Is MAGA Starting to Crack?

by Jon Fuhrman

Thursday, May 8.  We’ve been waiting, ever so patiently, perhaps too patiently, for some signs that the Trump Presidency would start to cave in on itself, that Republicans would slowly start to awake from the MAGA spell.  Well, perhaps we are finally starting to see some daylight.

In Georgia, Democratic incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff was generally seen as the single most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in 2026.  Ossoff’s most likely opponent was Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who would be termed out in 2026, so a Senate run for him looked like the next natural step.  But Ossoff got some really good news last week.

Kemp had stood up to President Trump in 2020, when Trump famously asked someone, anyone, to find him another 11,000 votes in Georgia, earning some bipartisan respect – and Trump’s ire – as he supported the GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s flat-out refusal to cheat.  Despite that, he and the President had sort of come to terms with one another, and Kemp would likely have had the President’s endorsement if he asked for it.  But Kemp decided not to run for Senate.

Kemp was, unquestionably, the GOP’s strongest candidate.  He was polling ahead of Ossoff (the only GOP candidate to do so).  He had bipartisan respect, and he has been, all things considered, a pretty good governor.  But he said no. 

Now, Ossoff is the clear favorite, and a Senate seat that might well have flipped will likely remain safely on the Democratic side (especially if one of the true crazies, like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, wins the GOP primary – that might even be enough to give the Dems a shot at the governorship).

So why did Kemp walk away from an almost sure win?  Maybe, despite the current polling, it wasn’t such a sure win.  Perhaps Kemp is looking ahead, seeing the deterioration in the Trump edifice, fearing that he would have to defend the President and all his policies, and he decided that was not only politically unpalatable, it was morally unpalatable.

If shrewd politicos in Georgia are fearful of where this President will be in a year and a half, imagine the environment in states much more purple.

One example of that is North Carolina, where GOP incumbent Senator Thom Tillis is up for re-election in 2026, and, in somewhat of an inverse situation, is regarded as one of the GOP’s weakest incumbents.  To make things worse, Democrat Roy Cooper, who just finished his second term as Governor, is being hotly pursued by national Dems to run against Tillis.  Cooper is pretty much Democrats’ dream candidate, and he’d start out on a relatively even footing, Tillis’ 12 years of incumbency notwithstanding.

Is Tillis nervous?  Well, last week he announced he would not vote to confirm a Trump nominee for U.S Attorney for the District of Columbia.  The nominee, Ed Martin, really was a particularly loathsome example of MAGA excesses in the legal arena.  But despite pressure from the White House, Tillis stuck to his guns and said he wouldn’t vote for Martin in committee.  That would have led to an 11 – 11 deadlock.  Then, rather than lose the vote, Senate leadership punted and cancelled the vote.

Somewhat amazingly, President Trump gave in.  He pulled the nomination, and in Martin’s place, nominated Judge Jeanine Pirro, a former district judge and District Attorney from New York and, more recently, a Fox News favorite and election-fraud conspiracist.  Perhaps Pirro is even more noxious than Martin, but the fascinating aspect of all this is that a Republican Senator felt empowered to defy the President, and live to tell about it.  There appear to be no negative consequences, no late-night Truth Social posts, no threats of primaries, no media leaks crying for vengeance.

If one Senator can get away with this, others surely are watching and thinking they don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid.

Also from North Carolina comes some other good news on the legal front.  In November, there was a race for a State Supreme Court seat.  The Democrat, Associate Justice Allison Riggs, won re-election by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million votes cast.  A narrow margin indeed, but multiple recounts upheld that slim victory.  But the GOP candidate, Jefferson Griffin (a judge on the State Court of Appeals, a lower court in the North Carolina judicial system), wasn’t satisfied.  He appealed to the State Elections Board, then to various state courts, seeking to disqualify various ballots from heavily Democratic areas.  First he sought to disallow over 65,000 ballots; that got narrowed down to 1,600 ballots.  The Democrat, Justice Riggs, went to Federal Court to try to stop these appeals.  Just last week, Federal District Chief Judge Richard Myers, who just happens to be a Trump appointee, issued a final definitive ruling that said no, you can’t change the rules after the election.  Further, he was actually rather emphatic and elegant in his opinion.  You simply can’t try to cherry-pick results and apply different rules to different ballots. 

One would think that this is pretty self-evident, pretty basic.  But this pattern of contesting election results after the fact (when you lose the elections) is becoming part of the GOP standard playbook.  The Judge’s ruling, in this case, definitively puts a stop to that.  The GOP candidate this week conceded the election.  Typically, the losing side might appeal such a ruling to the Circuit Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court.  But they didn’t.  Either they thought the ruling was so strong, and so patently obvious, that they’d get laughed out of the appellate courts, or they feared, on a larger scale, that appellate court rulings on this point would set a regional or national standard and hurt GOP efforts elsewhere to wreak electoral havoc.  Either way, Democrats have notched another victory in an important swing state.

