Thanks a heap, Mr. President: a good senator circles the drain

I made a lot of phone calls for Sen. Joni Ernst in 2012. An attractive, articulate, smart conservative-  honest, ideologically committed but far from fanatical, the first woman ever to represent Iowa in Congress and the first female combat veteran on Capitol Hill- she was on the short list of those I thought might turn out to be our first woman president. She attracted national attention with an ad in which she boasted of experience castrating hogs on the farm, cited it as evidence that she knew how to "cut pork," and promised to make the special interests "squeal."  I was overjoyed at her victory, flipping the seat which clinched the Republican majority in the Senate. And she seemed to be doing a decent job.

And then came Donald Trump. Reportedly on his short list to be his running mate, she delivered a rousing speech at the 2016 Republican Convention which left me uneasy. Political reality is political reality, and it was probably necessary for Sen. Ernst to give that speech. Certainly, it was necessary for her to give public support to the party's nominee for president, unfit for the office though he was. But she seemed to do so with a little more exuberance than I would have hoped.

She's been a reliable vote for the president in the Senate, although she claims to differ with him often in private. She's been an able senator and represented Iowa well in most respects. Under most circumstances, she'd be the odds-on favorite to win a second term, and in normal times she'd probably have my enthusiastic support yet again.

But these are not normal times. Iowa was one of the states whose electoral votes were crucial to the fluke which put Donald Trump in the White House, but it's hard to see how he can avoid losing it in 2020. It was the rural vote that carried the state, and Iowa farmers have been devastated by Mr. Trump's silly trade war with China. It's cost them an estimated $2.2 million and is putting farmers out of business right and left. The farm belt was crucial to Mr. Trump's victory in 2016, and it's hard to see how it's not going to be awash in a sea of blue on election night in 2020.

Trump's popularity has dropped 20 points in Iowa. Joni's should be fairly high. Instead, it's hovering around 50%. She's lost my support by her failure to speak out more forcefully against Trump's absurd and often ugly policies, and she will be hard-pressed to regain it. She's a primary example of the good men and women who have been compromised by party loyalty and/or an ideological determination to defeat the left at all costs, becoming supporters not only of a president who is unworthy of their support but of a movement that at its core is the antithesis of everything they once stood for.

If Joni is smart, she'll start publicly criticizing Donald Trump just as loudly as she can, especially on the tariffs; it's hard to see how she can have any chance at all of being re-elected otherwise. She must separate herself from the president in the minds of Iowa voters if she is going to have any chance of a second term, and it won't be easy at this point. Whoever the Democratic extremist is who opposes Mr. Trump a year from this November is going to carry Iowa, and the closer Joni Ernst clings to the Trump line the more certain it is that her political career will go down the drain with him.

And it's a shame. She had such promise. She was such a great example of what was good about the Republican party before Donald Trump came along to ruin it all. The lasting damage the Trump phenomenon has done to the Republican party will only be apparent in retrospect. It will doubtless include the loss of many able and promising public servants like Joni Ernst. But even more, the lasting damage the GOP's headlong rush to support this inept and unfit president will coat the party for years with a stench that will take a long time to wash off.

Barring the emergence of a centrist third party to provide meaningful opposition to the Democrats in the interim, the most lasting result of the Trump phenomenon will be that the left will run wild, without meaningful opposition it's possible to take seriously, for years.