The 2026 Trump Collapse: Anatomy Of A Republican Disaster

This is a republished monologue with permission from the creator. You can hear the original show, “Trump Gets The Blame,” here.

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The midterm election wasn’t a wave. It wasn’t a cyclone. It was the collapse of the Republican and the Trump coalition; a total collapse.

Some races, as of Wednesday night, are still too close to call. Republicans lost Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Ohio, and Kansas. Alaska and Mississippi are still too close to call. Six seats in total — as many as eight — the worst loss for any party since 2014 during President Barack Obama’s second midterm when he lost nine Senate seats. Republicans likely lost 40 to 41 House seats, with eight more being too close to call. The New York Times estimates that the Democrats will have 255 seats at the end of this election. Republicans will have about 180, which is not quite as bad as the 2006 and 2008 midterms, wave elections; after those two wave elections, Nancy Pelosi had 257 seats. So it’s not up to that level, but it’s very, very close. Almost at the Pelosi majority, only in one midterm, not two.

Republicans also lost the governor’s mansion in Georgia, Texas, Alaska, and Ohio. It was so bad for Republicans that they lost every statewide office in Arizona, Texas — although some still haven’t been called yet — Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Democrats have new trifecta governments in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Minnesota. Republicans lost state legislatures all over the country, including, most importantly, the Texas State House. Democrats came close to surpassing Kamala Harris’s election numbers in most states.

In Alabama, the Democrat running for Senate lost by a substantial margin; they were 25,000 votes short of reaching Kamala Harris’ total. James Talarico, the new Senator from Texas, surpassed Harris’s numbers by 100,000 votes. In South Carolina, Annie Andrews surpassed Kamala Harris’s numbers by 7,000. Jon Ossoff was 80,000 votes shy in Georgia. Charlie Booker, who also lost in Kentucky, is a person I didn’t hear about during the entire election cycle. He got 50,000 more votes than Harris in Kentucky.

In Iowa, Josh Turek trailed Harris by 30,000 votes. Mississippi’s Senate race is a nail-biter. Democrats are 4,000 votes short of Harris’s numbers. And in Kansas, Adam Hamilton received 10,000 more votes than Kamala Harris. The blue wave hits differently in different places. Most other states didn’t hit Kamala Harris numbers for Democrats. New York did not hit Kamala Harris numbers for Democrats. New York Governor Kathy Hochul didn’t even get Trump numbers from 2024. Most big blue states didn’t have anywhere near election-level turnout. Massachusetts, nowhere near. Illinois, nowhere near. These deep blue states didn’t show up with nearly as high motivating numbers as the red states did. And we see both persuadable Independents and high Democrat turnout really making the difference.

On the other hand, not a single Republican reached Trump-era levels. Some did not reach their 2022 numbers. Greg Abbott, who has been governor of Texas for 12 years, did not receive as many votes in 2026 as he did in 2022, despite more than two million new people moving to Texas over the last four years. You have to think some of those people were probably Republicans. Yet he couldn’t find enough votes to surpass 2022 despite millions of new people there. None of these states would have flipped toward the Democrats if Republicans had shown up in the same numbers as Trump. None of them, not one. That’s very important.

In many of these states, like Tennessee, where Marsha Blackburn won the governorship by two points, Democrats showed up at 93% of Kamala Harris numbers. Republicans showed up at 49% of Trump numbers. You cannot afford to have your base level of support not show up.

Republicans voted like it was a normal midterm. Democrats voted like it was a high-stakes presidential election. And some of that is because Republican candidates didn’t work to preserve their seats. Republican candidates did not do the job.

Roger Marshall in Kansas didn’t hire a campaign manager until the end of October — just a few weeks ago — telling people, “Don’t worry,” allegedly telling Republicans, “Don’t invest your money early on in Kansas,” and allegedly has been living in Florida for quite some time. How on earth was that supposed to go any other way?

What about Michael Whatley? Why was he the nominee in North Carolina? He performed so badly, losing by 20 points to a popular former governor. He cost a number of House seats to go Democrat in North Carolina that shouldn’t go to Democrats.

Cindy Hyde-Smith, the incumbent Senator for Mississippi who’s in that election nail-biter, didn’t campaign seriously. The Republican National Committee put out a letter and a notification to her and a few other Republicans saying, “You need to take this election seriously. You need to campaign.” Allegedly, she did not. From everything I’m hearing, she did not.

