Politico writer Kyle Cheney said President Donald Trump’s grip on his party may finally be slipping, at least for a moment.
“[T]he extraordinary rebukes and headwinds the president is now facing — much of it from within his own party — are revealing a GOP beginning to reckon with a post-Trump future,” Cheney said, a move “crystallized after voters surged to the polls to support Democratic candidates for statewide races in New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia and Pennsylvania.”
Those elections “shattered expectations” in close contests, but Cheney said Trump wasted the aftermath “recycling old grievances, berating members of his own party and choosing sides in a burgeoning intra-MAGA debate about antisemitism and bigotry within the GOP coalition.”
Now, post-election, Republicans are suddenly feeling independent.
“A year ago, the idea that a Republican-led Congress would vote overwhelmingly in favor of anything Trump opposed would have been fanciful,” said Cheney, but now the party is handing him a “stinging rebuke” on a vote demanding the Justice Department turn over the full library of Epstein files. Trump’s pressure campaign against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) also went nowhere, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) stuck to her guns on backing the petition, despite Trump calling her a “traitor” and attempting to sic his MAGA coalition upon her.
In addition to the Epstein vote, Republicans in Indiana rebuked Trump’s call for a mid-decade gerrymander to ensure the House will go Republican in 2026. When asked to do another Texas-style gerrymander, state GOP leaders signaled they “simply lacked the votes to make it a reality, drawing a threat from Trump to endorse some Republicans’ primary challengers,” said Cheney.
Maybe Republican lawmakers feared redistributing Republican voters into blue territories would also water down red districts with an unpopular president at the top of the ticket. Whatever the reason, Cheney said countermeasures by Democrats in Virginia and California could make Trump’s nationwide push “a wash.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, with its Republican majority, appears to be set to knock down Trump’s tariff power by questioning whether the president can leverage emergency powers to tariff foreign governments at will. And his proposal for a 50-year mortgage hit a wall among both tenured conservatives and MAGA upstarts alike.
Trump’s demand that the Senate dump the filibuster also got squashed, as did his petition to jettison the blue slip process, which gives home-state senators the power to veto nominees for judgeships and U.S. attorneys they find unacceptable.
Local prosecutors, many of them Republican, also went after people pardoned for their roles in his bid to subvert the 2020 election.
“Presidents can’t pardon state-level crimes, and within hours of Trump’s sweeping clemency he got a stark reminder. In Nevada, the state Supreme Court revived a criminal case against six of Trump’s pardon recipients who falsely claimed to be legitimate presidential electors. And in Georgia, a supervisory prosecutor reupped the criminal case against Trump himself for seeking to overturn the state’s election results,” said Cheney.
These are some of the recent “brush-offs, brushbacks and breakups that have threatened Trump’s aura of invincibility,” Cheney said.
Read the full Politico report at this link.
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