Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar just put out a 26-second campaign ad Thursday morning that opens with “Mr. President.” Addressing the camera, she tells Donald Trump that some of his immigration enforcement “has gone too far,” adds that half the people ICE detained in July had no criminal record, that he should “be careful what your advisors are telling you,” and that “the same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” She then says her name and approves the message.
It’s actually quite stunning for what seems at first to be a rather pedestrian ad campaign for several reasons, not least because it breaks the 11th Commandment made famous by Ronald Reagan: “Thou shalt not speak critically of a fellow Republican.” But even more stunning is that this is a GOP member of Congress who has done the math and is betting that a critical position against Trump is better for her re-election chances than walking lockstep with the party leader.
Republicans have been criticizing Trump for nearly a decade but in ways that effect them absolutely nothing politically: An anonymous quote to Politico or a Sunday show host gets told there are “concerns.” But Salazar is a Trump-endorsed incumbent up for reelection in just 48 days, and she’s using her own campaign message to tell voters that his signature policy went too far. ICE DID arrest 49,571 people in July, with 51 percent of them having no conviction and no pending charge, so her numbers hold up.
She also tells Trump he could be “what Lincoln was for slavery or what Reagan was for communism,” in the same 26-second spot. The White House will almost certainly insist that she’s just making an appeal to the president, but even this version of dissent is still dissent. And this has gone viral with her approval tag on it.
Watch the video below:
Trump endorsed her in February, which did not go over well with his base, making this more of a national story than a Miami one. Laura Loomer said she couldn’t believe it, and Marjorie Taylor Greene called the endorsement “an insult to his base.” But Trump kept the endorsement and the candidate he personally certified just seven months ago? She’s now telling his own voters he broke a promise to them. On camera. With friends like these…
She’s not the first to put out a campaign ad blaming appealing to Trump, but she is not alone in House Republicans creating some political distance from the president. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, both Iowa Republicans who had opposed earlier war-powers resolutions, voted Tuesday with Democrats to direct the president to end the war with Iran.
Does this make Trump suddenly toxic for the GOP? The president doesn’t believe so; in fact, he thinks the opposite. During a Wednesday night rally in Gastonia, NC, he told attendees to “pretend I’m on the ballot just one more time.” Fair enough, but he apparently didn’t get the memo about a Fox News poll that dropped just a couple of hours before his speech, which was so unkind to Trump and the GOP that, after a segment on Special Report, it never came up again on prime-time Fox News opinion programming the rest of Wednesday evening.
It found that voters were far less likely to support somebody who’d been endorsed by Trump, by a whopping ratio of two to one. No wonder the most-watched pro-Trump Fox News personalities ignored its own network’s poll, which featured plenty more evidence that the Trump administration and Republican Party are not in particularly strong stead.
President Trump wants the midterms to be about him. But a handful of candidates actually running have looked at the same numbers and so far decided that’s not the best campaign to win an election. If polling gets goes from bad to worse, one can only wonder how many more will jump from the sinking ship that is Trump.
Hopesprings eternal even if this feels like too little too late.
I am reminded of hedge fund backstops Joe Manchin, Sinema and Fetterman.