It Was Trump, Stupid

By Mark Antonio Wright

Wednesday, November 04, 2026

 

Two years ago, on November 6, 2024, as the world awoke to the most breathtaking and remarkable political comeback in American history — Donald Trump’s return to the White House — I wrote that “Donald Trump is the most consequential American political figure of the 21st century so far.”

 

He arrived on the partisan political scene not more than 15 years ago. But in that short time, Trump has decisively closed the Obama era in American politics, which began with what many on the left thought was a permanent realignment in 2008. With his reelection in 2024, Trump has defeated Barack Obama’s successor’s successor and his ideological heir, Kamala Harris. I think it’s fair to say that Trump has also, in a second try, defeated Joe Biden by forcing him out of the race last summer. Trump has now — twice! — climbed the Blue Wall and dismantled the Obama coalition in the crucible of a general election.

 

Two years later, that remarkable comeback has ended in a crushing electoral defeat on a scale not seen since the post-Watergate election of 1974. The Republican Party’s majority in the House of Representatives was washed away, which was not unexpected. But its Senate majority also went down to stunning defeat — swept away in the Blue Tsunami in heretofore red states. Kansas’s Roger Marshall lost. South Carolina’s Darline Graham lost. Democrats won in Senate races in North Carolina and in Iowa and, in an almost unimaginable turn of events a year ago, the Republican Party lost a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. Republicans also lost the Texas governor’s mansion. Republicans lost the Texas lieutenant governor’s race. The Texas legislature is likely to tip to the left. Republicans’ majority on the Texas Supreme Court may go from 9–0 to 5–4.

 

My friend Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in these pages that the explanation for all this is that it’s “The War, Stupid.” “Anyone,” MBD argues, “who privileges other explanations than the Iran war [for the GOP defeat] is selling you a just-so story.”

 

Exit polls showed 74 percent of voters deemed the Iran war a “major” or “crucial” factor in their vote. Sixty-two percent of voters think the war was “wrong.”

 

The fact is, the administration ran on slogans about putting “America First.” When Trump announced the resumption of war in February this year, he did so in the middle of the night heading into Saturday, and the vast majority of his address seemed to be aimed at Iranians, rather than Americans. He did not bother to make a case for the war. Congress was given a letter about it the following Monday.

 

Yes, of course. But of course it’s more than all that. It’s more than the war: It’s Trump. The American people rejected Trump.

 

They rejected Trump on the grounds of his handling of the war, yes — but moreover they rejected him (and by extension his party) for his constant distractions, distractions that everyone understood detracted from the fundamental reason that Trump got himself reelected. In 2024, Trump promised — no, he guaranteed — a return to low inflation and prosperity; he promised real wage growth; he promised cultural normality.

 

Instead, the last two years have brought an air of shambolic chaos in Washington. Trump careened from 30 percent tariffs to a trade war with China to 10 percent across-the-board tariffs to a trade war on Canada to 100 percent tariffs on China to a potential invasion of Greenland to a real shooting war in the Persian Gulf. On top of all that, he called the “affordability crisis” a hoax; he put his face on the coinage; he caterwauled about the Nobel Peace Prize; he spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on his White House ballroom and the grass on the National Mall and the trees surrounding public golf courses in D.C.; he spent the closing weeks of the campaign performatively describing the rear ends of Republican political candidates; he put internet-obsessed 14-year-olds in charge of the White House Twitter account.

 

I’ve long thought that the true origins of the blue wave that crashed ashore this week were the Liberation Day tariffs of April 2025. But the issue, in my view, wasn’t tariffs per se — though the tariffs did put upward pressure on prices and that certainly didn’t help.

 

I see the Liberation Day the same way that I see Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal debacle in the summer of 2021.

 

Why? Afghanistan and Liberation Day were the precise moments when normie, not particularly partisan, not particularly tuned-in Americans looked up in horror and lost confidence that Biden and then Trump were capable of basic competence. Neither presidency ever recovered.

 

If the economy were roaring throughout 2025, inflation was under control, and real wages were up, voters may have given Trump a little more leash on Iran and high gas prices in 2026. After all, while gas and diesel prices were painfully high, American combat troops weren’t dying in large numbers. But after the chaotic deployment of the tariffs in April 2025 and the economic shocks that resulted, voters simply weren’t going to do that.

 

To be clear, the Iran war, especially the way it has been handled, especially the way that Trump constantly promised that victory was just around the corner (or was already in the bag), is not popular. But unpopular foreign wars don’t typically turn Texas into a blue state. Texas, after all, with its important oil and gas sector, has a lot to gain from consistently elevated energy prices. If the Iran war was so extremely unpopular as to come close to destroying the Republican Party as a viable electoral enterprise going forward, where were the massive street protests in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston?

