The End of MAGA
It turns out that even former supporters have fallen out of love with Trump
By Yonoson Rosenblum
President Trump instructed voters to act as he were on the ballot. And Democrats were only too happy to have voters follow his instructions. It turns out that even former supporters have fallen out of love with Trump.
The Republican Party has just suffered one of most decisive beatings in the history of American politics. A "virtual extinction," in the words of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. American Enterprise Institute election expert Sean Trende compared the results to a nuclear bomb. From any vantage point, the results were beyond the wildest imagining of either friends or foes of Trump. The day before the election, the Washington Post's Dan Balz still cautioned that Democrats faced an uphill climb to take the Senate.
And then. The reliably Republican South is no longer. In Texas, Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico, with an entire portfolio of looney statements, crushed his Republican opponent (about whom more later). Not only that, Democrats won every statewide race. In South Carolina, the sister of the recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham lost by a comfortable margin. In deep-red Mississippi, the incumbent Republican candidate is trailing by a little over a thousand votes as of this writing. Only Florida held the line, and even there, the Republican candidate for the Senate barely held off a far-left Democratic candidate.
The Republican Midwest was no happier a story for the party. Kansas elected its first Democrat to the Senate since 1932. In Iowa too, the Democratic candidate won for the first time in recent memory. Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown reclaimed his former seat in the Senate, after a two-year hiatus. And of course, Abdul El-Sayed, who for the first time put overt antisemitism and Muslim Brotherhood affiliations on the ballot, captured the Senate seat in Michigan, and it wasn't that close. (Early exit polls, showed 57 percent of Jewish voters backed him.) In Maine, Lady Luck finally ran out for flinty Susan Collins against a Democratic candidate who had used his position as Maine senate majority leader to initiate and pass legislation that benefited his son's business.
In every single demographic, Republicans ran substantially behind their 2024 performance. Their efforts at redistricting, based on the mistaken assumption that Hispanics had shifted decisively to the Republican column, fell flat.
IN SHORT, voters have grown tired of the Trump insult-comedy shtick: the cruelty, the chaos. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario were not high on anyone's wish list, certainly not while gas prices remain high (by American standards). Even less so, threatening war with Denmark over Greenland or suggesting that Canada become the 51st state.
In the end, Trump was left like King Lear on the heath, standing in front of the reflecting pool on the National Mall and talking about how beautiful it is. And the day after, he was back to boasting about his beautiful new, garishly decorated ballroom with Corinthian columns.
Writing in National Review, Jim Geraghty, who is not a fan, captures the president's inability to stay on message to explain or sell his policies, something that has contributed greatly to the general perception that the war with Iran was a huge mistake:
"Trump's personal style hits me like nails across a chalkboard. The stream-of-consciousness rambling, the derisive nicknames, the insults, the unpredictable obsession with minutiae, the increasingly rare occurrences of a clear, coherent, or logical argument — this is not leadership or effective communication, and the fact that anyone thinks it is just reflects how much Donald Trump has reset our standards since he descended the escalator on June 16, 2015. A whole lot of Republicans convinced themselves that Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he had revolutionized politics. The accumulated evidence strongly suggests that Trump won because he wasn't Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris....
Our octogenarian president, who never was good at holding his tongue, is getting even less inhibited as he ages, even more prone to bizarre tangents, and even less capable of staying on message."
It is astonishing how many of Trump's losses in the midterms were self-inflicted wounds. In Texas, he backed Ken Paxton over four-term senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary, even though Paxton had been impeached as state attorney-general by a Republican-controlled legislature for his corruption. He was a philanderer and a plain lazy candidate to boot. Darline Graham, Lindsey's sister, had no qualification other than having been raised by her brother. In one campaign debate, she responded to a question by admitting that she knew little about foreign affairs.
The blunderbuss manner in which Trump wielded tariffs senselessly inflicted pain on Iowa farmers and Maine residents, two states in which Republicans lost the Senate seat.
And at no point did Trump lay out the case for the war against Iran, after having claimed to have obliterated Iran's nuclear program in June 2025. Every step of the way, the administration appeared to be making it up, with no strategy and seemingly no planning for the various contingencies. On day four of the renewed bombing, Trump was claiming total victory, and again on day 240.
The American people might have tolerated higher gas prices caused by Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz if they had a clear understanding of what was at stake or what the duration of the war was likely to be. They received neither. And that made it much easier for critics of Israel to claim that everything was done at Israel's bidding.
The most common complaint mentioned by Democratic voters in exit polls was the corruption of the president, his family, and their toadies. The president himself offered high-priced subscriptions to his Truth Social account for early information about impending presidential actions. That's insider trading under securities law.
In their dealings with Putin and various Middle East countries, son-in-law Jared Kushner and presidential golfing buddy Steve Witkoff appeared to be mixing discussions of development projects with diplomacy. And the Trump sons made little effort to hide their involvement in unsavory cryptocurrency schemes. Meanwhile, presidential pardons were bartered for political and business favors.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.'s former fiancée (not to mention Gavin Newsom's former wife) and a Trump family insider, was dismissed from her role as ambassador to Greece after it became clear she was offering or trading favors with wealthy businessmen for personal gain. The next two years will be filled with nonstop congressional inquiries into the Trump family finances, which will give 2028 a post-Watergate air.
