Republicans sense the Trump train has finally gone off the rails, and they're tiptoeing toward the exits

• Republicans have been too terrified of the base to defy President Donald Trump — until now. With a Trump wipeout increasingly likely, cracks of daylight between Republicans and the president are appearing.
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he avoided the White House because it was unsafe. Sen. Ben Sasse said Trump was an awful leader and a shame to the party. Rep. Denver Riggleman said Trump had made the GOP into "QAnon after dark."
• Win or lose in November, Trump and his legacy have indelibly stained the GOP, and it's likely that Republicans' rushing for the emergency exits of the Trump train has only just begun.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

Republicans have marched in lockstep with President Donald Trump ever since he ripped out the free-market-supporting, limited-government-espousing soul of the GOP in 2016, replacing it with a proudly ignorant, willfully sadistic, ultranationalist populism.

With less than three weeks to go until Election Day, a small number of congressional Republicans — who have heretofore been too terrified of "the base" to meaningfully criticize their party's Dear Leader — are starting to act like they know the Trump train has finally gone off the rails. And these suddenly conscience-filled GOPers don't want the public to confuse them with Trump dead-enders.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, as cold-blooded a political tactician as he is a loyal Republican, has thrown subtle but substantive shade at Trump, saying he has avoided the White House for months because its lax COVID-19 protocols make it an unsafe environment.

And, of course, he's right. Trump's White House might be the most dangerous workplace in Washington, DC.

Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia, an Air Force veteran who lost his GOP primary bid to a conservative challenger, told CNN that Trump's retweet of a QAnon-related account accusing Barack Obama and Joe Biden of assassinating Navy SEALs to cover up the supposedly faked killing of Osama bin Laden was "bats--- crazy." Which, of course, it is.

Riggleman called Trump's retweet "dangerous" and said such preposterous conspiracy theories were part of "the language of radicalization." He added that the party under Trump had become "QAnon after dark." In another interview, Riggleman said it was "sort of crazy" that he'd been called brave for condemning his party's flirtations with QAnon, which include the nomination of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon booster who's almost certainly guaranteed a congressional seat in a deep-red Georgia district.

But that's just where the GOP is right now, where "bravery" is simply calling madness by its name.

So far, no one has gone further to put daylight between themselves and the president than Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse. On a conference call with constituents this week, Sasse positively savaged Trump's leadership during the pandemic, saying he didn't think "the way he's led through COVID has been reasonable or responsible, or right."

Sasse assailed Trump's foreign-policy predilection for kissing dictators' butts, selling out our allies, and ignoring China's concentration camps filled with Uighur Muslims and the death of democracy in Hong Kong.

The senator also decried "the way he treats women," the way he "spends like a drunken sailor," the way "his family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity," the way he'd "flirted with white supremacists," and the way he "mocks evangelicals behind closed doors."

To reiterate: This wasn't a secret recording. This was a public conference call. Sasse absolutely wanted this message to get out. With his eyes on a possible 2024 presidential run, the onetime Trump critic who then sought his endorsement is signaling: "I'm not with him."

McConnell, Riggleman, and Sasse have different motivations for distancing themselves from Trump before he loses rather than after, when no one will care. They reflect the growing sense — echoed even by the longtime Trump ally Rupert Murdoch — that Trump will be rejected by the American electorate by a wide margin.

Trump's presidency and his "stupid political obsessions" stand a very good chance of making an entire generation of young people and huge swaths of women "become permanent Democrats," as Sasse put it on the call.

Win or lose in November, Trump and his legacy have indelibly stained the GOP, and it's likely that Republicans' rushing for the emergency exits of the Trump train has only just begun.

• Read more:
• 'Totally Under Control' filmmaker Alex Gibney on Trump's hapless coronavirus response, Jared Kushner's ridiculous PPE strategy, and the breakdown of America's institutions
• The Trump administration made the White House a COVID hotspot and an unsafe workplace. There isn't much the workers can do about it.
• Being a parent of school-aged kids during COVID is to be helpless in the face of failed 'leaders'
• Andrew Cuomo is shamelessly trying to memory-hole his coronavirus nursing home fiasco