 

More convincingly, after eleven years as the dominant, completely unavoidable figure in the nation’s political life, the American people were sick of Donald Trump. On Tuesday, they showed him just how sick of him they were.

 

Two years ago, still in awe of Trump’s political comeback, I cautiously warned that “there is nothing permanent about any of the so-called ‘permanent’ realignments in our politics.” Indeed. There was nothing permanent about Trump’s 2024 victory. The great rightward vibe shift could be squandered. The congressional majorities could be frittered away. The mandate could be wasted, even thrown in the gutter.

 

And yes, make no mistake: Trump squandered his mandate to be normal, to bring back prosperity, to be more than simply not Joe Biden’s Woke Democrats. He blew it all up in a short two years. Tuesday night was the end of the Trump era — all that remains is watching the rubble bounce and trying to pick up the pieces.

 

It wasn’t the war. It was Trump, stupid.

To the Bitter End, Trump Has Been the Author of His Own Ruin

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, November 03, 2026

 

It is Election Day — it’s all over but the voting and counting tonight. I can hardly believe we made it through yet another campaign season of craziness, all the way to the finish line, and I am glad to be with you, dear readers — here at the end of all things. There are no eagles coming to save us from onrushing doom this time, however, no deus ex machina to extract the Republican Party from an electoral judgment fully two years in the making.

 

And in all matters, great and small, this outcome has been crafted by Donald Trump. Truly, Donald Trump is the master of his own fate, the author of his own bad fortune, down to nearly every detail and grace note. Seen one way, it’s a perversely Nietzschean triumph of the will: No other president could singlehandedly put their party so deep down in a hole that half the operatives I’m talking to consider the Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina Senate races to range from “severely threatened” to “gone.”

 

First, there were Trump’s overarching policy blunders that set the scene for all that voters are angry about: The tariff regime crippling America’s heartland is inexcusable, dubiously constitutional, and hideously destructive to the GOP’s chances in once-solid red states like Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. (And Trump will never let it go.) The trade war (and bilious, senseless rhetoric) has made Trump toxic with all those who share a border with our otherwise innocuous northern neighbor, Canada. The Iran war has precipitously raised the price of gas — and has no end in sight, especially given the administration’s warnings about resumed strikes. Inflation continues to bite on top of all of that. The Ukraine war has devolved into a double-dealing farce.

 

And through it all, there Trump and his friends and family have sat — shamelessly corrupt, gorging themselves like ravenous hogs from the public trough, and flaunting it all with such open trashiness. It’s clear that nearly everybody in or around this White House treats the Trump presidency primarily as a financial opportunity rather than a public responsibility.

 

It’s enough to put the American people off their lunch, and then we must turn to all the specific moves Donald Trump made to ensure that the GOP would field the weakest possible slate of candidates for Senate in nearly every race. Trump’s primary criterion for judging politicians has always been personal loyalty: Only the most docile, loudly croaking toady in the room gets his endorsement. This means he has thrown his support behind mook after mook: He cleared the field in the Ohio governor’s race for Vivek Ramaswamy back in January 2025, and look at how that has turned out! He chased Thom Tillis from office in North Carolina over a minor budget dispute — and his handpicked replacement candidate is going to get destroyed by former Governor Roy Cooper.

 

In South Carolina, so desperate was he to replace Lindsey Graham with a loyal puppet that he forced his wildly unqualified sister Darline to run as his anointed choice for a six-year term — and now that seat is seriously threatened by both Democrats and disgusted Republicans alike. In Georgia, Brian Kemp was not-so-subtly discouraged by the Trump administration from even bothering to run for Jon Ossoff’s Senate seat — a thankless task in any event, and one even harder given Trump’s history of interference in the state. Instead, Trump got the candidate he wanted, and MAGA moron Mike Collins is going to be flattened by Ossoff in a campaign that just might carry the Democratic candidate to victory in the governor’s race as well.

 

Jim Geraghty made much the same point a few days ago: This is the team Trump wanted, nay demanded. The unthinkable now seems likely to happen in Texas, as human-bullfrog hybrid Ken Paxton is about to be defeated by progressive James Talarico — because Trump chose to back the one man too corrupt for Texas politics. (For those who might argue that Paxton was a guaranteed primary winner, Trump’s early intervention might have made a difference; in any event Paxton’s political career is only conceivable in a world where Trump’s own legendary ethical problems made Paxton’s even worse ones survivable.)

