This week Trump threatened a genocide, lost an extremely unpopular war, and then Republicans got absolutely shellacked in elections Tuesday night as they have been getting absolutely shellacked in elections since Trump took office. And yet. Barely any Republicans criticized Trump for threatening genocide; almost none of them criticized him for losing an incredibly unpopular war. Instead, as congressional reporter Steven T. Dennis noted, virtually the entire Republican Congressional caucus chose to respond to Trump’s horrific threats and incompetent defeat with silence. Republicans who stand with Trump are getting crushed in polls and at the ballot. But their uniform reaction is to…just keep standing with Trump and hope that things get better somehow. To put it mildly, this is not how politics is supposed to work. Usually, when the president’s approval is spiraling down towards the mid-30s and he keeps doubling down on unpopular policies, people in his party make some effort to distance themselves from the president in an effort to overperform him and keep their seats. There are always strong incentives not to criticize your own president because you don’t want to lose primaries, and also because criticizing the president can drive down his approval even more, damaging the party. But at some point—and that would be now!—self-preservation is supposed to kick in, and people in tough districts are supposed to start heading for the exits. So—why isn’t that happening? One useful way to answer that question is to look at the two most exposed Republicans in Congress; Juan Ciscomani in AZ-06, and Brian Fitzpatrick in PA-01. According to analyst G. Elliott Morris, Ciscomani’s district was Trump +1 in 2024; Trump’s approval there is now a shocking -24. Fitzpatrick’s district was Harris+0; Trump’s approval there is now -23. You’d expect Ciscomani and Fitzpatrick to be working to distance themselves from Trump so that some of those people in their district who hate Trump will maybe vote for them. FitzpatrickAnd Fitzpatrick is in fact doing just that. He is consistently ranked the most bipartisan member of Congress. In 2021, he was one of ten GOP members to vote to strip Marjorie Taylor Green of her committee assignments in response to comments in which she called for executing leading Democrats. In 2025 he was one of only two Congresspeople to vote against Trump’s Big Ugly Piece of Shit Bill, citing his opposition to the legislation’s Medicaid cuts. At the end of that year he was one of three Republicans to force a discharge petition to bring the extension of ACA subsidies to a vote. This January he gave an interview in which he said he had written in Nikki Haley for the 2024 election and criticized Trump’s “lack of moral clarity”. Critics of Fitzpatrick have pointed out that his efforts to distance himself from Trump are largely performative. He regularly votes with Republicans, and tends to vote against them only when the party has enough of a margin to do what it wants without him. He portrays himself as an independent, but when the chips are down, he is a reliable vote for fascism. The critics aren’t wrong. But the performance still matters. Fitzpatrick is doing what you expect Congresspeople in swing seats to do. He supports his party because a weak and divided party hurts him, but he takes independent votes where he can because a reputation for independence helps him in his district. He is not a hero of the republic. On the contrary, he is a fascist cog destroying the republic. But he is also a member of congress reacting fairly rationally to his electoral incentives. CiscomaniIn contrast, Juan Ciscomani—in a district even more anti Trump right now than Fitzpatrick’s—is doing much, much less to establish a reputation for independence. He’s said he opposes a nationwide abortion ban; he’s said he opposes cutting Medicaid. But he has voted with Trump literally 100% of the time. Ciscomani didn’t join Fitzpatrick in opposing the piece of shit budget; he didn’t join Fitzpatrick in the discharge petition to prevent the end of ACA subsidies; he doesn’t criticize Trump’s moral character. Instead, he vomits out sycophantic pro Trump babble that you’d expect from a member in a deep red bulwark, rather than from a guy who’s constituents overwhelmingly loathe their president. So, what gives? Why does Fitzpatrick behave like a repulsive Republican who knows he’s in a difficult district, while Ciscomani behaves like a repulsive Republican who can’t tell his deity from Trump’s ass? Part of the issue is probably down to differences in temperament and intelligence. But I think you also have to look at the fact that the Arizona GOP is deeply broken. It continually nominates conspiratorial freaks and weird Nazis to contest winnable statewide elections which they then lose. In 2021 the state GOP censured their own governor and John McCain’s widow for not being sufficiently rabid and awful. The party is on its way to nominating rabid whacko Andy Biggs to run for governor, and the Maricopa County GOP attacked his primary opponent for pointing out that Biggs has ties to antisemites and Nazis. Now, I’m not saying that the Pennsylvania GOP is a model of health and decorum. They nominated antisemitic fuckhead Doug Mastriano to run for governor in 2022 and comically inept toad Dr. Oz to run for Senate and then watched both of them get crushed in (again) winnable races. But in 2024 the party managed to settle on the merely odious Dave McCormick for Senate, who narrowly won the seat—and one victory in a major statewide race is more than the Arizona GOP has been able to do in the Trump era despite Arizona being a redder state. Nor has the Pennsylvania GOP censured Fitpatrick for his votes or for talking shit about Trump, presumably because they know he’s in a close seat and they would like him to keep holding it. In short, the guy from the state where the GOP is completely divorced from reality is unable to figure out how to respond to electoral incentives; the guy from the state where the GOP is still tenuously tethered to reality behaves more or less as you’d expect a politician to behave. The logical conclusion is that Republicans who are not responding to electoral incentives are being influenced by a rabid authoritarian party that no longer know how or cares to do democracy. The party is brokenI don’t think this is a shocking revelation or anything. But I do think it’s at least somewhat controversial, and therefore worth thinking through. You’ll often see people arguing, for example, that Republicans—in office and out—do not defy Trump because he has some sort of personal, charismatic hold over them. Or people will suggest that Republican electeds are physically afraid of Trump’s followers—as they well might be given January 6 and the way he deliberately targets them for death threats. But Fitzpatrick shows that some Republicans do in fact run against Trump when it makes sense to run against Trump. Others like Ciscomani, do not. The difference doesn’t seem to be charisma or death threats. It seems to be the kind of state party they are associated with. Some state GOP parties are more broken, and more openly fascist, than others. But the truth is that the Republican party as a whole is quite broken and quite fascist at this point. And that means the problem we’re facing isn’t just Trump. It’s an authoritarian party that no longer responds to democratic incentives because it hates democracy. When elected leaders don’t respond to democratic incentives, they are easier to beat at the ballot box. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have not just one fascist, but an entire fascist party to deal with. And that means Democrats need to do more than win elections. They need to crush the fascist party after they win. Are they willing to do that? I hope so. But I am not as certain as I’d like to be. |
