McCorkle: Will blue wave force S.C. GOP to confront Trump’s illegal policies?

By Will McCorkle | To say that the 2026 election was a message to President Donald Trump is an understatement. South Carolina elected a Democratic senator for the first time since 1998 – and even counties like Berkeley and Dorchester went blue.

In Dorchester County, there was a nearly 20% swing from 2024. Nationwide, it looks like the election will be the largest U.S. House popular vote margin since 1976. If there were ever a time for Republicans to finally stand up to the most egregious and even illegal policies of the Trump Administration, it would be now.

Over the last two years (and really the last 10), the line has kept moving for what the Republican Party has been expected to accept or ignore when it comes to Trump – whether it was his failure to release the Epstein files, his initial support for a live-streamed execution, his open insider trading or his illegal war in Iran. But the line he crossed just weeks before the election would seem to have been something that would be even too far for most GOP politicians – Trump blatantly betraying Ukraine and supporting Putin.

The original reporting showed that the White House reportedly gave permission to titan Elon Musk to slow down Starlink telecommunications operations, which meant Ukraine was unable to stop an incoming Russian attack that led to preventable deaths. This was after Ukraine attacked Russian data centers, which have been revealed to be the source of bots for many anti-democracy movements around the world, including here in the United States.

Trump also ignored the law authored by the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina signed earlier this year. He said sanctions would be lifted on Russian oil and that the U.S. would be directly buying oil from Russia. Of course, this means that we are not only directly supporting Putin’s war machine in Ukraine but indirectly funding the very country we are fighting, Iran. The irony is almost without words.

There are different explanations for Trump’s actions. The most innocent is that he wanted to see a slight drop in oil prices before the midterms. Of course, being willing to support a dictator to receive a temporary reduction in oil prices is still far from innocent, and of course it did not work. Other explanations are even more horrific, such as him possibly being far closer to Putin than has been publicly revealed, Putin threatening Trump with blackmail, or Trump purposely seeking to weaken Ukraine and Europe.

Even though most Republican politicians align with Trump on everything, they will not come out and say a positive word about Putin. Some will actually speak out strongly against Putin and even vote for bills against Russia. But it is telling that few are willing to call out Trump when he ignores those laws. They will just sit back quietly and support the president. As of this point, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., has not said anything about Trump’s horrific actions, but instead went and campaigned with him and stated that, “I believe that South Carolina and America should always be Trump country!”

I know GOP leaders like Scott have been willing to defend incredibly illegal and immoral actions from Trump, but are they really going to be silent and complicit in supporting the Russian dictator? If so, they have betrayed everything the U.S. is supposed to stand for and have absolutely disqualified themselves to serve the people of South Carolina.

And if they will not call out Trump based on moral or constitutional principles, they might want to do so just out of sheer political survival.

2028 is coming up, and Scott might realize soon that South Carolina might not be as easy a victory as it was in the past.

Will McCorkle is a college educator who lives in Summerville.