The Retreat That Costs Nothing: Republicans Perform Distance From Trump
The pattern is unmistakable: as Donald Trump loses support heading into the midterms, the Republicans who carried him this far are edging toward the exits. Not on principle — on arithmetic. Trump is presiding over a failing presidency and lashing out at the news media, most recently by banning CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House. When a party's own incumbents start putting daylight between themselves and the president, it is because they have read the ground beneath them and found it giving way.
Consider who is doing the peeling. In South Dakota, the Republican secretary of state has endorsed a Democrat to succeed her — the latest Republican incumbent to speak out against conservative candidates as President Trump loses support before midterm elections. This is no marginal figure. Monae Johnson runs South Dakota's elections. The official charged with administering the vote has looked at the conservative field and thrown in with the other side.
Then there is the money. Iowa's Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator, on Saturday urged Trump to place an embargo on diesel exports amid high prices for the fuel — pressing the president in the open rather than lobbying in private. Grassley asked, in his own words, “[W]hy doesn’t Pres Trump put an embargo on diesel exports like presidents in the 70s put embargoes on ag[riculture] products [because] food prices were inflated.” A member of the president's own party is invoking inflation and fuel costs, the kitchen-table pressures voters feel, and demanding the White House act. That is a senator getting ahead of his constituents' anger before it reaches him.
The messaging apparatus is faltering in step. Sent onto Fox News to make the affirmative case, Pennsylvania Republican Dan Meuser managed the opposite. Brought on to discuss the upcoming midterm elections and argue that voters should support Republicans, his interview instantly backfired. When the pitch collapses on the party's friendliest network, the problem is not the messenger. It is that there is less and less to sell.
The most telling defection is the quietest, because it comes from inside the administration. Trump derided the United Nations last year as an institution that, in his own words, “wasn’t there for us”. Yet his own top envoy to that body has spent a year on the job making clear it may have its uses after all. Even the people Trump appointed to execute his contempt are, in practice, working around it. When your own instruments stop obeying the rhetoric, the rhetoric is spent.
Read together, these are not unrelated stories. They are one story about power sensing its own decline and repositioning — each of these officials calculating that proximity to Trump has become a liability. But notice how little the repositioning costs. When Texas Railroad Commission nominee Bo French posted a racist post, several Republicans condemned it while others distanced themselves without withdrawing their endorsements. That is the shape of the whole retreat: distance performed, endorsement kept. None of it is courage. It is self-preservation dressed as independence, the reflex of officials who intend to still be in office after the president is diminished.
And here is what none of the maneuvering touches. While the party choreographs its distance, the machinery of the administration grinds on against the people with the least protection. In Austin this weekend, a federal immigration agent shot and injured a man, leaving him in serious but stable condition, according to Mayor Kirk Watson. The agent rammed the man's car, then got out and opened fire at least five times, a local official said; police said he was shot once in the torso on Austin's north side. No secretary of state's endorsement reaches that man. No senator's letter about diesel reaches him. The electoral theater is a fight over who inherits the wreckage — not over who was buried under it. When the Republicans who built this presidency finally break from it, remember that they are running from the consequences, and that the people those consequences fell hardest on never had the option.