 

Realize that in November 2024, in the wake of Trump’s remarkable return to the presidency, it was simply mooted that the Senate would be out of reach for Democrats in 2024. The map was so forbidding for Democrats! (“What, they are going to gain seats in Kansas or South Carolina?”) Now even my prediction of a 50–50 tie, offered in September, looks impossibly rosy compared to some other people’s.

 

Trump’s closing argument, the New York Times bemusedly reported yesterday afternoon, was given at the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial. In his speech, he was entirely resigned about the outcome of the midterms: “For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms. But we gave this a very strong shot.” Qué será, será, I suppose. But Trump mostly spoke about the one thing that, in his ruin, gives him comfort: the permanent upgrades he has spent government money on, particularly the Reflecting Pool itself — now finally reopen after its disastrous failed renovation earlier this year.

 

After he finished with the pictures, the president turned to other matters of national interest. Matters including: the nature of Corinthian columns (“the most beautiful in the world”); the soul of grass generally, and Bermuda grass specifically (“like the human being, grass has a life also”); the endurance of granite (“it literally has thousands of years of life”); the renovation of a public golf course on the Potomac that he’s planning; statues; the White House ballroom; graffiti; and the new White House helipad.

 

That, readers, is the sound of a man audibly retreating to his psychological “happy place” — entertaining youthful fantasias of “Trump the Builder” rather than confronting the wreckage of his own administration and his party. Because what cares Donald Trump for the fortunes of the Republican Party? They have always been a mere means to an end for him, a prize to be mastered and used for personal advantage and self-glorification. Despite Trump’s egotistical pleas to voters to “pretend he’s on the ballot,” he is not — Republicans are, and they are about to get swept away by the judgment of the people.

 

Donald Trump will still be there, though, for two more years, beyond the reach of the law and the voters alike. He has already accumulated massive — perhaps generational — debts on the Republican Party’s credit card, and has every reason to rack up more. Why should he care? He’s not the one who ultimately pays the bill; the GOP is. He has always considered himself unencumbered by even the barest obligation to the party whose brand he has usurped. We can only guess what happens next.

How Trump’s Iron Grip on the Republican Party Put the Senate in Play

By Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott

Monday, November 02, 2026

 

Americans are angry about war and prices, and a president’s second midterm is always difficult — but a series of decisions by President Donald Trump has made Republicans’ Senate majority ever-more vulnerable.

 

The mark Trump made on the midterms began in the summer of 2024, when he selected former Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Since then, the president’s personnel and political decisions have reshaped the Senate battleground from what looked like an impenetrable red wall into a toss-up.

 

His decision to pick Vance opened up a special election in Ohio that will by the end of this week cost the GOP hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially a Senate seat. Trump’s party-boss mentality in North Carolina, Texas, and South Carolina has further contributed to the yawning battleground.

 

He endorsed Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia’s Senate race against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff — a contest that never really got off the ground after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump tried to take down in a primary in 2022, passed on the race. Ossoff is favored to win.

 

And party insiders blame Trump’s tariffs and war with Iran for creating a volatile Senate map that has left seats in red states like Nebraska and Kansas vulnerable. Republicans could hold the chamber — or lose as many as a half-dozen seats on Tuesday.

 

“Every negative for the GOP this cycle is a downstream effect of Iran,” said a person close to the White House. Republicans can lose up to three seats and still keep Senate control.

 

Trump’s zeal on the campaign trail is undeniable and he helped direct huge sums of money into the midterms, albeit later than many Republicans would have liked. He spent the last weekend capping off a breakneck fall campaign schedule stumping in Iowa and Kansas, two places where the GOP was strongly favored to win a few months ago but now is struggling.

 

“President Trump has a 97% endorsement record and he remains the best turnout machine for our base voters,” said Republican National Committee press secretary Natalie Baldassarre.

 

Trump is hosting nearly 20 tele-rallies in the last days of the campaign, in addition to his almost-daily travel for rallies over the past month. The White House has sought to emphasize the administration’s accomplishments on issues like the border, crime, and US investment and manufacturing, as they look to encourage low-propensity voters to turn out for Republicans.

 

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said.

 

But his moves to reshape the party in his image over the past two years also often showed little regard for conventional political risk assessment.

 

Trump created two special elections with decisions to put Vance as his vice president and Marco Rubio, a popular former Florida senator, as his secretary of state.

 

On Tuesday, Democrats are underdogs in Florida after nominating democratic socialist Angie Nixon to face appointed GOP Sen. Ashley Moody. The race is more competitive than expected but not a five-alarm fire like Ohio, where Vance’s replacement, Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, is in a precarious position.

