This Is the Most Panicked Republicans Have Been in Years
It’s a political base problem few are willing to admit.
Republicans are imploding over Jeffrey Epstein, and the evidence is hard to miss. The panic among GOP lawmakers is unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade of reporting on Congress.
There have been plenty of intra-party freakouts over the years, to be sure. But they were all alike in an important way: the central concern was what voters in the middle would do. Donald Trump’s own ascent to the presidential nomination in 2016 scared Republicans to death because they thought he would alienate the swing voters whose support was believed to be an essential part of electoral viability. As president, Trump similarly frightened GOP lawmakers with his erratic behavior and governing incompetence, which led to losing the House in 2018. He frightened them again with his criminal attempt to stop the transfer of power in 2020; and with his political meddling in 2022, which cost Republicans the Senate that year.
But after each of these episodes, Trump reassembled himself à la Dr. Manhattan because Republicans let him. And after each loss, Republicans passed on the introspection (and self-immolation) that have become customary rituals for Democrats when they suffer humiliations of defeat. Instead, they just got more MAGA.
This time with Epstein is different. Republicans can’t keep their heads down and trust that the base will keep holding them up, because the Republican base is what’s causing the current panic. Far-right lawmakers are anxiously trying to navigate around the Scylla of Trump and congressional leadership pushing them to hold off on the Epstein issue, and the Charybdis of the hot-headed multitudes who lifted them into office after getting them to promise to reveal every dark secret of the Epstein case.
Here are four views of the Republicans’ fraught situation on Capitol Hill in light of Trump’s recalcitrance about Epstein.
Mike Johnson is actually showing signs of stress
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