It Was About to Be a Good Week to be Susan Collins. Then Trump Did What Trump Does.

It was shaping up to be a good week for Susan Collins. Then the trade talks with Canada collapsed, the president announced a new round of tariffs, Ottawa retaliated within a day, and every Republican running for Senate in a state that touches the Canadian border acquired a problem they cannot solve and cannot ignore.

The midterms are roughly two months away. There is no version of the next eight weeks in which those candidates get to talk about something else.

The map does the damage

Michigan, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, Alaska. These are the seats that decide control of the chamber, and they are precisely the places where a trade war with Canada is not an abstraction — it shows up in lumber prices, in grocery bills, in the cost of running a business whose supply chain crosses a bridge. A candidate in Arizona can treat this as a foreign policy question. A candidate in Maine cannot.

The feud has also gone personal, with Trump trading shots with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and pausing to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America, which is either a negotiating tactic or the precise opposite of one. Canadian coverage has treated the sequence as a genuine rupture in the relationship. American coverage has treated it as a Tuesday. Both of those responses create problems for a senator who has to answer questions in Bangor.

The rest of the week did not help

In South Carolina, Darline Graham beat Rep. Ralph Norman in the Senate primary runoff by about five points, despite a debate answer on national security that his own side spent several days trying to explain away. She faces Democrat Annie Andrews in November, in a race that was not supposed to be interesting.

In Georgia, Mike Collins spent the week answering for a former staffer who posted an AI-generated image of himself in Klan robes — the latest in a sequence of staffing revelations that has stopped being a series of coincidences. In Texas, Greg Abbott, who was delighted to announce a $40 billion Google data-center investment last November, ordered a pause on new data-center approvals pending an audit of how much power and water the things actually consume. That is a governor discovering, ten months late, that his constituents can read an electricity bill.

And then the actual emergency

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow this week to deliver a warning against attacking a NATO member, following intelligence suggesting Russia may be probing a Baltic state. The last comparable moment was in 2025, when NATO shot down Russian drones over Poland.

That is the item that should have dominated the week. Instead it competed for oxygen with a lake, a data-center audit, and a primary in South Carolina — and lost, because the presidency currently generates more news than the news can absorb.

For Collins and everyone in her position, this is the structural problem rather than any individual controversy. A senator can distance herself from one bad week. She cannot distance herself from an administration that produces four of them simultaneously, in a state where the tariffs arrive before her explanations do. The Republican Senate map was always going to be tight. It is now being run by someone who does not appear to have looked at it.