I MUST ADMIT that I was happy that President Trump triumphed in 2016 and 2024. My wife and I and over 40 descendants and spouses live in Israel, and I pray that they will all grow to old age in peace and security. I judged — and still judge — that their chances of doing so are much greater with President Trump in the White House than with Democratic party successors to Barack Obama, who entered the White House intending to put distance between Israel and the United States, and left eight years later after allowing the UN Security Council to pass the most anti-Israel resolution in its history, effectively defining its borders as the 1949 armistice lines. In between, Obama built up Iran as a regional hegemon and acquiesced to its acquisition of nuclear weapons.
And I entertained hopes that the second Trump administration would prove less chaotic and more disciplined than the first. Those hopes were buoyed when the administration entered office with generally well-crafted executive orders relating to DEI on campus, so-called gender-affirming care, and with a determination to fight antisemitism on campus. The appointment of Harmeet Dhillon to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and veteran black civil rights attorney Leo Terrell as her senior counsel gave hope of an aggressive defense of Jewish students. (Dhillon just announced her resignation.) Above all, the administration successfully closed the southern border to illegal immigration within a short time span.
But I can say I was never a fan of the Trump persona, as I have made clear in these pages. In particular, I was offended by his coarsening of political discourse and diminution of the dignity of the office of president of the United States. When someone asked me about voting for him in 2016, I was careful to say, "Don't discuss him at the Shabbos table." And one prominent rabbi, I learned later, told congregants in a private gathering, "No one should be president whom you would be embarrassed to introduce to your mother."
Yuval Levin put it well: "His silly nicknames and his petty whining haven't gotten any dumber — they were always this dumb. But many people who thought they were funny have grown sick of them, and Trump's sheer unseriousness now strikes some of his former supporters as inadequate to the office and the moment."
AMERICAN ELECTORAL POLITICS are generally pendular. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won the largest percentage of the popular vote of any presidential candidate in modern times. Four years later, Richard Nixon was elected president on the Republican ticket. In 2008, Barack Obama easily defeated Senator John McCain, and the Democrats claimed 257 seats in the House and 60 in the Senate, as well as 29 governor's mansions. Within eight years, the Democrats had lost 63 seats in the House, 12 in the Senate, and 13 governor's mansions.
But there is a caveat. The defeated party must take stock and find a way to right itself. It is far from clear that the current Republican Party can do that. The ones whose presidential ambitions suffered most from the crushing defeat would appear to have been Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio because of their association with the rejected Trump presidency.
And I would argue Vance more than Rubio. Vance is far more articulate than Trump, but he displays the same streak of nastiness that characterizes his boss. When his friend Vivek Ramaswamy, running for governor of Ohio, ran a campaign ad in which the mother of Amy Acton, his Democratic opponent, accused her of having lied about being abused as a child by a stepfather and claimed her daughter suffered from psychological problems, Vance defended the ad (as did President Trump) despite its sheer cruelty. Worse, the court records fully supported Amy Acton's story, which was corroborated as well by her brother. Acton easily defeated Ramaswamy.
Moreover, Vance favors the Trumpian sneers and sarcasm. Rubio by contrast has repeatedly shown himself capable of appealing to "the better angels of our nature," in the words of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Vance's neo-Catholicism places little emphasis of qualities such as mercy and kindness, and too frequently hearkens back to a pre-Ecumenical-Council period, when Catholic parochial school kids were constantly on the lookout for Jewish kids to beat up for the alleged sins of their ancestors.
That was seen in Vance's failure to correct questioners at Turning Point USA events who asked why should America give money to Israel, when the Jews are our enemies. Nor does Vance appear to recognize the tension between his emphasis on himself as a "heritage American" and his newly adopted Catholicism. His Protestant forebears formed an entire political party — the Know-Nohings — based on their being anti-papist.
Vance has already begun the process of separating himself from Trump, and setting himself up as the leader of the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party (even as Carlson railed against Trump and declared his support for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan). Vance blamed the Republican defeat primarily on the war with Iran and the United States' relationship with Israel. He did not specify why that relationship was wrong, but by linking the two things, he implied that Israel had misled the United States into war, just as his friend Tucker never tires of doing.
In any event, Vance's explanation was a bit too tidy. Trump's approval ratings plummeted after the Liberation Day tariffs went into effect, and never recovered. The Republican ratings deficit on the generic congressional ballot were 16 percent lower than Democrats back in December, a full three months before the Iran war resumed.
Iran, writes Park MacDougald in Tablet magazine, was just a microcosm of "everything wrong with the administration, ranging from impulsiveness and poor planning to erratic communication and a weakness for style over substance."
The Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party cannot prevail in a general election. In a country in which half the population will be non-white by mid-century, there is scant future for a white nationalist party. But even if Vance cannot win a general election, he can destroy the party from within and ensure that no other Republican wins either.
In his infinite ambition, Vance is trying to thread too many needles. He seeks to both separate himself from Trump and present himself as the heir apparent at the same time. And he would like to secure the groyper vote, while betting that the 79 percent of Republicans who are highly supportive of Israel will feel they cannot desert him for the Democrats, a plurality of whom, even before the election of a passel of DSA candidates last Tuesday, already opposed any funding of offensive weapons for Israel.
Like that of his Yale Law School classmate and close friend, Ramaswamy, my bet is that Vance's gamble will prove too clever by half.
The elections do not augur well for the future of Israel or the Republican Party, which remains its main bastion of support. But as I told an old friend who called, distraught, from the States this week, "I have one big advantage over you. I believe in the Ribbono shel Olam."
More on the implications for Israel next week.