\n<\/p>\n
Ideally, this interview<\/span> would have been over breakfast at a diner in Omaha, and the local congressman, Don Bacon, would have ordered his namesake. He says he eats bacon two or three times a week when he\u2019s in Nebraska; he likes it extra crispy and, if possible, prepared at home. \u201cIf you ask me for my favorite bacon, it\u2019s Angie Bacon,\u201d he told me this week, referring to his wife of 41 years. (Sadly, the congressman and I were speaking not over breakfast but by phone.)<\/p>\n Angie enjoys having her husband in Nebraska for a number of reasons. One is that if he\u2019s home, she\u2019s less likely to sleep with a gun\u2014something she resorted to when harassment and death threats got really intense a few years ago. These menaces have become progressively worse in recent years. Protesters showed up at the Bacon house during an Easter-egg hunt that he put on for his grandkids two years ago. County police were parked in the driveway. Eventually, the Bacons moved to another house, in a more remote location. But it all can get exhausting. The congressman was working 12- to 14-hour days, bouncing between Washington, D.C., and Omaha. \u201cAfter the last election, I was on E<\/em>. I had no gas in the tank,\u201d he said. Bacon announced last week that he would not run for reelection in 2026.<\/p>\n This was not a huge surprise. Bacon, who had spent 30 years in the Air Force before coming to Congress, in 2017, is one of the last remaining House Republicans who are not thrilled\u2014and willing to say they are not thrilled\u2014by the direction their party has taken since Donald Trump took it over. Bacon has been a rare GOP lawmaker willing to criticize Trump during a second presidential term that has otherwise been marked by acquiescence. After the Signalgate scandal, Bacon suggested that Trump should fire Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom Bacon dismissed as \u201can amateur.\u201d He has also called Trump \u201cvery weak\u201d in his approach to Russia.<\/p>\n None of which makes for a savvy career move if you\u2019re a Republican in these Trump-dominated times. For the likes of Don Bacon, quitting in disappointment has become a familiar endgame.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve seen this miniseries before: A Republican who considers themselves to be a traditional Reagan conservative vows to fight for their principles and beliefs. But when these principles and beliefs conflict with what Trump wants, things get complicated\u2014and often unpleasant. Your party threatens to recruit a primary challenger. The president does not take kindly to you. His supporters say nasty things. And it all takes a toll.<\/p>\n Bacon, 61, is coming off of an especially high-stress period. He was considered something of a wild-card vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic-policy package that the president signed into law on July 4. It was not universally seen as beautiful, even among some who wound up voting for it, including Bacon. \u201cTo me, this bill was an 80\u201320\u2013type bill,\u201d Bacon said. He liked that the bill bolsters the military and protects the tax cuts that had passed during Trump\u2019s first term. He did not like how the bill will explode the deficit and lead to Medicaid cuts. Ultimately, Bacon swallowed his reservations, voted yes, and decided to head home.<\/p>\n Either you like bacon or you\u2019re wrong<\/span>, reads a sign in the representative\u2019s Washington office, displayed not far from a prominent model pig. For the most part, House members from both parties seem to like Bacon, the colleague. They describe him as one of the few Republicans left in Washington who do not consider moderate<\/em> or bipartisan<\/em> dirty words. This has proved a winning position in Bacon\u2019s swingy Second Congressional District of Nebraska. (Kamala Harris carried it by 4.6 points in 2024, making this the bluest district that a House Republican represents.)<\/p>\n Still, Bacon\u2019s relative independence has made him a bipartisan target. The MAGA contingent derides his RINO, or \u201cRepublican in name only,\u201d apostasies, such as when he was the only GOP House member to vote against a bill to rechristen the Gulf of Mexico as the \u201cGulf of America.\u201d (\u201cI thought it was dumb,\u201d he told me.) Democrats, meanwhile, have been eyeing Bacon\u2019s district since he was first elected, in 2016. \u201cVulnerable House Republican\u201d has effectively become part of his job title. After a three-term GOP mayor of Omaha was defeated in May by a Democrat, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared that the \u201cDon Bacon retirement watch\u201d had officially begun.<\/p>\n Bacon told me that the nature of the threats he has received has changed. He used to get the hardest time from the far left, \u201cthe Bernie Sanders crowd,\u201d he said. \u201cThey hate Trump so much, they don\u2019t think straight.\u201d But lately, threats have come more from the \u201cdark MAGA guys.\u201d As Bacon put it, \u201cIf you show any disagreement at all with Trump, you\u2019re a traitor. It\u2019s sort of strange.\u201d<\/p>\n Things became really ugly in late 2023, during the race to elect a new Republican House speaker. Representative Jim Jordan, the choleric conservative from Ohio, was the clear favorite of Trump and his House acolytes; Bacon was not kosher with this, and the abuse followed. \u201cThere\u2019s, like, four people on social media, and they have a million followers,\u201d Bacon told me. \u201cAnd they are thugs.\u201d He received 31,000 phone calls to his office during the speakership brawl, he said, plus texts and emails.<\/p>\n Bacon continues to believe that \u201cwe\u2019re just in a phase right now.\u201d He is among the latest in a long line of departing Republicans who seem to think that the Reagan-vintage GOP will magically return when the phase\u2014which has lasted about a decade\u2014finally ends. \u201cMaybe when President Trump\u2019s term is over, we\u2019ll see a readjustment,\u201d he said. \u201cRight now, what I think America wants is a little bit of normalcy.\u201d<\/p>\n Bacon told me that one of his goals after leaving Congress will be to \u201cfight for the soul of the party,\u201d meaning the GOP. This struck me as typical of the tortured logic that many politicians rely on to justify their departures\u2014the idea that they are pursuing a fight just as they exit the arena. Bacon countered with the idea that representing a district is not necessarily compatible with restoring a soul. Nor is serving in Washington. \u201cI\u2019ve got to worry about being reelected if I want to be a congressman,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d rather be more vocal about what I believe in.\u201d<\/p>\n Bacon does not rule out running for Nebraska governor, or even for the presidency, in 2028\u2014although the latter seems like something that Republican-primary voters would rule out fairly quickly. Whatever he winds up doing, he has more immediate priorities. He has 11 grandchildren who live within a 10-minute drive from his home in Papillion, south of Omaha. \u201cI do feel like there\u2019s a little bit of weight off my shoulders,\u201d Bacon said. He is trying to restore his own sense of normalcy.<\/p>\n He recently had his grandsons over and cooked for them. \u201cThey\u2019re not sure they like my eggs,\u201d he told me, \u201cbut they like my bacon.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ideally, this interview would have been over breakfast at a diner in Omaha, and the local congressman, Don Bacon, would have ordered his namesake. He says he eats bacon two or three times a week when he\u2019s in Nebraska; he likes it extra crispy and, if possible, prepared at home. \u201cIf you ask me for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[3906,3907,959],"class_list":{"0":"post-10792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-moderate","9":"tag-opts","10":"tag-republican"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}