 

The longtime preference of Husted, a former lieutenant governor, was to run for governor, according to multiple people familiar with internal party deliberations. He was instead appointed to the Senate and Vivek Ramaswamy ran for governor; Ramaswamy now trails Democrat Amy Action. A campaign spokesperson for Husted said that he “is completely focused on retiring Sherrod Brown once and for all this Tuesday.”

 

“Public polls in the national media have gotten Ohio wrong every election cycle since 2016,” one Ohio GOP operative argued.

 

Drama in the South

 

A year after selecting Vance, Trump tangled with Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., over healthcare cuts included in the tax cut law, prompting Tillis to retire. Tillis told Semafor afterward that Trump’s backing might not have helped anyway: “I’m not sure that his endorsement would have helped me in a general election in North Carolina next year, to be quite candid.”

 

Trump quickly cleared the field for former RNC Chair Michael Whatley, avoiding a costly primary, but Whatley’s candidacy crumpled against his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper.

 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview last summer that Tillis was “established” and “knew how to run and win in North Carolina,” while also praising Whatley as a candidate who could win with Republicans united behind him. In recent weeks, however, Republicans essentially ceded the race as the battleground map expanded to places like Texas.

 

Thune and many sitting GOP senators had hoped to convince Trump to back Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. But Trump gave Cornyn the cold shoulder after the Texas Republican’s remarks questioning Trump’s viability heading into the 2024 election cycle.

 

Trump instead backed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who won the nomination. Paxton is trailing in most polls while receiving the most air support of any candidate.

 

“Texas was an unforced error, I think, on the part of the president,” Cornyn told Semafor in previously unreported comments earlier this year. “We spent a lot of money trying to win the nomination, but the promise was that if I won the nomination, then that would be a layup in November. That’s all off the table.”

 

Had they been nominated again, Cornyn and Tillis may have had tough races too, but most Republicans now believe they would have been closer.

 

Paxton could still win, but the race undoubtedly opens up a shocking vulnerability in Republicans’ red wall. So too in South Carolina. After the death of his longtime ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Trump backed Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., who most senators thought would be an interim senator.

 

Instead, Trump helped launch Graham’s run for a six-year term, even as several other prominent Republicans mounted their own campaigns. Graham defeated conservative Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., in the primary runoff this summer with Trump’s help, but Graham is now in a toss-up race with Annie Andrews, who is outraising her by astronomical margins.

 

Norman barely lifted a finger to help Graham and the race has gotten closer and closer, prompting intervention from the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP-aligned super PAC.

 

“There’s an incredibly divided Republican Party in South Carolina,” Andrews told Semafor in September. She added that polling clearly showed “that Darline was going to be easier for me.”

 

Room for Disagreement

 

Republicans say some of Trump’s impact has been positive. Trump helped draft top GOP recruits like Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers, directed tens of millions of dollars into battlegrounds, and gave Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, distance from him in a state where he’s not popular.

 

Republicans also credit Trump with clearing primary fields in several crucial races. “The president and his team have been valuable partners in the fight for the Senate majority,” said Joanna Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We will continue working tirelessly as one team.”

 

Alex Latcham, executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, said, “Republicans are fully united in our efforts to defend the Senate majority and deliver commonsense solutions for working families.”

 

Burgess and Shelby’s View

 

Trump was very careful with his narrow House majority, even rescinding an administration position for Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., over fears it could cost them a seat. His relationship with the Senate has been much more tempestuous because of his political decisions.

 

Adding further strain has been Trump’s pressure campaign on the Senate to kill the filibuster, pass voting restrictions, and stomach the tariffs and the Iran war. It’s little surprise that’s all led Republicans to this moment of deep uncertainty.

Things Are Going to Get Ugly

By David Frum

Tuesday, November 03, 2026

 

Donald Trump won’t be able to cope. If he loses control of one chamber of Congress, never mind both, the world will see a personality collapse and rage meltdown on the scale of the final sequence of the Lord of the Rings.

 

The Donald Trump of 2018 could cope, barely. Back then, he had a number of things going for him. First, although Republicans suffered heavy losses in the House, they gained two seats in the Senate. Trump interpreted the Senate gains as proof that “people like me,” and the House losses as a rebuke to Trump-disloyal Republicans. “Mia Love,” he said of a Republican who lost her seat in Utah, “gave me no love, but then she lost. Too bad.” Second, the Trump of 2018 had the benefit of a strong economy. The war he was fighting in Iraq and Syria was going well and commanded broad bipartisan support, given that it had started under President Obama.

