Even conservatives are fleeing the GOP as increasingly more Individuals flip in opposition to Trump’s authoritarian challenge.
President Donald Trump departs after making an announcement within the Roosevelt Room of the White Home in Washington, DC, on February 12, 2026.
(Saul Loeb / AFP through Getty Photos)
Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member within the pink city of El Cajon, on San Diego’s jap outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and becoming a member of the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official within the area’s native authorities. “I’ve been a Republican for 50 years,” he stated, within the assertion explaining his motion. “I simply can’t stand what the Republican Occasion has change into. I’m formally renouncing the Republican Occasion.”
An legal professional buddy of mine in San Diego, who is aware of native politics inside out, texted me, “When Trump has misplaced this man, he’s in actual hassle!”
Present Concern
President Donald Trump’s authoritarian challenge is lastly operating into actual headwinds. That doesn’t imply that the hazard is passing—removed from it, as Trump’s escalating assaults on the voting course of within the runup to the mid-term elections illustrate and as his venomous, racist social media posts testify to. But it surely does imply that Trump is shedding management of the storyline. Even amongst his personal base, there’s a rising realization that there’s something rotten on the core of his administration.
Having failed to interrupt the desire of Minnesotans regardless of two months of federal occupation, humiliation rituals, and brutal violence, the Division of Homeland Safety introduced on Thursday morning that it was ending the Minneapolis surge. It wasn’t as a result of the surge had failed, Tom Homan was fast to say; it was as a result of Minnesota authorities had begun to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Customs and Border Safety.
Don’t imagine Homan’s clarification. The surge is ending as a result of tens of 1000’s of Minnesotans stood sturdy and proud. They protested within the face of generally deadly violence meted out by ICE brokers. They protected their neighbors. They refused to be cowed. And, because the ICE atrocities multiplied, the US public more and more got here to facet with Minnesota in its battle in opposition to this federally ordered occupation. By the tip of January, extra Individuals advised pollsters they wanted to abolish ICE than advised them they wished to maintain the company intact.
When this horrific chapter is written into US historical past books, Minnesota shall be understood because the place the place peculiar Individuals defeated Stephen Miller’s might-is-right, white supremacist imaginative and prescient. Nonviolent protesters confronted the armed may of the federal authorities, and the federal authorities, having misplaced the battle for coronary heart and minds, retreated. It’s also in Minnesota the place Democrats lastly determined to combat over the funding for and accountability of ICE and its associated safety companies.
A pair days after Kendrick introduced that he might not justify being affiliated with the Republican Occasion, Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi was testifying earlier than Congress. It didn’t go properly. When Consultant Joe Neguse challenged her on why she had employed a convicted January 6 felon, who had been caught on digital camera urging his fellow protesters to kill Capitol Law enforcement officials, Bondi’s solely response was that Trump had pardoned the person. It was hardly a prime-time reply. When Neguse then challenged her on why she had fired many of the cryptocurrency enforcement crew on the Justice Division, thus easing the best way for Trump to make an unlimited fortune off the crypto business, Bondi melted down, screaming at Neguse like a pissed off little one. When Republican Thomas Massie went after Bondi for eradicating some names from the launched Epstein recordsdata, Bondi had one other meltdown, snapping, “This man has Trump Derangement Syndrome. He’s a failed politician.” She appeared like a petulant, name-calling teenager.
It was a rare public glimpse into Trump’s sycophantic cupboard. It’s one factor to be extraordinarily unlikable, one other to be blitheringly incompetent. In these hearings, Bondi got here throughout as each.
Her fame additionally wasn’t precisely enhanced by this week’s resolution of a grand jury in Washington, DC, to refuse to issue indictments sought by the federal government in opposition to Senator Mark Kelly and 5 different legislators who had reminded members of the navy that they need to not obey unlawful orders. On the Nuremberg Trials, after World Struggle II, US and different allied prosecutors succeeded in establishing the precedent that “I used to be solely obeying orders” is just not a official protection for these concerned in struggle crimes or crimes in opposition to humanity. But, beneath Trump, the US Protection and Justice departments have sought to punish individuals who restate this apparent ethical fact. The grand jury’s resolution was one other reminder that when the general public has a say, they have an inclination to rebuff the administration’s efforts to make use of the Justice Division as an enforcer in opposition to political dissenters.
The choice to indict Kelly and the others was subsequently panned even by many Republicans, with outgoing North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis furiously denouncing the Justice Division’s use of “political lawfare” in bringing these prices.
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Bondi, in fact, stays in workplace, however any pretense that she is a reputable legal professional normal is lengthy gone. Her incapacity to maintain cool beneath strain and her repeated misuse of her workplace to carry prosecutions demanded of her by a vengeful and Structure-scorning president has made her an “legal professional normal” with air quotes round her title—a reality-TV rent hopelessly out of her depth whose quarter-hour of fame has lengthy since expired.
So, too, Secretary of Homeland Safety Kristi Noem and Secretary of Protection (aka “Struggle Secretary,” chest thump chest thump) Pete Hegseth stay in workplace regardless of their bouncing from one disaster to the subsequent. The newest: The FAA’s suddenly announcing, on Wednesday morning, that it was closing El Paso’s airspace for 10 days, then, a couple of hours later withdrawing the closure. After initially refusing to make clear why the closure, which might have sealed America’s Twenty second-largest metropolis off from the remainder of the world, had been ordered within the first place, the company let it’s identified that it was as a result of Customs and Border Patrol was testing, with Pentagon acquiescence, anti-drone expertise over civilian airspace in southwest Texas—and that they hadn’t bothered to coordinate this correctly with the FAA prematurely. In any remotely regular administration, such beautiful ineptitude would have resulted in a number of firings and/or resignations. On this administration, the place accountability is for the birds? Bubkes.
None of that is taking part in properly with the general public. Final week at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump advised his viewers that he needed to win the election in 2024 as a result of in any other case he would have had a “dangerous ego.” Having received, nonetheless, he boasted, “Now I actually have an enormous ego, although.” Fifteen months on from the election, that monstrous ego is butting up in opposition to a quickly altering political actuality. By massive margins, Individuals, together with a rising variety of Republicans, are turning decisively in opposition to him and his mendacious cupboard.
“One factor has change into clear to me,” Kendrick told reporters on Monday, as he introduced that he was leaving the GOP. “The Republican Occasion is past redemption.”
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