Trump keeps hitting himself in the face —and the GOP is suffering for it: DC insider

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 8, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

President Donald Trump is defeating himself by pushing dissident Republicans out of his party, a longtime political journalist recently observed — although he added Democrats could still get in their own way.

“He has won his way to the lowest popularity of his presidency,” Joe Klein, a former Time columnist and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “He has won so many primary elections—in Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana—that his Republican Party is furling itself into a cult. It’s the reverse of those stop-action photos of flowers unfurling. It is like watching a slow, angry, gangrenous death. And he keeps traveling the path—a straight line toward self-aggrandizement—that gives him immediate joy, but will result in long-term agita. The rest of the year doesn’t look good for Donald.”

Klein then quoted Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who expressed concern that Trump’s success in pushing far right candidates to triumph over moderate ones in party primaries will hurt Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. Klein elaborated on this point, saying that it could also harm Trump’s ability to function in the current Senate.

“Indeed, Trump may have lost his zombie majority in the Senate, now that [Louisiana Sen. Bill] Cassidy and [Texas Sen.] John Cornyn have been freed to vote their conscience on crucial issues,” Klein wrote. “The President waved goodbye to Cornyn’s traditional conservatism when he endorsed the comprehensively loathsome Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate primary in Texas. ‘John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him,’ Trump said, ‘but he was not supportive of me when times were tough.’”

Klein observed an irony here, given that Cornyn supported Trump 99.2 percent of the time and that apparently was not enough for the president. By transforming the Republican Party into a cult of personality for Trump, Klein pointed out that the entire organization will be vulnerable to Trump’s serious mistakes, particularly his kowtowing to China and his failed war against Iran.

“That leaves two-thirds of the American people open to be won by his opponents…if only his opponents weren’t Democrats,” Klein wrote. “The party’s delusions deepen. Tom Edsall reports this week a plethora of polls showing that Dems are even less popular among the American people (39% approve of them) than Republicans are (40%). And yet, the Dems have a clear path—a superhighway—forward, if they just rejoin the rest of American society.”

Citing the political scientists David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley and Joshua Kalla at Yale, Klein argued Democrats can win in the midterms by moving toward the center on issues like police funding, enforcing minor crimes, affirmative action, transgender issues and the environment. By contrast, Democrats need to continue to be progressive on bread-and-butter issues like the minimum wage, Medicaid and Social Security.

“This is nothing new,” Klein wrote. “The Left has been the heart of the Democrats’ problem since Bill Clinton identified it as such. This week CNN released the party’s hidden autopsy of the 2024 election: No surprises there, either. Democrats run to win arguments; Republicans run to win elections, the report concluded.”

Urging Democrats to move away from identity politics and culture war issues, Klein instead encouraged them to follow in the footsteps of the late Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who Klein described as a fellow “left-handed Jew,” and who he praised for moving to the center on key issues in order to win elections.

“For Democrats, neatness has involved avoiding the difficult truths on too many issues,” Klein argued. “They have settled for an empretzeled politics of evasion. They have opposed racial equality, favoring instead a program of patronizing and infantilizing blacks. (When was the last time you heard a white liberal dispute a black activist?) They favored social experimentation over traditional truths. (When was the last time you heard a Democrat acknowledge the rock-solid sociology that two parents are better than one?) They have ignored the education of poor children, ignored the cascading wealth of evidence that charter schools are a necessary reform. ‘Look, we’re in the tank to the teachers unions,’ a leading Dem once told me. It is a septic tank. In an attempt to appease their various activist groups, especially feminists, they have done mortal damage to the English language. The left scorns billionaires when it is clear, as Barney realized, that free enterprise, carefully regulated— as his Dodd-Frank financial reform bill tried to be—was necessary for prosperity. There has never been a socialist economic boom.”

He concluded, “In the end, it takes real ineptitude to allow a sociopathic charlatan to win two presidential elections. The Democrats have achieved that. And while history suggests that they will transcend their ineptitude and win a House (and maybe a Senate) in 2026, they will have to do so in the most painful way, body-surfing a cultural minefield. Barney Frank was a good man who refused to be dishonest with himself. It would be nice if one of our two parties learned something from that.”

Klein has long been known for his willingness to criticize both parties with equal vigor. Speaking to this author for Democracy at Work last year, Klein applied this reasoning to explain why Democrats need to capitalize on Trump’s inflationary tariffs.

“Politics runs in cycles,” Klein argued. “The Democratic Party had always had a labor influenced left-wing that threw disproportionate weight, and Clinton got much of his funding, as did the DLC, from another wing of the Democratic Party, which was kind of socially liberal and economically conservative Wall Street people. They were against tariffs. They were very much in favor of free trade. And I remember that Clinton struggled with this, especially when it came to China.”

At the same time, Klein said he understood why Trump’s protectionist message proved persuasive to many swing voters.

“The Chinese didn't play by the rules, [which] made characters like Donald Trump possible,” Klein explained.

As far back as 2006, Klein has been known to criticize both parties. Even though he admired the Democratic President Bill Clinton and staunchly opposed many of the Republican President George W. Bush’s policies, he famously criticized both parties for their reaction to controversial Bush era policies like the National Security Agency (NSA) engaging in warrantless monitoring of domestic conversations.

“The liberals are reacting to this issue in their usual reflexive way,” Klein wrote at the time, angering many on the left. “Meanwhile, George Bush and others in his administration are being very cynical."

He concluded that the issue could be easily resolved because "all that's needed is an updating of the FISA Act or the Patriot Act."

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