It’s Trump’s Party and He’ll Crash If He Wants To
The GOP has never been more Trump’s party. Midterm voters will surely notice.
A month and a half ago, Donald Trump reached into his bag of negotiatin’ tricks and pulled out a few threats of genocide: If the “crazy bastards” of Iran wouldn’t “Open the Fuckin’ Strait,” the president warned, a “whole civilization” would die. Didn’t work then, but maybe second time’s the charm: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking,” Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday, “and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.” Happy Monday.
Live by Trump, Die by Trump
by William Kristol
“This is the party of Donald Trump.” So Sen. Lindsey Graham proclaimed on Meet the Press yesterday, in the wake of Sen. Bill Cassidy’s defeat in the Louisiana Republican primary. Graham is right. The Republican party is unquestionably and unambiguously Trump’s party. And the GOP will be dragged down by him, burdened by his dead weight, as it sinks this fall beneath the political waves.
As Graham was confirming that the GOP is Trump’s party yesterday, CBS News released its latest survey, conducted by YouGov, of more than 2,000 adults last week.
The first question asked was, as usual, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?” Here are the answers from this poll so far this year:
January 2026: Approve 41 percent, disapprove 59 percent.
February 2026: Approve 40 percent, disapprove 60 percent.
March 2026: Approve 39 percent, disapprove 61 percent.
April 2026: Approve 38 percent, disapprove 62 percent.
May 2026: Approve 37 percent, disapprove 63 percent.
Yes, the movement of American public opinion away from Trump has been frustratingly slow. But unlike in the last half of 2025, when Trump’s numbers were basically stable at around 41 percent to 59 percent, the movement this year has been real. The decline to 37 percent approval (and the climb to 63 percent disapproval) has been slow but steady, gradual but inexorable. One percentage point a month adds up. (And this morning, a new New York Times/Siena poll has very similar numbers, with Trump at 37 percent approval, 59 percent disapproval.)
When you dig into the CBS poll, it gets worse for Trump. Separating those who approve or disapprove of Trump strongly from those who do so only tepidly, here’s what you get:
Strongly approve: 20 percent.
Somewhat approve: 17 percent.
Somewhat disapprove: 11 percent.
Strongly disapprove: 52 percent.
Sitting at 20 percent vs. 52 percent among the voters with the strongest opinions is not a strong position.
And when asked, “How much do you think Donald Trump cares about the needs and problems of people like you?” Americans responded:
A lot: 18 percent.
Some: 17 percent.
Not much: 14 percent.
Not at all: 51 percent.
These are very bad numbers for Donald Trump. And these are very bad numbers for the Republican party.
As Ron Brownstein points out, “Trump is consistently in a much deeper hole now than other recent presidents who had bad mid-terms.” A party’s performance in a midterm, especially when that party has controlled both the presidency and Congress for the preceding two years, tends to correlate pretty reliably with the president’s approval rating. This makes sense. After all, in November, voters have to decide whether they want the next Congress to continue to go along with that president or to check him.
And that correlation will presumably hold all the more tightly when the congressional party is visibly tied at the hip to their president. Which, as Lindsey Graham said yesterday, today’s Republican party is.
So for all the complexities of the tasks we face confronting the ongoing disaster of Trump and Trumpism, the short-term political task today is pretty simple. The pro-democracy movement has to try to continue to drive down Trump’s approval, to the degree possible. At the very least, it has to get out of the way as Trump’s own actions lead to public disapproval.
And the short-term task of the Democratic party is also pretty simple: Tie Republican incumbents and candidates as tightly as possible to their president. This means among other things making them vote over and over for Trump’s unpopular policies and for his unpopular vanity projects. The best way to make sure Trump’s enablers pay a price is to make them continue, visibly and embarrassingly, enabling their leader. (And if some of them grow sick of doing so, or decide it’s in their political interest to allow a little space between themselves and the president, all the better. Some coverage of “Republicans in disarray” would be fine too.)
The closest parallel to this year could well be 2006. Republicans went into those midterms with control of both houses. Most polls had President George W. Bush around 37 percent approval on election day. Democrats took control of both houses, gaining thirty-one seats in the House and six in the Senate. They won the national popular vote in the House by eight points.
Trump and his party will be able to do a lot of damage over the next six months. They’ll be able to do a lot of damage for the subsequent two years even if Democrats do win Congress. But perhaps the tide has turned.
