Repudiation Without Repudiation

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 18, 2026

 

Save for the first seven weeks of his second term, the president’s job approval has been underwater for the entirety of his five and a half years in office.

 

Yet, across four election cycles during which he was either in the White House or on the ballot, never once has he been truly drubbed at the polls.

 

He won in 2016 and 2024 and overperformed his polling in 2020, coming within a whisker of victory in various battleground states. His party ended up gaining House seats that year.

 

The only election of the Trump era that arguably qualifies as a drubbing was the 2018 midterms, when Democrats netted 41 seats and flipped the House. But that’s more properly categorized as a near-drubbing. After all, Republicans picked up two Senate seats during the same cycle.

 

Since the day in 2015 that a certain witless ape rode a certain escalator, in other words, the Republican Party has never lost ground in both houses of Congress in the same election. Which makes the surging optimism in every corner of news media right now about an unfolding Republican calamity in November unnerving.

 

Hope of any sort bruises my tender pessimist sensibility. But I must say: There really is a lot of evidence suddenly that an electoral comet is inbound toward the GOP.

 

The polling has taken a turn. A week ago Democrats led by 6.5 points on the generic congressional ballot, a formidable spread but not quite duck-and-cover. As of this morning that margin has risen to 8.6 points, pushing the out-party above 50 percent for the first time this year in the RealClearPolitics average. That’s “head for the fallout shelter” stuff.

 

Certain polls have also gotten … weird, even to people who track them for a living. Incumbent Republican senators trail in Kansas and Idaho? Far-left Angie Nixon is dead even with GOP Sen. Ashley Moody in Florida? Democrat James Talarico’s lead over Ken Paxton in Texas is growing, not shrinking, as Election Day approaches?

 

I’d call all of it preposterous—if not for the fact that Republican candidates and groups have also begun behaving in ways that reek of panic.

 

“Trump’s super PAC and its cutout organizations are spending big money in at least 17 districts that Trump carried in 2024 by over five points,” The New Republic noted yesterday. “That includes six districts that Trump won by over 10 points.” J.D. Vance was deployed to Kansas(!) this week to stump for Sen. Roger Marshall and will campaign in Iowa(!) today to shore up Republicans there.

 

Other party officials are preparing to join the rescue operation in traditional red strongholds. Asked about having to fundraise for Republican candidates in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy grumbled to reporters that those states “ought to be fat-guy layups for us.” In Georgia, usually a fiercely contested battleground, the GOP might give up on trying to unseat Sen. Jon Ossoff and spend its money on electoral triage elsewhere.

 

As for Republicans who are on the ballot themselves, Senate candidate Ashley Hinson just released an ad—in Iowa—touting her track record of working with Democrats. Days earlier, two House Republicans from that same state joined Democrats in voting to restrict Trump’s war powers on Iran. In the president’s own home state of Florida, GOP Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar resorted to posting a straight-to-camera video addressing him directly in which she warned that “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. … The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

 

Reaction to that ad among the chud commentariat was what you’d expect, never mind that Salazar voted in favor of funding ICE. But political reality is what it is: Both nationally and within Florida’s traditionally right-wing Cuban community, Trump’s bread-and-butter issue has grown moldy from public outrage that he’s targeted the wrong people for deportation.

 

Bless his heart, the vice president was reduced to begging voters in a recent interview for “another chance” before catching himself and rephrasing his request for “another couple of years” of congressional control instead. “Another chance” implies that the White House blew the chance it was given by voters in 2024. Which it did, and Vance knows it.

 

Add it all up, and you can begin to discern the outline of a comet in the sky, growing larger by the hour. (Even Joe Rogan has started identifying as left-wing again, for cripes’ sake.) For once, Donald Trump’s party faces meaningful losses in the House and Senate under his leadership. Many of the president’s critics found his narrow defeat in 2020 bittersweet insofar as it accomplished the goal of removing him from office but not the grander goal of repudiating Trumpism emphatically. Six years later, we’re on the brink of repudiation at last.

 

Except we aren’t really.

 

Vindication, not repudiation.

 

Certainly, we’re on the brink of seeing the president himself repudiated.

 

Look no further than the latest polling on the cost of living for evidence. By no means is America currently experiencing the worst inflation in its history, yet somehow Trump is pulling the worst approval rating on inflation of any president in modern U.S. history. Worse than Jimmy Carter, worse than Ronald Reagan. Worse even than Joe Biden.

