I & I Editorial Board“If we don’t win the midterms, they’re going to blame me. You know that. And if we do win them, I will get no credit whatsoever. It’s true. I won’t get any.” — President Donald Trump, Oct. 10
Well, at least Trump doesn’t have to grumble about not getting credit for a big election victory on Tuesday. Will he ever accept the blame? Because the scale of this loss is truly colossal when you dial the clock back two years.
Let’s review:
When voters went to the polls in 2024, the country had just endured four years of a mentally incapacitated and utterly clueless president. Four years of being called semi-fascists. Four years of hyperinflation and falling real wages. Four years of illegal aliens pouring across the border and invading towns across the country. Four years of rising crime rates at home and embarrassing failures abroad.
Trump, as he did in his first election, tapped into the nation’s unrest. He had a villain in Joe Biden and the Democrats. He had a plan to put America back on the path it had been on during his first term.
And on Nov. 5, 2024, Trump achieved one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. He’d survived two impeachments and endless, unethical, democracy-threatening attempts by Democrats to weaponize the legal system and imprison or impoverish him. He’d survived two assassination attempts – one by millimeters.
His election victory was definitive – flipping counties across the country, gaining ground with blacks and Hispanics, winning the popular vote, and scoring a decisive Electoral College margin. The New York Times declared the day after that “Trump is set to transform Washington as G.O.P. extends gains.”
The election left Democrats demoralized and leaderless. Biden was an embarrassment and an outcast. Kamala Harris was a pariah. The party was seen as having been taken over by woke elitists who were hopelessly out of touch with working families. Republicans were in the catbird seat.
In February 2025, The Hill ran a story about how “GOP gains in voter registration raise red flags for Democrats,” and that “together with Trump’s victory, the registration figures add to signs of an uphill climb for Democrats in the years ahead.”
Trump’s approval rating at the start of the second term was higher than it had ever been in his first. And he was in a unique position to essentially have a second chance at a first term, with the added benefit of knowing he couldn’t run again.
It appeared he’d learned his lessons from his first term and had a better team in place ready to execute his plans. He started with a bang.
After Trump’s first week in office, we wrote that:
The 47th president is different, different from the 45th, and different from every president going back to the 19th century.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said Trump’s first week in office “totally reset my conception of what’s possible, in two wholly different dimensions.”
The headline on law professor and Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ recent New York Post op-ed declared that Trump’s “unprecedented and swift action … has reset the national mood.”
But then the wheels started coming off. Instead of focusing on wringing inflation out of the economy, Trump launched an erratic, unfocused, divisive trade war that opened him up to the charge — rightly so — of raising prices instead of cutting them.
The attacks on Iran, as justified as they were to prevent that terrorist nation from acquiring a nuclear weapon, could have stopped with the bombing of its underground facilities, with the promise of more if they tried to reconstruct it. The wider campaign, which we support but which he never fully justified to the public, jacked up the cost of both gasoline and food — the two things where prices are the most obvious to consumers.
Trump closed the border while restarting wall construction, which were massive victories. But the deportation campaign has been a needless PR disaster.
And Trump’s fixations on the White House ballroom, the Kennedy Center, and various other D.C. projects only served to paint him as vainly focused on the wrong priorities.
As a result, in two short years, Trump’s approval rating has cratered, Republicans are back on their heels, Democrats are reenergized, and socialists are winning elections. All those across-the-board gains in Republicans votes in 2024 disappeared.
Those who suffer from Trump Fanboy Syndrome will blame anything and everything but Trump. Yes, the media share part of the blame. The daily avalanche of world-is-ending-because-Trump-is-crazy stories is bound to have an effect on the public. And it is true that the left regrouped and started mounting organized protests faster than anyone might have expected.
But Trump knows better than anyone that he will never get a fair shake from the press or the radicalized Democratic Party. So why play into their hands? Every day, Trump gave his critics fodder by refusing to stay on any sort of message.
He could have spent the past two years focused on getting the economy back on track and selling his successes. He could have staged public events to showcase people who’ve benefited from his policies, held press events celebrating the opening of new factories, talked about nothing else but the economy and how people’s lives are getting better after four disastrous Biden years.
Trump is a showman who knows how to tell a compelling story. Yet it seems as though the only time he put these gifts on full display was at his State of the Union addresses — hardly enough to change people’s minds when they are getting a barrage of negative stories from the other side.
This is not to gainsay the many policy victories Trump has secured. The pro-growth tax cuts and deregulation, the demise of the corrupt USAID, the massive reduction in the federal workforce, the anti-fraud efforts, showing American strength abroad, and many others. We have been celebrating them on these pages, just as we have been calling out the many media lies about Trump. (See, for example, “Don’t Buy The Media Lie: Gas Prices Are Not Higher Under Trump Than Biden.”)
But Trump has the giant megaphone, and a little message discipline would have gone a long, long way.
We are always reluctant to give politicians advice. But if Trump wants to turn the victories he did achieve into a lasting legacy, he needs to do something he’s never done before — eat a giant helping of humble pie, and focus like never before on securing that legacy. Because if he fails to do so, the country he loves will be lost to the socialist robber-barons now fully in control of the Democratic Party.
