Less than a year after Kari Lake lost a winnable gubernatorial race in Arizona, she was back on her horse. 

At the kickoff event for her 2024 Senate campaign last October, she rolled the tape on a video recorded by former President Donald Trump, who explained that he would need “strong fighters like Kari in the Senate” once he was “back in the White House.”

“We have to have a big strong majority to help me push our America First agenda through and to push it through really fast,” he continued. “That starts right here tonight by helping Kari Lake win in Arizona.” 

“I am proud to give her my complete and total endorsement for the United States Senate. She is very special,” Trump concluded.

His support was nothing if not well earned. Lake constructed her entire 2022 campaign for governor around appealing to Trump. She praised him in terms so effusive they’d make a proud mother blush. She went out of her way to insult Trump’s late intracoalitional enemy John McCain. She pushed his stolen-election conspiracy theories so hard that even Trump himself reportedly mocked her over her single-minded zeal. And ahead of a rally at which Trump was slated to appear, Lake staged a photo op of her vacuuming the red carpet on which the former president was set to appear. 

She also lost that election to an uninspiring Democrat who ran a basement campaign based on not being Kari Lake.

Lake wasn’t the only one to win her primary on the back of Trump’s endorsement before falling short in November 2022. Doug Mastriano was blown out of the water in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial contest after being endorsed by Trump. Senate candidates Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, Don Bolduc, and Herschel Walker were all similarly selected for their sycophancy and then rejected by general election voters for it.

What was supposed to be a red wave turned out to be a huge disappointment. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) retained the title of Senate majority leader. And Republicans took the House by such a narrow margin that it crippled their ability to govern. 

In the immediate aftermath of the midterm elections, Republicans were bitter. The GOP had been running against an unpopular Democratic trifecta with inflation, the Biden administration’s neglect of the border, and the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan looming large. How could this have happened?

At the time it was obvious: Trump had been the chief architect of their underperformance. 

“The voters have spoken, and they have said that they want a different leader. And a true leader understands when they have become a liability,” declared Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, a Republican.

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) lamented the party’s lack of “good quality candidates,” musing that “you can’t have a party that’s built around one person’s personality.”

Even longtime Trump loyalists, such as CNN’s David Urban, didn’t hesitate to state the self-evident. “Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the side of a cliff,” Urban admitted. 

It wasn’t just the chattering class that seemed fed up. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), fresh off a dominant reelection victory, gained on and even supplanted Trump in some state and national polls. But Trump’s political pardon came in the form of his legal indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. 

Voters were rightly outraged by the use of “creative” legal means to achieve Democrats’ ends and almost uniformly rallied around Trump. The rest is history.

***

After enjoying a long stint in the catbird seat while President Joe Biden floundered over the last year or so, Trump once again finds himself in a tough race.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s replacement of Biden atop the Democratic ticket threatens Trump’s hold on not only the Rust Belt states that Trump’s campaign had believed the election would come down to but also on the Sun Belt states that it believed it had in hand.

Before Biden stepped aside, Trump had a commanding 5.8-point edge in the RealClearPolitics polling average in Arizona. Now, it’s 0.2 points. In North Carolina, his lead has been cut down from 5.4 points to 0.9 points. And in Georgia, his 3.8-point advantage has been trimmed down to 1 point. According to FiveThirtyEight, another popular polling aggregator, he’s already forfeited his leads in the first two states and has come within half a point of doing the same in Georgia. 

There is good reason to think things could get worse — not just because Trump has been running an increasingly undisciplined campaign but because the consequences of his reimagining of the GOP may finally catch up with him.

In 2022, Lake lost in a squeaker. This year, she’s set herself up for a thrashing. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) has a nearly 7-point advantage in the RealClearPolitics average. In each of the last three surveys included in that average, Gallego has led by 8 or 9 points.

Lake’s position could very well threaten Trump’s in the Grand Canyon State. While the idea of coattails, or the top of a party’s ticket either raising the ceiling or lowering the floor for downballot candidates, should be a familiar one, it’s possible that this phenomenon might work in the reverse this fall. 

