With six months to go until Election Day, the White House seems to have already accepted that Republicans will lose control of at least one chamber of Congress.
A Washington Post report on Monday said that lawyers in Donald Trump’s White House are privately briefing Trump political appointees about how to handle congressional investigations—which Democrats are sure to launch if they flip the House, Senate, or even both in November’s midterm elections.
“It’s obvious to everyone that it’s very likely” Democrats will win the House, an unnamed Trump administration official who attended one of the briefings told The Washington Post.
The official added that the briefing on how to handle Democratic-led congressional oversight “was a sober-eyed conversation.”The Post went on to report that “At least some staff members have considered the briefings preparatory, given the growing sense across the Trump administration that the Republican Party is in trouble and that the time has come to prepare for worst-case scenarios.”
This is just the latest sign that Republicans have entered the acceptance phase of the stages of grief.
For example, Senate Republicans were publicly nudging aging right-wing Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to retire before the midterms, as the GOP may not have a majority next year to confirm Trump’s nominees if a vacancy arises.
Senate Republicans were also urging Trump to fire the Cabinet officials he’s sick of now, because confirming replacements if the GOP loses its Senate majority would be difficult if not impossible.
On the House side—where Democrats are clearly favored to win control after November’s elections—Republicans are also showing tangible signs that they know their fate.
For example, Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is refusing to set an election date to fill the vacancy created by skeevy Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales’ resignation—likely because the race would be competitive and his party could lose the seat in a special election. That would put Democrats one seat closer to the majority, and deal a major psychological blow to GOP donors and voters.
And Republican lawmakers are retiring at a massive clip, with the number of GOP departures rivaled only by those from 2018. That exodus is a tell that Republicans know they would be returning to Congress in the minority, and thus chose to hang it up and leave rather than suffer that indignity.
Meanwhile, Republicans are desperately rushing to pass new, gerrymandered congressional maps to try to stave off losses in the midterms—a corrupt move blessed by a Supreme Court that Trump and the GOP stacked with partisan hacks.
However, even if their gerrymanders succeed, Republicans are still likely to lose the House. In fact, the redrawn maps Republicans passed to try to rig the election for their candidates may not even work. Trump’s coalition is falling apart as voters turn on him over the war he launched in Iran that is spiking costs here at home.
And gerrymandering cannot save the GOP’s Senate majority, which is now at risk due to Trump’s unpopularity.
Ultimately, the midterms are going to be a disaster for the GOP—and they know it.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
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