Our Best Stuff From a Week of Midterm Postmortems

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello and happy Saturday. The only thing as sure as death and taxes is recrimination and upheaval for the losing party in the wake of a midterm loss. And we saw plenty of that this week. On election night, as it became clear that the Democrats would take control of both the House and the Senate, President Donald Trump said he would not challenge the election results and even pledged to work with Democrats. In an interview recorded last Friday with Ross Douthat for 60 Minutes, he suggested he’d be open to an immigration deal. But another move he made that same day called that into question. Midterm losses typically give way to staffing shakeups, so it was unsurprising that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles resigned under pressure. But on Friday the president named deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—the architect of Trump’s harsh immigration enforcement policy—to replace her. What’s going on? Nick Catoggio tried to answer that question in Boiling Frogs, and the best he could come up with was that Trump may want to dangle immigration reform in front of the new Democratic majority in hopes of warding off investigations. But he’s also skeptical about that. He writes: The White House’s fash-y excesses will infuriate the left-wing base and make it impossible for likely Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries to compromise with Republicans. If there were even a small chance of the two parties avoiding all-out war over the next two years, Trump putting a “wartime consigliere” in charge of his operation presumably extinguished it. In Wanderland, Kevin Williamson dug into Miller’s reasoning for being so hostile to immigrants, suggesting that Miller’s sense of nostalgia for the postwar era reflects a certain kind of ignorance. He writes: One of the things sentimental right-wingers have in common with sentimental progressives is an idiotically idealized view of the 1950s. Mr. Miller, poorly if expensively educated, may not be entirely familiar with what was actually going on in the United States in the halcyon 1950s and 1960s, but it is worth knowing that elite institutions such as Ivy League universities were still actively discriminating against Jews such as himself, for instance by limiting the enrollment of Jewish applicants to universities under the old numerus clausus system. But Mr. Miller’s family was doing alright in those years, and maybe that is the point. The Millers had advanced high enough up the ladder to start to think about pulling it up behind them. There weren’t any other major shakeups, but the fate of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was up in the air early in the week. Reports emerged that Trump was consulting aides and advisers as to whether Hegseth should remain on the job given how much the Iran war had dragged down Republicans in the midterm, and given that the incoming Democratic majority might want to impeach the defense secretary. But then it turned out that a potential impeachment wouldn’t wait for January. Outgoing GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, who lost his primary back in May, had introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth back in September, prompting Speaker Mike Johnson to declare a recess and send legislators home ahead of the midterms. Massie reintroduced the articles on Monday. Trump denounced the attempt that same day, and then on Tuesday gave Hegseth an “‘A’ PLUS, PLUS, PLUS” for giving a defiant press conference ahead of a vote. Later Tuesday, the House Republicans not named Massie banded together, voting to refer the impeachment articles to the Judiciary Committee, effectively tabling the effort. Contributing writer Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer, believes that Hegseth should be removed, but he took a few issues with the particulars of Massie’s case, which was based on violations of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 regarding the Iran war, Hegseth’s conduct in operations in Venezuela and Yemen, and his attempt to discipline Sen. Mark Kelly for telling military members that they should not follow illegal orders. Regarding Iran, Nelson noted, “it seems odd to target the person who may have conducted the illegal war rather than the person who ordered it—or at least without including him,” meaning Trump. And he argued that the articles pertaining to Venezuela and Yemen amounted to policy differences between the administration and Massie, a longtime isolationist. He writes: We should acknowledge that the soon-to-be-departing Massie is hardly a worthy vessel for the effort to hold Hegseth accountable. He is an isolationist who has tried to restrain the necessary use of American influence abroad, a conspiracy-monger who makes common cause with the craziest fever swamp dwellers, and a man who is far too willing to adopt antisemitic winks and nods. As Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon pointed out, discussing his consideration of Massie’s resolution, there are myriad better complaints specific to Hegseth, including withholding approved aid and support to Ukraine and attempting to withdraw U.S. commitments to Europe without presidential knowledge. But Massie no doubt wants more of that kind of withdrawal and hollowing of alliances. Given Miller’s elevation, Hegseth’s