The rats know something the captain Trump won’t admit.
More than one in eight members of Congress have announced they will not seek reelection in 2026. Thirty-six House Republicans are walking away. Seven Republican senators are not coming back — the most Senate retirements from one party since 2012. Mitch McConnell is gone. Thom Tillis is gone. Joni Ernst is gone. Marjorie Taylor Greene — Trump’s most theatrical loyalist — didn’t even finish her term. She resigned mid-session after a public falling out with the president she spent years defending.
This is not normal political turnover. Politicians retire when they’ve accomplished something or when they’ve had enough. They flee when they know what’s coming.
What’s coming is a reckoning. Trump’s approval is underwater. Special elections have been delivering Democratic overperformance for months. The party that ran on populism passed a tax bill for billionaires, gutted Medicaid for working families, and handed the apparatus of government to a man who fires inspectors general, silences federal employees with NDAs, and governs by chaos and grievance. Voters watched. Voters remembered.
The Republicans departing include members who clashed with Trump’s vision of expanded executive power — and members who enabled every minute of it. What they share is a poll. They’ve all seen the same numbers and drawn the same conclusion: the name Trump on their record is a weight they cannot carry across a finish line.
The irony is exquisite. The movement that promised to drain the swamp is now watching its own members drain out of Washington before the voters can drain them out themselves.
Call it what it is. Not retirement. Not public service completed. Not time with family. Escape.
They voted for every bit of it. They defended every bit of it. And when the bill came due they were already gone.