A prominent conservative writer says President Donald Trump has no one to blame but himself for Republicans’ crushing midterm losses, and he’s floating a familiar name to lead the party out of the wreckage.
“Two years after his triumphant popular-vote victory, Donald Trump got whupped on Election Night,” Dan McLaughlin wrote in an analysis for the Daily Mail. “Make no mistake, this was a repudiation of the President.”
McLaughlin pointed to exit polls showing that only 16 percent of voters turned out to support Trump, while 43 percent said they voted to oppose him, 65 percent said his policies had made the economy worse, and 55 percent said he lacked the mental capacity for the job.
“None of this had to happen,” McLaughlin lamented.
He argued that Trump abandoned the formula that worked in his first term. Tariffs and the Iran War drove up prices “most importantly of all, for drivers at the gas pumps,” while ICE sweeps “led to deadly shootings of American citizens.”
McLaughlin also faulted Trump for steamrolling Congress, refusing to let lawmakers vote on tariffs or approve the war in Iran. Instead, he wrote, Trump “picked pointless fights with Canada and Denmark over Greenland and spent his energy on vanity projects [such as] the Kennedy Center, the triumphal arch, the ballroom and the Gulf of America.”
He said Trump’s “heavy-handed aversion to dissent” drove Republicans like Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) into retirement, and their seats went to Democrats, while his hand-picked candidates flopped.
“It was too perfect a metaphor that Trump spent his last speech of this 2026 midterm campaign at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, gazing at his renovation, entranced like the mythical Narcissus by his reflection in his own works,” McLaughlin wrote.
As for who leads Republicans “out of the wilderness,” McLaughlin said Secretary of State Marco Rubio is too closely tied to the Iran War. Instead, he pointed to outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who “emerged on Tuesday unmarked by the defeat.”
DeSantis’ Senate pick, Ashley Moody, won re-election, Republicans held the Florida governorship with Rep. Byron Donalds, and his property-tax ballot measure appears to have passed. And in interviews, McLaughlin wrote, DeSantis “sounds like a man free to criticize Trump’s foreign and domestic policies.”
“Maybe right-leaning Americans are now ready for something different, more focused and more competent,” McLaughlin wrote.