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I’m really struck by how much tonight’s GOP debacle reflects President Donald Trump’s bad decisions — on policy, on candidates and on his midterm redistricting ploy.
Voters, including many who supported him two years ago, offered an emphatic thumbs down on his signature initiatives — especially tariffs and his impulsive attack on Iran — which have made working families’ cost-of-living crisis worse. Then there’s Trump’s spectacularly bad judgment in foisting weak candidates — like Ken Paxton, Michael Whatley, Darline Graham and Vivek Ramaswamy — on his party. He sure can’t pick ’em! This enabled Democrats to pull off stunning upsets deep in the red zone and perhaps create more battleground states. Nor have the president’s imperious instructions to GOP state leaders to gerrymander their way to victory paid off. In fact, it appears that Republicans are even managing to lose races in districts redrawn to give them a supposedly insurmountable advantage.
Midterm setbacks are common, but it’s hard to think of another midterm election in which a sitting president did more to create the basic conditions for his party’s sweeping defeat. This is a catastrophe for Trump and for Republicans who have obeyed him with cultish fervor.
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