‘he Is Kryptonite’: Republicans Start Breaking With Trump

In late January, when President Donald Trump endorsed his close ally Rep. Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, Tiffany said he was "especially honored” and promised to "make Wisconsin great again."

But in recent weeks, he's taken a different tone.

Tiffany responded to Trump renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" by declaring "the Great Lakes are the Great Lakes," brushing aside the edict. He broke with Trump's pro-data centers position, criticized the easing of tariffs on beef imports, and deflected questions on the president’s proposed mail-in ballot reforms that the Supreme Court blocked earlier this week. And after years of questioning whether the 2020 election was rigged against the president, including supporting an FBI probe into Wisconsin’s votes in May, he's now taken to sidestepping the issue.

“Joe Biden won,” Tiffany said in a statement to local fact-checking outlet Wisconsin Watch earlier this month.

The rhetorical shift from such a staunch Trump ally is among a series of breaks from the president that Tiffany and other battleground Republicans have made in recent weeks. They’re an implicit acknowledgment that, even in states and districts where Republicans have had success, candidates are suffering from a deteriorating national political environment for the GOP.

Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar released a TV ad on Thursday directly criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement as having “gone too far.” She warned Trump in the ad that “the same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Republicans close to Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO she would need to start distancing herself from Trump in subtle ways to win her critical Senate race. They’re worried that the president’s tariff agenda and the ongoing Iran war are undercutting her chances.

Hinson herself was caught admitting the Iran war would become a “political liability” if it extended much longer back in June. She criticized Trump’s plan to import discounted beef last month.

And two other Iowa Republicans, Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, voted to limit Trump’s use of war powers and end the war in Iran on Tuesday despite having repeatedly voted to green-light the war since March. Nunn said in a statement following the vote “Iowa has already paid a devastating price” for the Iran war, referring in part to two U.S. servicemembers from Iowa who were killed at the beginning of the conflict. Miller-Meeks said she “will not vote to keep our soldiers in an open-ended war, with Iowans paying too much at the pump.” None of them attended a campaign rally Vice President JD Vance held in western Iowa on Friday; Vance urged voters to back Hinson, who he called “an amazing public servant,” from the stage.

All five of them, along with several other Republicans in competitive races, skipped the GOP midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month.

“We’re in a bad political environment,” said Michigan GOP strategist Jason Roe, who is advising the campaign battleground of Rep. Tom Barrett, one of the Republicans who skipped the Dallas convention. “These elections are a referendum on our government. [Trump] is the head of the government.”

The pressure is only increasing with the midterms less than two months away. Trump’s approval rating is stuck under 40%. while several POLITICO polls have found that half of Americans think his deportation agenda is too aggressive and thateven Trump’s loyal MAGA base is losing patience with the Iran war, given the economic costs.

“These candidates know how to read a poll,” said a GOP strategist working for Republicans in races around the country who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Referring to Trump, they added: “They know he is kryptonite.”

Some other battleground Republicans who received Trump’s endorsement have since deleted or minimized references to the president on their campaign websites. Almost none of them are mentioning Trump in their ads — just two battleground GOP candidates have aired a TV ad mentioning the president since Aug. 1, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact — out of hundreds of new ads from Republicans in competitive Senate, House or governor races.

One was Hinson, who pledged to work with both Trump and Democrats on health care issues.

One Republican who was involved in a recent fundraiser for Hinson and was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations acknowledged growing fears that the race is too close for such a red state. They said Hinson risked losing the seat if she didn't put more space between herself and Trump on several key issues that were roiling voters in Iowa.

“He's putting Iowa in play,” one House Republican who’d spoken to Hinson said of Trump.

Hinson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the campaigns of Tiffany, Salazar, Nunn and Miller-Meeks.

When asked for comment on Tiffany's behalf, Republican Governors Association Kollin Crompton pointed to Tiffany's plane crashing in a Wisconsin lake a week ago. He sustained minor injuries.

“In the same week that Tom Tiffany survived a life threatening plane crash, Politico wants to talk about this. Tells you everything you need to know,” Crompton said in a statement.

Wisconsin Republicans privately admit that Tiffany, like others in their party, is walking a tightrope.

“Every campaign in the country right now has to balance being your own person versus how you appropriately align yourself with the president,” said a Wisconsin GOP strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly without jeopardizing their work for other campaigns. “Sometimes it’s lockstep with the president, and sometimes it’s not. And the art of this whole thing is figuring out where to break.”

In response to a request for comment, RNC spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said: “No matter the topic, we encourage candidates to run the races they need to run to best represent the voters. The president understands when candidates need to add nuance to policy stances in order to win elections and prevent Democrats from taking control."

That’s slightly different from what she told POLITICO a month ago, when asked about some Republicans who didn’t want the president on the trail with them.

"[Trump] is the biggest turnout machine for mid- to low-propensity voters and we need those voters to get to the polls,” Baldassarre said at the time. “If members are choosing to keep an arm’s length from the president, they risk alienating their base [and] they risk 15 to 20 percent of their key Republican voters not turning out because they don’t feel like they’re a good supporter of the president’s policies.”

White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement that “President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party” and encouraged voters to back Republicans in November.

Trump hasn’t always been willing to tolerate Republicans breaking with him in the past. When asked about Salazar’s ad, he said he still supported her campaign but criticized her comments. “I'm very strong on the borders, and she isn't. And she's a nice person. I got her elected. Without me, she wouldn't have gotten elected… So she got a little bit soft on the border. I understand that. But I just don't happen to be there,” he said Friday afternoon. He also reiterated his endorsement of Hinson in a Friday social media post.

Tiffany’s splits from the president, most recently on data centers and beef imports, are particularly striking given his past: He had signed on to the lawsuit backed by Trump allies requesting the Supreme Court throw out the presidential election. He proposed a bill in 2025 that would allow state and local authorities to veto refugee resettlement in their communities, and co-sponsored a resolution expressing support for Trump deporting migrants to a Salvadoran megaprison earlier this year.

Some Wisconsin Republicans worry that sharp pivots away from the president could be read as cynical and alienate Tiffany from Trump’s base.

“You’ve got to be careful doing the Etch A Sketch politics,” said Wisconsin GOP strategist Ben Voelkel, who is not involved in the race. “You’re not gonna convince Democrats to not call you a Trump lackey or whatever other pejorative they want to use.”

For Salazar, her striking break from Trump on a splashy issue — the deportation agenda — underscored just how much backlash there has been in her Miami-area district. She has long pushed for immigration reform, but the ad escalated her clash with the president.

“I am doing what I think is correct,” Salazar said in her first interview since the ad ran, on the “The Manny Munoz Show” on Friday. “Right now, we're seeing that in South Florida things are getting more out of hand when it comes to ICE.”

Salazar dodged repeated questions from Munoz about whether she’d given the White House a head’s up about the ad, saying only that she and Trump had a “very good relationship” and that the TV spot was no different than what she has been telling the White House in private. “I'm not criticizing him. I'm forewarning him” about turning away Hispanic voters, she said.

A GOP volunteer who’s been canvassing in her district in Miami-Dade County said voters raised deportations and arrests repeatedly. The person, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called anger over mass deportations a “big problem” and added that “people are mad as hell at us.”

The person said Salazar’s ad showed that when it comes to Hispanics abandoning the GOP, she understood she’s the “canary in the coal mine.”

Samuel Benson contributed to this report.