GOP Lawmakers Are Retiring in Droves. Trump Is Partly to Blame.

A Washington Post analysis looks details how the President has shaped his party.

President Donald Trump arrives at Lima Allen Airport to participate in a tour of Pratt Industries with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Sunday.Evan Vucci/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Since Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Republican lawmakers have left the House of Representatives in droves. A Washington Post analysis found that 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who have been in office since January 2017 have departed or retired.

Forty-one have announced they wouldn’t seek reelection or left national politics altogether since Trump took office, more than the two dozen Democrats who left during Obama’s first term in office. But why? “The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP—and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him,” the Post reported.

Though many have publicly cited family as the reason, the Post reported that privately, there’s some frustration about the party’s future direction under Trump. “I think a lot of members are pretty nervous that Trump doesn’t win reelection. And then we’re in the minority and we have a Democrat in the White House,” a Republican leadership aide told the Post. “We’re in the wilderness right now, but if you lose the White House, then that is the extreme wilderness.”

Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell, who announced his retirement in July following Trump’s tweets telling Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, put it this way: 

“Did any member of this conference expect that their job would start out every morning trying to go through the list of what’s happening in tweets of the day? We’re not moving forward right now. We are simply thrashing around.”

Read the rest of the report here

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate