U.S. Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) attend a Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing (REUTERS)
Intelligencer columnist Ed Kilgore says Republicans derived a benefit from chaining themselves to President Donald Trump over the last decade, but they are definitely not the party to envy anymore. If anything, they're living "a total nightmare."
“[The year] 2026 has been even worse for [Sen.] John Thune (R-S.D.) and his GOP colleagues,” wrote Kilgore. “Senate Republicans began the year absolutely secure in their majority, thanks to a very favorable landscape and insane amounts of money. Now that majority is in real peril. The congressional GOP is totally dependent on Trump, and he seems to be the one Republican in Washington who doesn’t understand that the party can’t win the midterms unless it addresses Americans’ cost-of-living concerns.”
Kilgore added that Thune has been insisting that the Senate abandon its bipartisan traditions such as the filibuster, automatically approving judicial appointments from each senator’s state and working with a nonpartisan professional parliamentarian. He quoted Trump’s Wednesday Truth Social post to illustrate his point.
The other striking thing about the Truth Social post, Kilgore said, is that Trump "seems to be returning to the sort of plague-on-both-your-houses 'outsider' rhetoric he deployed regularly during his first presidential run in 2016."
"He says Republicans are complicit with 'Dumocrats' in blocking the excellent Pulte; have 'ridiculous' views on the blue-slip tradition; and 'fell into a trap' by refusing to blow up every single precedent in order to enact the SAVE America Act.
Trump's plan appears to be "keep publicly attacking his party for disloyalty and incompetence while demanding that they win the midterms," he added, which spealls trouble for most any party fighting to retain its slim majority. But of course, Kilgore added that "Thune must know that even if Republicans somehow maintain control of the Senate, Trump may depose him as majority leader anyway in favor of a new punching bag."
Veteran reporter and author Michael Wolff, who has covered Trump’s life and political career in depth, recently explained in his Daily Beast podcast “Inside Trump’s Head” that the president’s fellow Republicans are nervous that the poor quality of his appointees will impair their own credibility.
"I think it is that Trump’s low-rent lackeys and incompetents now are challenging every Republican senator’s credibility," Wolff explained to co-host Joanna Coles. He later said that “when this administration began, the new president gets the benefit of the doubt," adding that this is especially damning for lawmakers who supported Trump’s questionable appointees in order to show partisan solidarity.
“Almost each and every one of the senior Trump appointments — how do we characterize them? As lackeys and incompetents,” Wolff argued. “Almost everybody in the Senate, especially Republican senators, has had to reevaluate the votes that they’ve cast for these people and has had to reluctantly take responsibility for putting these lackeys, incompetents, and completely unfit people in the job. That is a pattern. That’s there. And this has become a separate political issue for Trump.
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