 

Third, Trump did not have a lot personally at stake in the election of 2018. The big threat to him that year was the investigation of his Russia connections by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The Mueller investigation was conducted within the executive branch. That investigation had been initiated even though the Republicans held the House, and Trump was later able to contain the damage from the investigation even though Republicans lost the House. Fourth, Trump in 2018 was younger, nimbler, and planning for the future: his reelection race in 2020.

 

Polls sometimes miss. But if the most recent ones are accurate, the Trump of 2026 faces big losses in both chambers, all of them directly implicating him. The president opened a Senate seat in North Carolina by harrying the incumbent Republican, Thom Tillis, into retirement. Former Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, now appears headed to a victory so big that he may flip the state legislature too, potentially upending one of the most successful Republican congressional gerrymanders. In the race for Ohio governor, Trump endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy, whose noxious campaign may cost the GOP not only another Senate seat, but the state legislature too. Trump even put a Senate seat in Texas in play by favoring the radioactive Ken Paxton over the popular incumbent, John Cornyn. Trump also started a war with Iran that he is not winning. He imposed tariffs that have raised prices and hurt farmers. He accelerated inflation with the deficits exacerbated by his so-called big, beautiful bill.

 

The Trump of 2026 has a lot at stake in today’s unignorable election. The second Trump administration is a network of scandals and corruption. Subpoena power in the hands of his opponents will expose Trump and his family to enormous legal and political risk. Unlike in 2018, large numbers of Americans connect Trump’s self-enrichment to their economic decline. Gallup found that 89 percent of Americans agree that corruption is widespread in government, up 10 points from just a year ago, and up 30 points from 20 years ago. That’s far higher than in any other developed country, comparable to levels found in Lebanon, Peru, Ghana, and Nigeria.

 

The Trump of 2026 is more addled and more clumsy than the Trump of 2018. In his final preelection speech, he reminded voters of his botched renovation of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.—and mused about renaming the pool after himself.

 

Trump’s style of politics is authoritarian. He does not inspire or negotiate. He issues orders. He demands submission. He makes everything about himself. Trump never tried to broaden his support. He blatantly favored disaster-aid requests from states with Republican governors over those from states with Democratic governors. He was more likely to apportion tariff relief to firms that donated to Republicans, and more likely to refuse relief to firms that did not. When he encountered opposition in Congress, he responded with insults that permanently alienated legislators whose help he might need later.

 

Trump ruled his party by fear, and now the fear is ebbing. On Sunday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made a campaign appearance near Mar-a-Lago to call on Republicans to take concerns about rising gas prices seriously—a cost most Americans blame on Trump’s Iran war. On November 1, the commentator Tucker Carlson posted on X a claim that Trump was planning a nuclear strike on Iran—and that only Vice President Vance and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff stood in his way. Somebody who supports Vance is leaking to enhance his appeal at the expense of the president.

 

Trump will not respond patiently to such challenges from within. He holds hundreds of millions of dollars in his MAGA super PAC and related entities. Whatever remains after the races this year could then go toward sustaining the Trump family’s political power—conceivably backing a future presidential bid by one of Trump’s children.

 

If the Democrats take the House and subpoenas start arriving, Trump will still retain control of the U.S. military and U.S. security services. He can indict people, he can invade nations, he can invoke emergency powers. He will get angrier, noisier, and crazier.

 

He doesn’t care about the future of his party. He doesn’t care about the future of the country. He will want to punish a nation that, in his view, has ungratefully rejected him. Corruptly obtained money never feels secure. Trump, his children, and his inner group of close friends and sycophants most enriched in the past two years have a lot to worry about as the minutes of Trump’s presidency tick down.

 

The worst is yet to come.

Cutting Off Israel Won’t Appease the ‘Anti-Zionist’ Left

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 03, 2026

 

During an Election Day interview with the Fox News Channel, Donald Trump ruminated on America’s commitments to “paying Israel,” which is a terrible way of describing U.S. aid and support for the Jewish State (most taxpayer dollars earmarked for aid never leave the United States). Nevertheless, the president made some news:

 

President Trump on U.S. aid to Israel: "We were giving them $4 billion. We are. But it gets cut off at the end of the year. Why? Because they don't need it.

                                                                                                                                                    

"Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when they don't need it? It's a bad talking point." pic.twitter.com/xkfmbs5lTg

 

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) November 3, 2026

 

“We made a deal months ago that we’re stopping,” he said. “And they’re fine with it. Because, you know, they’ve become a very successful country. They don’t need it.”

 

However, the president’s approach to this issue has a domestic political component. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like [Abdul] El-Sayed when they don’t need it?” Trump asked. “It’s a bad talking point.”

