It was not yet 11 o’clock good afternoon On election night—almost the worst election night ever for the sitting president’s party—Donald Trump spoke for the first time. For weeks, he has traveled the country insisting that voters behave as if he were on the ballot and that the campaign should be a referendum on him and his policies. But Trump’s first reaction was to deny all responsibility. “I was not on the ballot. If I had been, we would have won by a landslide!” he posted defiantly. Minutes later, he blamed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for losing his election, claiming that one of the country’s most conservative politicians was defeated because Abbott had become a “green man” – a Republican in name only. Minutes later, Trump posted a picture of a red baseball cap with the words “veto” Just before midnight, he said it was all because of his former favorite television network. “Fox News,” he complained, “is responsible for these losses by continually and persistently attacking Dumocrat’s opposition, and worse.”
Yes, we get it. He won’t go quietly. He won’t accept blame. A failed Trump is still Trump. “I shouldn’t feel guilty,” he told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “It’s just a point in time.”
But the scale of Tuesday night’s reckoning exceeded even his ability to lie, cover up and evade. It’s really hard to steal an election when voters across America reject you. These are the president’s own voters, in states he won by huge margins just a few years ago. On Wednesday morning, J.D. Vance admitted that it wasn’t that Republicans didn’t show up, but that they did show up. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026,” he wrote on social media. Reality, even if only temporarily, would burst the White House bubble. Even Trump and his cronies know that Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas did not conspire together to rig the outcome. This blue wave of justice is made in red America.
No matter what he says in the future — and I have no doubt he will spend years pretending that what just happened didn’t happen — Trump knows it, too. While the scale of his devastation is still becoming clear, he told reporters era He is “absolutely willing” to accept the results of his preparations for the past two years.
The 2026 midterm elections will be remembered now and forever as one of the most decisive rejections of an American president since Richard Nixon climbed aboard that helicopter in 1974. Republicans losing the House by 35 seats or more and the Senate by as many as eight seats (which now seems a very real possibility) have only happened once since World War II: in 1958. That campaign is a far cry from the 2026 referendum. The dangerous rhetoric, destructive behavior and bizarre personal preferences of those in the White House.
Trump’s insistence on making the election so uniquely about himself is unsurprising, but it’s a Greek tragedy blunder—the epic soliloquy of Narcissus on the National Mall that can only be read as a direct repudiation of the president. Republicans in Washington have failed miserably over the past two years in defending the country from the depredations of their party leaders, but Republican voters across the country — at least enough of them — have acknowledged their mistakes and taken some significant action to right them. as Maga As Fox News pundits struggle to find words to explain a catastrophe they don’t want to admit is coming, much of the clarity can be found in viral clips of ordinary Republican voters interviewed in polls, clear and most obviously, a sense of moral repugnance: They no longer want Trump, his policies or his party.