Greene’s complaints about Trump and congressional dysfunction in her farewell statement “rang true to … many in the House GOP,” Punchbowl News reported yesterday, adding that “a few other GOP members messaged us over the weekend saying that they, too, are considering retiring in the middle of the term.” When news leaked shortly after that the president was about to lose the plot again by announcing a proposal to extend Obamacare subsidies—the very thing Democrats had fought for in shutting down the government—the word from Mike Johnson’s newly irritated conference came back clear and firm: no.
And Trump listened. The announcement was quickly postponed and remains unscheduled as I write this on Tuesday. (One conservative strategist memorably described Trump’s new Obamacare scheme to NOTUS as “a proposal that basically looks like what he just ripped Marjorie Taylor Greene a new a–hole over.”) For the second time in less than a week, America’s Duma did the unthinkable by working its will on the czar.
Are the “battered wives” of the House and Senate GOP really poised to leave the abusive relationship they’ve been stuck in for the past 10 years, as Punchbowl’s report implies? If so, why now?
Irrelevance.
One way to answer “why now?” is to consider why congressional Republicans warmed up to Trump in the first place after he was elected president in 2016.
He was a winner, remarkably popular among the base and with working-class constituencies that had traditionally eluded the GOP. Apart from a few key issues, his policy positions weren’t fully formed, making him ripe for steering by conservative ideologues. And his election had delivered a so-called “trifecta” for the party, empowering Republicans in Congress to shape federal policy.
All of that has since been turned on its head. The president’s popularity is shrinking, and the GOP looks electorally feeble without him on the ballot. He, not Mitch McConnell, is driving the party’s agenda and steering it into places that rank-and-file Republicans very much don’t want to go. And Congress has been reduced to a rump branch of government for whom everyone, including our autocratic executive, feels justifiable contempt.
To Republican lawmakers, Trump’s ascendance seemed to promise an era of relevance. As of November 2025, it’s delivered the opposite, to such a grotesque degree that the main order of business in the GOP-led House nowadays is members trying to censure each other.
The “why now?” analysis starts with Trump’s popularity. The GOP was annihilated in off-year elections earlier this month due to the White House’s brilliant decision to cede the issue of affordability to Democrats. The president is now stuck with the worst approval rating of his second term as he continues to insist that the cost of living isn’t as bad as your lyin’ eyes are telling you and Americans continue to politely disagree. He won nine years ago by running as an antidote to professional politicians who were chronically “out of touch” with the average person’s concerns. Now he spends his time indulging in Biden-esque fantasies that “things are really Rockin’” economically and that he’s getting the best poll numbers of his career.
House Republicans are watching that, foreseeing a midterm bloodbath, and calculating that the already unlikely scenario in which Trump runs for a third term is disappearing beneath the waves of advanced age and advancing unpopularity. For the first time since he took over the GOP, Trump looks like a truly lame duck. So why continue loyally serving him in Congress? What’s your reward for sticking with him as his approval rating (potentially) plummets to 35 percent, when the best-case scenario for your near-term political future will be serving in a powerless House minority?
Meanwhile, the party’s agenda is increasingly unrecognizable to anyone who remembers politics before Trump. Sometimes that’s because the president doesn’t care very much about a particular policy and chooses to prioritize his political needs instead, as is plainly the case with his pivot on extending Obamacare subsidies. He’s panicked that the affordability issue will crush the GOP in the midterms and make him accountable to a Democratic Congress next year, so he’s suddenly willing to continue propping up a program that he and his party have spent a decade trying to repeal.
Other times, it’s because the president cares a lot about a policy and is happy to jam it down the throats of Republican members of Congress regardless of how they might feel about it. Tariffs are an obvious example, as is brokering an end to the war in Ukraine in a way that would mortgage that country’s sovereignty to Russia. If you’re a conservative lawmaker, your job nowadays consists of quietly tolerating terrible nationalist initiatives, pretending not to notice terrible socialist ones, and occasionally working with Trump on issues like tax cuts where his preferences happen to overlap with yours.
His fickleness and imperiousness on policy will only get worse over the next three years as he draws closer to retirement and has less to lose, a grim prospect for congressional Republicans. To make matters worse, Trump palpably doesn’t care about the drift among young right-wingers toward illiberal boors like his pal Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. The president isn’t going to spend political capital to try to reverse it, which means GOP lawmakers need to think hard about what sort of constituency they’ll end up serving if they stick around through 2028 and beyond.
How’d you like to represent a base that broadly agrees with Elizabeth Warren on economics but is also increasingly openly racist, with a special animosity toward Jews?
Contempt.
It’s one thing to be saddled with an unpopular figure at the top of your party and to be bossed around by the White House on policy. That’s not unusual for Congress, though the bossiness in Trump’s case is more extreme than we’ve seen from any president since probably FDR.
But it’s another to be ridiculed by the president and his cronies for your subservience. Steve Bannon, for instance, laughs about Trump having turned Congress into the Duma. Trump himself has reportedly boasted to confidants that he’s “the speaker and the president.” When Mike Johnson sent the House home for weeks during the shutdown, it seemed to signal the GOP leadership’s acquiescence in Congress’ marginalization. Our legislature is a contemptible joke, and even those who benefit from its servility can’t be bothered to pretend otherwise as a courtesy.
It’s hard to believe that any Republican lawmakers retain a shred of self-respect after 10 long years of learned helplessness, but if you believe Punchbowl News, some do. One senior House Republican gave the outlet this statement about Greene’s surprise retirement:
This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all—appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened. They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.
More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.
