Good post-election morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Real quick, help us out by clicking the ❤️ and tapping restack so we can get these stories in front of the most people. Those two clicks help immensely.
A source in Donald Trump’s White House source told Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem that the president is despondent over Tuesday night’s blowout loss for Republicans. And as Democrats prepare to take control of both chambers of Congress, in January, both Trump along with multiple members of his Cabinet could all face impeachment investigations. Ohio Governor-elect Amy Acton made history as the Buckeye State’s first female governor, and she apparently sent Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s concession call straight to voicemail after he exploited her childhood sexual abuse for an attack ad. And in Texas, former Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan is calling last night’s results an “extinction-level” event for the GOP.
Before we get to the news, an urgent request: as election results poured in last night, Raw America’s reporters in Washington were working their sources to get the inside scoop on how Trump and Republicans were responding to the midterms. Our managing editor was reaching out to the press offices of high-ranking Democrats to get live interviews scheduled with key decision-makers in the next Congress. We’re only able to do this work because of readers who chip in to fund our newsroom as paying subscribers.
Tonight at 5:30 PM ET, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez — the #2 Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee — will be joining Raw America to discuss Democrats’ plans to hold top Trump administration figures accountable in the next Congress! Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
After Democrats won control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump is now officially a lame duck. Raw America can reveal that people inside his administration say the president is despondent over Tuesday night’s results.
One White House source told Raw America’s Brian Karem that the loss “brings to an end to this presidency. He’s a lame duck.” The source added that Trump is “not taking this well.”
For more than three hours Tuesday night, as the resentment against Trump showed itself in vote tallies across the country, the president remained uncharacteristically silent.
At 4 PM ET, he posted a scathing critique of Fox News to his Truth Social account, claiming he was still the most popular president in history.
But one staffer said he went “radio silent” after polls started to close across the country. For the next several hours as election results rolled in and a Democratic win became more obvious, the president remained silent.
Shortly after 7:30 PM ET, he posted to Truth Social that he “wasn’t on the Ballot” and that if he had been, “we would have won in a landslide.” He went on to call Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott — who lost in a landslide to Democrat Gina Hinojosa — a “RINO,” or “Republican in Name Only.”
“The president worked harder than the candidates themselves,” Raw America’s White House source said. “He wasn’t on the ballot.”
As Trump shifts blame for the debacle of the midterms, several Democrats said Trump is avoiding responsibility for the candidates he promoted and campaigned for. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on NBC Tuesday night that “Trump asked people to vote like he was on the ballot, and that’s exactly what they did.”
There continues to be speculation about what exactly Trump will do following Republicans’ blowout loss in the midterms, including filing lawsuits to challenge election results in various states and trying to prevent newly elected Democrats from being officially seated. However, White House staffers are confiding to Raw America that the president may just spend the final two years of his term focusing on building his $400 million White House ballroom and “spending his time at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster.” One Ohio Republican said they would be “looking for work first thing tomorrow.”
Shortly after 8 PM ET, Trump appeared to have changed his defiant tune, and told the New York Times he would accept the results of the election and will find a way to work with the Democrats going forward.
But Raw America’s White House source scoffed at that statement, saying Trump “won’t work with the Democrats and he won’t take responsibility for anything that he does.” They added that “he never has and he never will.”
That prediction may have already been proven correct, as Trump went on to post a meme to Truth Social showing a red hat with the word “VETO” on the front. He also heaped more blistering criticism on Fox News in which he blamed the network “for these losses” by constantly putting members of the opposition on air.
One supporter of failed Texas U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton told Raw America that the stinging defeat was “all on the president.” They added that Trump “asked people to vote like he’s on the ticket and America is done with Donald Trump.” A staffer for defeated South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Darline Graham told Raw America: “The president cost us a red state.”
Chris Vance of the anti-Trump GOP group Our Republican Legacy rendered his own take of the election, telling Karem: “The Republican Party has suffered a devastating defeat. The American people have rendered their verdict on MAGA, America First and the policies of the current administration and Republican Congress. 2028 begins now. Donald Trump will never again lead the Republican Party in a general election. It is time to begin the debate about the future of a principled Republican party in the post-Trump era.”
Once Democrats take back control of committee gavels in a few months, they’ll also be deciding how to proceed with a growing stack of impeachment resolutions that went nowhere under the current Republican Congress. Lawmakers have already filed articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. There are also at least four impeachment resolutions specifically aimed at Trump.
