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.
I’m not including things like his brutal immigration crackdown because that does have some level of support, though now clearly in the minority. I’m talking about the things that even his supporters are at best mostly indifferent to. Yes, they support them publicly because he did them. But that’s not the same. How many Republican electeds are thinking now: I’m really glad he started his war with Iran. The country is better off and my election prospects have gotten better. You’re seeing this play out with the Canada trade war as his candidates try to back him but find it close to impossible.
No, I don’t expect them to rebel, but they also won’t be happy. They’ll be harder to rally to his side. They’ll be questioning whether he’s an asset or a liability two years later — especially if he continues to govern in this way through the final two years of his presidency. It’s worth noting that while Trump has decided that “Republicans” have screwed up the midterms, most of the data before us suggests that Republicans are actually more popular than Trump, to the extent the two things that can separated. The temperature of all of this will be heightened as his partisan foot-soldiers are inevitably looking toward him when he, temperamentally, needs to remain the center of attention.
We know what Trump does in these situations. He finds some new narrative that invokes partisan muscle memory, the other guys being implacably evil, to tighten partisans into his own ranks. Every politician does this to a degree. Bill Clinton shifted from his ’94-95 mode to triangulation and focusing on GOP extremism. But with Trump, everything is in more garish colors, more apocalyptic and total.
We’ve already seen some preview of this. Democrats are bloodthirsty communists and terrorists who want to storm your home and transition your family members. But that actually hasn’t had as much traction with his base recently compared to how much it angers Democrats. And what is most consistent for Trump is that he needs something new — that’s either a feature of his short attention span or just intuitive understanding of the attention economy. You need a new thing. The old thing lacks the shock and novelty. Maybe he doesn’t have a third act in him. But it’s worth thinking a bit over the horizon on what the third act angle is likely to be.