Republicans Turn on Trump as Midterm Wipeout Ignites Blame Game

Republican lawmakers and strategists erupted in finger-pointing after Democrats seized control of both chambers of Congress in a midterm rout, with many in the party placing the blame squarely on President Trump even as he insisted the loss happened only because he “wasn’t on the ticket.”Within hours of Democrats sweeping to majorities in both the House and Senate, Republicans were putting the blame on the president, citing his tariff policies, an unpopular war in Iran that drove up prices, and his support for weak candidates in the campaign’s final weeks.Vice President JD Vance, who is weighing a 2028 presidential run, went far off the reservation on Wednesday morning, saying the sound drubbing wasn’t because Mr. Trump wasn’t on the ballot. “The reason we lost is the war,” Mr. Vance wrote on social media, adding that “everyone knows why we lost” and that “any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” In his post, Vance said data showed Republican turnout had actually held up but that many 2024 Trump-Vance voters cast ballots for Democrats instead, which some have dubbed a “Red Rebellion.” He cited polling that found voters wanted the party to end the war, focus on the cost of living, “put America first,” and reconsider the U.S. relationship with Israel. “The reason we lost is the war,” he repeated. “In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting,” he wrote. “To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so.”Mr. Trump held no post-mortem press conference, instead talking to reporters as he led a tour of the White House’s new ballroom, the president’s pet project. On Mr. Vance’s assessment that the Iran war was a drag on GOP candidates, Mr. Trump said, “I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term, and probably, that’s probably it’s true. But at the same time, if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again because long term, it’s the only answer.” The president, who appeared to ignore some questions he didn’t like during his brief appearance, said he just couldn’t “transfer” the love from his supporters who attended his 29 campaign rallies to GOP candidates.“I mean, if I were on the ballot, we would have won. You saw the people that were packed, 1000s and 1000s of people at every rally. And if I was on the ballot, we would have won. But they just couldn’t transfer that love. There was such love at those rallies; it was incredible. We weren’t able to transfer the love to candidates,” he said.With the shellacking, some Republicans were emboldened to rip the soon-to-be lame-duck president. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who did not seek re-election in his battleground district, dismissed Mr. Trump’s framing outright. “This is all about him,” Mr. Bacon told The New York Times, calling the president’s explanation “nonsense.” Mr. Bacon argued that Trump’s own unpopularity was the “No. 1 reason” for the defeat, followed by his decision to back weak Senate nominees such as Ken Paxton in Texas and Senator Darline Graham in South Carolina. “We lost the Senate race in South Carolina for Pete’s sake,” Mr. Bacon said. “He pushed bad people forward.”Florida Governor Ron DeSantis went even further, delivering one of the bleakest assessments of the party’s prospects and warning that the damage could last into the 2030s. “Dems will get 55 Senate seats and 250+ House seats,” Mr. DeSantis wrote on social media Wednesday, predicting Republicans were unlikely to recapture Congress by 2028 and “might not have a shot at Senate control until 2032.” He said there was “zero” chance of confirming a conservative successor to Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito for the remainder of Mr. Trump’s term — and “probably zero” even under a future Republican president. Mr. DeSantis pointed to the administration’s handling of immigration enforcement and the Iran war as the two policies that most eroded support, criticizing the choice of Kristi Noem to lead enforcement efforts and accusing Republicans of “gaslighting” voters about the war’s effect on gas prices.Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in Michigan, told The Times that Mr. Trump had “almost dared Americans to vote against him,” closing the campaign with what Mr. Roe called a “greatest hits tour on every annoying thing that could be done to aggravate the American people.” Mr. Roe called the president’s explanation for the loss “ridiculous” and said Mr. Trump was “the engineer of the Republican collapse.”The scale of the defeat stunned even seasoned operatives. Democrats won Senate seats in states Republicans had held for decades, including Kansas, which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, and Texas, where the party hadn’t won statewide in more than 30 years. “It’s on him. It’s not on anybody else. It’s a total, complete rejection of President Trump,” a top Republican lobbyist in Texas, Bill Miller, told the BBC. “This is a disaster of the first magnitude. Nobody saw it coming like this.”Other Republicans placed blame on weak campaigns rather than the president alone. A Texas operative told the BBC that Mr. Paxton ran “the worst Senate campaign in the country from either side of the aisle,” while his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, ran “a really good and smart campaign.” Still, Dick Wadhams, a Republican consultant in Colorado, said it was “ironic” for Mr. Trump to deflect blame given that most of the candidates who lost key Senate races in conservative states were recruited or endorsed by the president himself. “This was not a pro-Democratic vote,” he told The Times. “This was an anti-Trump vote.”Not all Republicans turned on the president. House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Mr. Trump forcefully, saying Democrats “truly do have Trump derangement syndrome,” while Senate Majority Leader John Thune issued a statement touting the party’s accomplishments without acknowledging the losses. Mr. Trump, for his part, suggested on Fox News that voters “didn’t like the candidates” he endorsed because “some of the candidates that I endorsed fought me,” and his base “didn’t like that they fought me.”

Republicans Turn on Trump as Midterm Wipeout Ignites Blame Game

Republicans Turn on Trump as Midterm Wipeout Ignites Blame Game

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