Republicans Are About to Pay for Trump’s Mistakes

 

Republicans Are About to Pay for Trump’s Mistakes

 

Tariffs, a costly war and political vendettas have left Republicans scrambling to defend their congressional majorities.

President Donald Trump owns this upcoming defeat, the author writes.

 

By Jonathan Martin11/03/2026 12:01 AM EST

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/11/03/republicans-2026-blame-trump-01145671

 

Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.

When it becomes clear Tuesday night or Wednesday morning that Republicans have taken “a thumper,” to borrow Bill Clinton’s phrase, President Donald Trump will lunge for scapegoats.

Trump will claim Republican candidates should have embraced him more, that Democrats cheated and that their losses could have been avoided if only Senate GOP Leader John Thune had waved a big, beautiful wand and passed a voter ID bill.

Don’t believe a word of it.

Presidents from both parties have suffered midterm shellackings, but never until 2026 has a president been so single-handedly responsible for the wave that’s about to crash over the GOP.

Trump owns this upcoming defeat — and he seemed determined to prove as much by using election eve to stand in front of the Reflecting Pool and remind every undecided voter that he’s more interested in his vanity projects than their needs.

By commission and omission, he kneecapped Republican candidates, torpedoed the party brand and allowed a leaderless opposition mired in factional fights to stage a Truman ’48-style comeback two years after they lost every swing state. After forging a diverse 2024 coalition that, if it held, would have broken the back of the Democratic Party, Trump showed no interest in sustaining the alliance he had created. It will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in American political history.

The story of this midterm will be written by the voters who Trump drove away from his column — Black, Hispanic and young people, and the Republicans who tolerated his buffoonery as long as he kept the economy afloat and didn’t plunge the country into costly wars.

He did neither. And when the election season neared, he sent his party toward machine gun nests armed with butter knives.

To this day, could a single elected Republican tell you what their agenda is for the next two years? There was no plan, no platform and no vision — a party left to one man’s hourly whims.

In fact, the most coherent proposal presented by Trump this year was straight bribery. Or, to be more creative in the Chicago spirit, ex post facto walking-around money. What else to call the president’s September stunner, which caught the ostensible GOP congressional leaders by surprise, that if Republicans retained power they’d dust off every American adult with $5,000. Vote GOP, and you can get your beak wet — not exactly from the Adam Smith canon, was it?

The only actual consistent message the rest of the fall from the office of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln is that Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) has a nice ass.

But let’s back up.

The big-ticket items are as glaring as they were entirely avoidable: tariffs; a war of choice that sent gas prices soaring; and frittering away his best issue, immigration, by sending ICE agents to restaurant kitchens and suburban rooftops as if they had just hopped out the chopper in Abbottabad in search of Osama bin Laden.

Trump then compounded these mistakes by largely flooring it past innumerable off-ramps to lessen the political damage he had brought upon himself and Republicans with these decisions.

He has instead focused on a series of Washington-area property renovations, decorations and dedications to himself. These projects are amusing to snicker about, and perhaps the most benign way for Trump to spend his time, but they of course only hurt his party’s fortunes. The obsession tells voters about his priorities. As I wrote late last year, these are 12-year-old boy indulgences, Tom Hanks in “Big” and ice cream sundaes for dinner stuff.

Yet Trump does enjoy the power game elements of politics. So let’s tally up the bill he ran up for Republicans this election cycle.

First, he insisted on a mid-decade gerrymander scheme — one that few in Congress craved — to protect the House majority. This, inevitably, prompted Democrats in blue states to do the same with their boundaries, largely mitigating potential gains. But it also, just as inevitably, angered Black voters who saw the power grab as potentially diluting their power (same as when they saw the unceremonious firing of a series of Black general officers in the military). In slicing the lines thinner, Trump’s lieutenants also imperiled GOP incumbents who were pushed into a brutal election season with fewer Republican voters on offer.

And what about the Senate, which at the start of 2025 seemed sure to remain in GOP hands given the seemingly friendly map this year? Well, let’s start with the only two of 22 states Republicans were defending this year that Trump didn’t win by double digits in 2024 (yes, you read that right).

Trump ran off North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis in 2025 over a legislative spat, and once Tillis announced his retirement, why, it sure became easier to lure former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper into the race. Who did Trump choose as the Tillis replacement in a state full of ambitious Republicans? After his daughter-in-law, Lara, declined the job, he turned to his RNC chairman, who had next to zero profile with North Carolina voters.

Then there’s Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins has defied political gravity for thirty years in the sprawling and trade-heavy state. But that got a lot harder this year with the spike in diesel prices, an ICE agents shooting a man in Biddeford and then Trump’s late-summer decision to revive a trade war with Canada and attempt to rename Lake Ontario.

But surely, Republicans would hold the majority as long as they retained red states such as Texas, Louisiana and South Carolina? Well, Trump pushed out multi-term incumbents in Texas and Louisiana, and then he turned a nice gesture — appointing the late Lindsey Graham’s sister to his seat — into a white-knuckle ride by nudging her to run for the full term.

Besides the repeated Senate interventions, Trump also used his time in party purges that demonstrated his intra-party strength but did nothing to ensure the party’s congressional majorities. Running off Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and a handful of Indiana state senators? Congratulations. Displays on the Battle of Fort Wayne will no doubt kill at the future Trump Library.

The flip side of his loyalty tests was undercutting his party’s Democrats-are-Bolsheviks messaging by repeatedly swooning over the most prominent democratic socialist in America, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Then there were those who didn’t run, in part because of their own choices but also because they didn’t want to bow and scrape to MAGA. Who-coulda-been is a long list, but let’s leave it at Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, whose decision effectively ensured Sen. Jon Ossoff’s re-election.

For those who did run, Trump’s idea of help was holding rallies with them, in which he droned on about good-looking guys in the crowd or how Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), locked in a must-win Senate race, had lost a lot of weight — without the help of GLP-1. You can’t make this stuff up.

Now, let’s give Trump Inc. some credit. They stopped the president from routinely ridiculing their most at-risk incumbent, Susan Collins.

And they didn’t sit on their war chest. The president allowed the money he had raised to be spent for his party’s candidates. The problem was that the green light didn’t come until after the summer, when it was clear after the collapse of the Iran MOU that Republicans were confronting a rising blue wave.

And what were he and his aides doing all year long?

Exacerbating voters’ biggest concerns: about the cost of living, immigration, corruption and data centers. Imagine if Trump had made a show of firing, say DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, instead of just shuffling her to another job. Or consider if he had told Stephen Miller who was really in charge. Or if Trump had offered grace to GOP governors facing pressure on data centers and in need of a special session to show their concern over the issue. Or, get this, what if he had cashiered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before the midterms and sent a statement about the war.

Speaking of sins of omission, I wrote this in August, and it looms even larger now: The biggest difference between this midterm and that in 2018 was the GOP lacked a good, base-motivating court fight.

How did Trump, not exactly a respecter of separation of powers norms, never offer Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito an offer they couldn’t refuse? Or even try.

It’s not as clean-cut with the Fed, because the markets may have revolted, but you would have thought this time last year Trump would pick a chair who shared his dovish views on interest rates and would have pushed for lower interest rates headed into the election.

I’ll end with this, as Peggy Noonan would say. In her column this past weekend, Noonan pleaded for a thorough and clean stomping to help begin the GOP’s reformation. It was the latest, and most public, example of what has been a recurring theme among Republican professionals: a quiet prayer for a good ass-kicking.

Thanks mostly to your great president, that wish is about to come true.