EXCLUSIVE — Former Florida state Rep. Mike Beltran removed prominent mentions of President Donald Trump from his campaign website after winning the GOP primary for Florida’s 14th Congressional District. Ahead of Beltran’s crowded primary…
Page A8From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
Republican candidate scrubs Trump from his website; Trump doesn't stop others from challenging his own VP
As it ran on the front
Watch the small stuff, because the small stuff is where people tell you the truth before the pollsters catch up to it. A House candidate in Florida spent some time this week scrubbing the major pro-Trump material off his own campaign website. Not adding to it. Removing it. That's a data point, and data points don't lie the way surrogates do.
Now put that next to the other data point, the one about the President himself not doing a single thing to dissuade Republicans from lining up primary challenges against his own Vice President, for 2028, three years out, while he's still sitting in the chair. You don't let people challenge your own number two unless either you don't care who follows you, or you've already done the math on who's replacing who, and it isn't a math problem you're trying to solve in anybody's favor but your own.…
…(cont) Here's the read from the end of the bar: nobody at the top of this party is building anything that lasts past the next election cycle, and everybody underneath them knows it. The candidate in Florida isn't stupid — he looked at his own district, looked at the calendar, and decided the name on the sign was worth less than it was six months ago. That's not disloyalty, that's arithmetic, the same arithmetic the party's own people at the top are doing when they let one of their most powerful officials get challenged in public without lifting a finger to stop it.
This is what it looks like when a coalition starts pricing in its own expiration date. Nobody announces it. Nobody holds a press conference to say the brand is depreciating. It shows up in small acts — a deleted paragraph on a campaign site, a non-denial about a primary fight nobody had to have — and by the time it's obvious to everybody, the people who saw it early have already repositioned. The rest of the party is still out there running on a name that its own candidates are starting to quietly take down. That's not a prediction. That's the website, right now, today, missing a section it used to have.
“Everybody in this party is quietly measuring the exits at the same time — one guy's scrubbing his own campaign website, and the top of the ticket is letting his own Vice President get primary challengers lined up. When the family stops defending you in public, that's not politics, that's an actuarial table.”
“Look, campaign websites get updated for all sorts of reasons, staffing changes, messaging refresh, it's not a repudiation — and the President not weighing in on 2028 primary chatter, that's just him respecting the process, staying above it, being presidential, which, yes, is a change of pace, did I say that.”
The receipts
President Donald Trump is letting Republican candidates jockey for 2028 presidential primary position, as Monday marked the second time in as many weeks he declined to clear the 2028 primary field for Vice President JD Vance or Secretary…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.