In a vacuum, such an eventuality might seem unlikely. When you look at the particulars of this year’s cycle, it seems markedly less so. Lake has an extremely high name ID thanks to her failed statewide campaign two years ago. Moreover, she is inextricably tied to Trump and is polarizing, at best, and loathed, at worst, for many of the same reasons Trump is — most notably her election denialism.

All indications are that when Arizonans go to the polls, some will vote for Trump while rejecting Lake. But given their close, well-documented relationship and Harris’s replenished war chest, it’s reasonable to wonder just how many will pursue that course. If Harris can turn even a quarter of prospective Trump-Gallego voters into Harris-Gallego voters, that could be the difference between winning and losing in a state decided by 0.3 points in 2020.

Trump faces a similar headache in North Carolina, where Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson is just as likely as Lake to be an anchor tied around the former president’s ankles.

Robinson, the lieutenant governor, is a dumpster fire of a candidate. Like Lake, he’s made a mockery of himself by indulging Trump’s voter fraud victim fantasy. But the rest of his baggage almost renders that particular dishonor obsolete.

At a time when Democrats are grappling with the political vulnerability of unchecked antisemitism within their party, Robinson has emerged on the national scene to throw them a lifeline. Addressing the release of the acclaimed Black Panther superhero movie on Facebook in 2018, Robinson complained that it had been “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist” to “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze [a Yiddish slur for black people] pockets.” In another instance, he expressed his agreement with an antisemitic conspiracy that the Rothschild family was fulfilling the villainous role of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, one of the Bible’s eschatological prophecies.

And that’s to say nothing of his Holocaust denial, condemnation of the “shameless attention hogs” (see also: women) who breastfeed their infants in public, mockery of Paul Pelosi after his brutal assault, and disparagement of Michelle Obama as a man and her husband as a “top-ranking demon.” 

Trump endorsed Robinson at a rally in March, during which he called him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” “better than Martin Luther King,” and even “Martin Luther King times two.” 

RealClearPolitics pegs Robinson’s deficit to his Democratic opponent at 8.7 points.

***

Trump is a unique political talent. He made what should have been a competitive GOP presidential primary uncompetitive in 2016. He beat Hillary Clinton by breaking the “blue wall” in a way that arguably no other Republican candidate could have. He’s made inroads with traditionally Democratic voting blocs such as black and Hispanic men. And he’s staged an improbable political comeback that has him on the cusp of the presidency again.

His strength lies mostly in his singular, indomitable personality and force of will. His greatest weakness is his lack of self-control. Unfortunately for his party, the crop of charmless imitators who have followed him come with his characteristic recklessness and few, if any, of his virtues.

For a long time, Trump has evaded responsibility for the unserious party he’s constructed in his own image. He’s suffered blows to his pride, such as when Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) easily dispatched a Trump-backed challenger in 2022, but he’s never personally paid a political price for the havoc he’s wrought.

With Trump suddenly up against a halfway competent opponent in this year’s presidential race, that might be about to change.  

In Arizona and North Carolina, the Republican presidential nominee has sullied the party brand by propping up not just replacement-level, or even bad, candidates but dreadful ones who undeniably owe their whip hand in Republican politics to him. 

In Georgia, Trump cost the GOP two Senate seats with his post-2020 election meltdown before siccing Walker on them in 2022. He lost that race in the same year that Kemp won reelection by 7.5 points. There, at least, Trump recently saw reason and bent the knee before Kemp, thanking and referring to him as one of his “friends” just a few weeks after he called the popular, purple-state governor himself “the most disloyal guy I think I’ve ever seen.”

The race remains a toss-up, and there’s no reason to think that Trump could not pull it out — especially if he tightens up his own lips (and fingers). Still, the rotten fruit of his insistence on boosting irredeemable candidates is one of many clouds threatening to rain on what he thought just a few weeks ago would be a parade back to Washington. 

Welcome to the club, Mr. President. 

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and the Robert Novak fellow at the Fund for American Studies