By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, November 07, 2026
In the aftermath of Tuesday night’s wipeout, an
intramural Republican fracas broke out between MAGA populists and their rivals,
referred to as the GOP “establishment,” even though MAGA is the GOP
establishment. The dispute centers on competing rationalizations for the
debacle — was it caused by the Iran war or by the tariffs? To repeat what I
contended to Rich Lowry in our podcast this week, the argument signals that Republicans
are far from confronting what truly ails them. This is blame-shifting, not
serious self-examination.
Yes, there is a single, silver-bullet answer to
the question, “Why did we get crushed?” But it’s not a single policy, even if
there is no gainsaying the significance of the war and the import taxes. The
answer is Donald Trump — specifically, the president’s shameful,
erratic, often reckless, always self-absorbed, exhausting, in-your-face-24/7
second-term performance — reminding people nonstop of all the reasons they
disliked him the first go-round, but this time without the perception of rising
prosperity.
The implication of MAGA’s Iran war claim is that Trump
faltered because he betrayed his core principles: After campaigning as the
president who would stop “forever wars,” he gratuitously launched one that has
proved intractable, thereby — so the theory goes — adopting the futile “neocon”
policy of remaking the Muslim Middle East and subordinating America’s interests
to those of Israel (the place where the populist “right” and the “river to the
sea” left find common ground). The unsubtle aims are to (1) blame the GOP
establishment for the Democrats’ midterm sweep, and (2) detract attention from
other Trump policies, especially (but far from exclusively) the tariffs — which
MAGA supports because Trump swears by them, regardless of their contribution to
global instability and the high prices that have so agitated the public.
The so-called establishment’s more traditional
Republicans highlight the tariffs. That’s a better explanation: Trump 2.0
derailed on “liberation day” — on April 2, 2025, less than three months in —
and Trump has become increasingly unpopular ever since.
Moreover, where it matters, the tariff problem and the war problem get to the
same place, costs. The public is riled up about gas prices (among other
prices); it cares little about geopolitics in the Persian Gulf. Nevertheless,
tariff tunnel vision misses most of the story. And to the extent the tariff
theory is argued to counter critiques of the Iran war — which these Reaganite
“peace through strength” Republicans support in principle, although not as
Trump has waged it — it is a similar exercise in intramural blame-shifting.
Republicans got their clocks cleaned this week because
they made Trump the center of their universe, as if Congress did not exist
other than as a presidential pom-pom squad. Unleashed, Trump has governed like
a lunatic.
I am not trying to be provocative. To the contrary,
Trump’s secret sauce, the reason he has been able to succeed politically
despite his personal unpopularity, has been his uncanny prowess at depicting
his opponents as lunatics. The collapse of border security, rampant
nonenforcement of the immigration laws, boys in girls’ locker rooms, DEI — we
can run down the list, but the common thread is that Trump had a unique talent
for spotlighting 70–30 or 80–20 issues, the ones as to which he could side with
the vast majority of Americans, while Democrats were aligned with the fringe. “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” —
remember? Beneath all the twaddle about “landslide” victories that sandwiched a
“stolen election,” the successful Trump’s resonant message was, “You need me
because these people are crazy and, unlike your familiar genteel Republicans, I
will fight them.”
Show’s over.
Yes, the Democrats are still lunatics. But in national
politics, they’ve been in the wilderness for a couple of years. Don’t worry, by
mid-January everyone will remember why, even after his 2020 attempted soft
coup, Trump managed to beat them four years later. In the meantime, though,
Trump became the frighteningly crazy guy who made the sidelined Democrats seem
comparatively stable.
After being elected, Trump tried to make Matt Gaetz
attorney general — and while that didn’t pan out, he managed to install a
gaggle of sycophants who turned televised cabinet meetings into spectacles in
cloying that would make his old pal Kim Jong-un blush. He started his term by
pardoning 1,600 January 6 defendants, including hundreds of rioters who’d been
convicted of assaulting police and vandalizing the Capitol. That was just the beginning of what’s become a thriving pardon industry that enriches Trump-connected
lawyers, lobbyists, and PACs, with clemency doled out to drug
traffickers, corrupt pols, white-collar fraudsters, and a Trump crypto partner — with the pardons canceling out well over $1 billion in restitution for crime
victims.
It has never stopped. Virtually every day there is some
stupefyingly insane action or announcement. Trump and Vice President Vance
shockingly brawled with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the
Oval Office, browbeating him as the cameras rolled. The country grasps that
Ukraine is the victim of aggression by Russia, an American foe run by Vladimir
Putin, a murderous dictator. Yet, our president bizarrely fawns over Putin while pressuring Ukraine to surrender on
Russia’s terms. It boggles the mind. When not browbeating Ukraine, Trump was
threatening to annex Greenland, a territory of our NATO ally, Denmark — and wouldn’t rule out using military force. And the
tariff-fueled trade war was just part of the president’s maniacal campaign
against our neighbor and ally, Canada — which included implicit threats to take
it over (“the 51 st state,” “Governor Trudeau,” etc.) and so enraged Canadians,
who were poised to elect a conservative government, that they decided instead
to retain the Liberals on the rationale that they’d be sure to resist Trump.
