Even Republicans say Trump is 'falling apart' amid increasingly unhinged behavior

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts to a question in Washington, D.C., January 9, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Donald Trump's increasingly erratic, unhinged and potentially illegal conduct continues to rattle more and more Republicans, with one privately telling Salon that the president is "falling apart."

On Friday, Brian Karem, Salon's White House columnist, published an extensive rundown of Trump's barrage of alarm-raising scandals over the course of the last month, from his administration's unrelenting deportation effort in Minnesota to the FBI raid on election offices in Georgia to Secretary of State Marco Rubio's claim before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that the U.S. will control the budget of Venezuela after the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro. Trump, acting "delusional [and] demented," has "left us at a point where facts do not exist," Karem argued.

"It is apparent we’ve reached the point of no return," he added. "Untethered by reality, the Trump circus can no longer surprise any of us. But it is a growing danger to all of us — and the Republicans know it."

Karem echoed the growing sentiment that Republican lawmakers, though remaining deferential to Trump in public, are growing increasingly critical and panicked about his agenda behind closed doors. One anonymous GOP senator was blunt in their take on the situation while speaking to the Salon columnist about a bizarre Trump fundraising email that seemed to threaten to send ICE after people who did not donate.

“That’s just nuts,” the senator said. “He’s falling apart.”

Earlier this week, Axios obtained exclusive audio of GOP Sen. Ted Cruz speaking harshly of Trump and Vice President JD Vance during a private meeting with donors in mid-2025.

"I've been in conversations where [Trump] was very happy. This was not one of them," Cruz said of a meeting he took with the president.

"You're going to lose the House, you're going to lose the Senate, you're going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week," Cruz claimed to have told Trump, to which the president responded, "F—— you, Ted."

During last week's public hearing over Jack Smith's investigations into Trump, Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, claimed that his Republican colleagues were regularly bashing the president in private.

"These guys are so lucky that they are not under oath because they would have to tell you what they really think of Trump," Swalwall said. "They call him crooked. They called him cruel. They called him a scumbag. I’ve heard you all say it.”

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