 

The policy that Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu hashed out may be mutually agreeable and strategically sound. And yet, if Trump thinks that a revision of the status quo like this will persuade the “anti-Zionist” left to soften its outlook toward Israel, he’s nuts.

 

If this becomes U.S. policy at the beginning of next year, as Trump forecast, it will have about as much effect on the anti-Israel left’s advocacy as did the end of high-tempo combat operations inside Gaza 13 months ago. Which is to say, it won’t have any effect at all.

 

Those who continue to rail against the ongoing “genocide” inside Gaza are operating independently of the facts on the ground. Why should an amendment to a line item that consumes 0.05 percent of America’s annual outlays represent a moderating force?

 

As CBS News correspondent Ross Douthat expertly exposed in his interview with El-Sayed, the candidate is himself hostile to, in his words, “the currently existing state of Israel.” He retreats to the motte of foreign aid when addressing mixed company. But when El-Sayed is pressed even modestly to expound on his views, he explains that his true objective is Israel’s dismantlement.

 

It’s not about American aid. It never was. There are many compelling reasons to transition away from the current posture toward Israel on which both sides of the equation can agree. But mollifying Israel’s monomaniacal critics isn’t one of them. They cannot be appeased.

Donald Trump Is Bad at Politics

By Jonathan Chait

Tuesday, November 03, 2026

 

Long before he entered politics, Donald Trump divided humanity into winners and losers, and nothing has mattered more to him than counting himself among the former. This need drove his refusal to accept the 2020 election results—how could a man defined by winning lose?

 

Whatever misgivings some Republicans may have about Trump’s character or his policies, many subscribe to the theory that, if nothing else, the man knows how to win. And his aura of mastery has extended beyond his followers to the Americans who most detest him. The disgust with which many liberals regard Trump is mixed with fear and envy. His powers of persuasion are a source of endless fascination. They have launched a thousand diner safaris to explore his mystical hold on Real America, and inspired innumerable Democratic activists and intellectuals to ponder how they could create a Trump of their own.

 

But Trump is not a winner. He is, for the most part, a loser. In 2016, he lost the national popular vote—that is, the measure of which candidate Americans wanted to win the election—by two percentage points. His party lost control of the House in the 2018 midterms. Trump lost reelection in 2020. His sole unambiguous victory came in 2024, when he faced the clumsy fill-in candidate for an unpopular administration, against which he prevailed, almost by default.

 

And now he has lost again. The 2026 midterm elections are delivering a repudiation of historic magnitude to the president’s party, extending far deeper than the customary pendulum swing against the party in power. Not only did Trump’s presidency as a whole repel the electorate, but also his specific interventions in Republican primaries proved counterproductive. He handpicked Senate candidates, such as Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina, for their loyalty, assuming that any warm body could prevail in such deep-red states. Yet Graham went down to defeat, and Paxton currently trails his Democratic opponent, James Talarico.

 

The results help clarify the precise nature of Trump’s political talent. He does possess a certain animal cunning that allows him to home in on human weakness, among both his allies and his targets. (“Jeb’s a loser,” he said in February 2016. “The last thing we need, frankly, is another Bush.”) His speech is so ambiguous and discursive that he avoids being pinned down on particulars. These traits have made him relatively effective as a challenger, exploiting discontent with his opponents while making grand promises (a golden era of wealth, world peace) without specifying any steps he will take to achieve them. None of these skills translates to effective governing.

 

After his election victory two years ago, Democrats feared, and expected, that Trump would coast on the economic recovery he inherited. The post-COVID inflation that had poisoned Joe Biden’s presidency was settling back to normal, and Trump needed only to allow economic gravity to do its work while taking credit for the result.

 

Instead, Trump carried out the wrenching economic changes that he was unable to enact during his first term, in part because he was obstructed by his advisers and by senators from his own party. In 2017, he came one John McCain vote short of defunding the Affordable Care Act, a defeat that spared Trump’s party the political repercussions of stripping health insurance from millions of Americans. In 2025, a more compliant Republican Congress granted him his wish to gut the ACA, along with food stamps, courting the pain they had avoided eight years earlier.

 

After successfully taking advantage of the Biden administration’s failure to contain a surge in migrants, even winning support from millions of Latino voters, Trump proceeded to alienate swing voters with mass deportations carried out through a frequently brutal and occasionally deadly campaign of mass terror.

 

After promising during the 2024 campaign to bring down prices, he took active measures that economists knew would push them higher. Rather than using tariffs mostly as a bluff and settling for modestly rejiggered trade agreements for which he could claim credit, as he did during his first term, he imposed the costliest tariffs since the Herbert Hoover era.

