MAGA Smells the Danger. Ooops! Too late!

by Rick Wilson - Sep 23

Anyone who has watched a nature documentary with David Attenborough’s rich voice describing the impending horror knows the scene. A herd of wildebeest, gazelles, or some other doe-eyed ungulates crowds the watering hole. One head comes up, then another. Ears swivel. Nostrils flare. Something is out there in the tall grass or lurking just under the water, and the herd doesn’t know exactly where, but it knows enough to be afraid.

In a few moments, one of them is going down. Oh, the whole herd won’t fall, but the predators always get the slow ones, the dumb ones. And MAGA has a lot of slow, dumb candidates this year.

Welcome to the Republican Party, six weeks before the midterms.

Republican politicians are herd animals. I spent a good chunk of my life driving them across the savannah. Once upon a time, they could zig, dodging the incoming danger, and the base would nod quietly and whisper, “Whew. He got it in time.” Some years, like 2006, very few could dodge fast enough and smart enough to escape. (Stop me if this sounds familiar, but high gas prices, rising inflation, a deeply unpopular war in the Middle East and a President with cratering approval ratings made that year a political killing field for the GOP.)

The herd animals of the MAGA GOP took the wrong lessons from the last decade, believing that fealty to Donald Trump was the ultimate survival play. Their reflexive hatred of anyone who deviates from the course of pure, esoteric Trumpism is definitional.

“Win the primary, and we’ll be fine” was their mantra, much like the herd that needs to get to that watering hole, but forgets the lions in the grass on the way and the crocs lurking just under the water when they get there. Wildebeest are not famous for their frontal lobes, and neither is Mike Johnson’s MAGA Conference. But their instincts are finally telling them what the polls told everyone else months ago.

So this week, the herd smelled something in the wind and started to move.

Mike Rogers, who spent the spring sounding like a man ready to fly a B-2 into Tehran personally, filmed an ad in a Michigan grocery store announcing that “the war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.” Ashley Hinson said the same in Iowa. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn voted to curb Trump’s war powers. John James, Tom Tiffany and Jon Husted all wandered over to the same patch of grass. Jon Husted. In Red Ohio.

Then came the sanewashing. Byron Donalds, who lovingly refers to Trump as “Daddy,” quietly scrubbed at least eight mentions of Trump from his campaign website, like a man trying to get out of a DNA test with a pregnant mistress. One day he’s all on the Trump-Is-God train and the next he couldn’t pick Donnie out of a well-deserved lineup. Maria Elvira Salazar cut an ad telling Trump his immigration crackdown went too far.

Scandal-plagued Susan Collins called the Canada trade war a mistake, which is the Collins equivalent of setting herself on fire in the Senate chamber. Rogers, meanwhile, decided tariffs are “necessary, but not a one-size-fits-all solution,” a sentence engineered in a focus to mean nothing at all. Farm-state senators begged for a diesel export ban until Trump caved at the UN. And in the first half of September, out of more than 500 Republican TV ads, exactly twelve mentioned Donald Trump.

The most powerful man in the party has been airbrushed out of the party’s advertising, like a purged Politburo member in the Stalin era. “We hardly knew Comrade Krasnov. He was an intern. A coffee boy.”

It won’t work. The stain of Trump doesn’t wash out.

Seven months of this war. Seven months of cheering it, voting for it, going on Fox to explain why $100 oil was a small price for American greatness. Voters have memories, and Democrats, for once, have video. Saying the war “needs to end” is not the same as saying it was a mistake, and the polling collapse on the war and the economy for Trump is now around the necks of every MAGA candidate.

Every voter standing in that grocery aisle next to Mike Rogers knows exactly who signed up for it. He did. Every farmer and trucker in Iowa paying $7 for diesel knows that, if she gets elected, Ashley Hinson will be the same Trump fangirl she was before the crisis hit. In races where Hispanic voters are turning hard toward the Democrats, Trump’s economic disasters, coupled with the rampant cruelty of the immigration purges, mean GOP seats in Florida and Texas are breaking hard against MAGA.

And here’s what should keep them up at night.

The fear they feel right now is the mild version. Right now they’re afraid of polls, which are abstractions. On election night, the lion comes out of the grass and takes the slow ones, and the herd will watch it happen in real time on the decision desks at MSNOW, CNN, and, most deliciously, Fox.

Then comes the second fear: Trump, who has never once in his life accepted a loss as his own, turns around and blames every Republican who dared to put an inch of daylight between themselves and Dear Leader. The survivors will spend the rest of their careers being hunted by the guy they thought was their shepherd. Stephen Miller pregamed it yesterday with tweets attacking Senate Majority Leader John Thune for failing to pass the SAVE Act.

That’s the part they still don’t get. Trump is the ultimate externality. Every one of these candidates has built a careful little distancing strategy - enough to just get the normies back but not enough to make the Dear Leader angry. Every one of those strategies is hostage to a man who doesn’t know what he’ll do between lunch and his afternoon diaper change.

He told the listless crowd in Dallas that soaring energy costs were “a very inexpensive price to pay.” He invited Xi Jinping to Washington. He has forty-one more days of Truth Social, rally riffs, and whatever brain weather rolls through at 2 a.m. that he dictates to First Lady Natalie Trump.

You cannot run a disciplined campaign when the most important variable in your race is the least disciplined human in public life. Almost everything he does between now and November will hurt them, and they’ll find out about it the same way you do, from their phones.

I’ve won more bets than I can count over the last decade from Republican friends who swore that this time Trump would be smart. He’d pivot. He’d adjust. He’d stay on message, read the teleprompter, let the pros run the campaign. He never has. Not once.

Now the herd is placing that same bet again. They’re wagering that Trump will let them run on the disastrous “90% with the president” formula and quietly hide the other ten. That he’ll sit still. That he’ll let them live.

I like our odds. Lots of work to do still, but I like our odds a lot.

Everything Trump Touches Dies. It doesn’t expire, and it doesn’t wash out.

The wildebeest can sniff the wind all they want. The lion was never out in the grass. He’s been standing right next to them at the watering hole the whole time, and they’re lunch.