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The Republican Crack-Up Has Begun

Even conservatives are fleeing the GOP as more and more Americans turn against Trump’s authoritarian project.

President Donald Trump departs after making an announcement in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 12, 2026.

Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego’s eastern outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and joining the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official in the region’s local government. “I’ve been a Republican for 50 years,” he said, in the statement explaining his action. “I just can’t stand what the Republican Party has become. I’m formally renouncing the Republican Party.”

An attorney friend of mine in San Diego, who knows local politics inside out, texted me, “When Trump has lost this guy, he’s in real trouble!”

President Donald Trump’s authoritarian project is finally running into real headwinds. That doesn’t mean that the danger is passing—far from it, as Trump’s escalating attacks on the voting process in the runup to the mid-term elections illustrate and as his venomous, racist social media posts testify to. But it does mean that Trump is losing control of the storyline. Even among his own base, there is a growing realization that there is something rotten at the core of his administration.

Having failed to break the will of Minnesotans despite two months of federal occupation, humiliation rituals, and brutal violence, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday morning that it was ending the Minneapolis surge. It wasn’t because the surge had failed, Tom Homan was quick to claim; it was because Minnesota authorities had begun to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Customs and Border Protection.

Don’t believe Homan’s explanation. The surge is ending because tens of thousands of Minnesotans stood strong and proud. They protested in the face of sometimes lethal violence meted out by ICE agents. They protected their neighbors. They refused to be cowed. And, as the ICE atrocities multiplied, the US public increasingly came to side with Minnesota in its struggle against this federally ordered occupation. By the end of January, more Americans told pollsters they wanted to abolish ICE than told them they wanted to keep the agency intact.

When this horrific chapter is written into US history books, Minnesota will be understood as the place where ordinary Americans defeated Stephen Miller’s might-is-right, white........

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