second-guessing whether standing next to him will cost them their jobs.
That’s an important distinction.
Even now, most Republicans aren’t willing to break with Trump completely. They still need his loyal MAGA voters, who overwhelmingly want candidates to stick with the president. So they praise him in public, complain about his policies in private, and hope voters won’t notice the difference.
It’s political cowardice dressed up as strategy.
The problem is that Trump has spent a decade demanding absolute loyalty from his party. Republicans helped create a political culture in which disagreeing with him could mean being branded a traitor. Now they want to pretend they were independent thinkers all along.
Good luck with that.
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