Many MAGAworld figures are already pointing the finger of blame for their midterm losses squarely at president Donald Trump and his policies.
Trump spent Tuesday evening lashing out at Fox News for platforming the Democrats who swept aside their GOP opponents in deep red states and took control of the House and Senate.
“[Fox] bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse,” the president wrote on Truth Social. Later in the night, he called in to Fox News, where he congratulated the Democrats on their results.
Trump made clear that he doesn’t think the historic blowout was a reflection of his popularity, writing “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” He then posted a picture of a red baseball hat with the word VETO embossed on the front.
But in the hours that followed, MAGA revolted.
Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster, called the results “a political catastrophe of historic proportions” and Trump “a 80 year old lame duck president.” Walsh blamed Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran and his focus on trivial matters like attempting to rename artificial intelligence super intelligence and the White House ballroom.
For right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich, it was Trump’s decision to ostracize libertarian voters that was partly to blame.
Mike Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who was among the most prominent voices pushing bogus conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen, also blamed Trump, writing on X that “Someone needs to look in a mirror.” Flynn also blamed Christians for not showing up to vote.
But noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had another take on why Trump was to blame.
“I think he’s a Democrat, I’m gonna just say it right now,” Jones said on his show Tuesday night. “I’ve tried to salvage Trump, I’ve not been sure, I’ve invested so much—maybe I was blind to it—I think he’s the ultimate Democrat sleeper cell and he works for them. I’m 100 percent at war with Trump.”
Other MAGA figures like right-wing commentators Jack Posobiec and Nick Sortor both blamed Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran for the losses, but didn’t directly name Trump in their posts.
Unsurprisingly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman who broke decisively with Trump earlier this year, also blamed the president. “Tonight was a total referendum on Trump. He told people to vote like he was on the ballot and they did,” Greene wrote on X.
One notable aspect of MAGAworld’s response to Tuesday’s GOP wipeout was the relative silence coming from some of Trump’s biggest supporters.
Elon Musk, who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting losing Republican candidates, has not said who was to blame for the results. He did post a joke saying his ”election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time” and commented that it was “interesting” that an exit poll showed the Iran war was a “massive losing issue.”
Rogan O’Handley, a vocal MAGA influencer known as DC Draino who posts incessantly on X about politics, has also not reacted publicly to the results. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who was reelected on Tuesday night, said the results were “not what we’d hoped and fought for,” but failed to say what or who was to blame.
White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller has also not commented publicly on the results, but his wife, Katie Miller, who boosted election conspiracy theories earlier on Tuesday, laid the blame on the media, which she called “a propaganda arm of the woke left.”
There were, however, a few right-wing figures who continued to publicly support Trump despite the losses, including MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, who wrote, “President Trump is a hero for stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon, and now he should finish the job.” Instead of blaming Trump, Loomer spent Tuesday evening lamenting the end of America and the rise of communism.
Another right-wing figure continuing to back Trump was the former Fox News host-turned-conspiracy theorist Lara Logan, who blamed an anonymous group of Republicans who conspired to bring about the defeat so they could “get rid of the MAGA movement and the establishment would retake the party.”
Chaya Raichik, who runs the hugely popular LibsofTikTok accounts, blamed the losses on a years-long Democrat plot to import “millions of foreigners.”
Kari Lake, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Jamaica, also refused to lay the blame at the president’s feet and was one of the few election deniers who continued to boost claims of a stolen election. “America, do you think that our elections are honest? Do you have complete confidence that only legal votes were counted?,” Lake wrote in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Others, like Harrison Smith, a host on Steve Bannon’s War Room show, turned their ire on their fellow right-wing influencers. He blamed Loomer, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, Will Chamberlain, and AIPAC, the prominent lobbying organization, for the losses.
But at least one former Trumpworld figure did take the blame on themselves. Former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem posted on X that the massive losses happened because “we were too successful in the first year of the Trump administration.”
