When the Grift Gets Too Heavy for the Furniture

Trump wanted obedience, silence, and the last laugh, but even the loyalists are starting to hear the ceiling crack.

I’d like to start today’s piece with a tiny personal note from the plague ward and birthday bureau: yesterday was my birthday, so I’m one year older and Mom can officially say her baby is 28, our appraisal is next week, Ezra is now crawling all over the place like a tiny determined floor inspector, and it looks like June for his MRI. I am also sorry for the lack of pieces lately. We have had a lot of work to do, and, because the universe enjoys comedy in the style of a wet sock puppet, all my kids caught pink eye.

So yes, if you have been wondering where I have been, the answer is somewhere between real estate paperwork, medical scheduling, babyproofing, and administering eye drops to children who behave as if I am trying to baptize them in lava.

Anyway, the Republic is doing great.

There is a particular point in every corruption story where the chandelier gets too heavy for the ceiling. For a while, everyone admires the glitter, the gold leaf, and the theatrical sparkle of it all. The powerful man stands underneath it, explaining that actually this chandelier is very normal, everyone has chandeliers, the chandelier is beautiful, the chandelier is necessary for national security, and anyone who notices the cracks spreading across the plaster is probably a traitor.

Then one day there is a sound from above. That sound, this week, came from Senate Republicans. The Associated Press has a piece out that is worth sitting with, because it isn’t just about one bill or one tantrum or one more example of the Trump administration trying to run the federal government like a personal grievance concierge. It’s about something broader and more interesting: Trump can still dominate Republican primaries, but the machinery of domination is beginning to jam when it has to become actual governing.

The immediate fight is over a roughly $70 billion immigration and deportation funding package that Senate Republicans didn’t move before leaving town. The Trump administration wanted movement, and Republicans generally love nothing more than funding deportation theater with the solemnity of a church bake sale. But this time, the package came with some extra Trumpian garnish.

One item was a $1.776 billion so called anti weaponization fund, tied to the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax records. The administration’s story is that the fund would compensate people who were supposedly targeted by government “weaponization” or “lawfare.” The concern, among people still in possession of a working nose, is that it smells like a taxpayer funded payout vehicle for Trump’s political allies, including potentially people connected to January 6.

Another item involved money for Trump’s White House ballroom and security project, because apparently the lesson of American decline is that the executive mansion has insufficient Versailles energy. This was all a little much, even for some Republicans.

Thom Tillis, who has announced he will not seek reelection, didn’t exactly reach for the velvet gloves. He reportedly called the fund “stupid on stilts” and a “payout for punks,” which is the rare Senate quote that sounds like it wandered in from a county fair dunk tank and decided to become constitutional commentary. Mitch McConnell, never exactly a flower child of the resistance, called it a slush fund for people who assaulted police.

And that is the thing about power when it gets too greedy. It stops asking its allies to do hard things and starts asking them to do humiliating ones.

Defend the indictments, the pardons, and the tariffs. Defend the war, the ballroom, and the payout fund. Defend the idea that people who smashed their way through the Capitol were actually customers in need of reimbursement and defend every crack in the ceiling until the whole chandelier comes down and everyone pretends to be shocked there was gravity in the building.

The Cassidy piece of this matters too. Bill Cassidy lost his Louisiana Republican primary after Trump backed a challenger, punishment for Cassidy’s long ago sin of voting to convict Trump after January 6. But losing has a funny way of clarifying the mind. Once Trump has already taken your future in the party and fed it to the base, there isn’t much left to bargain with.

Cassidy came back to Washington freer than before, more willing to criticize Trump and more willing to side with Democrats on questions like war powers. That doesn’t make him a hero in a cape, and it doesn’t erase years of Republican enabling, but it does show something important about the limits of fear. Fear works beautifully until the punishment has already arrived.

Tillis is a slightly different version of the same problem for Trump. He was not defeated first, he chose the exit ramp. After opposing Trump’s domestic spending package over Medicaid and health care cuts that would hurt North Carolina, and after Trump threatened him with a primary challenge, Tillis announced he would not run again. That means he too has entered the dangerous political category known as “Republican senator with less to lose.”

This is where Trump’s dominance starts to look less like strength and more like a bad landlord leaning on every load bearing wall in the building.

He can still punish dissenters. He can still decide primaries. He can still make Republican politicians sweat through their suits with one social media post. But each act of punishment creates more people who are either already defeated, already retiring, or already so cornered that obedience no longer buys them anything.