 

His disproportionately dismal numbers reflect the public’s disgust with his priorities as president, I suspect. Inflation may have been worse under Biden, but Biden didn’t spend his days preoccupied with demolishing the Kennedy Center or building a new White House helipad that’s supposedly the talk of the nation. Biden didn’t compound an existing affordability crisis by starting moronic trade wars aimed at jacking up the price of already expensive foreign goods, let alone by targeting allies toward whom most Americans have warm feelings. And Biden didn’t get elected on promises to bring down an already high cost of living before immediately forgetting all about it once he was sworn in.

 

He hasn’t delivered, he’s made things worse, and he doesn’t care: That’s the midterm case against Trump. If the GOP gets blown out, there’ll be nowhere for the president to hide from it. The outcome will be a direct repudiation of how he’s conducted business during his first two years back.

 

But a repudiation of postliberal ideology? That’s a harder case to make given that the engine of Americans’ discontent as the midterms approach involves the least postliberal thing Trump has done as president: attacking Iran.

 

“Trump running on lower gas prices and no more foreign wars and then starting a war with Iran that literally everyone except Pete Hegseth knew was going to be a quagmire has to be on the shortlist for dumbest political blunders in American history,” Nate Silver marveled yesterday. It was such an obvious political disaster in the making that even a dope like me saw it coming before the first bombs fell.

 

Although, as with the rest of Trump’s presidency, knowing that it would be a disaster didn’t prepare me for how much of a disaster it would be.

 

With Saudi Arabia’s oil now bottled up on its east coast by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz and on its west coast by the Houthis in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the global industry has grown so chaotic that J.P. Morgan analysts announced yesterday that they can “no longer model the endgame” of the tumult. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that Democrats’ sudden surge on the generic ballot over the last week was almost certainly driven by the surge in diesel prices and resulting inflationary implications for the wider economy. If those prices continue to rise, Democrats’ already gaudy lead will probably continue to rise with them.

 

There will be many political casualties from attacking Iran, from frontline Republicans on the ballot this fall to Trump’s historical legacy as president to, perhaps, J.D. Vance’s chances in 2028. But for “America First” postliberal ideologues, the war has been a political windfall. It’s proof of concept for isolationism: We warned Trump that another neoconservative war of choice in the Middle East would be a catastrophe and that Americans would hate it. And we were right.

 

Those ideologues won’t treat Americans turning out en masse in November to punish the GOP for that war as a repudiation. They’ll treat it as vindication—so much so that I’ll seize the opportunity here to repeat my prediction from last week. If a blue wave crashes down on Republicans and the president resorts to “rigged election” nonsense to spin it, right-wing postliberals like Tucker Carlson will be the most outspoken naysayers of the conspiracy theories. The wave is real, they’ll insist, and it’s precisely what Republicans should expect going forward if they persist in interventionism.

 

For “America First-ers,” an Iran-driven midterm blowout will be touted as confirmation that the party will need to get much more Tucker-y going forward to regain voters’ trust. Presumably that’s what J.D. Vance meant when he babbled about giving the White House “another chance”: He meant another chance at governing like the anti-war dictator-hugging postliberals he and the president purported to be in 2024.

 

No wonder too that so many MAGA devotees are furious at Maria Elvira Salazar over her new video. By blaming Trump’s unpopularity on his immigration policies, she’s confounding the far-right narrative that the coming bloodbath has everything to do with Iran. Americans love the postliberal “mass deportation” agenda, surely; it’s “forever wars” that they can’t stand.

 

To make the case that an Iran-driven electoral wipeout should be blamed on postliberalism, one needs to overlook postliberals’ policy preferences and instead argue instead that the ideology is inherently dangerous and destructive. One might say “Because postliberalism valorizes ruthlessness, it will always select for demagoguery rather than wisdom or competence. President Carlson might not start a major war in the Middle East but he could very well start one in Europe, by abandoning NATO.”

 

That argument will be a heavy lift, though, given that most right-wingers have spent 10 years getting comfortable with ruthlessness and demagoguery. In a battle for right-wing opinion, with antiwar postliberals on the other side shouting “we told you so” about Iran, I wouldn’t bet on it prevailing.

 

Unchastened.

