In a perfectly predictable fashion, President Donald J. Trump presided over one of the worst electoral defeats the Republican Party has ever experienced in any Midterm election.
Usually, these elections have lower voter turnout rates than the presidential elections every four years.
Donald Trump October 2026 White House Handout
President Donald Trump thanks the crowd after remarks at the Salute to America Celebration, Thursday, July 3, 2025, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Still, the historic turnout has completely reshaped and redefined the electoral map, and is likely a portent of the next several years–if not decades–in American politics.
Republicans are dazed.
President Trump appears in denial, oscillating between raging against Fox News and reassuring himself that he may have lost Texas, but gained Greenland.
Misreading the Room
It’s all so pathetic for a party that came back from the doldrums of the pandemic and January 6 and was returned to power only two years ago with historic majorities.
Those majorities have been utterly reversed.
And some of us were warning the Republican Party that unless they desisted from their preferred policies of tax cuts for the rich and more Middle East wars, they were going to lose in the 2026 Midterms.
Through it all, though, the GOP has avoided fully acknowledging how and why they lost.
It comes down to one thing.
And, in a moment of lucidity, the president somewhat acknowledged this reality.
Trump told multiple outlets in the last 24 hours–including Fox News and The Wall Street Journal–that the Iran War, now entering its ninth month, was a liability for Republicans.
However, the president refused to say he regretted the decision to launch the war of choice on February 28.
Before the war began, inflation was coming down, and the economy was improving after four years of the pandemic fallout and the Biden administration’s excessive spending.
Like a nuclear bomb going off throughout the economy, though, the decision to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran without congressional authorization or without any intelligence corroborating the president’s decision to go to war completely reversed the positive trends that were being experienced in the economy.
In a bizarre interview with Fox News, Trump claimed that the American people supported his war of choice against Iran but could not bear the economic consequences.
Trump completely misread the room.
That’s surprising, considering how easy it used to be for him to know what worried Americans.
That’s likely because his courtiers have painfully insulated him.
He’s lost his touch and his connection to the ordinary American.
It shows.
Rather than acknowledge this reality, he’s lashing out, downplaying the truth, and then blaming voters.
People felt that this last year, watching the price of gasoline reach record highs, experiencing the inflation genie being released once more from the bottle because of the war, and living in constant fear as to whether Trump would start World War III because he was in a bad mood.
Rather than acknowledge that his decision for war was the cause of his electoral defeat, Trump spoke around it. Yes, he acknowledged the war.
But he said it “played a role.” Then he spoke to Fox News about gasoline prices being the cause, as if the spikes in the price of gasoline were somehow divorced from his decision to start that war.
The Greatest Lame Duck President Ever
The Republican Party’s losses could easily be generational. Democrats captured Republican-held Senate seats in several key battleground states.
Democrats turned Texas, South Carolina, and Kansas blue! And Democrats didn’t just take both houses of Congress.
The Democrats won key governors’ races, and in many states they flipped solidly red districts, putting major wins in state legislative races, too.
Because of the Democrats’ victory in the House and Senate, the president is a lame duck. In fact, he’s more than a lame duck. He’s a failed president.
The American people resoundingly rejected him and his MAGA movement, which had become increasingly bellicose and detached from the needs of Americans.
The great realignment is here.
Weirdly, Trump made that realignment possible.
But there will be no going back to the way things were–anymore than there will be a way to go back to the neoliberalism of the 1990s and early 2000s that Trump’s rise to power in 2016 took us away from.
Bad Decisions Have Real Consequences
And it is all because Trump decided to start the one war he promised us he’d never start.
He did it without debate or much thought.
Now, the Trump revolution will evaporate, and he will be essentially a hostage in the White House, as an overwhelmingly adversarial, Democratic Congress strips his power to do much of anything.
The next two years will be defined by investigation after investigation, all leading to the election of the next Democratic president, where the Left will run the country with little opposition from a Right wing that is gutted and has discredited itself.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert is the Senior National Security Editor at 19FortyFive.com. He also manages The Weichert Brief on Substack. Weichert is the co-host of The Mario Nawfal Show on Twitter/X. He is the author of four bestselling national security books, most recently A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine (Encounter Books). His next book, Fortress Americas: A New Monroe Doctrine (Tucker Carlson Books), is due out December 8. Follow him via Twitter/X @WeTheBrandon.
