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In 2016, the late Lindsey Graham sent this famous tweet, proclaiming that “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.”
He was right.
I’ve been reporting on Trump’s backfiring overreach since the start of his second term, and each time I do, I get flooded with comments about why his unpopularity doesn’t matter. But it very much matters. And in one very important way: he is leading the Republican Party into further political ruin.
We have to be clear about how much of a failure the Trump presidency has been. Trump and his Project 2025 allies entered office with a singular mission to crush the left and seek authoritarian power. Instead, they’ve revitalized a left-wing opposition and weakened the Republican Party.
Senator Graham’s words were as prophetic as they were revelatory of how the party as a whole would soon abandon their principles to back Trump. Or, which is more likely the case, they proved they never had any principles to begin with. Trump ripped the mask off the GOP, and the face that was revealed was an ugly one willing to push the country to the brink of authoritarianism as long as they had a seat at the table.
But that corrupt bargain is leading to their fall, just as Graham predicted.
The very same sycophantic Republican loyalty that helped manufacture Donald Trump’s rise will help facilitate his and the Republican Party’s demise.
No matter how much Trump pretends it doesn’t, political gravity still exists.
Let’s break down how the Republican Party’s alliance with Donald Trump has backfired and get into some of the numbers that prove Trump’s all-time-low approval rating is damaging the Republican Party down-ballot.
One of Trump’s most profound impacts on our politics is that he made indecent people think they no longer had to pretend to be decent in order to be accepted in society. Not only could shameless grifters be accepted, they could become rich and powerful.
When Republican lawmakers saw a corrupt bigot say whatever came to his mind and not only avoid consequences but go on to win the presidency, some felt they were granted a license to take off their decency masks, too.
But those who embraced depravity didn’t suddenly become that. They just stopped hiding their true nature. Because, of course, Trump didn’t create this problem. He is the inevitable culmination of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy, where they subtly scapegoated people of color and immigrants for the economic woes of the white working class while legislating for the rich. Trump just moved from whispering dog whistles to yelling the quiet part out loud as he descended down his golden escalator in 2015.
That is the story of the modern Republican Party.
They entered into a political alliance with someone they knew was a depraved, reckless egomaniac. From Lindsey Graham to JD Vance to Mitch McConnell, countless Republicans have been clear-eyed about who Trump is, and embraced him anyway.
Trump has been well aware of this, and often referenced it in unintentionally self-aware ways, like in his recitation of the snake poem at his campaign rallies in 2016.
Republicans knew he was a snake when he walked in. They knowingly tied their political fate to him anyway, and now they refuse to break free.
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There’s been a lot of attention on what’s happening in the Democratic Party, but the internal debates playing out in those primaries are healthy. What’s actually remarkable is how little dissent is tolerated within the MAGA establishment, and how that’s led to a fracturing coalition as Trump betrays his own base.
When Republicans do choose to speak out, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, they’re exiled from the party. Those who remain have chosen to be cogs in Trump’s machine.
Republicans have abdicated their oversight responsibility, effectively rendering the legislative branch a limp arm of the Trump Administration. They’ve done nothing as Trump and his team of loyalists moved with reckless abandon to gut the federal bureaucracy, eliminate pockets of independence in the executive branch, unilaterally dismantle agencies, reshape the global order by undermining economic and diplomatic alliances, target civil liberties, and attempt to consolidate power in the presidency.
As Trump unleashed tariffs that have unilaterally raised prices on Americans, Republicans have refused to exercise their constitutional duty to check the president. As Trump pushed forward the Big Beautiful Bill, which amounted to the largest legislative wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history, they passed it. As Trump’s ICE killed American citizens and immigrants alike, the Republican Party responded by rubber-stamping billions in new funding for DHS. As Trump wages a fruitless war in Iran that has further destabilized the Middle East, they’ve done nothing to rein him in.
The GOP owns the consequences of the Trump presidency, whether they like it or not.
Republicans have fully embraced the monster they helped create, even as this lame-duck, politically weak president becomes an undeniable liability.
Now, as Trump’s political project fails, he seems hell-bent on taking the party down with him.
Now, let’s get into the numbers.
Donald Trump is a historically unpopular president whose second term has been defined by corruption, authoritarian overreach, and incompetence.
I’m an independent journalist who has been covering Trump and American politics for over a decade now, and I’ve never seen his polling this bad. In my previous reporting, we’ve established just how weak President Trump is politically. And it’s only gotten worse with each passing week.
