Saw that coming

| 9:00 pm EDT June 11, 2020
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It’s too little too late, and it deserves no praise or reward, but it’s finally beginning to happen: the Republicans in the House and Senate are finally starting to distance themselves from Donald Trump. In fact Forbes has documented an entire list of recent ways in which the GOP is now incrementally distancing itself from Trump. So what happened? We finally hit the threshold that Palmer Report has been telling you about for three and a half years.

There was never any timeframe for when the GOP would begin to distance itself from Donald Trump. It was never going to be about his behavior. It was never going to be a matter of right vs wrong, or growing a spine. Those aren’t real concepts in Republican land. Instead, it was always going to come down to one thing: math.

If Trump’s numbers ever got so low that Republicans in the House and Senate started to think they would be selfishly better off in their own careers by throwing him under the bus, they were always going to do it without thinking twice. The only question all this time was whether Trump’s numbers were ever going to get that ugly. But with his approval rating falling down into the thirties, and precious little time to turn things around before the election, the GOP players are increasingly starting to bet on Trump losing.

Again, we award them no points for this. Every single Republican in the House and Senate (except Mitt Romney) voted to acquit Donald Trump when they knew he was guilty and could have removed him. But right now this isn’t about them. This is about Trump – and their selfish decision to start distancing themselves from him is a good barometer of where they think things are headed.