Editor’s note: This is editorial has been updated to reflect the results of the Nov. 3 election.
—Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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So, suddenly we’re all Democrats now, playing the game by their rules by passing out blame for past errors and punishing those who, we’re told, are responsible for the conflicted quandary we’re in now instead of focusing on the future! Reimposing the Democrat agenda will empty the shelves of wisdom and insight, and unleash the kind of reign of terror that follows every revolution.
I say there is something MUCH bigger going on here than Trump’s inadequacies. The BidenAdmin Dems put the US thru HELL ON EARTH, and that was JUST 20 mos ago.
So what the hell is wrong with a society that can so quickly forgive 4yrs of Hell on Earth, and forget the 20 mos of tremendous victory the Trump Admin has given us?
A clueless, Godless electorate that is a total victim of media brainwashing, ….no critical thinking skills.
this is exactly true
Don’t be Dick.
“He could have spent the past two years focused on getting the economy back on track and selling his successes. He could have staged public events to showcase people who’ve benefitted from his policies, held press events celebrating the opening of new factories, talked about nothing else but the economy and how people’s lives are getting better after four disastrous Biden years.”
Trump did do that. You must have missed it. You should have signed up for the weekly WH newsletters then your op-ed here would have been accurate without the lies. Took a nosedive here with this piece. Right before an election too. Can’t find the respect button anymore.
If Trump can attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment by executive order, why wouldn’t a Democratic president do the same with the 2nd Amendment? Trump got his unitary executive. Any future Democrat who doesn’t take advantage of it is committing political malpractice.
How soon we forget.
There is no way anyone would have noticed the huge effort involved in wringing inflation out of the economy, and the mainstream media would have assigned credit anywhere but Trump. The El Sayed ad is a good starting point here. Do people really believe that eggs are $7 per dozen? If so, then there is nothing Trump could have done.
Now let’s look at the Iran war. If Trump had taken your advice we’d be looking at a repeat of the long effort to keep Saddam down. Iran is worse than a copy of North Korea, but with a lot of revenue. They’d rebuild and we’d maintain a huge force there to suppress them.
Let’s look at the war itself. People claim to be tired of it. There have been fewer American casualties than there are routine accidental deaths and suicides in the military over the same period. I have never experienced such a war.
Finally, there are no people streaming across the southern border, not being flown in from foreign lands. The media try their best to turn everything into a PR disaster, unless the Democrats are already a PR disaster; then they cover it up.
I’d like to say that voting the Donks in the form of Biden back into power should have taught the American people the hard way, but they couldn’t remember the disaster that Biden was for even a couple of months after it was gone.
Actually doing things to improve the world is a very hard task. Especially so when one has to fight the press, a third of your own party, suspicious elections, and our nation’s feckless foreign allies.
Good luck to us.
Yes, thanks Kilty. Four years of Biden-hell, and 20mos into the TrumpAdmin and people wanna go back to Dems??
Its the damn-fool electorate, the Godless people of this country who have no critical thinking skills and allow themselves to be delusioned by mass psychosis media.
Insights and Issues….we are ALL frustrated with the polls, and Trump is far from perfect, but blaming him is a super-simplistic and lazy formulation.
Those who think Trump’s campaign against Iran is to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon, which would be no threat to the United States, have rocks in their heads. It’s all about OIL! Iran is one of the most oil-rich nations in the world and Trump is showing that his goal is to corner the market on oil for the US. As for nuclear weapons, they require a delivery vehicle and Iran – and no other country except for Russia and a few European countries, namely the UK – has the capability to reach the US. They are a threat to Israel, which has a nuclear stockpile they won’t admit having, not the United States.
I agree with every word of this. I voted three times for Trump. I’ve never voted for one Democrat in my like, with almost 55 years of voting. But Trump thinks he knows everything and is smarter than everyone. He needlessly damaged his presidency, for no good reasons whatsoever. He goes out of his way to invite attacks from his enemies, while getting no benefits in return.
Of course, I’ll never vote for a Democrat as long as I live. I just wish Trump was smart and effective.
“The wider campaign, which we support but which he never fully justified to the public…”
In other words, you support Trump’s ruinous policies, but think that he as at fault for pursuing them? Strange.
Oh my, you clutched so hard the pearls are all over the Editorial Boardroom floor! You seem to have the pulse of the leftist mindset and declared, “Democrats are reenergized, and socialists are winning elections.” The Democrat Party is in disaray and they know it. When the midterms are over and they can point to their victories, what will the long term effect be? It will not be a cohesive, rational, and all inclusive party. Say what you will about Trump and his weaknesses, the Republican Party has never had a more unified and clearer direction under his leadership!
If Trump has done “hardly enough to change people’s minds when they are getting a barrage of negative stories from the other side,” how does adding to the other side’s deluge help? On the day before the election, this editorial’s timing lacks messaging discipline — if the goal is changing people’s minds. Can’t argue with your criticisms: Vanity meets ego in Trump’s branding strategy. Can’t argue with his policy victories. Yes, Trump holds the giant megaphone, but the media have their finger on the volume. Guess which class of message gets maximum volume?
You folks are either completely lacking Wisdom, or prefer the elitist liberal controllers.
I hope it is the lack of Wisdom and understanding.