When the Bottom Falls Out

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

My editor threw me a curveball this morning while we were brainstorming about a topic. “On the off-chance that Republicans hold both chambers” of Congress in November, she asked, “do they keep going along with Trump for the remainder of his term?”

 

At any other moment since 2016 save for about five minutes on January 6, a question about Donald Trump’s party sticking with him would have been silly. No matter what crimes the president might be committing, no matter how many people he may have shot on Fifth Avenue, the answer was always the same: Of course the wretched class of servile power-grubbing cowards we know as “elected Republicans” would go along.

 

But at some point this week, it ceased being silly. Some GOP lawmakers have suddenly … stopped going along.

 

The reason they’ve stopped going along is that, just as suddenly, the prospect that their party will retain both houses of Congress has become almost unimaginable. “Polls for Republicans are just getting worse by the day in a way that isn’t actually all that common in midterms,” Nate Silver marveled this morning. I noted last week that Democrats’ lead on the generic congressional ballot had begun to balloon, but the numbers since then have somehow turned even gorier for the GOP.

 

Some surveys, now sampling likely rather than registered voters, have Republicans down 14 points on the generic ballot. Trump’s net job approval has fallen to -22.4 points in Silver’s tracker, the worst rating of his second term. Seven different polls of Texas’ Senate race this month have Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton, some by as much as 6 points. For all the hype around Beto O’Rourke’s candidacy in Texas in 2018, never once did O’Rourke lead Republican Ted Cruz in a survey of that race.

 

Forecasters now see states as dependably red as Kansas and even South Carolina potentially coming into play if the GOP’s position continues to erode. The outlook is so grim that Trump himself has reportedly begun to entertain an unthinkable scenario: that his party might lose an election without the vote being rigged against it.

 

Some Republicans have decided that this, at long last, is the moment to utter a little light blasphemy about their lord and savior, the president. After 20 months of ceding practically every constitutional power they possess to a deranged Caesar, they’re keen for voters to know that they’re their own people.

 

At least four statewide candidates in the Midwest piped up this week to say that the Iran war needs to end. Trump’s name has disappeared from some GOP campaign ads and websites, most notably that of Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds. (How bad is the internal polling if Donalds feels obliged to disown the president in a Trump +13 state?) Utah Sen. John Curtis, who’s not on the ballot, seized the opportunity to squeeze the president’s family, calling for a probe into why Donald Trump Jr. is receiving lavish gifts from Russian oligarchs. Sen. John Cornyn seconded the idea.

 

There’s even been some grumbling about Trump rolling out the red carpet this week for the world’s most dangerous communist, Xi Jinping.

 

The probability of the GOP holding the House and Senate has grown sufficiently low that we needn’t consider my editor’s question about how Republicans might behave toward the president in the aftermath. What we should consider is how they might behave toward him in the much more likely scenario that he leads them to total annihilation at the polls.

 

Will a post-rout Donald Trump still exert overweening influence over the craven villains of the congressional GOP, who have conveniently discovered their spines at the very moment that it became in their own self-interest to do so?

 

Losing influence.

 

We can safely predict, I think, that his influence over Republican officials won’t be as oppressive after a blue tsunami as it’s been for the last decade. That’s a matter of simple electoral math and simpler political reality.

 

Like Ronald Reagan in 1980, Trump’s victory in 2024 rested on a “three-legged stool” of policy. Reagan offered fiscal conservatism, social conservatism, and Cold War hawkery; Trump offered a lower cost of living, an end to “forever wars,” and hostility to immigration of all stripes. The coalition his platform produced was diverse and unusual, uniting ardent right-wing nativists with middle-class Hispanics disgruntled by Biden-era inflation. Toss in populist independents who resent business-as-usual Washington interventionism and you had a winning margin (barely) in swing states.

 

That coalition has now been obliterated, shattered by Trump betraying his electoral mandate so completely that I’m stumped to think of a historical precedent. The first two legs of the stool have collapsed and the third, immigration, has been handled so poorly that it’s become a net liability for the White House. Read the polls and you can see the constituent parts of his 2024 base melting away in real time in anger at the foolish war he started and the oil crisis it’s caused.

 

The loyal right-wing base is no longer as loyal as it used to be. One new survey found Trump’s overall job approval dropping to 33 percent this month due to an 11-point decline in net approval among Republicans and “leaners” since August. His support within that group now stands at 71-27, no great shakes for a president normally known for attracting cultish devotion. Among those who voted for him two years ago, “strong” approval is down from 53 percent early last year to 35 percent now.

