I’m positive Trump planned to swagger out on the stage Wednesday and take credit for the red tsunami and especially congratulate himself on the landslides enjoyed by Dr. Oz, Tudor Dixon, Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano, Joe Kent, Adam Laxalt, John Gibbs, Mark Finchem, Kristina Karamo, Bo Hines, J.R. Majewski, Herschel Walker, Tim Michels, Karoline Leavitt, Kari Lake, Darren Bailey, Matthew DePerno and the rest of Team Trump. But there were no landslides… except against some of these MAGAts. And there was no swaggering out on a stage on Wednesday… or since. Instead, Trump has been defending himself and trying to deflect the blame for the Republican midterm disaster that is leaving the Senate in Democratic hands and the House still too close to call, but likely to leave whichever party wins less than a 3 seat margin!
His strategy now seems to be to place the blame on Mitch McConnell, something both sociopath Stephen Miller and Trump himself trumpeted yesterday:
This YouGov polling that was released yesterday is pretty interesting. Polled after the disappointing midterm results, it shows-- and for the for the first time-- that more Republicans and independents who lean Republican would like to see Ron DeSantis as the 2024 nominee than see the suddenly less beloved Señor Trumpanzee run again. And this is even before the ugly racist "tweet" Trump sent out on his failing social media platform about "Coco Chow" yesterday.
In his Atlantic column yesterday, David From wrote that though there were some “affirmative reasons to vote Democratic… it’s hard to miss the strong smell here of a thorough repudiation, up and down the ballot, of the post-Trump Republican Party, of the January 6 insurrectionists, and of a cultural agenda that seems to many Americans regressive and repressive… In every way you can measure, 2022 was a crushing repudiation— not only of Trump personally or of Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was corrupted, but of the larger Republican Party. For the first time since 1934, the party of the president lost not a single state legislature in a midterm year— and actually made gains in the Midwest: Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Every last one of the candidates running for offices to control elections who endorsed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election went down in defeat, as did up-ballot election deniers such as Blake Masters in the Arizona Senate contest and Lee Zeldin, who ran for governor in an otherwise good Republican year in New York.”
A Democrat won a Trump district in Washington State from a MAGA Republican who, having primaried the moderate Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler out of the seat she won in 2020 by 13 points, drove away GOP voters by blaming the January 6 attack on the FBI and defending the attackers as “political prisoners.” Supporters of abortion rights won all six contests where the issue was on the ballot: Kansas in August, then California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont in November.
Oh… and Trump’s candidate for GOP leader, Rick Scott, did as well. Scott is the head of the NRSC and he did an awful job and is eager to shift the blame away from himself and onto McConnell. Yesterday he was on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo talking about the letter he, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson are using to postpone the leadership vote so that they will have more time to undercut McConnell.
He’s still bitter because McConnell squashed his attempt to have the GOP run on a platform that included abolishing Social Security. He told Bartiromo’s audience that he’s a businessman— which is funny since his time as a businessman resulted in the biggest fines in history being leveled against his business— and that the GOP doesn’t run like a business. “What is our plan? What are we running on? What do we stand for? What are we hell-bent to get done? There’s no plan to do that. The leadership in the Republican Senate says, ‘No, you cannot have a plan. We’re just going to run against how bad the Democrats are.’ And, actually, then they cave into the Democrats.”
He's clearly getting his talking points directly from Mar-a-Lago in a very coordinated effort to displace McConnell as minority leader. I suspect that a sizable majority of Republicans in the Senate have no interest at all in turning the party caucus into a MAGA-Bund outfit under Trump's thrall, not after they watched almost all the Trump-selected MAGA Senate candidates, from Mehmet Oz (PA) and Don Bolduc (NH) on the east coast to Adam Laxalt (NV), Blake Masters (AZ) and Tiffany Smiley (WA) out West, all go down in flames, Bolduc by 10 points, Smiley by 14 points. Republican senators have their own careers to worry about and no one is eager to go the way of Trump Steaks, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka or... the New Jersey Generals.