Multiple polls over the last few weeks have found Trump’s approval rating at an all-time low and his support among Republicans at an all-time low as well.
Last week, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has Trump’s approval at an all-time low of 33%, after multiple polls over the last few weeks have put his approval rating at similar lows.
He is underwater on all key issues as Americans reject his abuses of power, betrayals of his campaign promises, his Iran War, and his raising of prices while he enriches himself.
When a president is this weak, usually, you’ll find members of their same party seeking to distance themselves from some of his more unpopular policies. But Trump won’t let Republicans do that.
I talked about this in my most recent appearance on MS NOW last week:
As I pointed out, Trump’s approval rating with Republicans is also seeing all-time lows. We’re also seeing those who strongly support the president seeing new lows as well.
It’s not just the polls showcasing this weakness. In elections over the past year and a half, Democrats have either won or significantly over-performed. The most notable example of this was the November 2025 off-year elections, which showcased massive Democratic wins and stunning Republican underperformances.
Democrats notched decisive wins in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Maine, Georgia, and California, to name a few. Democrats saw double-digit wins in the Virginia and New Jersey governor races, and counties with heavy Latino populations saw double-digit swings to Democrats. We saw similar swings in special elections this year.
We’ve also seen evidence of Trump’s coalition fracturing in light of Trump’s weakness. Key MAGA media figures have diverged from the president on his cover-up of the Epstein Files and his reckless Iran War. There’s also evidence that the MAGA media ecosystem is fracturing and plummeting in viewership, which I covered in a previous video.
An NBC News poll at the end of last year showcased the splintering of MAGA, with traditional Republicans and MAGA-identifying Republicans now standing at 50/50. Since then, the all-time-low support among Republicans and declining strong support are also indicators.
In spite of the terrible polling, election losses, and splintering base, the Republican Party is still standing by Trump. This refusal to distance itself from Trump’s unpopular moves on the economy, immigration, and the Iran War has led to self-inflicted wounds to their midterm prospects.
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One of the key indicators of how poorly Republicans are expected to do in the midterms can be found in the generic ballot. Democrats lead in the generic ballot by an average of about 6-7 points, with some polls, like a recent Emerson poll, showing that lead as high as 11 points.
That is above the 3.1% national popular vote advantage New York Times Chief Political Analyst Nate Cohn has said Democrats need to win the House to overcome this new GOP gerrymandered environment.
Nate Silver has also moved the chances Democrats take the Senate to nearly 60%.
Ahead of this expected loss, Trump is already throwing Republicans under the bus and blaming them for his unpopularity. In an interview with Punchbowl News earlier this month, Trump said that voters are angry at Republicans, not him.
“The question is, will they vote? Because a lot of them [voters] are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you… They're not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.”
Prepare to hear a lot more of that after the midterms. Trump will blame his party for his own failures. That’s fine by me. It surely won’t help Republicans in 2028.
Ultimately, I think Trump’s attempts to interfere in the midterms will fail, as I’ve reported before in previous pieces. Then, Trump will be bogged down in congressional oversight for the first time this term. He’ll continue to act out in desperate ways, but those moves will be exactly that: desperate. Not from a place of power, but from a place of weakness, as his presidency falters and his legacy is defined as the worst president of all time.
The clock is ticking as the Republican congressional majority’s days are numbered.
Republicans own this, and there’s nothing they can do to convince Americans otherwise.
History is littered with political establishments thinking they can control a raging authoritarian. By the time they realize they can’t, it’s too late. Fortunately for us, it’s not too late for democracy.
Americans have repeatedly shown they will not stand for this. And they will so once again, in unmistakable numbers this November.
So, while the title of this video is how Trump is destroying the Republican Party, the truth is, they’ve destroyed themselves. And they deserve it.
If you enjoyed this video, smash that like button and subscribe. I’m going to dedicate a lot more time to longer-form videos like this. I’m a firm believer that curiosity is a more powerful algorithmic driver than outrage-bait, and I’ll continue to test that theory with these videos. If you’ve made it this far in the video, you’ve validated that optimistic belief, and I hope you consider supporting my work.
I’m an independent journalist who has been covering Trump for over a decade now. I’ve made appearances on MS NOW and CNN, and my work has been cited in The New York Times and The Washington Post. I documented every day of Trump’s first term and was among the first to cover Project 2025 back in 2023. Now, I run a best-selling Substack publication called Ahmed Baba News, where you can read more of my work and become a paid subscriber if you’re interested.
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Thank you for watching, and see you around!
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