survival, and the vote by the GOP House caucus to make combative Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan the House minority leader, Nick concluded the week was a giant “middle finger to the electorate.” He wrote: The White House is at war with Democrats—or, more precisely, with the historically lopsided popular majority that chose to put Democrats in charge of Congress last week. As on Election Day 2020, so too on Election Day 2026: When Americans tell postliberals that they want their country to change course, postliberals’ reply is, and can only be, “f— you.” By definition, an ideology that abhors accountability also abhors conciliation. With that, I’ll let you get to the rest of the highlights from the week. Jonah Goldberg had a great G-File on Wednesday looking at the divisions between the Reaganites and the new right, Michael Warren looked at what might become of J.D. Vance’s 2028 aspirations, and we did not ignore the brewing scandal around now-former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. All are featured below. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. Every serious person understands that the main driver of the massacre was Donald Trump himself (which is not to say there are no unserious people who deny this obvious fact). Every other explanation is secondary to Trump fatigue and disfavor. Pick a policy—the Iran war in particular or foreign policy more generally, tariffs, immigration, etc.—and the debate quickly shifts to arguments over whether it was Trump’s implementation of the policy or the policy itself that doomed Republicans. Was the Iran war folly in conception or execution? Are tariffs, industrial policy, and China-style state capitalism wise policy badly implemented or just bad policy, period? On the new right there’s a lot of “True Trumpism has never been tried” right now. Which brings me to Oren Cass and his very long, very tendentious essay in the New York Times, “Republicans Have Two Paths Out of This. They’d Better Choose Wisely.” Before I take out my red pen, I will acknowledge a couple of things I agree with. Cass writes, “There is no Trumpism, however, only Mr. Trump, following instincts and impulses that hew to no identifiable ideology.” I have been saying this sort of thing for well over a decade now. It was obviously true back then, so it’s nice to see Cass acknowledge that people like me were right all along. Long before AI became a household term, Jensen Huang recognized that graphics processors could become engines for general-purpose computing. His willingness to take bold risks and pursue new pathways in semiconductor architecture helped transform Nvidia from a gaming company into the technological backbone of the AI revolution. For his contributions to American prosperity and power, we should all be enormously grateful. But gratitude does not excuse Huang’s personal misconduct—nor should admiration for his technical achievements, or share of personal blame over a sex scandal, obscure deeper problems in his company’s conduct. The scandal involving Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore-based company Megaspeed, was a microcosm of Nvidia’s broader political struggle in Washington. Megaspeed was among Nvidia’s largest overseas customers, purchasing billions of dollars’ worth of American AI chips while facing federal scrutiny over its suspected diversion of that same technology to restricted end users in China. The conflict of interest with Megaspeed was extraordinary even without the espionage allegations against Alice Huang. It is still unclear—but remains completely plausible—that Huang’s personal relationship influenced how Nvidia treated a major customer under federal investigation. It is conceivable that the affair between the two executives may have influenced Nvidia’s decision to continue defending a business partnership that raised so many obvious red flags. Despite the obvious benefit to J.D. Vance of focusing on the Iran war as the only real flaw of the Trump agenda, everyone knows he can’t expect to just lop it off, like a diseased branch, and preserve the rest of the tree for himself. But what the Vance theory presupposes is: Maybe he can? Here’s how his team sees it: Vance is positioned better than anyone in the Republican Party to reshape the story of the midterm elections into something agreeable and soothing to the Republican Party primary electorate. Trump, who we all still love, got this one thing wrong, and he even says it was bad, and that’s how we lost. Americans still love Trump and Making America Great Again, it’s just that true MAGA hasn’t been tried. And by the way, aren’t these Democrats who are doing everything they can to sabotage our movement the real problem? And there’s the second part of the equation: From Team Vance’s point of view, nobody is better equipped than the VP to be the spokesman for the Republican minority in Congress. Democrats on Capitol Hill will overreach; they will push too hard, they will make mistakes, and Vance will be the young and energetic face of a GOP looking to save America from a Democratic trifecta in Washington. Best of the Rest MAHA Falls Flat in the Midterms Promised funding for candidates didn’t appear, and some advocates are rethinking their relationship with the GOP and the White House. Want to see more of The Dispatch in Google search? Add Us as a Preferred Source Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.