Darlene Graham in South Carolina was like the Disney movie where the housewife accidentally becomes a Senator, doesn’t know anything, and it’s loads of laughs for everybody.

Why did anyone think voters would view nepotism favorably this time? She was only in that seat because her brother, a very popular Senator, held it before her; he died, she knew nothing, and she embarrassed herself on the debate stage. She had no qualifications whatsoever to run for office.

Ken Paxton should have never run for that seat. He was painfully lazy. He’s been painfully lazy for a long time, but he was painfully lazy in an extremely competitive seat. He has a horrible reputation for running for office, going in with all the rumors of affairs and corruption, spending time during the campaign cycle in a competitive election overseas on vacations, allegedly spending most of his year going to Europe, which, kudos to him, but then don’t run for the United States Senate.

John Cornyn would have lost that race last night as well, but just not by double digits. You have to fight as if you care. A lot of these people had very tough races, and some worked for it, and some came up short even though they hustled, even though they fought, even though they tried everything they possibly could.

And other ones who could have won — we could have saved a number of these seats — barely bothered to show up. Candidate quality matters at the top of the ticket in a number of these seats and at the bottom. And I feel very bad for the people who really worked hard and lost. I give Mike Lawler complete credit. He is a hustler who works really, really hard; he’s a smart campaigner. Susan Collins is magnificent. That’s why she’s kept it so close for so long in such a difficult state. Ashley Moody worked her butt off in Florida only to win by a few points.

And in any other cycle, people like Mike Rogers would be the Senator from Michigan. Ashley Hinson would be the Senator from Iowa. Michele Tafoya would be the Senator from Minnesota like any other year, but not this year. And not this year — despite candidate quality, despite those people being good candidates who worked hard — because of one giant thing: Donald Trump.

We cannot, as Republicans, look at this election result and say Donald Trump is doing things correctly. Donald Trump deserves the biggest blame. He endorsed Ken Paxton. Ken Paxton probably would’ve won the primary no matter what — people really were done with John Cornyn. He told Darlene Graham to run for her brother’s seat for no reason whatsoever. We had qualified Republicans all throughout South Carolina.

Trump pushed Michael Whatley into that seat in North Carolina and gave him that endorsement. And then there is Vivek Ramaswamy, who went down in flames in Ohio. We didn’t have to lose the Ohio governorship. We picked a terrible candidate when the lieutenant governor of Ohio is a college football coach and a superstar. Instead, he picked the most unlikable human being imaginable.

But worse than picking bad candidates for a number of these races, he created this political environment. Democrats were going to have a good 2026. It’s a midterm; that’s what happens. It’s cyclical. One party wins, one party loses. The next time the other party wins, the other party loses. One party wins, they overreach, people get tired of them, they vote for the other party. From November 2025 until March 2026, Democrats held a RealClearPolitics polling average of four to five points, which means they would’ve won the House no matter what and would’ve maybe picked off a Senate seat or maybe two. Something that would’ve been bad for Republicans, but not this bad.

Then we had what happened in late March: “Liberation Day,” when Trump was yo-yoing different tariff numbers almost daily for months, saying the tariffs were this high and then this low. I’m not against tariffs, especially as a tool to get better trade agreements from other countries or to punish a country that’s really harming America on specific products. We’ve been doing that basically since our founding. There’s nothing unusual about that. But “Liberation Day,” when he was announcing global tariffs and then changing them and then dropping them for some products and then increasing them for others, and it was changing day by day, created uncertainty in the market and created fear among the overall population.

It hurt his reputation, it hurt America’s reputation, and it didn’t do anything he thought it would, or he promised it would. It raised prices a little bit on a few products here and there, but it created a lot of uncertainty, and it created the media headline that Trump was raising your prices just as Americans were coming out of the four long years of mass inflation since COVID and since Joe Biden’s presidency. People were thinking, “Oh wow, we’re finally getting out of this. We’re going to get Trump 1.0 over again.” That’s what they thought when they voted for Donald Trump in November 2024. And then this is what he was doing a year into his presidency — zigzagging with different tariffs and creating the narrative that he was raising all of your prices.

