US President Donald Trump looks on on the day the final steel beam goes into the ballroom, at the White House in Washington, DC, US, November 4, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
Republican operatives are tearing into President Donald Trump’s inner circle after Tuesday’s historic midterm losses, and some are saying out loud that the people responsible deserve to be cast out.
“In any civilized society, we would set them on an ice floe and push it out into the middle passage,” a Republican pollster told New York magazine’s Intelligencer. “But they’re like cockroaches.”
The pollster described a “criminal laziness” running through the party, with slavish devotion to Trump producing “god-awful” candidates and poor messaging, but that person did identify one silver lining in the purge of some of the party’s worst candidates, including Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton.
“Well, we’re at rock bottom,” the pollster said, “but there are a lot fewer guys around to dig.”
As Democrat James Talarico closed in on victory in Texas, angry texts poured in from GOP operatives who saw out-of-touch party elites getting rich while everyone else absorbed catastrophic losses, Intelligencer reported.
“Susie Wiles, James Blair, and Chris LaCivita have proven themselves to be historic – losing South Carolina, Texas, and Kansas,” one GOP strategist said, naming three of Trump’s closest advisers. “Trump has truly hired the dumbest people.”
Another operative, who had polled nearly every competitive House district, blamed Rep. Richard Hudson, who ran the National Republican Congressional Committee and lost his own North Carolina seat to Democrat Richard Ojeda.
“Absolute embarrassment for Richard Hudson, Hudson’s NRCC, and the White House,” the operative said. “They hand-picked a lot of their candidates, took huge swings, such as starting the redistricting war, and it all blew up in their faces.”
Even a Trump-aligned strategist conceded “significant messaging failures across the board” and “significant unforced errors.”
Operatives said the bottom fell out after Labor Day, when voters tuned in and saw Trump “focusing on everything except their own bottom lines.”
Trump’s closing speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where he spent much of his time musing about marble and grass, captured the problem, one operative said.
“Trump focused on vanity projects instead of continuing to focus on affordability and growing the economy,” the operative said.
A Republican official leading one of the top Senate campaigns texted simply: “Really something.”
Even independent men, one of Trump’s strongest groups in 2024, abandoned the party.
“Across the board, the shift among this demo that voted strongly for Trump is alarming, 30 to 40 points in a lot of places,” an operative said.