 

So disaffected are Republican voters that they’ve begun to shift their allegiance from Trump himself back to the party. Per Echelon Insights, 56 percent now say they consider themselves primarily a supporter of the GOP versus just 34 percent who consider themselves primarily a supporter of the president. That’s a complete reversal of right-wing opinion at around the time of his inauguration last year, when answers to that question split 36-59.

 

And what about the many Hispanics who defected from the Democratic Party to support Trump in 2024? Nate Cohn noted today in a piece for the New York Times that that demographic now leans 64-29 toward Democrats in an average of the generic ballot. According to the latest Times national poll, Trump’s approval among Hispanics on immigration stands at 26 percent and on the cost of living—no typo—at 8 percent. A wipeout among that group on Election Day could put numerous supposedly “safe” Republican districts in Texas and Florida in play, turning a smallish Democratic House majority into a large one.

 

All of this makes things straightforward for congressional Republicans in 2027 and 2028. If they want any shot at reassembling their victorious 2024 coalition in the next election cycle, they need to stop doing whatever Trump wants just because he wants it. The softening of his support on the disillusioned right gives them an opening to play to the middle by siding with the majority of Americans on contentious issues. Ending the war, reducing the cost of living—beginning with reining in idiotic, unpopular tariffs—and riding herd on the AI industry are all matters in which they stand to profit from breaking with the president after a midterm wipeout.

 

In some ways the political circumstances of a post-wipeout presidency will make it easy to do so, as Republican voters’ personal investment in Trump is destined to weaken. For one thing, they’ll at last confront the reality that someone else will lead their ticket the next time they vote for president. Meanwhile, “America First” postliberals like Tucker Carlson will eagerly (and fairly) be egging them on to blame Trump himself for the party’s electoral humiliation, insisting that the GOP would still be in power if not for his “neocon” adventure in Iran.

 

And that message will grow in fertile soil. Americans are under no illusions that the current administration, not its predecessor, is to blame for their financial misery. Per CNN’s Aaron Blake, 66 percent say that Trump’s policies have made economic conditions worse; the worst number Joe Biden ever got on that question was 58 percent. When asked whether tariffs have had a positive or negative effect on their finances, respondents split 13-67. When asked whether the war in Iran has, they split 8-73.

 

It’s the political equivalent of the paradox, “Can God make a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it?” Can Trump govern so terribly that even the thick propaganda bubble he built around the right can’t shield his fans from the truth about how terrible he’s been? We have our answer.

 

He’ll own the coming electoral disaster completely and even many of his current and former supporters will be in no mood to deny it, so it’s a cinch that congressional Republicans in the aftermath won’t be as obsequious as they’ve traditionally been. If I’m right that Trump is likely to behave more aggressively on foreign policy and trade, not less, following a midterm rout, then we really might see some meaningful Republican resistance in Congress to his policies as 2028 approaches.

 

But probably not that meaningful.

 

Partisan combat.

 

The reason I have difficulty imagining a sustained GOP revolt in the House and Senate during Trump’s lame-duck period isn’t because Republican voters categorically won’t tolerate it. It’s that they won’t tolerate it during a period of fierce partisan combat with Democrats.

 

The lack of meaningful partisan combat in Washington since January 2025 has been a serious political liability for the president. Nationalist demagogues thrive when they have formidable domestic enemies to rally their supporters against, and Trump hasn’t had one of those since he returned to office. Democrats have posed few problems for him in Congress, and in rare cases where they have—like filibustering the SAVE America Act—the president has flogged Republican skeptics of the bill with more relish than he has the other party.

 

His base is adrift because they have no domestic threat to get excited about and unite against. The closest thing is democratic socialism, and Trump keeps undermining that by holding hands with Zohran Mamdani every chance he gets.

 

His fans are demoralized. He, and they, need a foil to inspire them to light their hair on fire anew. And here’s the good news for them in a midterm wipeout: They’re about to get one.

 

We’ve seen this movie before. We know how Republican voters react when Democrats perpetrate a new “hoax”—i.e., a meritorious investigation of troubling behavior—on Trump. Absent the four criminal indictments filed against the president while he was out of office, Ron DeSantis might have won his party’s nomination in 2024. But once partisan warfare began around Trump, the reptilian impulse toward tribalism swept all other considerations aside.