 

When enterprising members of Congress decided, without Trump’s involvement, to pass a bill earlier this year to encourage more housing construction, Trump could have taken credit for their work and demonstrated at least an interest in addressing a major cost driver. Instead, angry that Republicans had failed to pass his bill restricting voting, he petulantly boycotted the signing ceremony. Declining to sign a bipartisan housing bill at a moment when housing costs are a top public concern is the political equivalent of being handed a baby and refusing to kiss it.

 

Most incredible of all, 10 years after he astonished the commentariat by standing on a Republican debate stage in hawkish South Carolina and declaring the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake,” Trump replicated the George W. Bush administration’s signature blunder by launching a war of choice in the Middle East without any plausible exit strategy.

 

Trump might have received a little bit of grace from voters if he had made visible gestures of concern for the pain that Americans felt from these policies. Presidents in the past have grasped the need to show the country that they are working hard, because, if nothing else, regular people typically assume that improving the economy is a function of presidential diligence, like a landlord fixing a leaky toilet. Instead, Trump turned his attention to decorating palaces, erecting monuments, renaming buildings after himself, and demanding awards.

 

He has weirdly inverted a classic populist trope, which posits that the wealth and comfort of the capital comes at the expense of the prosperity of the decent, God-fearing people of the heartland. Trump obsesses in public about his focus on the tiny area in the immediate vicinity of the White House. He devoted his closing message the day before the election to a lengthy recitation of improvements in the capital, from his war against algae to a proposed golf course, which he promised would give residents of Washington a discount. This fixation is a source of pride only for those whose chief goal for this presidency is Trump’s glorification.

 

***

 

The theme connecting all of these baffling choices is a misread of the 2024 election results. The MAGA cult was never large enough to win a majority of the Electoral College. Trump won because he offered an alternative to an unpopular Biden administration, and because enough of the public fondly recalled his first presidential term before COVID struck—and retroactively excused him for the consequences of his pandemic mismanagement. The myth of Trump’s political genius is primarily a by-product of this first-term good fortune. He inherited a healthy economy and had little effect on its trajectory, paradoxically benefiting from failure. The buoyant recovery created a floor beneath his approval ratings that no gaffe or scandal could crash through.

 

Trump, however, convinced himself that he had won because the public shared his conclusion that his first term had been a treacherous betrayal by his enemies. And so, while Trump’s 2024 coalition hinged on Americans who felt nostalgic for his first term, these same voters empowered a president determined not to repeat it.

 

He ruthlessly purged the bureaucracy and his party of all dissent so that he could build the dream palace of his imagination—an imperium that would silence his critics in the news media, reduce the business elite to sniveling courtiers, and venerate him as a king.

 

Many of these efforts have met with success. But the unwavering loyalty he has commanded within his party has come at the price of revulsion outside of it. Trump made the autocrat’s error of believing his own propaganda, thus denying himself the benefit of realistic advice that might help him avert or correct his misjudgments. And by treating disagreement as treason, he locked the exits, trapping his fellow Republicans with him as he burned down their reputation.

 

While the Americans who worship Trump as a culture-war champion or god-king remain enthralled, the ones who thought they were hiring him for a four-year gig to get a handle on the border and inflation regard his second term as a failure.

 

Those two constituencies are often conflated with each other, and Republicans have encouraged the conflation by treating his fans as the authentic Volk. In reality, Trump’s base is not synonymous with the country. His base has never constituted anything close to a national majority. Stripped of the protective gloss he enjoyed from the healthy economy during his first term, Trump has no more political magic than Jimmy Carter.

Contempt

By Dan McLaughlin

Wednesday, November 04, 2026

 

There are a great many lessons to be drawn from the steep descent of Republicans from the heights of 2024 to the collapse of 2026. But surely a big one is this: The party in Congress paid the price for Donald Trump’s contempt for the party in Congress.

 

It wasn’t always this way. Look at Trump’s first term. Sure, he didn’t always take the advice he was given from the Hill. His effort to repeal Obamacare was a halfway compromise between what he wanted and what Republicans wanted, and it failed. But he was much more open then to treating Republicans in the House and Senate as partners. The 2017 tax bill had Trump input and features, but it was largely conventional Republican tax policy, mostly written by Paul Ryan from prior Republican proposals. On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell and committee chairs such as Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham had a lot of input on judicial nominations. Trump sent executive branch nominees to the Hill with an eye to who would get confirmed. He grumbled but accepted reality when McConnell and his caucus wouldn’t budge on abolishing the filibuster. For all of Trump’s instincts to demand personal loyalty, Republican senators kept a sufficiently distinct brand from his that a number of them survived tough races in 2020 when Trump was going down to defeat.

