One of President Donald Trump’s greatest political talents is bending the rest of his party to his will. After the 2024 election, he went into overdrive on that front, claiming his “landslide” victory gave him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
The results don’t indicate that, but the GOP swallowed it whole. Some lawmakers even argued they should relegate themselves to vassals for Trump’s agenda. (“Whatever that is, we need to embrace it,” Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas said. “All of it. Every single word.”)
But that might not have been the wisest strategy for Republicans hoping to keep their seats in the 2026 midterm elections.
Trump has used that wide latitude to say seemingly whatever he pleases and to pursue policies that the American people decidedly dislike, most recently with the Iran war.
It’s almost as if he doesn’t care that what he’s doing could torpedo the GOP’s hopes in less than seven months — because Congress doesn’t matter much to his view of power.
Republicans might want to proceed accordingly.
Trump’s unhinged behavior
Trump has always conducted business in his way — he once called it “modern-day presidential.”
But as the New York Times’ Peter Baker puts it well, the president’s recent conduct has “turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate” that has stalked Trump.
The Iran war is a case in point. Trump launched it without bothering to build a consistent case for it to the American people. The objectives have regularly shifted, and Trump seems unfamiliar with basic details.
He has threatened Iran with apparent war crimes and even warned last week that “a whole civilization will die tonight” — before averting that course.
“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” Trump said in one missive on Easter Sunday.
He’s also exacerbated a feud with the popular and American-born Pope Leo XIV over the war.
As part of it, he even posted a seemingly blasphemous AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ. When even allies started criticizing that, Trump deleted the post and bizarrely claimed he thought the image showed him as a doctor — a contention now the butt of endless social media jokes.
But it’s hardly an isolated incident.
Trump’s behavior continues to push the bounds. He has also in recent months posted extremely callous thoughts after the deaths of two nemeses: Hollywood director Rob Reiner (suggesting the murder victim had instead died from “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”) and former FBI Director Robert Mueller (“Good, I’m glad he’s dead”).
And the president spent the early part of 2026 engaged in a public but ultimately failed effort to gain control of Greenland, an idea that nearly everyone dismissed as a joke when it was first floated years ago.
The most recent events have led even some former Trump allies — like ex-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Candace Owens and Alex Jones, as well as first Trump administration employees Ty Cobb and Stephanie Grisham — to warn that the president is crazy or insane. Some of them and others on the right have even floated the unlikely solution of removing Trump from office using the 25th Amendment.
A majority of Americans seems to notice his behavior too. A recent poll from Reuters and Ipsos showed 61% — and even 3 in 10 Republicans — agreed that Trump has “become erratic with age.” Other polls suggest rising concerns about Trump’s mental acuity, though not to the same extent as with former President Joe Biden a couple years ago.
It’s not just unhinged; most of it is also unpopular
If Republicans skeptical of the Iran war thought Trump might back down amid rising gas prices at home and declining poll numbers, they might want to think again. On Monday, the US began a blockade of Iranian ports.
And while there could soon be another round of US-Iran peace talks, Trump made clear before last weekend’s negotiations that his militarism wasn’t going anywhere. “Our great military is loading up and resting, looking forward, actually, to its next conquest,” Trump said, without specifying what that would be.
He’s repeatedly floated forcing regime change in Cuba, saying he could “do anything I want” with the island. If that happened, it would be the third “conquest” in just a few months in 2026, after the US ousted and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.
This is a pattern with Trump. Nearly all of the major policies he’s pursued have been rather predictably unpopular. The Iran war polled very poorly before it began but so did Trump’s tariffs, his big agenda bill, his pardons of January 6, 2021, defendants and a series of convicted fraudsters, and much more.
And even when the policies started with more support, the Trump administration’s implementation has often made them more unpopular. That’s been most notably the case with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to popular programs and the administration’s harsh deportation campaign.
Trump’s immigration crackdown, which many Americans long thought was too heavy-handed, blew up after two protesters were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis in January. But the writing had been on the wall for months.
What Republicans do now
It’s not clear that Trump has given up on Republicans in 2026 — and he’s got plenty of reason not to.
If Democrats won the House, they could launch politically dicey investigations of the Trump administration using their subpoena power, for instance. And Republicans would very much like to hold the Senate to fill any Supreme Court vacancies.
But Trump certainly seems to care more about doing what he wants in the time he has left in office rather than the political consequences for his party.
And even if Republicans conclude that the president doesn’t have their best interests at heart, their options for keeping him in check are limited.
Some of them are starting to stand up for their legislative prerogatives and push back on certain administration actions they don’t like. On the war, for example, some Republicans have signaled they won’t agree to the administration’s requested $200 billion funding package. But that’s a far cry from truly limiting Trump’s authority to prosecute the war.
And even if more in the party embraced Greene’s view that Trump has lost it, it’s nearly unthinkable that enough Republicans would back impeachment or using the 25th Amendment.
What could be telling is if more Republicans — especially those who fear for their careers — start to carve more distance from Trump.
His poll numbers are hitting new lows, in some cases even worse than after January 6. He’s alienated a large swath of 2024 Trump voters. And Democrats are over-performing in special elections, like the one for Greene’s old seat last week, by larger margins than ever in the Trump era.
It’s been nearly a decade since Sen. Lindsey Graham, now a Trump ally, posted his infamous tweet.
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it,” the South Carolina Republican said.
Fast forward to 2026, and the GOP has a bad situation that, like Graham previewed, it can see coming: A president who is more emboldened than ever to do whatever he wants — which is regularly hurting his party.
The question is increasingly whether Republicans can do anything about it — or even convince Trump to try.