Radio host Erick Erickson corroborated that. “Can confirm that both House and Senate guys despise the White House legislative team and are tired of being treated as just there to do the White House’s bidding,” he tweeted on Monday. “Lame Duck is here. These guys will either assert their need to be a part of decisions, or they will quit early.”
Mike Johnson is the equivalent of a puppet ruler installed by a conquering king. Like the more embarrassing members of Trump’s Cabinet, his authority derives entirely from the president because he’s achieved nothing independently to earn the respect of his deputies, and so he protects the source of that authority zealously. That’s why discharge petitions, formerly an esoteric procedure in the House, have gone mainstream lately. Everyone understands that the House is “occupied territory,” with the speaker’s first loyalty owed not to his conference or to his institution but to the president. If members want to legislate on something that offends Trump, like releasing the Epstein files, they have no choice but to use tactics that go around Johnson.
Occupations, especially ruthless ones, do tend to incite resentment and eventually resistance. The “resentment” phase in Congress has been simmering for years, but maybe Trump’s weakened political position has finally awakened an insurgency. Or perhaps the awakening came from having to watch Greene, whose MAGA credentials are impeccable, be swamped by death threats after the president dubbed her a “traitor” for turning on him. When even she can’t pass a litmus test that would spare her from the battered-wife treatment, it’s time for other Republicans in the House to wonder what they’re doing with their lives by serving this party.
What Greene said in her retirement announcement about not wanting to spend 2027 and 2028 defending the president from Democratic impeachment inquiries may also be feeding the insurgent mood. House Republicans should be used to that, one might think, since they spent 2019 and 2020 the same way. But two things are different now: Trump has been far more aggressive in bullying the House GOP this year than he was during his first term, antagonizing its members, and the grounds for his next impeachment are likely to be much sturdier than they were when he was impeached for seeking a quid pro quo with Ukraine.
Seemingly every day, news breaks of sordid bribery schemes, recklessness in using lethal military force, vindictive prosecutions of political enemies, and other abuses of power. At a minimum, making excuses for Trump as Democrats pursue investigations will be politically uncomfortable for House Republicans; in extreme cases, like with his naked influence peddling, his behavior will be indefensible. To serve in the GOP minority in the next Congress will be less a matter of making law than having to do White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s job every day with the degree of difficulty dialed up.
Republican lawmakers made a tacit bargain with Trump when he was first elected, I think: We’ll support you, just please don’t give us *too* much embarrassing behavior to have to defend. He’s now broken that bargain and is piling up corruption as brazenly as he can, liberated by his reelection and his consolidation of power over the government. He doesn’t care a whit about how his conduct affects the congressional GOP’s electoral prospects beyond what control of the House and Senate means for him personally, which explains everything from his heedlessly chummy photo op with midterm poster boy Mamdani to his tone-deaf insistence on building a White House ballroom while Americans wrestle with making ends meet.
Go figure that members who have been treated like “garbage” by the White House might now want to break their end of that bargain, too.
An abusive relationship.
There’s an obvious objection to all of that, of course. If House Republicans are so aggrieved at Trump’s domineering behavior toward Congress that they’re thinking of retiring en masse, won’t that … make things worse?
Whoever succeeds them as Republican nominees in their home districts is likely to be more slavishly obedient to the president than they are, inevitably pledging undying loyalty in exchange for Trump’s endorsement. Democrats might reclaim the majority next fall, but the next GOP conference will be even more obnoxiously MAGA than the current one, a sea of Marjorie Taylor Greenes minus her independent streak. That’ll make it easier for the president to dominate Republican members.
I think the proper answer to that objection is: Yeah, so?
It’s too late to still be worrying in 2025 about “good” Republicans being replaced in Congress by “bad” ones, as the good ones nowadays usually vote out of fear the same way the bad ones would vote out of conviction. (Admittedly, that’s less true lately as lame-duckery has set in.) At this point, it might be better to have a few out-and-out groypers elected to the House to give Americans a good, hard, unfiltered look at what the right has become than allow the party’s image to continue to be inadvertently laundered by the likes of Dan Crenshaw or whoever.
The less respectable the GOP establishment becomes, the more likely an electoral backlash to the party becomes. And if that backlash doesn’t happen because Americans end up preferring the increasingly radical populism of the post-Greene Republican Party, then we’re cooked as a country anyway. Better to know it than to go on pretending.
I encourage House Republicans to retire because, frankly, it’s the only way to end the abusive relationship they’re in—not with Trump but with their own voters, the real abusers in modern right-wing politics.
That analogy is uncomfortable because it casts the careerist quislings of Congress in the role of sympathetic victims, which they aren’t. They’ve directly and indirectly enabled the president’s cretinism for a decade because they enjoyed the prestige of having a seat in Congress, even at the price of continuously farting away Article I’s authority to keep Trump and his supporters happy. The fact that they’ve discovered 10 years later that they made a bad trade doesn’t earn them credit for being conscientious.
But their choice was driven by a bona fide civic dilemma: They’re charged with democratically representing a constituency that doesn’t really believe in democracy. What’s the proper course of action when your job requires you to carry out the will of a Republican base that thinks the president should be able to do whatever he wants and will remove you from office—and maybe threaten you physically—if you disagree?
The only way out of that dilemma is to quit that abusive relationship and let those lousy voters find someone who will represent their autocratic wishes enthusiastically, not reluctantly. If the “battered wives” of the House Republican conference really have finally mustered the dignity to say no to that and leave, however belatedly, good for them. It’s a small mitigating factor to their legacy as villains of American history.