Somehow, the president decided it’d be great to pick a fight with Pope Leo XIV, rebuking him as “WEAK on
crime and terrible for Foreign Policy” — Catholic voters loved it, I’m sure.
The context was immigration — an issue as to which Trump undermined his
admirable early success in stabilizing the southern border by adopting gratuitously
draconian and frequently illegal enforcement policies. These included deporting
scores of suspected Venezuelan gang members, without the required due process, to a terrorism prison in
El Salvador that has been condemned by the State Department for human-rights violations. Trump attempted to justify himself
by invoking the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act on the
laughable assertion that the United States was being subjected to a military
invasion or predatory incursion. After two protesters in Minnesota were shot
dead, the president sacked his hapless homeland security secretary, but the
fallout of the ill-conceived, under-resourced dragnet has persisted.
Under the Orwellian guise of ending the weaponization of
law enforcement, the Trump Justice Department has pursued patently meritless
cases against the president’s political enemies. Notoriously, the president publicly posted a dressing down of the term’s first
attorney general, Pam Bondi, for dragging her feet on this lawfare agenda.
Courts have thrown out several of the cases, and refusals by grand juries to
approve indictments — previously rare in federal law enforcement — are becoming
routine. The Trump retribution campaign has resulted in the firings of
prosecutors and FBI agents who were assigned to work on Biden-era
investigations, despite assurances to the contrary made by top Trump appointees
during confirmation hearings.
Speaking of confirmation hearings, Trump has made a
practice of avoiding them: Determined to staff district U.S. attorney posts
with loyalists who’d have trouble being confirmed, Trump and his minions have
illegally relied on statutes governing temporary appointments to circumvent the
constitutional requirement of Senate approval. The result has been
disqualification orders by federal judges and chaos in several districts over
whether routine enforcement actions are lawful. Bondi botched a harebrained initiative
to appease MAGA activists by disclosing voluminous files related to the
investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophile (and former Donald
Trump pal); the fallout was an ill-conceived congressional disclosure law that
a frustrated Trump felt compelled to sign — which itself has generated a
separate scandal over whether the Justice Department is still concealing records, including some relating to the
president.
Trump’s DOJ dropped a corruption prosecution of then–New York City Mayor Eric Adams
while pressuring Adams to support Trump immigration enforcement policies,
prompting the resignation of the highly regarded interim U.S. attorney in
Manhattan, whom Trump had appointed. The DOJ has also tried to defend executive
orders by which Trump sought to put out of business, or force hefty settlements from, law
firms that had employed attorneys who’d investigated or otherwise crossed
swords with him — so far, the courts have invalidated the orders against firms that chose
to fight rather than settle. And not content with pardoning the Capitol riot
defendants, Trump used a collusive lawsuit — the president, supposedly in his
private capacity, sued the IRS, an executive agency he controls — to generate a
“settlement” trough, risibly branded the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” to pay the
pardon grantees “compensation.” The cherry on top of the slush fund was the
attempt by the president’s second AG in this term — his former private defense
lawyer, Todd Blanche — to grant Trump immunity from IRS audits.
In what was supposed to be his big summation speech on
behalf of Republicans prior to the election — but turned into a rambling spiel
on Washington architecture — the president said that renaming the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to the “Trump Reflecting
Pool” was under consideration. He instantly felt the need to assure listeners that he was joking. Small wonder. Trump
has tried to rename the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after
himself (in violation of a statute — a judge has invalidated the gambit). He named a class of
battleships after himself. We now have “Trump Accounts” in
tax law. The Trump State Department announced that the U.S. Institute of Peace
had been renamed the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” to “reflect
the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.”
Trump also caused stirs by delusionally ordering that the
Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the “Gulf of America” (the Associated Press was barred from the White House press pool
for declining to use the new name), and directing that Lake Ontario is now “Lake America.” At
recent campaign rallies, he has floated renaming both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans — “Ocean of
the Americas” and “Trump Ocean” are in the running. In
statutory law, we have a Department of Defense, but Trump has denominated
it the “Department of War” — although he has occasionally denied that the Iran war is a war in an attempt to
evade Congress’s constitutional war powers.
In potential violation of long-standing federal law, the
Trump Treasury Department grafted the president’s visage onto U.S. currency (a
$1 coin issued in connection with the nation’s 250th anniversary) — and it has
started issuing paper currency bearing his signature (in the previous 165 years
of minting bills, it had always been a Treasury official’s signature). And now
hanging on several government buildings in the Capital are huge banners
brandishing Trump’s portrait.
The center of attention in the capital, however, is the
White House. There, Trump unilaterally demolished the East Wing in order to
build a ballroom. He paved the Rose Garden. The Oval Office is gilded in gold,
and Trump has added a “Presidential Walk of Fame,” in which he has hung a
picture of an autopen where a portrait of Biden would otherwise be — a funny
about which he had a good laugh with the dictator of communist China, on whom he
lavished a treacly state dinner. There is, in addition, a very live controversy over a gigantic arch Trump proposes
to build at Memorial Circle, which links the National Mall to Arlington
National Cemetery — at 250 feet, it would dwarf the nearby Lincoln Memorial.
