When Miami Representative Maria Elvira Salazar stood in front of the White House and recorded her first campaign ad, she told President Donald Trump he had gone “too far on immigration enforcement” and warned that Hispanics who had elected him to office had been betrayed. The loyal Republican’s straight-to-camera critique of Trump immediately became national news.

But Salazar wasn’t sending a message to the president. He knew where she stood. She was signaling to fellow Republicans that they had permission to publicly distance themselves from their party leader to save themselves from electoral collapse.

It worked. By Tuesday, five other prominent Republicans in tight statewide races rushed to show voters where they disagreed with the unpopular president. Each of the candidates had defended Trump and his policies for months but, as their races tightened and poll after poll showed the president’s approval ratings underwater in their states, they started to worry: Was Trump an anchor that could sink them all?

Republicans who didn’t have the courage to speak up as Trump corrupted the executive branch and usurped congressional authority have suddenly grown backbones. Michigan US Senate nominee Mike Rogers, who has vigorously defended the Iran war, cut a campaign ad saying for the first time that “The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” because fuel and grocery prices are too high. Iowa Representative Ashley Hinson, the Republican candidate for US Senate who voted seven times against House resolutions to end the war, also called for the conflict to end because Iowans “shouldn’t have to foot the bill.” U.S. Representative Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor in Wisconsin, and U.S. Senator Jon Husted, who is seeking re-election in Ohio, also joined the “end the Iran war” brigade on Tuesday.

Self-preservation is a powerful elixir.

Even one senator who wasn’t up for re-election found some courage. Utah Senator John Curtis called for the Senate Judiciary Committee to probe the Trump family’s dealings with foreign governments, including the wedding party for Donald Trump Jr. financed by a Russian oligarch. He’s the only Republican to finally acknowledge that kleptocracy is a thing.

All of this is happening because of the president’s declining approval ratings, which themselves are the product of his misguided war with Iran and his failure to fulfill his many promises, especially on the economy.

Some of Trump’s most sycophantic followers in red states are now doing precisely what an egotist like Trump loathes: removing pictures and fawning references from public spaces. Ty Masterson, a Republican state senator running for governor of Kansas, started the trend when he removed from his website a picture of himself with Trump in the Oval Office. Byron Donalds, the Republican candidate for Florida governor, this week removed at least eight mentions of the president from his campaign website.

For years, Republican allegiance has meant moral cowardice in the face of Trump’s exploits. Donalds spent the last year name-dropping the president at every opportunity. Just two weeks ago, he addressed Trump’s convention in Dallas gushing, “Thank God for President Trump.”

The hypocrisy is rich. Trump spent much of the primary season using his campaign firepower and his social media trolls to sideline Republican lawmakers who criticized him. Remember U.S. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie? Remember Senators John Cornyn, Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy?

Now Trump’s tune has changed. He is not demonizing Salazar for her complaint about his handling of immigration enforcement. Instead, Trump said only that he was still supporting her. He tepidly told reporters: “I disagree with her.”

The disagreement has been evident for the last year. Salazar has been appalled by Trump’s mass deportation campaign that stripped legal status from thousands of Cuban, Venezuelan and Haitian migrants in Miami. She sponsored the Dignity Act, a bipartisan bill to provide a legal status for some undocumented immigrants and modernize the legal immigration system. The White House never gave it the time of day. She also never publicly complained.

Now Salazar is in trouble in a district Trump carried with 57% of the vote. Recent polls show her in a statistical tie with Democrat Eliott Rodriguez.

With less than six weeks left until Election Day and 156,000 votes already cast, Trump has little choice but to accept the cold shoulder from his fellow Republicans. He also can’t blame faulty polls for their caution. Hinson, Rogers, Tiffany, Masterson and Donalds hired Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio.Voters should see through this performative dance. It’s reminiscent of when the Trump campaign realized that Americans were souring on Project 2025 and the president’s campaign team suggested he had nothing to do with it. But that was a lie. Once Trump got elected, he adopted the unpopular policies of the Heritage Foundation’s manifesto without hesitation.

Voters want governors and a Congress who can stand up to corruption and incompetence 52 weeks a year, not only in the run-up to an election. Republicans who didn’t have the courage to call Trump out until now can’t be trusted to do it after November.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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