GOP Candidates Find Creative New Ways to Distance Themselves From Trump

Pay No Attention to That Man Inside the White House

Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, the Miami Herald noticed yesterday, scrubbed his campaign website of almost any mention of Trump’s name. He is, of course, not the first. Mike Beltran, running in Florida for a U.S. House seat, changed his website so that rather than stating he “felt inspired by President Trump’s 2016 victory,” it now explains he felt “called to public service.” Joe Mitchell, running in Iowa, once described himself as a “trusted voice in the MAGA movement” who would “always fight for the hard-working Iowans who have made their support for President Trump loud and clear.” Now, the Washington Post noticed, he promises to “clean up Washington and put working families first.”

The lack of enthusiasm among 2026 candidates for the Trump-headlined Dallas midterm convention was perhaps the canary in the coal mine. Now, amid dismal poll numbers, Republicans candidates are scrambling to put distance between themselves and the president in ways large and small — though the president is quite hard to ignore.

Some have taken a stand against the Iran War, with Ohio Senate candidate Jon Husted calling for it to “come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices.” Just before the House left for recess until November, seven Republicans joined with Democrats to vote to end the war.

My favorite example in this is Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor in Wisconsin. At TPM, we’ve highlighted the extent to which his defining characteristic is his election denial and the lengths he went following the 2020 election to keep Trump in office. As recently as May, he was encouraging the FBI to probe how his state conducted the 2020 election, and would not say who won it.

But, asked this month about that election, a spokesperson for Tiffany told a Wisconsin news outlet where he stood: “Joe Biden won.”

State Department Office With White Supremacist Name Does White Supremacist Things

A Washington Post investigation earlier this week provided the most extensive detail yet of the Trump State Department’s new Office of Remigration. The office, which takes its name from a European neo-Nazi concept of ethnic cleansing, has been behind the third country removals that have ramped up throughout the Trump administration, depositing immigrants to the U.S. in countries to which they have no connection.

• The Post obtained documents that detail the deals behind these removals, showing payments of $81 million to 13 foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian regimes.
• The Trump administration has deported a whopping 25,000 people in this way to at least 28 countries, per the Post.
• Many of these migrants have described, to the Post and numerous other outlets, inhumane conditions imposed by both the ICE agents who carry out the deportations and the third countries that ultimately receive the deported, including beatings and a lack of access to medical care.
• I was particularly interested in the details of why and how the term remigration — which comes from the darkest corners of the European right — was given to this office. (I know at this point in the Trump administration this kind of thing can fail to shock, but I really would encourage you to read TPM reporter Chris Mathias’ backgrounder on the term to understand how extreme its origins are, and what the administration is winking at here.) The Post documents how career staffers at the office — which, prior to its Trump administration repurposing, was dedicated to helping refugees — questioned State Department leadership about the name and mission change. “The message we got was that was the exact terminology they wanted,” one staffer told the Post.
• The office’s work is the brainchild of Stephen Miller and his closest administration allies, the Post reports.

Tabs

• Missouri earlier this year sued the Trump administration with an audacious demand: that it conduct reapportionment in a way that excluded many categories of immigrants, giving more power to Missouri in the U.S. House and Electoral College and less power to blue states. Missouri this month dropped its suit, however, convinced that the Trump administration plans to do just that, Layla A. Jones reports for TPM.
• Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the far-right Trump administration ally Jair Bolsonaro, stands a real chance of beating President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s upcoming presidential election, Bloomberg reports.

Woman of the Hour

It’s Susan Collins who, ProPublica reported and the New York Times now confirms, saw an FBI inquiry into her fundraising shut down under Trump.