Opponents, who contend that such a project requires congressional approval and
an explanation of where the funding would come from, have sought to stop it
administratively and in court. On Thursday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking
construction.
Amid starting the Iran war without congressional
authorization, deploying U.S. forces without congressional authorization to
extract Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, and using lethal military force
without congressional authorization to kill at least 240 people suspected of
ferrying narcotics in the Caribbean, Trump has zealously lobbied to be awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize — and castigated the committee for rebuffing him. The prize
was awarded in 2025 to María Corina Machado, the political activist who heroically
fought for democratic reform against the leftist regime of Hugo Chávez and
Maduro. In a gesture of gratitude to the United States, Machado presented her
prize — which she had traveled to Norway at great personal risk to accept — to
Trump. On brand, the president accepted the award rather than graciously
declining.
Upon deposing Maduro — who faces trial in the United
States on the same drug offenses as to which Trump pardoned one of his
co-conspirators, former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez — Trump
did not turn to Machado’s reform party (from which Maduro stole the last
election, treachery that Trump had used as justification for deposing him).
Rather, he installed Delcy Rodríguez, the Maduro regime’s No. 2. He then
pressured Rodríguez to surrender 65 billion barrels’ worth of Venezuela’s oil
reserves, without congressional authorization and in violation of Venezuela’s
constitution; to develop the reserves, the administration recruited a Chavez
crony, Alejandro Betancourt López, who has been under criminal investigation by
several countries for money laundering. (See my series, links here.) The Trump administration originally kept the
proceeds of Venezuelan oil sales at a bank in Qatar in order to prevent
creditors cheated by the Maduro regime from seizing it through U.S. legal
processes. The proceeds are now held in U.S. Treasury accounts, but the
administration has stonewalled questions about how the funds have been handled
and disbursed.
When the Supreme Court quite rightly invalidated his
first set of illegal tariffs, Trump lambasted the justices — particularly two of Trump’s
own stellar appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — as “unpatriotic,”
disloyal to our Constitution, “fools and lap dogs for the RINOs and the radical
left Democrats,” and “an embarrassment to their families.” He even claimed the
Court had been “swayed by foreign interests” — which was rich considering
the source.
I won’t even try to summarize Trump’s manic daily output
of social media posts. Suffice it to say that they are habitually juvenile,
profane, nasty, and self-aggrandizing (depicting him variously as Jesus
Christ, a king, a crown-wearing fighter pilot defecating on his political
critics, and so on). On Easter Sunday this year, Americans were treated to a Truth
Social post in which the president of the United States warned Iran, “Open
the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST
WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Quite apart from the pathological nature of these
exhibitions, they are constant. There is no surcease, and normal people
in the country detest it.
Finally, about the unseemly grabbing with both hands . .
.
No, I’m not just talking about the “Palace in the Sky” — the luxurious Boeing 747-8 aircraft
the president accepted from Qatar as a replacement Air Force One (though it’s ill-equipped for the job) that is ultimately to
be transferred to his post-presidential library. Trump has increased his
personal net worth by well over $2 billion since his second term began just 22
months ago. The president’s financial accounts, which are not in a blind trust,
have made tens of thousands of trades in the securities markets — more than all members of Congress combined (something we
know because, unlike his predecessors who did not trade stocks while in office,
Trump triggered federal law disclosure requirements).
His two elder sons have simultaneously ballooned their bottom lines by hundreds of millions of dollars. Much of it
was generated by crypto schemes, in which foreign investors who have major
business with the United States — most prominently, an Emirati government official and royal family member — have
invested billions (see my series, links here). Meantime, the Trump administration, the Pentagon in particular, has poured billions of taxpayer dollars into companies in which Don Jr. and Eric Trump have invested;
and the Trump organization, which the brothers run (and in which the president
maintains shares) continues to negotiate lucrative deals, in the billions of
dollars, in countries (and with entities linked to the governments of those
countries) that are deeply entwined in U.S. foreign policy concerns, including
the Iran war.
It may be that none of this is illegal — although, when
the previous president’s relatives cashed in on his political influence with foreign regimes heavily reliant on
the United States, in an amount that was a bare fraction of the astronomical
sums we’re talking about here, MAGA Republicans on Capitol Hill brayed about
“the Biden crime family” and talked openly about impeachment. What matters, in terms of
the verdict the voting public rendered this week, is that the Trumps’ behavior
has been brazen and unprecedented: In the not-distant past, it would have been
deemed disqualifying for an incumbent and his family to leverage the awesome
powers of the presidency for personal gain — indeed, the Framers made bribery a separate ground for impeachment
over precisely this concern.
You can tell yourself that Tuesday was all about the Iran
war or the tariffs. The cold truth, however, is that American voters previously
turned on Democrats because the Joe Biden they championed did not appear to be
functioning as president — and they didn’t like it; and this week, they turned
on Republicans because the Donald Trump they champion has turned the presidency
into something they don’t recognize — and they don’t like it.
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