Republicans will never turn on Trump. He’s gobbled up too much power in the architecture of the Republican Party. Even as his national approval numbers have continued to tumble, Trump has upped his ritual slayings of Republican incumbents, some for lack of total loyalty and then some, like John Cornyn, just for — well, let’s just say it — for the fuck of it. So it’s not just that he has too much power. The party’s elected officials are now overwhelming his people. When you see a breakdown between the White House and Republican majorities on Capitol Hill, it doesn’t come with any fingerprints. It’s almost like a black hole. Things that were going to happen just suddenly don’t happen. Or things disappear without a really obvious explanation.
The White House’s maybe-backaway from the Trump Thug Fund is an example of that. Todd Blanche says the Trump family’s immunity stays. They might try bring the fund back at any moment. But for now they’ve shelved it or are claiming they have. And the court ruling against it isn’t a sufficient explanation. They get those all the time. They’re abandoning it because it’s simply too unpopular on Capitol Hill.
John Thune has been telling Trump that. Even Axios this morning ran an item on “Thune’s breaking point.” And it even seems like it may have been Mike Johnson, no doubt in the most worshipful way, who delivered the final message on the Thug Fund. This isn’t a matter of anyone on Capitol Hill seeing the light or finding that the Thug Fund was a bridge too far for them. It’s simply too unpopular. Each new cash-out/corruption gambit measurably increases the danger that Senate Republicans will lose their majority next year. The House may already be a foregone conclusion.
It’s not that Republicans are breaking with Trump in any showy way. They’re not becoming less MAGA. It’s that Trump’s behavior is no longer in any alignment with their electoral interests. They’re not turning against him. That’s impossible. They are — particularly in the Senate — just getting less eager, less willing to make votes to back his latest farcical demands.
With all our doom-saying about how nothing matters, there’s a reason Trump’s popularity and power have ebbed this steeply. The mix of the ballroom, the Thug Fund and perhaps now the triumphal arch together amount to a kind of slavering, militant, Marie Antoinette-ism that is simply impossible to defend outside of maybe the hardest-core MAGA base, which is maybe 25% of the population or less. Too little attention has focused on the way this period of cash prize/retribution overdrive already at least temporarily sidelined Trump’s new immigration funding bill.
Everyone is rightly skeptical of any claim that Trump is finally losing his hold on the GOP or that some older version of the GOP is reemerging. You should be skeptical of that because it’s not happening. And that’s not what I’m arguing. Trump really has whittled down the GOP until it’s overwhelmingly made up of MAGA acolytes. But everyone wants to get reelected. It’s a response to Trump’s new focus over the last four or five months, one that was already significantly a response to his diminishing popularity. Trump is focused almost exclusively on retribution, demonstrations of untrammeled power, and cashing out as much money as possible before 2029. Defending his GOP majorities or doing anything to make it easier on Republicans to win reelection doesn’t seem to play into his calculus at all. Even his election-rigging moves — like housing nepo-baby Bill Pulte to oversee the U.S. intelligence community — seem more focused on 2028 than 2026. He seems completely indifferent about the midterms. He’s doubling down on the least popular, most toxic parts of his agenda.
In a way none of this is new. Trump has never cared about the Republican Party to the extent it exists separate from himself and his political fortunes. It’s just that he and the party haven’t been as clearly at odds with each other until now.