Thursday, May 8.  We’ve been waiting, ever so patiently, perhaps too patiently, for some signs that the Trump Presidency would start to cave in on itself, that Republicans would slowly start to awake from the MAGA spell.  Well, perhaps we are finally starting to see some daylight.

In Georgia, Democratic incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff was generally seen as the single most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in 2026.  Ossoff’s most likely opponent was Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who would be termed out in 2026, so a Senate run for him looked like the next natural step.  But Ossoff got some really good news last week.

Kemp had stood up to President Trump in 2020, when Trump famously asked someone, anyone, to find him another 11,000 votes in Georgia, earning some bipartisan respect – and Trump’s ire – as he supported the GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s flat-out refusal to cheat.  Despite that, he and the President had sort of come to terms with one another, and Kemp would likely have had the President’s endorsement if he asked for it.  But Kemp decided not to run for Senate.

Kemp was, unquestionably, the GOP’s strongest candidate.  He was polling ahead of Ossoff (the only GOP candidate to do so).  He had bipartisan respect, and he has been, all things considered, a pretty good governor.  But he said no. 

Now, Ossoff is the clear favorite, and a Senate seat that might well have flipped will likely remain safely on the Democratic side (especially if one of the true crazies, like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, wins the GOP primary – that might even be enough to give the Dems a shot at the governorship).

So why did Kemp walk away from an almost sure win?  Maybe, despite the current polling, it wasn’t such a sure win.  Perhaps Kemp is looking ahead, seeing the deterioration in the Trump edifice, fearing that he would have to defend the President and all his policies, and he decided that was not only politically unpalatable, it was morally unpalatable.

If shrewd politicos in Georgia are fearful of where this President will be in a year and a half, imagine the environment in states much more purple.

One example of that is North Carolina, where GOP incumbent Senator Thom Tillis is up for re-election in 2026, and, in somewhat of an inverse situation, is regarded as one of the GOP’s weakest incumbents.  To make things worse, Democrat Roy Cooper, who just finished his second term as Governor, is being hotly pursued by national Dems to run against Tillis.  Cooper is pretty much Democrats’ dream candidate, and he’d start out on a relatively even footing, Tillis’ 12 years of incumbency notwithstanding.

Is Tillis nervous?  Well, last week he announced he would not vote to confirm a Trump nominee for U.S Attorney for the District of Columbia.  The nominee, Ed Martin, really was a particularly loathsome example of MAGA excesses in the legal arena.  But despite pressure from the White House, Tillis stuck to his guns and said he wouldn’t vote for Martin in committee.  That would have led to an 11 – 11 deadlock.  Then, rather than lose the vote, Senate leadership punted and cancelled the vote.

Somewhat amazingly, President Trump gave in.  He pulled the nomination, and in Martin’s place, nominated Judge Jeanine Pirro, a former district judge and District Attorney from New York and, more recently, a Fox News favorite and election-fraud conspiracist.  Perhaps Pirro is even more noxious than Martin, but the fascinating aspect of all this is that a Republican Senator felt empowered to defy the President, and live to tell about it.  There appear to be no negative consequences, no late-night Truth Social posts, no threats of primaries, no media leaks crying for vengeance.

If one Senator can get away with this, others surely are watching and thinking they don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid.

Also from North Carolina comes some other good news on the legal front.  In November, there was a race for a State Supreme Court seat.  The Democrat, Associate Justice Allison Riggs, won re-election by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million votes cast.  A narrow margin indeed, but multiple recounts upheld that slim victory.  But the GOP candidate, Jefferson Griffin (a judge on the State Court of Appeals, a lower court in the North Carolina judicial system), wasn’t satisfied.  He appealed to the State Elections Board, then to various state courts, seeking to disqualify various ballots from heavily Democratic areas.  First he sought to disallow over 65,000 ballots; that got narrowed down to 1,600 ballots.  The Democrat, Justice Riggs, went to Federal Court to try to stop these appeals.  Just last week, Federal District Chief Judge Richard Myers, who just happens to be a Trump appointee, issued a final definitive ruling that said no, you can’t change the rules after the election.  Further, he was actually rather emphatic and elegant in his opinion.  You simply can’t try to cherry-pick results and apply different rules to different ballots. 

One would think that this is pretty self-evident, pretty basic.  But this pattern of contesting election results after the fact (when you lose the elections) is becoming part of the GOP standard playbook.  The Judge’s ruling, in this case, definitively puts a stop to that.  The GOP candidate this week conceded the election.  Typically, the losing side might appeal such a ruling to the Circuit Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court.  But they didn’t.  Either they thought the ruling was so strong, and so patently obvious, that they’d get laughed out of the appellate courts, or they feared, on a larger scale, that appellate court rulings on this point would set a regional or national standard and hurt GOP efforts elsewhere to wreak electoral havoc.  Either way, Democrats have notched another victory in an important swing state.