That wasn’t all. Then we had the hiring of Kristi Noem and her alleged boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly was trying to line his own pockets at the Department of Homeland Security. And those two absolute fools made a joke of that institution, a joke of mass deportation, and created the impression that ICE agents were just scooping up children and shooting random people in the streets of Minneapolis. There were terrible images left and right around immigration enforcement from a woman who was spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing commercials for herself while it was happening.

And, speaking of Corey Lewandowski, there are the stories of every Tom, Dick, and Harry who had Donald Trump’s phone number, selling access to the president to line their own pockets.

Some things Trump isn’t involved with are simply a matter of, “Hey, I have Trump’s number. If you give me a hundred grand, I’ll give you so-and-so.” This is one thing I hope Democrats do investigate is the number of people making promises on behalf of Trump, both that he may know about and that he has no clue about, to line their own pockets. I really actually hope they do get to do that and expose that. I’m on board with looking at corruption involving people who have access to the president.

But most importantly, there was the Iran War, and that was the nail in the coffin. That raised gas and food prices and made inflation go past wage growth in this country. This was everything that Donald Trump promised he wouldn’t do economically and on foreign policy. And people were against it.

His own administration was against it. But there were people like Mark Thiessen and Mark Levin who sat there and cheered this war and who lobbied the president for this war. There are more Jew haters in Congress because of them. There are more antisemites in Congress because of them. There are more socialists in Congress because of them. I genuinely hope they both lose their contracts to speak about politics ever again — they have no business. They screwed America more than anybody. Those few people lobbying the president on a daily basis through phone calls and through media hits shouldn’t have a job today.

Relatedly, Donald Trump should have banned TikTok. It’s the law. The law says to ban TikTok. Joe Biden and Donald Trump didn’t do it, but Congress passed it. The president signed it. TikTok should be illegal. TikTok went from being the purveyor of Gen Z pro-Trump narratives to being a cesspool of antisemitic tropes and antisemitic conspiracies all against the Iran War that fed young people, the same young people who had voted for Donald Trump just two years ago, that the Iran War raised your prices and made America look weak.

And for those who say we need to finish the job — finishing the job means sending ground troops. If you think that would’ve been good in this election cycle, we would’ve lost the Wyoming Senate seat. We would’ve had a communist from Wyoming for six years in that Senate seat. We would’ve had Donald Trump impeached. There’s no other way to say it. And we would’ve probably created a failed state and had to import a million Iranian refugees on top of it.

And then there was the constant and endless defense of AI data centers, and the American people were turning away from them while Trump was defending them.

And then there were minor things like his handling of the Epstein files.

In the 18 months of the campaign for president, Donald Trump built the most incredible coalition to win the White House with the backing of the popular vote and both chambers of Congress. And in the following 18 months, he systematically, brick by brick, took that whole thing apart. Young people didn’t show up in any sort of numbers on Tuesday. The youth Republican vote was horrifically bad. They did not show up at all. That is why we’re seeing these huge swings among young people, because only one side voted.

White men aged 18 to 29 — a group that voted for Donald Trump by 28 points in 2024 voted for Democrats by 17 points. It’s not because they all flipped; some did. It’s because one side didn’t show up at all. They didn’t bother. Donald Trump broke his promises to them.

When exit polls asked voters in this election, “What are the critical issues, and how did you vote because of them?” Thirty-four percent said Iran was a critical issue, and they voted 71-27 for Democrats. When they asked about data centers, 23% said it was a critical issue, and they voted 64-34 for Democrats. Government corruption: 54% said it was a crucial issue, and they voted 62-36 for Democrats. The economy: 35% said it was in poor shape, and they voted 84% Democrat. But there is one bright side on immigration, an issue that 36% said was crucial: 58-41 voted Republican.

That is the one silver lining, which makes it even more shocking that Donald Trump got on Fox News and said, basically, that we need to work with the Democrats on immigration.

No candidate could have outrun this. Trump broke his promises to the American people on these key things, and the Republican response was, “I’m not going to vote.” His administration was perceived as being comically corrupt, Third-World corrupt, and Democrats voted at presidential election levels. That is the lesson to take from this.

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Ryan James Girdusky is an author, podcaster, political consultant, and writer whose work has been featured in multiple publications including the Washington Examiner, The American Conservative Magazine, The Week, Human Events, and The Daily Caller. He is the host of “It’s A Numbers Game with Ryan Girdusky” podcast. Follow him on X: @RyanGirdusky