It was not a surprising first reaction from Donald Trump after getting his ass handed to him in a Democratic wipeout and rebuke of the Trump agenda, as Trump always goes with his gut:
A bit later in interviews with Fox News and the New York Times, he said he would accept the results of the midterm shellacking, but added that midterms were a historical check on US presidents.
Eventually it turned to more of the blame game, pointing out that he wasn’t on the ballot, and the candidates who lost were not good enough.
MAGA allies initially tried to protect Trump’s feelings, generally noting it wasn’t fair to hold him responsible for the historic losses of the party.
MAGA operatives also pointed to weak candidates like those in Georgia, Michigan, and Texas.
Inside the MAGA machine, shock eventually became anger at Donald Trump.
“It’s on him. It’s not on anybody else. It’s a total, complete rejection of President Trump,” Bill Miller, a top Republican lobbyist in Texas, told the BBC. “This is a disaster of the first magnitude. Nobody saw it coming like this.”
“It was just one mistake after another,” said Gregg Peppin, a Republican strategist in Minnesota. “Clearly, in state after state, people did not like the president’s policies.”
An anonymous White House ally said it was a “perfect storm” of anger at the president over the Iran war, tariffs, and immigration brutality.
“There’s palpable frustration [within] the party about how this has all played out,” the person said, and much of it is directed at Trump. Anger with Trump “is extremely high.”
Of course we all expect that Captain Chaos will soon have MAGAts licking his “wounds.”
