Republicans seem to be backing away from former President Donald Trump as his legal scandals continue to mount, but MSNBC's John Heilemann said it may be too late to prevent the former president from dooming their chances in November's midterm elections.
The GOP had expected to regain congressional majorities, but a series of political wins for President Joe Biden and the Democrats, compounded with grave concerns about Trump's handling of classified materials and his role in Jan. 6, are making Republicans jittery, but the "Morning Joe" analyst said they may be stuck with him.
"I think, you know, the day has come," Heilemann said, "When will Republicans wake up and realize Donald Trump is political poison? I think it's starting to happen, you know, and I think it took all of this, the thing you and I have been talking about for the last couple months which is, you know, all that historical, the historical headwinds for the in-power party plus inflation plus all the things that we're teeing up this year to be a good year for Republicans, then seeing it all kind of fall apart."
"We don't know what the outcome is going to be," he added. "How ever Republicans ultimately do in November, it has fallen apart in their hands. The notion of the red wave over the course of these last few months, that is no longer present in anyone's mind. No honest Republican thinks they'll win 40, 50 seats in the House or win four to six seats in the Senate. That dream is gone. It's obviously largely to do with the fact that Donald Trump -- he'd already done the thing Democrats most hoped for, right? He'd become the center of the conversation in the 1/6 hearings, talked about the presidential race. Those things were going to give the Democrats a way to make the race about Trump and make him the poster boy for what they want the race really to be about, Republican extremism across the board, right -- guns, abortion, democracy, everything, right? The only thing he could have done that would have made it worse was to do what's happened now around Mar-A-Lago, which is to give every national-security Republican and mainstream Republican in the country a reason to think that Trump may have committed a violation of the Espionage Act and is likely staring down the barrel of an indictment."
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Each of those elements presented a worst-case scenario for Republicans and their hopes in this fall's elections, Heilemann said.
"I think it may be too late in this cycle for Republicans to cut the umbilical cord to Trump," he said. "They're too tied up with him at this point. They can't just pivot out of that in the next couple months, the time is too short. It's a long-term question for the party, though. If they're going to wake up, they should wake up at this point and go, we already blew this cycle in some sense. We have to start thinking about 2024 and cutting the cord before then."
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