GOP To Trump: ‘You Can’t Sit With Us’ During The Midterms [Op-Ed]

Welp, apparently, the GOP has backed itself into a MAGA corner, creating a political rock and a hard place for the party that no one could’ve seen coming except everybody who isn’t a MAGA sycophant. 

Now, as the midterm campaign trail heats up for candidates from both parties, Republicans are in a position where they have to either alienate their far-right conservative constituents by distancing themselves and their campaigns from the most unpopular president of out lifetimes (and probably all of U.S. history), or alienate general election voters, including independents, by refusing to say plainly: nah, that fool in the White House can’t sit with us.

As it turns out, some GOP hopefuls are doing the latter, or, at the very least, trying their best not to talk about President Donald Trump at all.

From Politico:

So far, they haven’t settled on a unified approach, according to interviews with more than two dozen GOP lawmakers, candidates and operatives. Mostly, they don’t want to talk about it.

When asked in an interview if he wants Trump to campaign in his swing district this fall or spend time elsewhere, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) gave an indirect answer.

“Listen, you know, I’m very happy with our campaign and the things that we’re doing,” he said. “Very confident with our conversations with the voters. I think we’ve got a great campaign plan, and we’re laser-focused on communicating with our constituents and talking about issues that are important to them.”

Some battleground Republicans have relayed to Trump’s political team that they don’t want him to visit their districts ahead of November, according to four Republican operatives involved in the conversations, granted anonymity, like others in this article, to candidly discuss private strategy and conversations.

And top GOP pollsters have advised some vulnerable Republican incumbents and candidates to not talk about Trump on the campaign trail, or at least limit their direct references to the president, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.

In fact, one  senior Republican involved in a competitive House GOP race in a district Trump won by double digits in 2024 told Politico flat-out that their team has “told them he cannot come.”

“Candidly, he would not be helpful here … I do not believe they would send him without our OK. And if they did, we probably wouldn’t campaign with him,” the anonymous Republican said.

Another Republican candidate described the guidance they had gotten from pollsters, saying, “You’re f*cked if you mention him too much, and you’re also f*cked if you don’t stay in his good graces.”

Former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake told CNN this week that “somebody with a 35% approval rating shouldn’t be getting out front on these races.”

A GOP strategist working on multiple campaigns tried to straddle the fence on whether or not to keep Trump on the “do not invite” list at campaign events, telling Politico, “Trump is still the most powerful turnout motivator for low-propensity Republicans or Trump Republicans, and so I think campaigns will and should use him and his brand in targeted ways like mail, digital, or text, but I’m not going to try to bring him to town if he’s underwater and it’s going to hurt us with a majority of voters.”

So, again, Republicans have to figure out whether they’re going to appease the “low-propensity” idiots in their bases by sharing a stage with Trump, or treat Trump like the Five Heartbeats treated Eddie King Jr. during his drunken rendition of “Nights Like This.”

Mind you, all of this comes as Trump is planning to hit 35 battleground districts during the last leg of campaign events leading up to the midterm elections in November. It also comes after the president claimed that voters are “angry at Republicans,” but are “not angry at me,” because, baby, our president is simply not one to deal with reality when there’s plenty of MAGA sand around him to stick his head into.

Trump is a man who needs to feel loved no matter how unloved he actually is, and if one tried to tell him that even a Republican’s campaign rally is a place where his presence might do more harm than good, well, that’s just not a message he’s going to receive in good spirits. They’d better give that man the wrong address or place a golden statue of himself in front of Air Force One and hope it has a distracting, moth-to-flame effect. 

They better post some AI slop of Trump attending their rallies in hopes that he forgets and thinks he was already there. They better put portraits of Barack Obama at every entrance as Trump repellent. They better make sure none of the escalators work, or something.

Or, you know, maybe Republicans should stop electing moronic cult leaders to the White House so they don’t end up in this position in the first place.

Just a thought.

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