Republicans are finally paying the price that party leaders predicted when they first nominated Donald Trump, and there’s no clear path out of the hole he’s dug for them, according to a new analysis.

On the night Trump clinched the GOP nomination in May 2016, then-Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it," and Vox's Eric Levitz observed that finally proved true.

“On Tuesday night, the reckoning that Graham had prophesied finally arrived, just a decade behind schedule,” Levitz wrote.

Democrats appear set to win nine of the cycle’s top 10 Senate battlegrounds, including longtime GOP strongholds Kansas, Texas and South Carolina, and are favored in Alaska. They are on track for at least 255 House seats, and analysts expect their share of the national congressional vote to be the largest for either party since the 1970s.

Among the casualties was Graham’s own sister, Darline, whom Trump hand-picked to run for the late senator’s seat in South Carolina.

Levitz credits part of the rout to economic pain, noting Trump “showed less than zero interest” in the cost of living, driving up prices with tariffs and a war in Iran that sparked a global energy crisis.

But the economy alone can’t explain a wave this large, he argued. Inflation was over 7 percent when Joe Biden suffered a much smaller midterm rebuke in 2022.

Instead, Levitz wrote, “the cruel and authoritarian character of Trump’s political project was more naked over the past two years than ever before,” including white nationalist slogans posted from federal agency accounts and indiscriminate ICE raids. Latino counties swung massively against Republicans, and Trump’s willingness to condone ICE agents’ killing of two U.S. citizens may have energized his opposition “to an unprecedented extent.”

Now Republicans must figure out how to escape, according to the analysis.

“The party plainly needs to distinguish its brand from the president’s,” Levitz wrote. “Yet its remaining elected officials are overwhelmingly from deeply pro-Trump jurisdictions. And unlike George W. Bush after 2008, Trump is unlikely to quietly abide his party disowning him.”

The defeat may at least make future GOP leaders think twice, Levitz argued. The next one “may hesitate before launching new trade (or actual) wars, winking at neo-Nazis, or letting federal agents execute American citizens.”

“The political costs of Trumpism were, in fact, exceptionally high,” he concluded. “It just took 10 years for the bill to come due.”

Donald Trump’s last appeal to midterm voters, held at the base of the Lincoln Memorial with the Reflecting Pool as a backdrop, exposed the fact that the restoration is already deteriorating, the Washington Post reported.

During his speech, Trump bragged about the renovation. “We fixed the leaks, we resurfaced the bottom in a beautiful dark blue,” he said, adding that it had been finished in “the strongest coating you can get.”

Right after the speech, two Washington Post reporters walked the entire perimeter of the reopened pool. They found several spots where the coating appeared to be "cracked or starting to peel." In at least 20 other areas, the color was "noticeably uneven, streaked with light blue" instead of the “American flag blue” Trump touted.

Alerted by the Post, the Interior Department responded with an unsigned email full of praise for the president.

“The Reflecting Pool has never look this beautiful and it’s all thanks to President Donald J. Trump,” a spokesperson wrote. “He’s an expert builder who was able to repair the pool in ways Obama and Biden could never even dream of.”

The spokesperson blamed the light-blue patches on “surplus coating” that would “fade away or be lightly scrubbed off.” Shown photos of the apparent cracking, the spokesperson called them “stray pieces … left over from the renovation and needed repairs due to deranged vandalism,” and said they would be picked up.

The cause of the flaws isn’t clear, according to the report. But two people with knowledge of the situation told the Post that the National Park Service "knew early last week" about uneven coloring in areas that had already been repaired a second time.

Republicans warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a “reckoning” is coming as Democrats prepare to take over both chambers of Congress.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) delivered the warning on CBS News on election night, as results showed Democrats winning the House and the Senate.

Tillis tied his warning to the Pentagon money that the outgoing Republican Congress still has to pass.

“Pete Hegseth has a reckoning,” Tillis told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan. “He is one of the reasons why we don’t have the funding or guarantee for defense that we need.”

Citing Tillis' remarks, The Daily Beast concluded that fallout would be a "nightmare" for Hegseth.

The defense secretary also faces impeachment, and the latest push comes from a fellow Republican. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) filed eight articles of impeachment in September, accusing Hegseth of launching an illegal war in Iran that Congress never approved.

“If he’s still SecDef,” Massie wrote on X in October, describing his answer when a reporter asked whether he would bring the articles back once Congress returns. He told Roll Call his impeachment resolution had a “better than a 50 percent chance of passing.”

Starting in January, Democrats will control the House, where impeachment takes only a simple majority.

“The Democratic hammer is about to come down hard on Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth,” Punchbowl News defense reporter Briana Reilly wrote on X.

That gives Hegseth two impeachment threats to survive, a lame-duck vote that needs Republicans to join Massie and a Democratic House that could act on its own after January.

“Lawyer up,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the incoming House Oversight Committee chairman, said in a statement after Democrats won the House. The statement said he has vowed to take on the “Trump Crime Family.”

“Hegseth can resign, get fired, or get impeached. There is no 4th option,” MeidasTouch editor Ron Filipkowski wrote on X.

“They get to impeach. So they’re going to impeach everybody. They already have a list,” far-right streamer Nick Fuentes said on his podcast after the results came in. “They’re going to impeach Trump. They’re going to impeach Hegseth. They’re going to impeach probably RFK Jr., Vance. They’re gonna go for everybody.”

Tillis and Massie are not the only Republicans who have criticized Hegseth.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) all told The Hill last month that they learned of Hegseth’s latest cuts to the ranks of generals and admirals only shortly before he announced them. Collins called the cuts “deeply troubling.”

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) has called Hegseth “more of a performer than he is a leader,” though he told CNN he is leaning against impeachment.

All three still vote in the lame-duck session, where Massie wants his impeachment vote and Tillis wants the Pentagon funded.

“I think he’s terrific actually,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal on election night about Hegseth, even as he acknowledged the Iran war was part of why Republicans lost.

However, The Atlantic reported that Trump is “searching for a scapegoat” and has focused on those who told him the war would be quick and decisive. Hegseth was among the most publicly optimistic in the war’s early stages, it reported.

To add to Hegseth's humiliation, Democrat Nancy Lacore, a former Navy admiral Hegseth fired, was projected to flip a House seat in a South Carolina district Trump won by 13 points after a campaign.