The first impeachment fight may kick off before the new Democratic Congress is sworn in. Outging Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky — who lost his primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed challenger (who won last night’s general election) — aims to force a full House vote on eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth potentially as soon as next week. Massie is accusing Hegseth of waging war on Iran without obtaining the approval of Congress, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro without the consent of Congress and for blowing up boats in the Caribbean and killing several hundred people without first getting a judicial green light. The outgoing GOP majority may vote to table it, though it’s unlikely the next Congress would do the same.
Trump called the effort to impeach Hegseth “terrible” and praised his Pentagon chief “the best at his job in many many years.” He also labeled Massie as a “loser” and “a major sleazebag.”
Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee, told NBC News that Trump has “undoubtedly” committed impeachable offenses. He pointed to the the Iran war, unauthorized spending without Congressional approval and his bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House to make room for his ballroom. Raskin added that Democrats “will not hesitate to use [impeachment] if we need to use it.”
Impeachment is still a heavy lift even with majorities in both the House and Senate. The only cabinet secretaries to ever be impeached were War Secretary William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024 and the Senate acquitted both. Nobody from the executive branch has ever been removed via the impeachment process.
After the Ohio gubernatorial race was called for Democrat Amy Acton, Republican billionaire candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s concession didn’t go as planned. Ramaswamy told supporters he’d called Acton to officially concede, and “left her a message.”
Plenty of Ohioans likely understood Acton’s refusal to take her opponent’s official concession call. Last month, the Ramaswamy campaign aired an attack ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother calling her daughter — who she hadn’t spoken with for decades — a liar about her childhood upbringing. She ultimately lost custody of Acton and her brother after Acton’s stepfather was criminally indicted for allegedly raping her when she was just 12 years old. Acton’s mother stayed married to her alleged rapist, who died while on the run from justice. Both Donald Trump and JD Vance supported Ramaswamy’s ad. Even outgoing Republican Governor Mike DeWine called it “deeply, deeply troubling.”
With 95 percent of the vote counted, the Associated Press showed Acton up by a margin of 51.9 percent to 44.8 percent. She’s officially the first female governor of Ohio and the first Democrat to hold the office since Ted Strickland back in 2006. Trump won the state in all three of his presidential campaigns.
Acton, who served as health director in DeWine’s administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, told supporters during her victory speech she’d gone from homeless to becoming a physician. She promised she’d “work with anyone and everyone,” including the Ohioans who voted for her opponent.
Tell Congress: impeach RFK Jr. for unleashing epidemics of deadly diseases on Americans with his insane policies!
Texas just went through its own massive anti-GOP reckoning. Three weeks ago, former Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan warned Texas Monthly’s Eric Benson that a big win by Democrat James Talarico in the U.S. Senate race would mean “a bloodbath down [the] ballot.” The New York Times now estimates Talarico will have defeated Republican Ken Paxton by about 9 points.
When Benson called Phelan Tuesday night, Phelan called the midterms “a complete extinction-level election.” He estimated there were 19 Democratic flips in the Texas House of Representatives, even though Democrats only needed 14 flips to win control of the chamber.
Texas hadn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office since 1994. This time, voters elected a whole slate of Democrats to every single statewide office. This includes Gina Hinojosa over incumbent Greg Abbott in the gubernatorial race, Vikki Goodwin over Dan Patrick in the lieutenant governor’s race, Nathan Johnson as the next attorney general, Sarah Eckhardt for state comptroller and Jon Rosenthal for railroad commissioner, handily defeating far-right MAGA Republican Bo French, who doubled down on a racist social media post late in the election. Trump’s mid-decade gerrymander, which was engineered to squeeze out five more GOP congressional seats in the Lone Star State, has so far led to a net gain of zero.
Phelan observed that while Democrats were working tirelessly to turn out voters, Donald Trump spent election eve talking about algae and pipes at the Lincoln Memorial while Democrats were focused on high gas prices and the cost of health insurance. According to Phelan, Democrats “were talking about what voters care about and we were not.”
Because Raw America has no billionaire owner telling us what to cover, we’re able to bring you an exclusive report describing the despondent mood in Trump’s White House and Democrats’ efforts to impeach both Trump and his Cabinet. But we can only keep this work going if the readers like you, who open these newsletters and read them to the end, step up to become paying subscribers.
Be sure to catch our live interview with Democratic Congresswoman Delia Ramirez at 5:30 PM ET tonight, where she’ll talk about Democrats’ plans to hold top Trump administration figures accountable. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media. Before you go, please be sure to hit the ❤️ and tap the restack button so we can get these stories in front of the people who really need them.