Just two years ago, Donald Trump romped to victory in a sweep of the popular vote and seven battleground states that left Republicans confident—even arrogant—that their grip on power was impregnable, at least through the president’s second term. That confidence has been shattered by voters who put Trump back in the White House but made clear in Tuesday’s midterm elections that they are through with MAGA.
On Wednesday, the mood inside the White House was bleak. Aides and other officials had expected to lose, but not this badly. Many were caught extremely off guard by the Democratic sweep, a person familiar with the matter told The Free Press, and were stunned by the Democratic Party’s historic gains in the deepest red territory. The most jaw-dropping examples include James Talarico’s double-digit Senate win in Texas, the defeat of Senator Darline Graham in South Carolina by Annie Andrews, who has never held elected office, and a comfortable flip of a Senate seat in Kansas to the Democrats for the first time since 1932.
Now comes the circular GOP firing squad about what went wrong—and the big question of how the party can rebuild.
Already, there is an emerging cohort of Republicans who believe that the blue tsunami should be attributed solely to the war in Iran, which led to steep increases in gasoline and diesel fuel prices. “Iran was a piece of it,” President Trump admitted to The Wall Street Journal as election results rolled in on Tuesday. Still, he said that he “did the right thing” and “would have done it again.”
The president’s concession gave Vice President J.D. Vance, widely seen as the early Republican presidential favorite for 2028, the permission structure to say out loud what he has been thinking for months: that the Iran war has been a political catastrophe for the GOP, and it’s past time to end it.
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