 

And so one of the key lessons of an electoral repudiation—”It’s time to rethink some of our ideological assumptions”—won’t be a lesson of this midterm for the right. Even if the coming “rigged!” spin fails to get much traction, it’ll be easy enough for them to process the result as a case of Trump having strayed from the path of Trumpism overseas.

 

There’s another lesson of wave elections that will inevitably go unlearned, though. Typically when the president takes a beating at the polls, he’s chastened by the vote of no confidence. George W. Bush accepted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation the day after antiwar sentiment propelled Democrats to a House majority in the 2006 midterms. Barack Obama began negotiating with new Speaker John Boehner in 2011 about reducing deficits following the Tea Party landslide in House elections the previous November.

 

Do I really need to explain why the current president is unlikely to be so conciliatory? We’ve all lived through the last 10 years. We all grasp, surely, that a man who’s incapable of humility will not—because he cannot—be humbled.

 

Trump isn’t going to “change course” if Republicans are drubbed at the polls. Almost certainly, he’ll double down on everything Americans hate about him.

 

That starts with the war. "I have a big decision coming up,” he boasted to Axios in a new interview this week. “Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me.” Some of his aides told Reuters recently that they’re trying to avoid new hostilities before the election but that they’ll “consider ramping up military action after the November 3 vote.” Trump has teased the probability of it himself.

 

Iran is reportedly counting on it. “Some Iranian leaders … believe now is a good time to [escalate] because Mr. Trump will return to war after the midterms anyway,” the New York Times claimed recently. “The president will either feel vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory or feel that he has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy, several of the analysts said.” My guess is that he’ll want to do it purely for revenge: If Iran’s sabotage of oil markets really does bring about a Democratic landslide, Trump will feel no qualms about ordering U.S. troops to rough them up as electoral payback.

 

His tariff abuses will also get worse thanks to the current Congress. Tucked away in the bill that passed this week authorizing new sanctions on Russia is a broad grant of trade authority that “could allow Trump to drop 100 percent tariffs on virtually any country he likes, for as long as he likes, and with pretty much bulletproof legal authority to do so,” The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell recently explained. Technically, those new tariff powers are limited to targeting a small number of countries that rely heavily on Russian energy, but some of the provisions are vague enough that they would effectively let Trump himself define what constitutes “heavy” reliance.

 

And maybe not just that. Some observers worry that he’ll define the European Union as a “country” under the law and attempt to satisfy his eternal grudge by waging a trade war on Europe writ large. Either way, handing Donald Trump a statutory license to bully other nations economically with little risk of interference by the courts is like handing a loaded gun to a troubled child. He’s going to pull the trigger at some point, if only just to see what happens.

 

As for immigration, Maria Elvira Salazar’s warning will almost certainly be disregarded. Why wouldn’t it be? Between the Democratic landslide at the polls and Trump’s descent into terminal lame-duck status, I’d bet every dollar I have that postliberals will spend the last two years of his presidency egging him on with pleas that now is the time for maximum viciousness.

 

We’ve lost Congress, they’ll say, and we’ll probably lose the White House in 2028. This could be the last chance we have for years to accomplish our goals and “save America.” (The noisier chuds will repurpose that logic to argue for refusing to relinquish power if they lose the next presidential election, almost needless to say.) Fascists view every emergency as an invitation to behave more ruthlessly, and they’ll surely treat the great midterm drubbing of 2026 as an emergency. Inescapably, the lesson they’ll draw from it is that it’s time to dial deportations up, not down.

 

Amid all of this, there will be immense antagonism between the president and a Democratic Congress bent on uncovering just how sleazy his financial conduct has become. (Americans are broadly aware of his corruption, another possible factor in the widening generic-ballot margin.) Trump being Trump, that might be all the reason he needs to choose escalation over conciliation in pursuing his agenda. War, tariffs, mass deportations, wrecking the occasional public monument: The voters who put Democrats in charge of the House and Senate hate all of it, so why shouldn’t he seek revenge on them by giving them even more of it?

 

Why should he care more about public opinion than about his own legacy when the public behaved so “disloyally” at the polls?

 

This is what happens when you place America’s welfare in the hands of someone who literally can’t fathom putting someone else’s interests above his own. “Repudiation” in a political context is really just a fancy word for “shame,” the idea that a public servant will feel morally obliged to change how he behaves if the constituents to whom he answers signal their disapproval firmly enough. Trump neither feels shame nor believes he should answer to anyone. There will be no lesson learned from this comet strike.