Over the last week, there have been a number of examples popping up on social media of Republicans, often very conservative Republicans in red states, removing President Trump from their campaign websites. It’s not terribly conspicuous. It usually amounts to taking an “endorsed by Trump!” button down and replacing it with some other innocuous tagline, or taking Trump out of a campaign biography. It’s very different from attacking Trump or doing anything publicly. But it still speaks volumes about the political moment, one in which Trump and everything about him if not everything he stands for is politically toxic, even in very conservative states and districts.
It allows us to look a bit over the horizon. What we see won’t surprise us. We probably know it already if we think about it. But it’s worth thinking about. If the midterms go more or less as expected, a lot of Republicans are going to be really, really pissed at Donald Trump. No, I’m not predicting some anti-Trump rebellion or reversion to the pre-Trump GOP. But it will be more than the standard disgruntlement after a bad election cycle. Because a Democratic wave won’t just be the expected thermostatic sloshing back and forth of modern politics. We’re still in a deeply sour public mood in which incumbents are always in some level of trouble. But in this case, Trump has taken step after step almost inviting a major backlash. The tariffs, the disastrous Iran War and resultant high fuel prices, the late fourth quarter trade war with Canada.