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Why so many congressional Republicans are retiring

More than a decade after President Trump came down the escalator the options for congressional Republicans are painfully clear.  

Option One: They can quit. Option Two: They can keep silent on alarming polls showing low public approval for Trump and his Republican Party as the midterms approach. Option Three: Accept that there is a price to be paid for Trump-worship.

Yes, blindly jumping on the Trump bandwagon delivered control of the White House, Senate and House. But now the cost of their idolatry is piling up for Republicans remaining in Washington as Trump begins his final days.  

Trump will not face voters again. But congressional Republicans seeking reelection are already paying the price for everything he does, including racist social media videos demeaning the Obamas and looking the other away from Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of teen girls.

A lot of Republicans are yelling “Door Number One!”

Fifty-one House members and 12 senators have opted not to run for reelection — on track for the most departures from Congress this century, according to an NBC News analysis. Most of the House members leaving are Republican, 30, and most of the departing senators, too, six.

Republicans are now fleeing Congress at a similar rate as they did in advance of the 2018 midterms, when Democrats captured the House majority by winning 41 seats.

Polling released last week suggests Republican voters — and their politicians on Capitol Hill — are increasingly exhausted by President Trump’s lies, corruption and bullying.

“If Donald Trump says, ‘jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our head,” Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) famously said after Trump won the 2024 election.

Nehls is one of those not seeking reelection. 

When former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) announced she was quitting Congress last year, she predicted that Republicans remaining in a Congress with a majority of Democrats would “be expected to defend the president against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me” — a situation she called “absurd and completely unserious.”

Greene’s forecast of bad weather for House Republicans who stay around for Trump’s remaining time in office now looks spot on. Last week, six House Republicans voted against Trump on tariffs. He immediately took to social media to attack and threaten them.

It had no impact because those six Republicans standing up to Trump have already made it clear they are retiring or they are in up-for-grabs congressional districts where Democrats are likely to win if Trump follows through on his threat to attack them.

Politico Playbook summed up the situation last week as “watching Trump slowly lose his iron grip over the party…the first half of last year looks increasingly like a high watermark, with Trump’s control of his party now only headed in one direction.”

Also, prompting the rush for the exits is the fact that Trump’s meager campaigning to boost congressional candidates has not moved the needle.

So, why should Republicans in Congress want to spend the next two years of their lives manning the barricades, taking arrows aimed at Trump, defending the indefensible?

And they will be against the ropes as Democrats punch away at the treachery of the Trump administration — everything from the gob-smacking cryptocurrency deals with foreign countries to benefit his family to the cover-up of the Epstein sex-trafficking conspiracy.

If Trump grants Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s brazen public request for clemency in exchange for exonerating him, do these Republican members of Congress really want to be the ones defending it in town halls back home?

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) now describes the Trump administration’s Cabinet secretaries and policy makers as “the Epstein class, ruling our country.” Ossoff pointed to the billionaires in the Cabinet and Trump’s own extreme wealth in describing the whole bunch as a fraud on populist right-wing voters. “They are the elites they pretend to hate,” Ossoff said of the Trump team.

Congressional Republicans looking at a reelection fight are staring at Fox polls showing 61 percent disapproval for Trump’s handling of the economy. Then there is the 62 percent disapproval of his handling of health care costs. And an even higher 64 percent disapproval of the Republican administration’s performance on inflation and tariffs. 

Fox ominously reports that voters most motivated to vote in the upcoming elections prefer Democrats. In fact, their 52 percent support “is the highest recorded for either party. In 2017, the last time it was even close (50 percent), House Republicans lost their majority later in that cycle.

As an idealist, I believe most new members of Congress arrive intending to get laws passed that will make life better in their districts.

But the current exodus from Capitol Hill reflects a hard truth: this polarized Congress has done little. Its major accomplishment will likely be a regressive tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy and corporations while exploding the federal debt.

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office forecast the debt would reach $64 trillion over the next decade.

Other than that, this Republican Congress has been marked by manufactured scandals, the longest government shutdown in history, and coverup of the Epstein sex ring.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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