Republicans Are Fleeing the Stench of a Rotten Congress
When it comes to Donald Trump, House Republicans do a convincing pantomime of love. Many of them chirpily parrot his lies. Most of them merrily launder his misdeeds. They grovel for his favor, gush about getting his endorsement and speak and vote in line with his desires.
They’re half partisan, half courtesan.
But there’s heartache underneath. Misery, even. That’s the truth of the Trump era, and that’s the moral of the 2024 exodus from Congress.
More than two dozen House Republicans, along with more than two dozen House Democrats, have headed or are headed for the exits, but the largeness of those numbers — which track with those in other election years over the past decade — don’t tell the story. What matters is who those Republicans are, the disgust in their goodbyes, their palpable sense of defeat and how it contradicts the fact that they have been in the majority in the chamber since early 2023.
In power, they have found themselves close to powerless. That’s the hellish paradox of their surrender to Trump.
For many of them individually, his blessing is the best or only way to maintain support among their Republican constituents back home and win election. But for the lot of them, he’s a curse, because he has contributed mightily to a degrading and dysfunctional culture on Capitol Hill.
Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and other banes of a serious, half-serious or even quarter-serious Republican lawmaker’s existence are Trump’s spiritual spawn. He begot their antics. He nurtured their rage. If being a House Republican has become unbearable, he bears critical responsibility for that.