If you want to understand the current state of the Republican Party, do not look at their policy papers. Do not listen to their speeches about fiscal discipline or the sanctity of the border. Instead, imagine a community theater production of Julius Caesar directed by a substitute teacher who has lost control of the classroom, where Brutus is livestreaming the assassination on TikTok and Caesar is frantically texting the principal to ask if he’s still in charge.
This week, the curtain rose on the latest act of this tragicomedy, and the star was none other than Elise Stefanik. For years, Stefanik has been the disciplined understudy, the loyal soldier who pivoted from moderate Harvard tech-conservative to MAGA firebrand with the seamless cynicism of a corporate rebrand. She is usually the one keeping the script tight. But on Tuesday, she decided to burn down the set.
The scene was something out of a absurdist satire, except it was legally binding. Stefanik, the Chair of the House Republican Conference, publicly nuked her own Speaker, Mike Johnson. She didn’t just criticize him; she gutted him. She called him a “political novice.” She insisted he “wouldn’t have the votes to be Speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow.” She accused him of lying to her face and mishandling a critical piece of national security legislation because he was “getting rolled” by Democrats.
It was the kind of public undressing that usually precedes a coup, or at least a very tense resignation press conference. It was the senior Republican woman—a demographic the party has historically treated as set decoration—storming center stage, grabbing the microphone, and announcing that the leading man doesn’t know his lines, can’t find his mark, and is probably stealing from the prop budget.
And then, twenty-four hours later, it was over.
The resolution was as jarring as the conflict. Stefanik and Johnson “smoothed things over” after a phone call that almost certainly involved a terrifying amount of yelling from Mar-a-Lago. Her pet provision—a rule requiring the FBI to notify Congress if they open a counterintelligence investigation into a candidate (a “secret letter” rule, if you will)—was magically restored to the defense bill. Stefanik emerged from the wings, dusted off her blazer, and puffed out some boilerplate nonsense about the GOP “delivering for the American people.”
Delivering what? Whiplash?
This pivot—from “he is a liar and a failure” to “we are a unified team delivering wins”—is the perfect encapsulation of the modern GOP. It wasn’t a reconciliation. It was a hostage video. It was the forced smile of a family posing for a Christmas card five minutes after a screaming match about who wrecked the car. The message was loud and clear: You can scream, you can threaten, you can humiliate the Speaker of the House in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and you will get exactly what you want—but only if you agree to pretend it never happened immediately afterward.
This isn’t governance. It’s a protection racket run by the people supposed to be writing the laws.
The Cracked Edifice of Unity
Zoom out, and the Stefanik-Johnson feud looks less like a personal spat and more like a structural failure. It is evidence that the cracks in the party are turning into canyons. We are watching a once-solid majority held together not by ideology or loyalty, but by gossip, threats, and a complex web of quid-pro-quo that would make a Chicago alderman blush.
Republicans once rallied behind bombast and spectacle. They loved the chaos agents. But now, the chaos has become the baseline, and it is expensive. The party that bills itself as the disciplined, “adults in the room” alternative to the “radical left” is currently bogged down in melodrama over the pettiest possible stakes.
Look at what they are actually fighting about. They are threatening government shutdowns over “hall-passing privileges” (proxy voting rules that Anna Paulina Luna went to war over). They are holding up defense spending—the literal salaries of the troops they claim to love—because they want to rewrite the rules on stock-trading bans to punish their enemies. They are rewriting national security protocols because one member wants a concierge service for FBI notifications.
It is a thrift-store dictatorship. It is a group of petty oligarchs bickering over who gets to sit in the big chair next to the broken punch bowl. Johnson isn’t a Speaker; he’s a beleaguered shift manager at a fast-food restaurant where the employees are actively setting the fryer on fire to see if he’ll notice.
The Competence Drain
The irony is structural and biting. The GOP spent years purging the “RINOs,” the moderates, and the institutionalists—anyone who cared about the boring machinery of governance. They replaced them with influencers, cable news regulars, and people whose primary legislative skill is posting. And now, they are shocked—shocked—that the machinery is broken.
They chased away the people who knew how to count votes and replaced them with people who only know how to count likes. Now, when they need to pass a defense bill or keep the lights on, they look around the room and realize everyone is recording a selfie video.
The cry for “competence” coming from the rank-and-file isn’t a sudden conversion to centrist politics. It’s exhaustion. They are tired of the constant fire drills. They are tired of having to explain to their constituents why the government might shut down again because Marjorie Taylor Greene is mad about a procedural motion from three weeks ago. Electability is creeping back into the conversation not because they’ve found their moral compass, but because they’ve looked at their internal polling and realized that “constant, screaming dysfunction” is a hard sell to suburban voters.
The Prelude to Collapse
As we stare down the barrel of 2026, the question isn’t whether the Democrats can defeat the Republicans. The question is whether the Republicans can survive themselves.
The party is eating itself alive. The “unity” they parade in front of the cameras is a brittle, hollow shell. It’s a unity enforced by fear—fear of Trump, fear of a primary challenge, fear of being the next one humiliated on X (formerly Twitter). But fear is a terrible adhesive. It works right up until the moment it doesn’t.
Is this what a majority looks like? A Speaker who is openly mocked by his own leadership team? A legislative agenda held hostage by the whims of individual members seeking a viral moment?
The GOP’s real enemy isn’t the opposition party. It isn’t the “Deep State.” It isn’t the media. It is entropy. It is the inevitable decay of a system that has valued loyalty over competence and performance over policy for too long. They have built a glass house, handed everyone a bag of rocks, and are now acting surprised that it’s getting drafty.
The Stefanik incident was a tremor. The earthquake is coming. And when the roof finally caves in, don’t expect them to band together to rebuild it. Expect them to stand in the rubble, pointing fingers, and arguing over who gets to sell the scrap metal.