The President is to Republicans what Lindsey Clancy is to kids. I remained an optimist. I was wrong, and the pollsters were right. But compared to many of my colleagues on the Right, I was a lot closer than them to what would happen. My daughter said last night was like a kid touching a hot burner on the stove after the parents had said not to.
For the last two years, the Trump Administration has been governed by a simple mantra: “We can just do things.” On Tuesday, voters replied, “So can we,” and wiped out the GOP. This was not a blue wave. This was not a blue tsunami. This was the breakup of a winning coalition.
Those voters, in breaking up the coalition, treated downballot races as proxies for their contempt of Washington, D.C. The race for dog catcher became nationalized because of Republican political malpractice.
In 2024, Donald Trump assembled a multiracial and multiethnic coalition of voters who bristled at the progressivism of the Democrats and the wreckage of the economy. By 2026, Trump and his White House acolytes set that coalition on fire to cater to a group of hyperonline grievance mongers who have confused Twitter with real life.
Last night, the American constitutional system worked as designed and worked so well and so thoroughly that the party that lied to itself in 2020 that it had lost only because the election was stolen is now lying to itself that it lost only because of gas prices and war. Last night’s drubbing was too complete to be theft.
It was gas prices.
And it was the war.
But it was also calling affordability a “hoax.”
And it was also the corruption.
The incompetence.
The tariffs.
The playing nice with Russia while treating our allies worse than our enemies.
The impression of cruelty.
The overly aggressive deportations.
The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic.
The arrogance.
The ballroom.
The reflecting poll.
The golf courses.
The arch.
The Qatari 747.
The aggressive redistricting push.
The threats against enemies.
It turns out a weekend Fox and Friends host might not be a reassuring beacon of competence to Americans.
Gas prices and the war cannot explain a wipe out from top to bottom in Texas or Georgia or losing South Carolina or Ohio or a total coast to coast wipe out. Only the simpletons can believe that.
Adam Hamilton won Finney County in Kansas, which was a Trump +35 county in 2024 and he did so with Hispanic voters. He did not do that just because of war and gas prices.
And shall we talk about Mississippi?
A few weeks ago, Bo French in Texas attacked University of Texas students who were American citizens of Indian descent. A portion of the President’s base cheered him on. Even some within the Administration, on public Twitter accounts tied to the Administration, echoed him. Those voters’ parents repudiated the racism in the GOP and wiped out Republicans in Texas, not because they support the Democrats, but because the party they had supported turned on them. It was political malpractice by the GOP.
Voters did not, on Tuesday, say they wanted open borders. They did signal they didn’t want their neighbors rounded up and deported before the actual criminals — and by criminals, they meant the actual bad guys, not people who just crossed the border illegally and have lived quiet lives. But MAGA knows no distinction.
Voters did not, on Tuesday, say they want globalism. They did signal that tariffs and economic protectionism have hurt them more than helped them. They signaled that a President randomly starting trade wars is bad. They signaled that a President far more concerned with tearing down parts of the White House than dealing with rising prices is a President they cannot trust. They are also furious with a half-assed war that raised gas prices, diesel prices, and fertilizer prices while straight-faced Republicans tried to tell them that, actually, the economy is doing great.
Voters are tired of the weirdos in Trump Land who trade on social media memes, latent racist memes, a fixation on winning Twitter, and nonsense over seriousness. Most of all, voters are tired of a GOP that fixates on an unbuilt high-speed rail line in California while ignoring the incompetence in its own midst. That incompetence imposed a random regime of tariffs and started a war without first securing enough missiles to finish the job.
And the President lied and lied and lied.
Voters have had enough, and today Republicans, instead of looking in the mirror and asking why voters rejected them, will blame the voters, just as Democrats did in 2016 and 2024. “Iran” will be the excuse, and everything else voters have been saying will be ignored by a party that won the popular vote two years ago and has woken up every day since committing political malpractice, guided by incompetence at every turn.
On Monday, on Fox News, Stephen Miller made his final pitch to voters, saying, “President Trump since he came down that golden escalator has saved America. He saved America from a corrupt political class, he saved America from open borders, he saved America from countries that want the American way of life to end from foreign adversaries, domestic adversaries. President Trump took a bullet for you, he bled for you, he faced life in prison for you. And what he needs from you tomorrow is your vote, your vote to keep producing American energy, your vote to keep our borders secure, your vote to keep crime, violent crime and murder at all-time record lows, your vote to keep men out of women’s sports, to keep DEI out of our universities, taxes low, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, to keep our military stronger than it’s ever been before, to keep the American dream alive for you and your children.”
The cultlike hagiography of the President by Miller ignores several things. First, it ignores that most voters have never cared for Donald Trump, even when they voted for him, but Stephen Miller and the White House team focused on the hardcore concerns of MAGA over the everyday concerns of ordinary Americans who wanted their economy fixed more than a culture war.
Second, what President Trump has done has been to govern by executive order and bullying demands.
Third, it was rank political incompetence because MAGA voted. The Republican and Republican leaning independent voters who do not like the President were the ones who needed to be mobilized. That speel is repulsive to those voters. Again and again this administration has committed political malpractice.
For all MAGA’s insistence that the country would end if the GOP got swept out, MAGA seemed to ignore that virtually all of what President Trump has done has been done in ways a future President can reverse with the simple stroke of a pen. Therein lies the conundrum for MAGA and the future of the GOP.
