It wasn’t even 11 P.M. on Election Night—the worst Election Night for an incumbent President’s party pretty much ever—when Donald Trump weighed in for the first time. For weeks he had travelled the country, insisting that voters act as though he were on the ballot and that the campaign should be a referendum on him and his policies. But Trump’s first response was to disclaim all responsibility. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted defiantly. A few minutes later, he blamed the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, for losing his own race, claiming that one of the most conservative politicians in the country had been defeated because Abbott had become “a RINO”—a Republican in name only. A few minutes after that, Trump posted an image of a red baseball cap with the word “VETO” emblazoned on it. By just before midnight, he was saying it was all because of his formerly favorite TV network. “Fox News,” he complained, “bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”
Yes, we get it. He’s not going to go quietly. He’s not going to accept blame. Trump in defeat is still Trump. “I shouldn’t feel guilty,” he told Bret Baier, of Fox News. “It’s just a point in time.”
But the scale of Tuesday night’s reckoning defies even his ability to lie, dissemble, and generally squirm his way out of it. It is really hard to steal an election when voters all across America reject you. These were the President’s own voters, in states where he won by huge margins just a couple of years ago. By Wednesday morning, J. D. Vance admitted it wasn’t that Republicans failed to show up but that they did. “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, if only temporarily, burst the White House bubble. Even Trump and his cronies know that Iowa and Kansas and Michigan and North Carolina and South Carolina and Texas did not all conspire together to rig the outcome. This righteous blue wave was made in red America.
Whatever he may say later—and I have no doubt he will spend years pretending that what just happened somehow did not just happen—Trump knows it, too. Even as the scale of the disaster for him was still becoming clear, he told the Times that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results that he’d spent the past two years preparing to contest.
For now and for forever, the midterm election of 2026 will be known as one of the most decisive rejections of an American President since long before Richard Nixon got on that helicopter in 1974. Republicans losing both the House by thirty-five or more seats and the Senate by as many as eight seats—which now seems like a very real possibility—has happened only once since the Second World War: in 1958. And that campaign wasn’t anything close to the 2026 referendum on the dangerous words, disruptive actions, and bizarre personal preferences of the man in the White House.
Trump’s insistence on making the election so singularly about himself was not a surprise, but it was an error right out of a Greek tragedy—an epic self-own by the Narcissus of the National Mall that could be read only as a direct disavowal of the President. Republicans in Washington these past two years failed spectacularly when it came to defending the nation from the depredations of their party’s leader, but Republican voters around the country—enough of them, at least—admitted their mistake and did something big to rectify it. As the MAGA pundits on Fox News struggled for words to explain the calamity that they had not wanted to admit was coming, there was much clarity to be found in the viral clips of regular Republican voters interviewed at the polls, clarity and the clearest possible sense of moral revulsion: they did not want Trump, his policies, or his party anymore.