I haven’t gone all Victorian poetry for a while, so if you’ll permit the indulgence, I’ll close with some lines from Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say not the struggle nought availeth”:
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main, And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.
Christian Nationalists Hit the Mall
by Andrew Egger
Yesterday, a consortium of right-wing Christians gathered on the National Mall for “Rededicate 250,” an event billed as “a National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” I would have liked to attend the event, to deliver you a firsthand report on the vibes, but I was prevented: I spent my Sunday at church.
Online later, however, I got the gist. “Rededicate 250” was what you’d have expected from this crew: a full-throated embrace of the MAGA iteration of the faith by the Trump administration, an uneasy amalgam of rudimentary Christian doctrines summoned up to bless smashmouth Trumpian politics. A host of administration officials and allies spoke via recorded video or from the stage: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, House Speaker Mike Johnson. Even Trump was beamed in on video to read some Scripture—a recycled video from a few weeks ago, it turns out, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind.
Over and over, the speakers hammered the inseparable connection between the defense of the faith and the aims of the modern Republican party. They, the onstage speakers, were on the side of the angels—and no one had any doubt who was on the opposing team.
“We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes, and the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this great nation,” Johnson said. (Ostensibly, he was praying.) “These voices insist to the young and impressionable that our story, the American story, is one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure, and that this story can only be understood through the lens of our sins. Father, we reject that.”
MAGA Christianity: Now featuring 100 percent less repentance of sins!
Others were even less subtle. Author and radio host Eric Metaxas—long one of the most insufferable voices on the Christian right—exulted that “it’s hard to believe it took two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand.” (He later claimed that this, as opposed to his usual Trump-worshiping shtick, had been a joke.)
I have to give the organizers credit for one thing: They were smart to pick the date they did. Two hundred fifty years ago yesterday, as the American colonies barreled toward war with Britain, the Continental Congress proclaimed a national “Day of Fasting, Prayer, and Humiliation,” declaring it the “indispensable duty of these hitherto free and happy colonies, with true penitence of heart, and the most reverent devotion, publicly to acknowledge the over ruling providence of God; to confess and deplore our offenses against him; and to supplicate his interposition for averting the threatened danger, and prospering our strenuous efforts in the cause of freedom, virtue, and posterity.”
Christianity and America have always stood both in harmony and in tension: The faith is in the country’s bones, yet the country has chosen from the beginning to hold faith and politics forcibly apart. In another universe, this event could have been a very different affair, along the lines of the longstanding National Prayer Breakfast—a bipartisan rededication to the importance of humbling ourselves and seeking the wisdom, blessing, and grace of God.1 But that approach has been dying a dual death: increasingly pushed aside for MAGA Christianity boosterism on the right, increasingly abandoned to die a death of neglect on the left.
It constantly dismays me to see my faith so deployed in modern right-wing politics—stripped bare, deracinated, cheapened into a bauble of cultural-political identification. We love our Christians, don’t we folks? I also worry that we are seeing a vicious cycle. In the minds of many irreligious types on the left, these sorts of charlatans are increasingly the only “Christians” they see. The more tightly the religious right tries to tie Christianity to the doomed and dying MAGA project, the less they can be surprised if whatever movement vanquishes MAGA turns out to be hostile not only to MAGA, but to Christianity itself.
This, of course, would suit the charlatans just fine: Their pitch to believers relies on them being, to a significant extent, the only game in town. But for those believers who made their peace with Trump for years on the spurious argument that he was the only thing standing between them and a political movement hostile to their faith, I worry that they may meet their destiny on the road they took to avoid it.
AROUND THE BULWARK
How Corrupt Is Trump? Here Are the Numbers… He’s the swampiest swamp creature ever, writes MONA CHAREN.
The Hard Right Hates Neil Gorsuch… It’s all about the constitutionalists vs. the nativists, explains Daniel Ruggles.
Ending the War Will Require Force… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN survey a wide range of jackassery, from Trump’s attack on longtime Mitch McConnell aide Robert Karem and his mismanagement of the Defense Department to the Iran intelligence leak, the Trump–Xi summit, Trump’s designs on Cuba, and the implications of Turkey’s newly unveiled ICBM.
What Can ‘A Man for All Seasons’ Tell Us About Today? SONNY BUNCH joins MONA CHAREN to talk about the 1960s classic that was a conservative touchstone.