Donald Trump and his political team have done what the pre-Trump GOP never did. They’ve shrunk the map. Pre-Trump, the GOP turned Georgia and Texas red. Post-Trump, they’re now blue. George W. Bush got legislative victories, many of which are still on the books. Trump’s victories are ephemeral and can almost all be wiped out by the next President. That redistricting campaign launched by the White House actually cost the GOP seats.
This makes the second term of Donald Trump the most impermanent presidency in American history.
Every big win, except tax cuts, can be undone by a single future President. Think of all the emotion, energy, money, and rage that went into building the second term. All we got was Ozymandias, and in the ruin, a lot of other good Republicans got wiped out because they refused to rein in the President’s excesses, turned a blind eye to the corruption, and excused the crude, the rude, the racist, and the antisemite on their own side, and the nationalists who, like the Democratic Socialists, actually hate America as it is and demand something in their own image.
On Tuesday night, God smashed a lot of idols. We are left with the pastors and pundits who insisted Christians needed to vote for evil because it was lesser, and the Christians and mainstream America resoundingly responded with, “No.”
God will not be mocked, even by Republicans who think, but for them, Christianity will collapse.
Some really good Republicans got wiped out last night. George W. Bush and Karl Rove turned Texas red and then helped turn Georgia red. Both flipped blue last night under MAGA, with James Talarico beating Ken Paxton in Texas, Greg Abbott losing, and the entire statewide Republican ticket in both Texas and Georgia being wiped out. Top-line Senate candidates who were poor picks and rage at the GOP fueled a massive backlash.
The party had the most control over its candidates and used it the least. Democrats had their own bad candidates this cycle, and they got rid of them. Graham Platner was the Democratic nominee in Maine, the race the party needed to beat Susan Collins. When a former girlfriend accused him of sexual assault, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ro Khanna all walked away from him, and he was off the ballot within days. Eric Swalwell was a frontrunner for governor of California until multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. House Democrats threatened to expel him, and he not only quit the race but resigned from Congress. For a party that spent four years insisting Joe Biden was perfectly fine, Democrats showed a surprising willingness to cut loose candidates who could not win.
Republicans did the opposite.
Some of the President’s problems were of his own making from the start. He could have pressured Ken Paxton to stay out of the Texas Senate primary against John Cornyn. Instead, he stayed silent for months and then endorsed Paxton in the runoff, handing Republicans a nominee who made Texas competitive. He picked JD Vance as his running mate, which opened Vance’s Ohio Senate seat, put an appointed senator, Jon Husted, on the ballot in a special election, and gave Sherrod Brown a shot at a comeback. In South Carolina, after Lindsey Graham’s death, the President pulled Graham’s sister, Darline, into the race for a full term and used his clout to carry a political novice through the primary and into the general election she could not win. The President is directly responsible for every one of these.
The President’s endorsement was the most valuable commodity in Republican politics this cycle, and he spent it on loyalty instead of quality. Mike Collins here in Georgia, Michael Whatley in North Carolina, and Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio were very good at praising the President and not very good at campaigning. Then there’s Darline Graham, who had no business staying in the race. For all the talk on the right about standing by your man, the Democrats made changes to their slate, and Republicans doubled down on bad candidates.
The President’s political team also showed its arrogance by pressuring Republican states to redistrict to lock in House seats, and in the process, Republicans further wiped themselves out. That arrogance provoked a backlash. Again, they said they could just do things, and voters last night said they could too.
The country did get real things from President Trump over the last two years, and Inez Feltscher Stepman laid out the record well in National Review this week. Illegal border crossings are down eighty-eight percent, close to one million illegal aliens have been deported, and violent crime has dropped. The administration has enforced the Civil Rights Act on behalf of white and Asian applicants and employees, rolled back racial bean-counting at the EEOC, restored due process to campus Title IX proceedings, cut the federal workforce to its smallest share since 1939, and begun shutting down the Department of Education.
Unfortunately, very little of that was written into law. The border was secure in President Trump’s first term too, and Joe Biden undid it in his first week with a stack of executive orders. Biden’s Title IX rewrite was itself a reversal of the first Trump administration’s rules. Nearly all of these wins are regulations, enforcement priorities, and executive orders, and the next Democratic president can undo them just as quickly. The wins that will last are the ones in the One Big Beautiful Bill: the extended tax cuts, no tax on tips or overtime, the Trump Accounts for children, the endowment tax, the cap on federal student loans, and the first federal school choice program.
Voters also got a national debt blown out by that same party-line bill, a President who wants the filibuster gone and judges who rule against him impeached, tariffs reimposed by executive action after the Supreme Court struck them down, and more executive orders in this term than in his entire first one. They got prosecutions of the President’s political enemies, taxpayer money steered to his allies, government stakes in private companies, pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut rates, and accidental detainments of American citizens presumed to be illegal aliens. National Review’s John Puri listed most of this last week as things conservatives should fear from a Democratic trifecta, and every item linked to something this administration has already done. For a President and party that campaigned against rising socialism, the President has embraced socialist and protectionist policies that have harmed more people than they have helped, and voters, on Tuesday, responded accordingly.
In 2024, President Trump built something no Republican had built in a generation: a genuinely multiethnic, multiracial coalition. Those voters were never a majority of his vote, but they were real, and they were the future of the party. Then the President, on the advice of the people around him, governed in a way that shattered it. The White House tolerated open racists, antisemites, and white nationalists in its orbit and let their priorities set the tone of its immigration enforcement. Federal agents gunned down Americans who were protesting. While people on the right, myself included, defended some of those incidents, most Americans saw what happened to Alex Pretti and the others as cruel and were repulsed…
