As President Donald Trump's unpopularity grows and Republicans face two serious scandals, an analyst signaled on Tuesday that the GOP could see "end of age vibes."
In analysis from Josh Marshall, the founder and editor-in-chief of Talking Points Memo, he described how the hegemony could end for the Republican Party. He recounted how something similar had happened in 2006 involving "lightly closeted" GOP lawmaker Mark Foley and "what we’d now call sexting with underage male pages in the House page program and was forced to resign."
And as the abuse allegations follow Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) and accusations of sexual harassment surround Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), Marshall suggests that Republicans could be seeing the backlash come November, despite the difficulty in predicting the midterm election results.
"But the two cases capture the culture of impunity that has defined the last 20 months, as well as the way increasing disconnect between what is happening in Washington, D.C., where Trump is all powerful, and the rest of the country where tidal forces are visibly moving against him. They are functioning eerily as a stand-in for everything else and create this mood, this kind of palpable sign of a majority going off the rails."
But Democrats don't have any easy path ahead either, he explained, as the party faces "simultaneous rebellion against the national leadership."
"To some degree there is a matter of almost impossible expectations," Marshall wrote. "Trump’s blitzkrieg through the Constitution, the rule of law and the most essential elements of democratic self-government have been so grave it would be almost impossible for a party, for the moment locked out of power in all three branches government, to meet the expectations of those who oppose him. But that is at best only a partial and limited explanation. There’s simply been a persistent mood and signaling of business as usual that has put the present leaders of the party in Washington, D.C. at odds with the great bulk of their voters. And to a great degree the outcome of the midterm elections will depend on how these two simultaneous and related but distinct unfolding rebellions interact."