Not all of the midterm election results have been finalized, as of this writing, but one thing’s clear: that promised/threatened “red wave” that would make the GOP the sworn enemy of President Joe Biden never happened. Among the disappointments were scores of Trump-picked candidates either underperforming or bombing. It was so bad that by the next day there were already prominent Republican rags calling on the GOP to dump Trump.
Let’s start with The Washington Examiner (as caught by Mediaite), who, in a piece attributed to the paper at large, argued that the problem were candidates like Dr. Oz, Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker, all fêted by Trump:
This is his fault. Without Trump to run against, Biden and the Democrats would probably have been roundly rebuked by voters. According to the exit poll — the same one that showed 74% of voters either “dissatisfied” or “angry” about the direction of the country — the only person more disliked than Biden was Trump.
As such, it was time for the GOP to release the guy who’s commandeered their party for the last six, incredibly long years. “These midterm elections have made it crystal clear that voters want to move past the chaos and dishonor of the 45th president,” they wrote. “They want the security and sanity that a competent and effective leader can provide. The Republican Party needs to recognize that, too, and act accordingly.”
The National Review (as per Raw Story) was even more blunt. “It’s time for Donald Trump to go,” wrote Charles C. Cooke. After Tuesday night’s “profoundly disappointing midterm-election result,” Cooke argued, Republican voters should tell “the Republican establishment to pound sand.” He also railed against the Trump wing of the party’s “frivolous, low-energy, old-boys-club complacency,” and called Trump’s attacks on Florida governor Ron DeSantis “classic establishment gate-keeping.”
But Cooke held the most ire for the big guy himself. “Trump is a loser. He squeaked past the most unpopular woman in America in 2016, he presided over a blue wave in 2018, he lost to a barely breathing Joe Biden in 2020, and he hand-picked a bevy of losing Republican nominees in 2022.”
Instead, Cooke charged that Republicans should turn to DeSantis, who won big in his re-election bid: “He beat the Democratic wave in 2018, he got the biggest challenge of the last four years — the Covid-19 pandemic — almost exactly right, and he won reelection by the largest margin achieved by any Republican gubernatorial nominee in Florida’s 177-year-history.”
Is this the end of the guy who gave the GOP such classics as the orb, the McDonald’s spread, and the attempted overthrow of democracy? Maybe, maybe not. After all, Teflon Don has weaseled out of trouble before.