It was epochal and marks a new era in our political history. And for once everyone rushed to name clearly what happened.
The morning after the 2026 midterm elections, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was searingly blunt. For the Republican Party it was “close to an extinction level event.” Its effects will “reverberate for the next decade or more.”
“It was a Watergate-level repudiation,” said Ted Cruz, soon to be Texas’ lone Republican senator, on a podcast.
Ronna McDaniel, Republican National Committee chairman in the first Trump term, told Fox News on Wednesday the election wasn’t only a Democratic wave, it was “a Republican rebellion.”
It wasn’t only the number of Democratic victories, it was their size. It was a night of landslides—James Talarico of Texas by 12, Jon Ossoff of Georgia by 18, Roy Cooper of North Carolina by 20.
Jonathan Martin on “Morning Joe” said the old red-blue paradigm has ended. Derek Thompson similarly marveled on his Substack: “Kansas voted like New Hampshire and Mississippi voted like Wisconsin.”
In the age of Trump all politics is national.
A rising 10-year-old coalition came apart. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and others had slapped its platform together based on what got cheers at the rallies of 2016. They made it up as they went along. But it takes a kind of genius to spy, imagine and build a coalition and make it hold for a decade, and it means plenty that it collapsed.
Mr. Trump was the author of the ruin. He picked the candidates to back, made the decisions on strategy, decided what to say and when to spend the money in his war chest. (Late in the election, according to the New York Times, when the price of ads had been jacked up; he considered it “my money.”)
He is fuming and casting blame—it was Fox News’s polls; if he’d been on the ballot it would have been “a landslide”; Greg Abbott is “a RINO.” Please. It was you, Fredo.
Vice President JD Vance rushed to lay down a marker on what had happened in a post early Wednesday on X. He said “the smartest data guy I know” had told him “a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed.” Smartest Data Guy is a real Sherlock.
Republicans, Mr. Vance said, did go to the polls—but “the main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
Well, yes. What were they “pissed” about?
“The reason we lost is the war,” Mr. Vance typed. “The president himself said so last night.” To suggest there might have been other, more important factors is “gaslighting.”
But it wasn’t “the war.” If it had been the war, there would have been demonstrations across the country from the time it commenced. The war was part of it, and Mr. Vance’s framing is convenient. He is long said to have opposed the war, so making it the reason for the debacle makes him look prescient. Mr. Trump says it’s the war because he believes his decision to go in was heroic, and now he suffers due to his heroism.
A loss this size has many reasons, a river this raging had many sources. It was a pervasive sense of financial insecurity worsened by high prices, which are connected to the war but also driven by tariffs. And it was corruption.
The American people expect a certain amount of corruption in government because government is composed of people, and men aren’t angels. They’ll accept a normal amount if the government keeps a strong economy and peace. But fail on the economy and peace and they’ll see your corruption and be angered by it. And if you give them corruption that is showy and shameless, they will punish you. They will admit to themselves that you are unusually sleazy and moneygrubbing—Bitcoin! Crypto! Charges of pardons for sale! Federal contracts for the companies of the sons! PLS WIRE AMEX 100K SOONEST!—and they will turn on you.
In this regard most of all, this White House drove the Republican brand into the ground.
In election coverage on the Free Press, Meghan McCain noted that when you see Mar-a-Lago in the media, it’s always like they’re having nonstop parties out of “The Great Gatsby.” All the reveling, it’s fancy and rich and careless, and in a time, outside the club, of want and anxiety.
It’s all stilettos and tuxes and gowns and pricey surgery and shiny tuxedo loafers in there, and in the White House. On Halloween night, three days before the epochal election, the festivities were huge and jungle-themed. Yahoo News called it “a camp, spandex-and-glitter-filled affair” with a caviar bar. Some guests dressed “in elaborate or barely-there costumes.” The Washington Post pool report had people dressed as leopards and snakes and in “tiger-print dinner jackets.”
When I read of it I thought of the costume party in the classic 1962 movie “The Manchurian Candidate”—a scary scene in which affluent Washington power-brokers gather in a mansion and the corrupt Sen. John Iselin, dressed as Abraham Lincoln, drunkenly spoons caviar into the shape of an American flag.
This administration’s soul is seen in its social life, and it is the opposite of populism—it is more like a low-class, high-tack oligarchy dominated by patricians who feel no obligation to even fake a little class.
The most clueless 1980s Kennebunkport Republican grandee would never flaunt wealth as these people do in their vulgarity and conceit. In my lifetime the GOP has been many things good and bad, but it had never been decadent.
In a post-election piece Thursday, Josh Dawsey of the Journal reported that voters in focus groups who didn’t normally monitor Washington often brought up “Trump’s pet projects”—the ballroom, the Reflecting Pool. A political strategist told Mr. Dawsey they’d say things like, “He doesn’t really care what I’m going through” and “He wants to put his name on everything.”
It’s going to take years for the party to dig its way out of this.
I’ll end with a prediction I hope doesn’t come true. I include it because Republicans on the ground now are thinking about what he has been to them, and what they owe him, as they start to rebuild.
At some point I suspect Mr. Trump is going to turn on his party. They didn’t deserve him, they let him down, he tried to help them but they wouldn’t let him. It’s going to be real bunker talk. It’s how he was probably always destined to wind up, swiveling around from the desk and telling the audience it’s fired.
We’re thinking of the scene from “A Face in the Crowd,” in which the charming and garrulous Lonesome Rhodes, a great network television star, signs off from his weekly show. The credits roll, and we see him talking in the background, silently. But he’s not sharing folksy wisdom, he’s telling an actor what he thinks of the audience. The sound is secretly switched on in the control room, and America hears it: “Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs.”
I suspect that kind of moment is coming. Another betrayal, another reason for Republicans to stand up straight and recover themselves.