'Bro We Need Your Vote': Matt Gaetz and a Desperate GOP Wrestle With Trump's Unpopularity

“Bro we need your vote,” former congressman and attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz posted on X on Tuesday. “I hate the war too. But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”

Gaetz, who withdrew his nomination to be President Donald Trump’s attorney general amid reports of sex with underage women 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-congressman’s bid for continued support of the party of Lincoln is pathetic because it ignores the voter’s complaint and instead offers up an old, overhyped fear. Yet it perfectly encapsulates an increasingly strong feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA movement, at least as it pertains to the midterm elections. There is virtual unanimity among election watchers and prediction markets that the Republicans will lose the House in November; the only question remaining is by how many seats. And, as pollster Nate Silver puts it, “it’s no longer accurate to describe the battle for the U.S. Senate as a ‘toss-up.’ In our terminology, that designation covers all races where neither party has more than a 60 percent chance of winning. But Democrats’ Senate chances are now between 63 percent and 69 percent in all three versions of FLIPR [Silver's proprietary analytical system], including 65 percent in our headline ‘Deluxe’ version.”

In the red state of Florida, Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar has openly criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and the Miami Herald reports that GOP gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds just scrubbed “numerous prominent references to his endorsement from Donald Trump as the president’s approval ratings hit new lows.” Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994, yet the Senate race between James Talarico and Trump’s handpicked and deeply compromised candidate, Ken Paxton, has turned a safe seat into a toss-up where the Libertarian candidate Ted Brown will cover the spread if current polling holds up (Brown pulled 267,039 votes, or 2.36 percent, in the 2024 Senate race). In the wake of overtly racist comments, the Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner, Bo French, has seen his lead and favorability ratings dip.

These sorts of developments seemed impossible even a few months ago, when a Trump endorsement routinely made or broke a candidate in GOP primaries. Yet as the president’s disapproval ratings jump to a historic high (66  percent, per Reuters/Ipsos), a plurality of registered voters (45 percent) agree that their votes in congressional races are votes “mostly against President Trump.” Twenty-four percent say their votes are mostly for President Trump, and 30 percent say he is not a factor.

It’s important to emphasize that the turn against Trump is not because the MAGA agenda has been blocked or compromised or watered down but precisely because it has been enacted virtually exactly as Trump wanted. Writing at the completion of the first year of Trump’s second term, Brian Doherty wrote that “Trump wielded state power to punish enemies and reward friends, sent the military into city streets under bogus pretenses and over the objections of local elected officials, authorized masked cops to enforce ‘papers, please’ policies on U.S. citizens moving in public (the loosing of such largely undisciplined shock troops in American cities where they are not wanted has now predictably resulted in the unconscionable murders of two citizens), ordered the serial murder of suspected drug smugglers, and disrupted the global economy by making Americans pay sharply increased taxes on imported goods, for starters.” While some of Trump’s policies have been disallowed by the courts or revised due to public outcry, he’s done exactly what he promised he would do, with predictably disastrous and unpopular results. One exception, fully of his own making, was making a clean release of the Epstein files. Whether you think there is anything of value in them or not, his refusal to fulfill his campaign promises has hurt him.

And then there’s the war with Iran, which Trump has repeatedly declared over or nearly over since U.S. bombing runs began in February. Indisputably a war of choice—and a choice that alienated even formerly devoted fans such as Tucker Carlson—the president has compounded its problems by waving away voter concerns over kitchen-table issues like the price of gas. The American Automobile Association (AAA) reports that the national average for a gallon of gas is $4.47, an increase of $1.30 from the same time last year. Most voters link at least part of that hike to the Iran war, which has spooked global energy markets and shows few signs of resolution on terms favorable to American interests. Yet Trump seems at best indifferent and at worst deeply hostile to voters.  Higher gas costs are “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” the president told crowds in North Carolina last week, as reported by the Associated Press. “Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more.”

As important as any specific policy is Trump’s overall emphasis on personal loyalty over anything remotely resembling philosophical principle. As the Florida voter who occasioned Gaetz’s response wrote, he was voting Democratic for the first time because the Republican Party “has abandoned our values for the sycophancy of a transactional leader who has none.” In mandatory financial disclosures released in June, the president reported that his family businesses hauled in at least $2.2 billion in 2025, much of it from an investment firm in the United Arab Emirates that secretly bought half of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company co-founded by Trump and his sons and headed up by Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. As Matt Welch characterized the scale of Trump’s self-dealing for Reason earlier this year, “The 47th president has serially exceeded the most infamous corruptions in U.S. history while generating a fraction of the outrage.”

If the best you can muster in the face of all this is, “I hate the war too. But the Democrats want to trans your kids,” your president, your party, and your movement deserve to lose power by historic proportions.

The post ‘Bro We Need Your Vote’: Matt Gaetz and a Desperate GOP Wrestle With Trump’s Unpopularity appeared first on Reason Magazine.