 

In a vacuum, right-wing voters might condone Republican lawmakers locking arms with Democrats to try to end the war or overturn Trump’s tariffs. But locking arms with them at a moment when they’re digging for dirt on the president, hauling members of his family before Congress with subpoenas, and impeaching his dumbest Cabinet members? That’s partisan high treason, aid and comfort to the enemy in the middle of war.

 

It shouldn’t be. A minimally sophisticated adult should be able to endorse working with the other party in matters that serve the common good, like repealing tariffs, while waging combat against it in others, like whether Trump should be free to commit crimes with impunity. But that’s not how the partisan mind—and especially the right-wing mind after a decade of postliberalism—works. All policy initiatives will end up being seen through the lens of combat, which means repealing tariffs will be viewed less as a sensible means to lowering costs than as a cruel Democratic ploy to snatch away the president’s favorite toy.

 

And so the post-rout GOP resistance to Trump will be crippled from the jump. After a midterm calamity, the base might be more willing to indulge congressional Republicans in disagreeing with the president on policy. But supporting Democratic efforts to constrain his powers via legislative action will be considered a betrayal.

 

Especially with Trump himself encouraging right-wing voters to treat it as such. You don’t need me to tell you that the president won’t graciously accept his new lame-duck status; he’ll look for ways to reassert control over the party following a blue tsunami, fearful that defeat will loosen his grip if he doesn’t. I suspect he’ll become even more profligate than he’s been in the past in threatening primary challenges in the next cycle for Republican lawmakers who back Democratic attempts to overturn his policies.

 

He might even be looking for excuses to do so. Replacing John Cornyn types in Congress with Paxton-style miscreants will be one of Trump’s last chances to leave an enduring stamp on his party as he prepares to leave office. Some House and Senate Republicans won’t be cowed by those threats, calculating that he’s lost too much juice politically to successfully punish them for defying him on policy.

 

But most will worry, true to their cowardly nature. Knowing that the people most likely to vote in Republican primaries are MAGA fanatics, they’ll reason that even a diminished Trump will continue to pose more of a threat to their reelection in 2028 than swing voters will. Besides, they’ll tell themselves, what’s the point of siding with Democrats on a bill that the president will veto anyway? It’s one thing to betray your party for a bipartisan policy win, but to betray it for a bipartisan policy loss? What’s to be gained?

 

Silver lining.

 

There’s one more reason congressional Republicans may continue to stick with Trump as he runs the country into the ground. After a decade of authoritarian conditioning and 20 months of Duma-fication, I’m not sure they know how to govern anymore.

 

When Sen. Kevin Cramer was asked this week about the Senate recessing for the midterms in lieu of hanging around to address the cost of living, he replied, “If there was something that we could get done that would help, I’d be all for it. But I don’t know what it would be at this point.” I mean, they could at least try to get 67 votes to repeal tariffs. Even with the House out of session, that gesture would be more politically productive than the dopey ban on diesel exports that some Republicans favor, which will likely drive up the price of foreign goods—and domestic gas!—and further alienate American allies.

 

The fact that addressing tariffs didn’t occur to Cramer, or that it did and he feared mentioning it, tells us a lot about how feeble the post-midterm GOP resistance to Trump in Congress is likely to be.

 

If you’re looking for a silver lining about how congressional Republicans’ behavior might improve after a midterm blue tsunami, I suggest lowering expectations for whether they’ll oppose Trump on policy and raising them for whether they’ll reject his inevitable “rigged election” spin about the outcome.

 

The more the public comes to expect a blue wave on Election Day, the more credible a blue wave will seem when it arrives. By breaking with the president on some of his initiatives lately and babbling to every reporter they see on background that they’re expecting a wipeout, Republicans are helpfully preempting Trump’s narrative that cheating must have been involved to produce a result so lopsided. The right knows why it’s losing and knows whose fault it is, and neither has anything to do with “ballot mules” or voting machines being hacked.

 

From top to bottom, the whole apparatus seems considerably less inclined to pretend otherwise than it was five years ago, the best efforts of a few truly committed wackjobs aside. Make it too big to rig, the president urged supporters during the 2024 campaign, encouraging them to hand him a margin of electoral victory so huge that Democrats couldn’t plausibly overturn it. Two years later, he’s on the wrong end of the same logic. Just deserts.