Trump Rages Wildly over Losses—and Accidentally Reveals How MAGA Dies

In the most predictable outcome ever, Donald Trump blamed everyone but himself for the blue tsunami that flipped the Senate and House on Tuesday night. No one was spared: Fox News, the GOP candidates, his own consultants—all of them, he fumed, brought about this epic catastrophe for his party.

But Trump’s fury has proven illuminating. Because the logical extension of his own claims is that the MAGA movement will almost certainly not be sustainable going forward, at least not in anything like its current form.

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump seethed as the results came in. This statement is true in only one sense: The Trump coalition really didn’t show up to the polls, and by his own accidental admission—since he’s now a lame duck—it never will again.

The MAGA coalition basically disintegrated on Tuesday night. Democrats flipped at least five Senate seats in states Trump carried by double digits, which could rise to seven if Democrats win in Alaska and Mississippi. Trump’s 2024 gains among Latinos and young voters—which were central to claims that MAGA had become a multi-racial, multi-generational working class realignment—evaporated.

Indeed, exit polls show that Democrats won Latinos and young voters nationally by extraordinarily lopsided margins. Democrats almost reached parity with Republicans among non-college voters. Democrats increased their vote share among working-class whites by 14 points relative to 2024. They won white women, notably reversing Trump’s 2024 victory among them.

Meanwhile, Democrats forged deep into MAGA country. Many Senate seats they flipped—Iowa, North and South Carolina, and possibly Alaska, where they’re favored—are among the more rural states in the country. Importantly, throw in Texas and many of the biggest wins were in the South. Democrats recaptured places like Mahoning County in Ohio, the archetypal Obama-Trump county and the epicenter of Trump’s capture of ancestral unionized working-class Democrats. En route to winning well over 250 House seats, Democrats flipped districts in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Appalachian North Carolina. The public rejection of Trump and his agenda was monumental and decisive.

Yet as the bad news rolled in, Trump raged at … Fox News. He insisted that Fox “bears responsibility for these losses” because it sometimes features the “Dumocrat opposition” on the air. He fumed at Fox for its history of publishing polls that displease him. He even called into Fox to complain.

In all this, too, you can also see a deeper revelation of MAGA failure. Fox has functioned as a major disinformational support system for Trump and the MAGA movement. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters details, it has propagandized on behalf of his Iran war, sanitized his ethnic cleansing campaign, and hidden his corruption and self-dealing from public view, among many other things.

Central to this has been the maintenance of plausible deniability. Fox does feature Democrats and does have a sterling polling operation. That’s all fine, but it’s also allowed Fox to obscure its role as a propaganda operation for Trump and his movement. The Fox-Trump alliance has in a sense operated as a bigger experiment in running totalitarian-style state propaganda on behalf of a dictatorial presidency.

This whole project failed spectacularly on Tuesday night. Trump’s criticism of Fox is actually an attack on Fox for not doing enough to deceive its viewers. And that’s true as far as it goes: Fox could not deceive them to the degree that Trump and MAGA needed it to. It could not sell them on the idea that the war was worth fighting—or on the notion that Trump’s economy and presidency have constituted world-historical successes.

Every indication right now is that the constellation of policies loosely described as “Trumpism” helped unleash this disaster on the GOP. As Ron Brownstein writes, exit polls showed public opposition to his tariffs and his personal corruption alike to be broad and deep. All signs are that Trump’s mass deportation campaign helped drive away Latinos. Tariffs, white nationalism, and the freedom of Dear Leader to pillage the public to his heart’s content are all key pillars of MAGA. Adam Gurri adds the essential point that this massive electoral rebuke was nothing less than a repudiation of the authoritarian consolidation at the core of the whole MAGA project. No amount of propaganda and lies from Fox could make any of it palatable. Nor will it be able to going forward.

In this context, it’s notable that Trump also privately raged at his own advisers over the losses. As The New York Times reports, Trump “vented his frustration at political aides and accused them of giving him bad information about polling in the lead-up to the elections.”

What Trump really means by all this is that his MAGA agenda cannot fail. It can only be failed. Only the messengers for it—Fox, GOP candidates, his own consultants—can possibly be to blame if it faces national rejection. His presidency has deeply alienated national majorities, but to Trump this simply cannot be so by definition.

The natural heir of MAGA is of course JD Vance. But as Jonathan V. Last writes, Vance’s only hope of getting the 2028 GOP nomination is to keep Trump happy. If so, he can apparently only go so far in admitting to the Trump presidency’s record of extraordinary failure in order to recalibrate. If he even edges in that direction, he very likely cannot be MAGA’s standard bearer.

Note that Trump already fired a warning shot at Vance along these lines:

Yet as Tuesday’s thrashing suggests, the MAGA agenda cannot appeal to anything close to national majorities in its current form, either. Maybe someone out there can pick this lock. But if Trump’s sound and fury signifies anything, it’s that it’s very hard to see where this movement goes from here, or what must happen for it to endure.