 

This time, things were different from the outset. Even with a Senate inclined to give Trump just about anything he wanted, he set the tone up front by threatening to demand that the Senate put itself in recess so he could appoint a cabinet without confirmation hearings. Even Trump couldn’t get Matt Gaetz confirmed, but Senate Republicans were browbeaten into accepting his other terrible nominees, including not only the execrable Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but also people such as Kristi Noem and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who have since departed in predictable disgrace. Along the way, Trump forces drove Joni Ernst of Iowa into retirement in good part by hounding her over her skepticism of Pete Hegseth and made Bill Cassidy’s position untenable as well. Ernst’s Senate seat will now be held by a Democrat.

 

Few things are more traditionally the prerogatives of Congress than the setting of tax rates. That includes tariffs, which were once the main source of federal revenue and enacted in highly detailed schedules by Congress that reflected the conflicting interests of different constituencies and regions. But breaking with the targeted tariffs of his first term, Trump early on unveiled sweeping, global tariffs that proved immensely unpopular and sabotaged his entire brand as a champion of a lower cost of living. Crucially, Trump did not go to Congress with this plan, the centerpiece of his second-term economic agenda. He gave no consideration to the export interests of farmers in states such as Iowa and Kansas (both swept by Democrats last night) or the deep economic ties of states in the Great Lakes region to Canada. He also didn’t bother to get fresh, clear legal authorization for his tariffs, which resulted in them being struck down by the Supreme Court after he tried to shoehorn them into language in a 1977 statute. True, had Trump gone to Congress, he might have been more constrained and a lot slower in putting tariffs in place. But he would have heard from the people’s representatives and engaged in the give-and-take that keeps political coalitions healthy — especially unwieldy ones like Trump’s 2024 coalition.

 

Trump practically rubbed salt in the wound of the irrelevance of Congress with the One Big Beautiful Bill, the very name of which announced to the public that Congress was only going to do one thing. Hard-nosed treatment of Republicans in that process drove another senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, to retire. His seat, too, will now be Democratic.

 

Then there was the Iran war. Trump didn’t ask Congress to approve bombing Iran in the summer of 2025 in Operation Midnight Hammer. He didn’t ask Congress to approve sending the military into Venezuela to remove its head of state. But at least those were short-term operations of the sort we have grown accustomed to presidents doing on their own.

 

The Iran war was different. From the start, it was more ambitious than Midnight Hammer. If it wasn’t originally obvious how long it would last, that was largely because it wasn’t clear what our war aims were. That’s because Trump neither explained them to the American people nor went to Congress. Again, things would have moved slower had Trump needed the approval of Congress, just as the invasion of Iraq moved slower because George W. Bush went to Congress in the fall of 2002. But then, Trump might have had both public input and an incentive to make a public case.

 

We remember that Iraq was a major contributor to wrecking Bush’s presidency and coalition in 2006. But that was the fourth year of the war. The war vote helped Bush build the GOP caucus in the 2002 midterms, and he was reelected with a popular majority and an expanded Senate caucus in 2004. Trump today can only wish that he got two good years after a far more modest war with no ground troops. But he had no public mandate because he didn’t get Congress involved.

 

When Trump decided to do something legislatively, he fixated on the SAVE America Act. He could have treated this as an election-year campaign issue, in which Democrats were forced repeatedly to vote against the bill in the House and cloture in the Senate, and rallied a unified party on that ground. Instead, he and his supporters treated the bill as a wedge against fellow Republicans. They demanded that the filibuster be repealed or altered to pass it, then blamed John Thune and Senate Republicans for not doing so, letting Democrats completely off the hook. The internecine warfare on this issue was a major wedge in Ken Paxton’s successful primary challenge to John Cornyn, who (like Cassidy after voting for RFK) got nothing out of abasing himself to endorse the end of the filibuster. Cornyn’s seat, too, will now be in Democratic hands.

 

The fact that they were formally consulted on neither of Trump’s two biggest decisions — tariffs and Iran — left Republicans straining to defend those decisions or find a reason why anybody should reelect them. And the list goes on. Trump didn’t ask for Congress to bless anything he was doing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He renamed the Department of Defense without asking Congress to change the law. His various vanity projects, or his domestic deployment of the National Guard, or the Department of Government Efficiency, or a dozen other things were done unilaterally.

 

Trump treated Republicans in Congress like they didn’t matter. Is it any wonder voters took the hint?