From Bunker Hill to Normandy, JD Vance Is Wrong About America… On How to Fix It, REP. JAKE AUCHINCLOSS joins JOHN AVLON to lay out a new “patriotic center” for Democrats—from taxing social media companies to fund education, to rebuilding America, fixing housing, confronting China, regulating AI deepfakes, and reclaiming patriotism from Trumpism.
Quick Hits
DOWN GOES CASSIDY: Donald Trump may have shed basically every non-Republican voter from his coalition by now, but that’s cold comfort for the Republican elected officials he’s decided to punish. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) limped to a distant third-place finish in Louisiana’s GOP primary Saturday, capturing only 25 percent of the vote—a stunningly poor showing for a Senate incumbent. Two MAGA challengers, Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a runoff without him.
Cassidy, a doctor and two-term senator, now approaches the end of his political career as a cautionary tale in the impossibility of living with one foot in the MAGA camp. He earned Trump’s undying enmity in 2021, when he was one of seven GOP senators to vote to convict the president in his impeachment trial after January 6th. But he also made periodic, wan attempts to shake Trump off his vengeance tour—most notably, by convincing himself last year to set aside his misgivings and vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. It didn’t work: Kennedy quickly and remorselessly broke the vaccine-policy promises he made Cassidy in exchange for his vote, and Trump made sure to crush Cassidy in his primary anyway.
The question now is how Cassidy will choose to spend the eight months before his term ends. At this point, he truly has no reason left to make nice with the president, who issued a gloating Truth Social post after his defeat: “His disloyalty to the man who got him elected,” Trump wrote, “is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!”2
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our Constitution,” Cassidy said in his concession speech. “And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power . . . that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
THE PARLIAMENTARIAN VS. THE BALLROOM: Senate Republicans’ plan to earmark a cool billion for Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project has run into a familiar and formidable foe: the Senate parliamentarian, the once-obscure functionary who is tasked with ruling what can and can’t be passed under simple-majority budget-reconciliation votes—and therefore along party lines. NBC News reports:
“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” Senate Democrats said after their meeting with the parliamentarian. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.” . . .
It’s not clear if Republicans can rewrite the provision in a way that would fully resolve the parliamentarian’s issues. The budget resolution detailing what can be included in the bill only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
If Senate officials again find the ballroom project falls under the jurisdiction of a committee other than those two, Republicans may be forced to leave that funding out of the bill, as they likely won’t find the 60 votes needed to overrule the parliamentarian.
ENERGY SHOCKS WORSENING: It’s been clear for a while, and it’s getting clearer: The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is a bonanza for American energy producers and a catastrophe for American energy consumers. As energy shocks pile up around the world, more and more international buyers are clamoring for American oil and gas—and with producers unable to just snap their fingers and pull enough out of the ground for everybody, an international bidding war is now underway for every single barrel. The Wall Street Journal has more:
For now, the U.S. has been able to meet needs at home and replace some of the missing Gulf barrels. No nation in the world’s history has ever exported as much energy: It shipped 14.2 million barrels of crude and products a day late last month—the rough equivalent of one out of seven barrels consumed globally in ordinary times.
But trouble is brewing. U.S. oil producers are barely stepping up their output, refineries are running at full-throttle, and domestic stocks are getting depleted fast. The upshot: American consumers are set to keep paying more for fuel to stay inside the U.S.’s borders.
“This is all just going to end so badly,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at commodities- and shipping-data provider Kpler. “We have to essentially get squeezed to the point where prices move higher to stop the barrels leaving.”
Cheap Shots
As we have written recently, Trump has been hard at work turning the National Prayer Breakfast into a partisan Republican event as well.
Cassidy was first elected to the Senate in 2014, the year before Trump began his career in Republican politics.
"Author and radio host Eric Metaxas—long one of the most insufferable voices on the Christian right—exulted that “it’s hard to believe it took two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand.”"
< Tim rubs his temples >
Does anyone else realize how truly insane and unhinged this statement is? Out of all the souls who have ever wandered this earth throughout all of time, Metaxas will have you believe that Our Creator was waiting for *exactly* this time and place to "raise up" the biggest fuckin' moral degenerate to ever hold office in the United States. And since the target audience for blasphemy has the collective critical thinking skills of a paper clip, they don't even bother to question it.
Hey, Eric...are you sure it's The Lord you're speaking for?
"The Americans may have the wristwatches, but we have the time": Iran Edition