The fallout from the 2026 midterms continues, and the knives are out. Many Republicans are blaming Donald Trump for the bloodbath endured by Team Red. For example, Eugene Volokh recommends this essay by Bill Otis as "worth reading".
There is plenty in Otis' essay which I think is just plain silly. The notion that Republicans would have performed better had they committed to a land war in Iran, and that Trump's main failing there was that he didn't have the "statesmanship" to sell such a war to the nation, is, shall we say, dubious. But that meat of Otis' argument, and the part Volokh excerpts, is, I think more line with a common conservative refrain sung over the past few days:
In an election where overwhelmingly the preeminent issue was affordability — in other and more candid words, the increasingly obvious decline in the standard of living huge numbers of people are feeling — what has Trump been occupying himself with? Here's a partial list: Building the White House ballroom (from which, in a tone deaf rendition that defies description) he gave his election post-mortem; re-doing the East Potomac Golf Course to make it a "premium" experience; building a Triumphal Arch no one asked for or thought about when they elected him; demanding prosecutions for imaginary vandalism at the Reflecting Pool; invading Greenland; making Canada the 51st state; re-naming Lake Ontario; re-naming the Gulf of Mexico; and perhaps most prominently, making sure his name gets put on the Kennedy Center even though he had nothing to do with its creation. Then there are numerous other items: Trump passports, Trump one-dollar gold coins, and "commemorative" $100 bills, to name three.
Exactly what does this Adventure in Narcissism seem like to the voter — actually, the millions of voters — who feel like they're being stretched thin? You don't need a florid imagination to answer that one. They gave their answer last night.
I don't disagree that these Trumpian initiatives -- equal parts self-aggrandizing and utterly tone deaf -- played a substantial role in driving voter resentment against him and his party.
But here's the thing: Republicans could have stopped all of these things.
They had unified control of Congress. They had plenty of levers by which they could have pushed back. They exercised none of them. Acting like the Republican Party, as an electoral institution, had no agency at all in any of this is absurd. None of what Trump was doing was a secret, or activity that was wholly and totally insulated from political disapproval in spite of Congress' best efforts. To the extent that Trump was behaving like an "oaf" or a "child" or with "immaturity", it stands out that the consensus GOP response was to say "go right ahead sir" right up until the moment the election blew up in their faces. That's an independent moral failing by essentially every elected Republican, and one that voters could and did justly punish of its own accord. Why should any voter trust a Republican with power if they couldn't rouse themselves to oppose any of this?
In short, voters were not, in fact, just observing and rejecting Donald Trump. They were observing and rejecting the Republican Party for its fecklessness, obsequiousness, and subservience to Trump. And that all is indicative of basic character failings that go far beyond one man in the Oval Office.
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