'The wheels are coming off': How this week changed everything for the GOP

U.S. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) arrives ahead of a classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) briefing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 18, 2026.

REUTERS/Nathan Howard
John Stoehr
September 25, 2026 | 03:30PM ET

The Washington Sun called it "panic week." During the last five days, Republicans across-the-board seemed to wake up to the fact that things are not going to get better from now until the congressional elections. This was the week in which Republicans everywhere realized, all at once, that the light at the end of the tunnel may be from an oncoming train.

“I don’t want to say the bottom is falling out yet, but I feel like we are in this place, and the realization is setting in, that some tough decisions will need to be made,” an unnamed GOP consultant told the Sun. “You can’t get around the fact that Democrats have the advantage on the economy, on gas prices. There’s no choice in this election. It’s a referendum on Trump.”

It's a referendum on the president, to be sure, but more precisely, on his terrible and illegal decision to attack Iran. Republicans hate it for ideological reasons. Trump was supposed to be for America First, after all. But they hate it even more for economic reasons. The cost of the war is burning up the economy, especially the rural economy, which rises and falls on the price of diesel. Diesel has been breaking records every day for the last two weeks.

“The war’s just gone on too long," a source close to Mike Rogers' Senate campaign in Michigan told Politico this week, after he released an ad calling for an end to the war. "Mike still thinks Iran shouldn’t have a nuclear weapon, but we originally thought this would take six weeks. Voters have been paying for it at their kitchen tables for too long.”

How bad is it? Let me bring your attention to Steve Deace. He's a popular rightwing radio host in Iowa. On Thursday afternoon, he reported on a briefing with Iowa House Republicans in which their own pollsters informed them that "if you are in a plus-15 district, [that] you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a plus-10 district you’re underwater, and that [the midterms] might end up being an even worse midterm environment than 2006."

Translation: Your seat is not safe even if Trump won district by more than 15 points. Your seat is in danger if Trump won your district by more than 10 points. In Iowa, the backlash against the Iran War is so big that 2026 is shaping up to be another 2006, in which the backlash against the Iraq War wiped out three of Iowa's five congressional seats for the GOP.

And as Deace knows, Iowa was a bellwether that year.

"If the environment is this bad in my home state, where Trump has been the most popular political figure over the last decade, I can’t imagine where it is everywhere else," Deace said.

If panic setting in this week, you would expect Republicans to take a stand, at the very least signal to the president that something has to change before it's too late. After all, Marjorie Taylor Greene said last week, “this is Trump’s fault." She added: “It’s $8.49 for diesel in California. It’s $6.59 in Georgia. I don’t care if it’s Georgia or California. It’s way too high.”

Yet while some Republicans, like Mike Rogers, are giving lip service to bringing the war to an end, that's about it. Even with the end times approaching, no one else seems ready to stick their neck out. Trump is polling at 29 percent in one survey, but panic is being accompanied by paralysis. All but four Senate Republicans, including Iowa's Chuck Grassley, voted against a resolution Thursday to block Trump from ordering more strikes on Iran. They voted to continue supporting the war, despite the war eating their party from the inside out.

Even Jon Husted balked on that vote. The Ohio senator, who is in a tough race against Sherrod Brown, made news this week by appearing to distance himself from Trump. "The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices," he said. Yet when it came time for action to meet the conviction of his words, he chickened out. Husted is a stand-in for his party. GOP voters may be screaming for relief. GOP candidates may be panicking. Yet so far, most Republicans will not choose to defy Donald Trump.

Even Iowa's Steve Deace, who can clearly see the portents of doom on the horizon, believes what's needed is more Donald Trump, not less. "We need the president out on the stump ASAP," he wrote. Deace called on the president to "articulate specifically what the mission and victory is in Iran and Hormuz, because out here in the cheap seats it feels like another Middle East War quagmire regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again."

This is it, though. It only gets worse from here. "Blaming the American president for price inflation is a way of life here," Virginia Heffernan wrote for The New Republic during "panic week." "Live by it; die by it. Trump did nothing but savage Joe Biden for high prices born of the Covid pandemic. Now he expects a pass for inflation he’s actively helped create."

The far right has abandoned the president. ("I don't just want Republicans to lose," Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, said. "I want Republicans to be annihilated from the face of the planet.") So have rightwing pundits. ("The war, cost of living (especially gas), and how he acts like he doesn’t give a s--- is what has pushed ['Red America'] over the edge," Rod Dreher said.) Meanwhile, Donald Trump is so depleted that he can no longer walk in a straight line.

The wheels are coming off, wrote journalist Mark Halperin this morning.

"As I sift through my inboxes and social media feeds over the most recent extended news cycle," he wrote, "what I see instead is ... a political figure who is swimming against the tide of a Blue tsunami as big as Connecticut, not because Ken Martin is suddenly a genius, but because an unpopular war and high consumer prices is no way to win a midterm election."

If the Republicans won't choose to defy Trump, well, democracy will choose for them.