The GOP Is Already Counting Down the Days Until Trump Is Gone

3 min readVice President J Divan Vance, the world’s least popular campaign surrogate, has definitively departed the reservation. It’s all over but the endless recriminations. From NBC News:“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance said in a lengthy post on X. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” Vance wrote. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”Forget the disclaimer at the top. This is J Divan’s declaration of independence. He might have a point. This unnecessary and illegal war certainly was a drag on Republican tickets across the country. But the primary issue, according to many polls, was the administration’s grotesque corruption, and Vance gave that a good leaving alone. From his Xweet:Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel.My guess? The pollster didn’t even ask any questions about the grifts and scams. Not even the folks whispering to Politico about how the president banjaxed the whole election mentioned that issue.“There’s a little bit of a reckoning in the Republican Party about where they go,” said Matt Dole, chair of the GOP in deep red Licking County, Ohio. “I think you’re going to see a part of the Republican Party advocate for a return to normalcy, which is not repudiating Trump’s ideology and policies, but will repudiate Trump’s style.”“It sounds a little ironic,” failed Maine Republican governor candidate Bobby Charles told Politico. “But I am nevertheless optimistic for the future because Trump’s going to be gone in two years.”The anonymous who talked to Politico were a bit more forthcoming.Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond, who have been preparing for the bloodbath and recriminations, were not buying it. They argued that flat characterization of Republican candidates as lazy could not possibly be applied to every vulnerable Republican who lost—and that Trump and the aides around him ought to look in the mirror.But tellingly, they refused to put their name behind it.The quivering mass of jelly that is the Republican establishment is still quivering.“We are beyond candidate quality. It’s a bloodbath,” one senior Senate GOP official said. “Trump did this.”A Republican operative working on swing state campaigns said Tuesday was a perfect storm “of just incompetence.” “The people in the White House didn’t do anything to stop him from engaging on things that were actively making everything worse because he was ignoring what the voters were caring about,” the operative said.The president spent the afternoon in his happy place—giving a tour of his ballroom.And in Mississippi, they’re still counting.