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’s in Nebraska; he likes it extra crispy and, if possible, prepared at home. “If you ask me for my favorite bacon, it’s Angie Bacon,” 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.)Angie enjoys having her husband in Nebraska for a number of reasons. One is that if he’s home, she’s less likely to sleep with a gun—something 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. “After the last election, I was on E. I had no gas in the tank,” he said. Bacon announced last week that he would not run for reelection in 2026.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—and willing to say they are not thrilled—by 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 “an amateur.” He has also called Trump “very weak” in his approach to Russia.None of which makes for a savvy career move if you’re a Republican in these Trump-dominated times. For the likes of Don Bacon, quitting in disappointment has become a familiar endgame.We’ve 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—and 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.[Read: No one loves the bill (almost) every Republican voted for]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. “To me, this bill was an 80–20–type bill,” Bacon said. He liked that the bill bolsters the military and protects the tax cuts that had passed during Trump’s 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.Either you like bacon or you’re wrong, reads a sign in the representative’s 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 or bipartisan dirty words. This has proved a winning position in Bacon’s 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.)Still, Bacon’s relative independence has made him a bipartisan target. The MAGA contingent derides his RINO, or “Republican in name only,” apostasies, such as when he was the only GOP House member to vote against a bill to rechristen the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” (“I thought it was dumb,” he told me.) Democrats, meanwhile, have been eyeing Bacon’s district since he was first elected, in 2016. “Vulnerable House Republican” 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 “Don Bacon retirement watch” had officially begun.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, “the Bernie Sanders crowd,” he said. “They hate Trump so much, they don’t think straight.” But lately, threats have come more from the “dark MAGA guys.” As Bacon put it, “If you show any disagreement at all with Trump, you’re a traitor. It’s sort of strange.”[Read: What the next phase of Trump’s presidency will look like]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. “There’s, like, four people on social media, and they have a million followers,” Bacon told me. “And they are thugs.” He received 31,000 phone calls to his office during the speakership brawl, he said, plus texts and emails.Bacon continues to believe that “we’re just in a phase right now.” 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—which has lasted about a decade—finally ends. “Maybe when President Trump’s term is over, we’ll see a readjustment,” he said. “Right now, what I think America wants is a little bit of normalcy.”Bacon told me that one of his goals after leaving Congress will be to “fight for the soul of the party,” meaning the GOP. This struck me as typical of the tortured logic that many politicians rely on to justify their departures—the 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. “I’ve got to worry about being reelected if I want to be a congressman,” he said. “I’d rather be more vocal about what I believe in.”Bacon does not rule out running for Nebraska governor, or even for the presidency, in 2028—although 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. “I do feel like there’s a little bit of weight off my shoulders,” Bacon said. He is trying to restore his own sense of normalcy.He recently had his grandsons over and cooked for them. “They’re not sure they like my eggs,” he told me, “but they like my bacon.”