The sandy dunes of Republican midterm prospects just turned to glass, and President Trump and his neocon handlers are desperate to blame the electoral A-bomb on everyone else. But the fundamental cause and effect are clear: In a misguided bid to disarm Iran, Iran nuked us after all.
Warmongers, establishment Republicans, and Trump’s most ardent defenders will blame “candidate quality.” They’ll say this was expected because midterms are traditionally rough for the party in power. And, of course, some of the blame falls on worse-than-useless Senate Republicans, who failed to deliver on even widely supported legislation such as the SAVE Act despite a GOP trifecta.
But while most Republicans expected a beating, this was a bloodbath. Democrats not only flipped the House of Representatives and the Senate, but they did so with candidates such as James “God is nonbinary” Talarico in Texas and Muslim Brotherhood-connected Abdul El-Sayed in the Midwest. Too many red states saw major upsets, including Kansas, South Carolina, and, most disturbingly, Texas — three states that haven’t had a Democrat senator in decades. Not even Republican Gov. Greg Abbott could hold onto his seat in the Lone Star State. Ohio flipped blue, as did North Carolina, Georgia, and Iowa.
Trump told Americans to vote as if he were on the ballot, and unfortunately they did. Exit polls show a whopping 74 percent of voters said Trump’s war in Iran was a major or crucial factor in their votes for members of Congress, and it’s obvious why. By directly driving up fuel prices, the Iran war has also raised prices across the board and made Americans’ everyday lives more difficult. Voters always pay the freight. Raymond James Research showed how Trump’s approval rating shares a nearly perfectly inverse relationship with the price of gasoline.
Republicans can’t convincingly pitch “affordability” when their latest war in the Middle East is putting the squeeze on Americans from every direction. Trump is delivering remarkably on deportations. He’s honoring his commitment to law and order. Violent crime rates under this administration are in freefall, and patriotism is in vogue. This administration deserves credit for all of those things and more. But it really is the economy, stupid.
Just as Anthony Fauci exploited Trump’s germophobia and helped tank his first term with devastating lockdowns, war-hungry Republicans hijacked Trump’s current term with ill-advised foreign entanglements. And that’s how regime-change adventurism on the other side of the world caused a devastating regime change here.
Things seem politically bleak for Republicans and the country in the foreseeable future. Democrats have been brazen about their plans to pack the Supreme Court; grant statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, which would give them even more congressional representation; codify Roe v. Wade as the law of the land; nuke the filibuster; hamper immigration enforcement and import Third World voters; and plenty more horrors the moment they’re back in control. In short, they’re determined to rig the game to maintain their power in perpetuity.
That means it will likely be even harder for Republicans to win the next time around. The GOP’s only potential path to future victory — if they even want it — is to reject the failed foreign policy of forever wars and return to the ethos that made MAGA so great: smart economics, pro-tradition, law and order, strong borders, America first. That’s how Trump broke from business-as-usual GOP politics to win in 2016 and 2024, and it’s likely the only hope of winning in the future.
Back in January, George W. Bush’s ex-speechwriter Marc Thiessen — just one among a chorus of neocons tempting the president toward another war in the Middle East — wrote, “There is no U.S. downside to striking the Iranian regime.” He went on to confidently predict that before year’s end, Trump would “visit a free Tehran — and receive a hero’s welcome from the Iranian people.”
Well, the year is almost out, the midterms provided a reckoning, and there’s no hero’s welcome abroad or at home. Instead of sticking their tails between their legs and slinking into the shadows, the same chorus of warmongers is already clamoring that the deep-blue spanking America experienced Tuesday is not their fault.
Indeed, it is. Don’t forget it.
