Trump Dooms His Own Party

By David Frum

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. Had they won, they could have stalled President Biden’s agenda and forced him to govern on Republican terms. All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a run-off in January.

 

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia. In rural and conservative areas of the state, 752,000 Georgians who had voted in November stayed home in January. Turnout rose by 228,0000 in Democratic-leaning areas. Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

 

Tonight, Trump repeated his self-destructive behavior.

 

If you are an anti-Trump voter who watched all or part of tonight’s speech to the nation, you saw a president removed from reality, babbling about conspiracy theories, threatening your right to vote. You probably came away from the speech alarmed, angry, and motivated.

 

If, on the other hand, you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

 

When presidents face tough election environments, they typically look for ways to rally wavering voters to the cause. In October 2010, President Obama promised supporters, “If everybody who showed up in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election.” Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

 

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

 

But the message makes no sense for the Republicans who are actually on the ballot in 2026. There are marginal Republican-held seats that might be saved by an exciting message about Republican themes, by an economic plan to curb inflation, by some good news about the war in Iran. Instead, Trump is serving dismalness. Even the people credulous enough to believe that Trump lost the presidency in 2020 because he got outsmarted by crafty Venezuelans cannot be too eager to return to the polls so he can be outsmarted again.

 

We’ll know soon enough just how many Americans watched the speech, how many heeded Trump’s call to demand that their representatives pass his SAVE America Act. But among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

 

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.