Republicans in Disarray? An Outbreak of Public Infighting Points to a Looming Disaster
The GOP can see the political bill coming for an unpopular president, an unpopular war and rising prices. And it’s getting ugly.
Donald Trump is publicly berating Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Thune is telling the White House to find its own votes. Mike Johnson is complaining that Republicans have made his House majority impossible to manage. Tucker Carlson is accusing Ben Shapiro of steering Trump into a suicidal war. Laura Loomer is attacking Tucker. Marjorie Taylor Greene is choosing sides. House Republicans are voting against Trump’s war while Senate Republicans keep it alive.
It’s a stunning development for a caucus that previously walked in lockstep with whatever Trump insisted and goes against the famous 11th Commandment often attributed to Ronald Reagan, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” But that old rule now sounds less like a commandment and more like an artifact from a simpler time.
The party can very clearly see a midterm disaster forming around a deeply unpopular president, a deeply unpopular war, and prices rising at the precise moment voters are beginning to pay attention. Republicans are trying to avoid that disaster. They have also begun fighting over who will be blamed for it, creating the very circular firing squad forever tied to the “Democrats in disarray” trope.
The factions are no longer just arguing over what Trump should do. Each one is building an alibi showing that someone else misled, obstructed, or forced him toward the policy that ultimately looks to cost Republicans Congress.
Iran is where the blame game is easiest to see because the war has left Trump and his party with no politically safe direction.
On Thursday, the GOP-led House voted 214–208 to restrain the war, with four Republicans joining Democrats. The GOP-led Senate kept it going by two votes. Mitch McConnell, absent from the Capitol for more than a month, missed a vote decided by exactly the kind of margin that makes his disappearance more than a grim Washington parlor game.
Meanwhile, nearly every visible political touchpoint is moving against the White House. Oil has crossed $100 a barrel. The price of a gallon of gas is back above $4 just in time for summer road trips. American casualties are rising. Iran rebuilt missile capacity we were told had been decimated far more quickly than the administration expected. Even Brian Kilmeade acknowledged on Fox & Friends that the speed of the rebuilding had surprised experts, while Charlie Hurt conceded that “this is not a popular war” and that Trump still needs to sell it. Lest we forget this week started with Laura Ingraham of all people calling on Trump to end the war, which was an idea echoed later by Speaker Mike Johnson.
The Pentagon then changed the official number of Americans killed from 18 to 14. Its press office blamed temporary data problems. Three military officials told The New York Times that four deaths had been removed because they occurred after Trump declared a ceasefire. The difference matters because the administration is asking the public to believe that a war continuing on day 145 somehow became a different war on the day Trump announced it had stopped.
Trump’s answer has been to threaten another “massive attack” against Iran “bigger than ever before,” which sounds less like a strategy than an admission that he is bereft of better options.
The America First isolationists have long warned Trump that another Middle East war would destroy his presidency. The pro-Israel interventionists insist that Trump’s mistake was failing to hit Iran hard enough. Republican leaders say they do not have the votes for everything he wants. Trump says weak Republican leaders are standing between him and victory. Fox News reporters report on interparty cracks while its opinion programs spend their time reading target lists and comparing the coming assault to Gladiator.
Nobody has a credible way out of the war. Everyone has a theory about whose fault it will be.
The fight over the SAVE America Act follows the same script, this time through an unnerving effort to operationalize Trump’s election denialism. Trump wants the Senate to pass legislation built around his insistence that noncitizens are corrupting American elections. The House passed its version, but Thune says he does not have 50 Republican votes. McConnell reportedly opposes it, and Lisa Murkowski has argued that its documentation requirements could force remote Alaskans to spend more than $1,000 simply to register.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that Trump’s patience with Thune was running out. Thune replied that perhaps she or someone else at the White House should get on the phone and find the votes.
Trump issues demands and leaves someone else to reconcile them with reality. Thune must produce senators who oppose the bill. Johnson must manage a majority in which a few members can stop the House whenever they feel ignored. Military commanders must deliver victory without more deaths, money, or time. Failure to perform the impossible is treated as disloyalty.
That has given the far right power wildly out of proportion to its numbers. It does not need enough votes to govern. It needs enough votes to prevent anyone else from governing, then enough access to Trump to blame the resulting paralysis on Republican leaders.
The media fights are more vicious because they are over the same scarce resource: Trump’s attention. Carlson’s charge against Shapiro is that Trump will “obey” him. Loomer matters because an idea reaching Trump’s feed can carry more weight than one moving through the State Department, Pentagon or Congress. Volodymyr Zelensky understood that when he gave her a private audience in Kyiv.
The Republican Party no longer has a chain of command. It has a very ugly and public custody battle over who owns this mess. And since no one in Trump’s party can openly blame him, they are left blaming one another.
Trumpism has now run into a problem it can’t work its way out of: the populist has become unpopular.