Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Sunday slammed right-wing influencer Laura Loomer's remarks posted on social media, condemning them as President Trump's "new MAGA and Republican Party." Greene reacted to an inflammatory post…
Page A10From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
GOP trails in 8 battleground Senate races, schedules a 'Trump-a-palooza' convention as members condemn its own rhetoric.
As it ran on the front
Here's the sequence, in order, because order is the whole story. Two months before the election, the polling aggregate has Republicans trailing in eight battleground Senate races. Not close in some, not battleground in the usual sense, eight of them. That's not a bad week, that's a structural problem, the kind you don't fix with a rally.
So what do they do. They schedule a convention. Not a strategy session, not a candidate recruitment drive, a convention, in Texas, described by their own people as very hasty, branded Trump-a-palooza, because when the ship's taking on water the move is apparently to throw a party on the deck and call it messaging.…
…(cont) And while that's being scheduled, one of their own — not a Democrat, not a pundit, one of theirs — stands up and condemns another one of theirs for rhetoric, and says the quiet part with her own mouth: this is the new party now, this is what it's become. That's not opposition research. That's a member of the party looking at another member of the party and saying, out loud, on the record, that something's wrong with what they've turned into.
Follow the money and the message separately and they tell you two different things, but follow them together and you get the real picture: the base is being kept loud and entertained while the numbers underneath quietly go bad. A hasty convention isn't a comeback plan, it's a distraction with a hashtag, and distractions cost money too — somebody's paying for the staging, the travel, the signage, while the actual problem, the eight races, the trailing numbers, sits there unaddressed because you can't put that on a banner.
The condemnation from inside the party isn't reassuring either. When your own colleague has to publicly say 'this is what we've become,' that's not a course correction, that's a eulogy delivered while the patient's still walking around. Nobody's fixing the polling by getting louder. They're just making sure nobody notices how bad it is until it's already happened, and by then the only people paying attention will be counting the empty seats.
“Trailing in eight races two months out, and their answer is a party in Texas with the boss's name on the banner. When your own people start calling it the new MAGA party out loud, that's not a talking point slipping, that's the roof coming off.”
“The convention is a standard show of party unity ahead of the midterms, timed to energize the base, not a reaction to polling — although the polling did come out first, and the convention got scheduled right after, so the timing is what it is, but unity, that's the message.”
The receipts
"I think the Republicans are in much better shape than what a lot of these media polls are showing, and look, we still got a long way to go between now and Election Day," pollster Jim McLaughlin said.
The Republican National Committee’s (RNC) first-of-its-kind midterm convention has been cloaked in mystery until a few weeks ago. Details are finally emerging about what’s expected to be a two-day pep rally to bolster hype and encourage…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.