Few who have ever lived could have had inscribed on their gravestones epitaphs as stirring as Thomas Jefferson’s: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.” All but a few Americans currently living can, however, inscribe this: “At least I was not a Republican member of Congress during Donald Trump’s presidencies.”
It is sensible to hope that on Nov. 3 most of the Republican Party will be smashed to atoms. It is now a trembling and embarrassed, because frightened, emanation of one man. Justice — of a rough sort, but still justice — will be done if the undertow from his unpopularity drowns many of those who have tried to purchase political longevity by obedience to him.
Vast Republican carnage should not be entirely indiscriminate. Two Republicans especially deserve to win their Senate contests.
If Mike Rogers, former seven-term congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is not Michigan’s next senator, Abdul El-Sayed will be. The Democrat is comfortable in the company of antisemites and Holocaust deniers.
If Sen. Susan Collins loses in Maine, this will be partly because she did something admirable and senatorial. Standing against manufactured hysteria, she voted to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 4,192 words spoken on the Senate floor, she examined his extensive judicial record and the sexual assault allegations against him. Demonstrating the complete lack of corroborating evidence, she concluded that the allegations could not meet even the minimal “more likely than not” standard. Read her statement and marvel at its sobriety about the Senate’s “advice and consent” duty. This is vanishingly rare among incumbent senators of both parties.
When judging Republican incumbents who have enabled Trump’s rampancy, and Republican candidates eager to further abet it, voters should remember: If there is no penalty for travesties, travesties will proliferate.
The president’s aching neediness explains his lengthening list of legally dubious, and unhinged, acts of self-celebration. Such as, taxpayer-financed ads praising him. And his proposed Arc de Trump that will double as a sniper’s nest.
Voters should ask: If there were only enough Republicans in Congress to sustain a presidential veto, would anything, including the president’s behavior, be any different? There will be enough in 2027. Beyond this number, any surplus of congressional Republicans is superfluous.
The electorate generally and particular constituencies are unhappy about the promised four-week war with Iran now in its eighth month. And about high gasoline prices. And about high diesel and fertilizer costs for farmers. And about another war of choice, Trump’s trade war, which has resulted in agriculture exports to China plummeting from $38.1 billion in 2022 to $8.4 billion in 2025. And about deportations and immigration restrictions that have disrupted industries from construction to meatpacking. And about much else.
Congressional Republicans can truthfully, if humiliatingly, say: Don’t blame us. We have nothing to do with the nation’s governance. Other than by passively ratifying, through acquiescence, the exercise of powers that Congress has often improvidently and sometimes unconstitutionally delegated to the president.
Perhaps congressional Republicans harbor ineffectual resentments of their irrelevance regarding foreign and domestic policies, his vandalism of the White House, and much else. This irrelevance is, however, a sufficient reason for retiring them. Voters should say to many Republican incumbents what Oliver Cromwell said in 1653 to England’s Long Parliament: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing … Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.”
If Republicans lose not only their House majority, but Senate seats they currently hold in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio and Texas, they might begin to wonder: Could we be doing something wrong? Such a resort to thinking is necessary to begin restoring legislative checks on the executive. And it is necessary if America is ever again going to have a conservative political party.
At last month’s Dallas “convention,” a video told the Republican congregation this: “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’” So, “God gave us Trump.” God’s caretaker constantly gives us an illuminating contrast with President John F. Kennedy, whose name on Washington’s performing arts center stirs Trump’s envy. Kennedy, when praised for his heroic leadership of his crew adrift in South Pacific waters after combat, was laconic: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” People who prefer Trump’s manner, and people who do not, know how to vote.
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