We all know that the symbol of the Republican Party is the elephant, but if Cenk Uygur is reading the tea leaves correctly, then perhaps that symbol should be changed, changed specifically to a rat. The kind of rat that abandons a sinking ship, that is.

Cenk’s assessment, which he explains in a YouTube Live video he shot Sunday, is based on recent statements critical of Donald Trump coming from GOP Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Texas’s John Cornyn. Sasse told a private group of donors that Trump kisses dictators’ butts, ignores the problems of the Uyghurs in China, does nothing to help the people of Hong Kong, mocks evangelicals in private and spends like a drunken sailor. Cornyn, meanwhile, in an interview with the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram newspaper, said that he has opposed Trump on issues like budgets and border wall funding, but has kept that criticism private.

Cenk says this newly discovered assertiveness about their objections to Trumpfrom Republican officials who have traditionally voted in lockstep with the president must be the result of their increasing awareness that the USS Trump is rapidly taking on water and they don’t want to go down with it. “I love the smell of Republican panic in the morning,” Cenk says, and these sudden discoveries among certain Republicans worried about their future viability that hitching their start to Donald Trump may have been a mistake is quite the profile in cowardice.