The disgraced former congressman appeals to voters to remain with the Republicans despite concerns over fuel costs and the confrontation with Iran.
“Pal, we need your vote,” former congressman and former attorney general hopeful Matt Gaetz posted on X on Tuesday. “I dislike the war too. But the Democrats want to push their agenda on your children.”
Gaetz, who pulled his bid to become President Donald Trump’s attorney general amid reports of sexual activity with underage girls and other improprieties, was replying to a Florida voter who declared, “When I vote for a Democrat…for the first time in my 41 years of life this November, it will not be because my values have changed, but because my party has abandoned our values for the sycophancy of a transactional leader who has none.”
The ex-lawmakers’ plea to maintain backing for the Lincoln-allied GOP comes across as feeble because it sidesteps the voter complaint and instead recycles an old, inflated fear. Nonetheless, it encapsulates a growing sentiment that the MAGA movement is losing momentum, at least in the context of the midterm elections. There is near-universal agreement among election watchers and prediction markets that the Republicans will lose the House in November; the remaining uncertainty concerns the size of the defeat. And, as pollster Nate Silver observes, “it’s no longer accurate to label the battle for control of the U.S. Senate a ‘toss-up.’ In our framework, that term applies only to races where neither side has more than a 60 percent chance of winning. Yet Democrats’ Senate prospects now sit between 63 percent and 69 percent across all three versions of FLIPR [Silver’s proprietary analytic system], including about 65 percent in our top-tier ‘Deluxe’ edition.”
In Florida’s red terrain, Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar has openly questioned the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and the Miami Herald reports that GOP gubernatorial hopeful Byron Donalds has just scrubbed a number of conspicuous mentions of his endorsement from Donald Trump as the president’s approval ratings sink to new lows. Democrats have not captured a statewide post in Texas since 1994, yet the Senate contest between James Talarico and Trump-selected and notably compromised candidate Ken Paxton has transformed a once-safe seat into a toss-up, with Libertarian Ted Brown possibly narrowing the gap if current polling holds (Brown received 267,039 votes, or 2.36 percent, in the 2024 Senate race). In the wake of blatantly racist remarks, the Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French has seen his lead and favorability numbers slip.
Such shifts would have seemed inconceivable just a few months ago, when Trump’s endorsement often decided GOP primaries. Yet with the president’s disapproval rating climbing to a record high (66 percent, according to Reuters/Ipsos), a majority of registered voters (45 percent) consider their congressional votes to be primarily a rebuke of President Trump. Twenty-four percent say their ballots are mainly for Trump, and 30 percent say he is not a factor.
It’s crucial to note that the pivot against Trump isn’t because the MAGA policy agenda has been obstructed or diluted; it’s because it has been carried out almost exactly as Trump intended. Writing at the close of Trump’s first year in his second term, Brian Doherty contended that “Trump used state power to punish enemies and reward allies, dispatched the military into city streets under dubious pretexts and against the objections of local elected officials, allowed masked officers to implement ‘papers, please’-style checks on ordinary Americans in public, and loosened such largely unchecked troops in cities where they are unwanted, resulting in tragic homicides. He also ordered the kill-and-seize approach toward suspected drug smugglers and disrupted the global economy by imposing higher taxes on imported goods, to name a few examples.” While some of Trump’s policies have been struck down or altered due to court rulings or public outcry, he has largely done what he promised, with outcomes that are predictably harmful and unpopular. One exception, self-inflicted, was his limited release of the Epstein documents. Whether you believe there is anything of value in them or not, his failure to honor key campaign promises has damaged him.
And then there’s the conflict with Iran, which Trump has repeatedly claimed to be near its end since U.S. bombing sorties began in February. It is widely recognized as a war of choice—and a choice that alienated even once-ardent supporters such as Tucker Carlson—yet the president has compounded its difficulties by brushing aside voters’ concerns about everyday costs, like gasoline. The American Automobile Association (AAA) reports the national average price for a gallon of gas at $4.47, up by $1.30 from a year ago. Most voters connect at least part of this rise to the Iran conflict, which has rattled global energy markets and shows little sign of a favorable resolution. Yet Trump appears at best indifferent and at worst openly unsympathetic to voters. Higher gas prices are “a very small price to pay for what we’ve done,” the president told crowds in North Carolina last week, as reported by the Associated Press. “Keep that in mind. It’s a bit more. In truth, even if it were substantially more.”
As much as any single policy, Trump’s overarching priority—loyalty to him above all else—stands out. As the Florida voter who sparked Gaetz’s reply noted, they intended to vote Democrat for the first time because the Republican Party “has abandoned our values for the sycophancy of a transactional leader who has none.” In the mandatory financial disclosures released in June, the president disclosed that his family’s businesses earned at least $2.2 billion in 2025, much of it from an investment firm in the United Arab Emirates that secretly acquired half of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company co-founded by Trump and his sons and led by Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s Middle East envoy. As Matt Welch described the scale of Trump’s self-dealing for Reason earlier this year, “The 47th president has repeatedly surpassed the most notorious forms of corruption in U.S. history while provoking only a fraction of the public outrage.”
If your only response to all of this is, “I despise the war, too. But the Democrats want to indoctrinate your children,” then your president, your party, and your movement deserve to lose power by a historic amount.