The Iran war powers fight belongs in the same roundup. House Republican leaders reportedly pulled a vote on a war powers resolution because enough Republicans were prepared to support it that it might have embarrassed Trump. That isn’t exactly a profile in courage, but it’s a signal. When your own party has to cancel votes to avoid revealing how many of its members are willing to restrain you, the problem isn’t just Democratic opposition. The problem is that the loyalty machine is starting to cough.

History is full of these moments, though they rarely announce themselves in the dramatic language we give them later. Power asks for one more thing, and then one more, and then one more after that. At first, people comply because it’s easier, safer, more profitable, or more convenient than saying no. Then the ask becomes too grotesque, too public, too legally dangerous, or too personally degrading.

During Watergate, Richard Nixon still had loyalists until he didn’t. What changed was not that every Republican suddenly discovered an untouched conscience in the hall closet. What changed was that the evidence, the public pressure, and the political cost made continued loyalty untenable. When Barry Goldwater and other Republican leaders went to the White House in 1974, they were not staging a revolution. They were telling Nixon the roof could no longer hold.

Franklin Roosevelt’s court packing plan is another example, though from a very different president and a very different political moment. FDR had enormous public power after reelection, but when he tried to bend the Supreme Court to his will by expanding it, members of his own party resisted. They didn’t do it because they were allergic to power. They did it because even allies sometimes understand that if one person gets to rewrite the rules whenever the rules annoy him, the victory becomes a future weapon pointed at everyone.

Trump’s Republican Party has spent years building him a throne out of cowardice, opportunism, resentment, and television lighting. But thrones are funny objects. They look immovable until someone has to carry them.

Right now, Trump is still the dominant force in the GOP. Nobody should confuse these cracks with a collapse. Most Republicans will still bend. Most will still explain. Most will still discover, with touching regularity, that whatever Trump just did is actually very serious policy if you tilt your head and ignore the smoke.

But this week showed something real. Not enough, not noble enough, not remotely soon enough, but real.

The metaphor isn’t civil war inside the GOP. That’s too grand and too clean. This is more like termites in a gaudy casino, the lights are still flashing, the carpets are still ugly, and the owner is still yelling that business has never been better. But somewhere underneath the floor, the structure is beginning to make choices of its own.

And if there is one lesson history keeps offering to people who never seem interested in learning it, it’s this: corruption doesn’t usually stop because the corrupt suddenly become ashamed. It stops, or at least stumbles, when the people required to carry it decide the load is too heavy, the smell is too strong, and the chandelier is now directly above their own heads.

But before I bid you adieu, there was one more thing this week that felt like part of the same system, even though it came not from the Senate floor but from beneath the soft lights of late night. Stephen Colbert took his final bow on The Late Show, and I have to say, having that happen on my birthday was frankly rude. I didn’t request a side of cultural grief with my cake, Stephen. There are forms for that.

But there he was, graceful to the end, standing inside a moment that could have been bitter and making it generous instead. That has always been part of his gift. Colbert could be razor sharp without losing his decency, furious without becoming joyless, and funny in a way that reminded people they were not crazy for noticing the rot. He brought millions of people laughter throughout the years.

And he didn’t look away. Whatever CBS says in its corporate language, whatever numbers were run or rooms were entered or hands were shaken, Colbert spent years refusing the central bargain of the era, which is that powerful people get to become grotesque in public while everyone else pretends not to see it. He saw it, he named it, and he made it ridiculous, which is one of the oldest and most useful forms of democratic hygiene.

Authoritarians can survive criticism, but they hate being laughed at because laughter punctures the costume. It turns the strongman back into a needy man at a podium, the marble monument back into a stage prop, and the king back into someone who can’t quite get the bronzer evenly blended near the collar. The jester has always been dangerous for exactly that reason. He doesn’t command an army, but he can make the throne look like no more than furniture.

So maybe Stephen’s exit belongs here too, in this strange week of cracks and canceled votes and Republicans discovering, perhaps temporarily and under duress, that there is still a Constitution somewhere under the couch cushions. Not because a late night show is the same thing as a Senate rebellion, but because both are about what happens when power demands not only obedience, but silence. Trump wants the ballroom, the slush fund, the war powers, the applause, the fear, and the last laugh too.

Colbert’s great service was that he kept laughing before Trump could claim it, and he helped millions of people do the same. That is certainly not nothing. In fact, in a country this exhausted, it might be a kind of public work.