A long time ago on a faraway field, my team lost a football game, and it was my fault.
The high school coach put his hands on my shoulder pads. He leaned in close to my muddy face mask. "Handling victory is easy," he said slowly, so it would sink into an angry teenager's mind, "I want to see what you do with defeat."
We could say the same to the defeated Republican Party today. These midterm results, even in once-secure strongholds, are truly disheartening. Many seem pleased, even eager, to point fingers now and duck responsibility. Interesting that media didn't find any angry MAGA backers looting stores and burning cars in mostly peaceful street protests.
The Wall Street Journal did publish an op-ed with the headline "Republicans Forgot How to Win Elections." It was written by Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn, who forgot how to win his own May primary election.
But no one on the right seems willing to accept collective blame for what is, in reality, a Republican team loss, a big one. And then, to move on.
Immediately after, Trump appointed Stephen Miller, the smart, immigration hardliner, as chief of staff and said he has invited Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to be his new press secretary. Looks like this White House is going to the mattresses for the new Democrat Congress.
But this defeat, heralded so happily by media, has also handed conservatives a truly grand opportunity to show what they can do with defeat. To turn a minus into a plus, as my father would say. Seriously. Politics has no game clock; it's never over. You lose — or win — episodes, not entire games.
Recall the GOP disaster of 1964. Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey vs. Barry Goldwater and William Miller. Democrats captured 44 states and 61 percent of the popular vote. They gained 36 House and two Senate seats.
Some observers suggested then that the party of Lincoln was on life support.
Then came the 1966 midterms. Republicans gained three Senate seats and 47 in the House. Plus seven new governor’s offices, including California, where some actor named Ronald Reagan entered stage-right as a political rookie.
That was the election where the GOP built its newfound strengths among working-class voters and across the South. Turns out, Johnson’s lopsided victory was the last time Democrats received a majority of white votes.
Just two years later — only 48 months after 1964 — Republicans won the first of what would be five of the next six White House elections and nine of the next 15. Not a bad recovery from a stinging loss.
Working in a congressional minority is a miserable existence even with the $174,000 salary and all the perqs. You’re powerless to control the agenda and only marginally affect it by obstructing. But these next two years, still with a GOP president, offer a golden opportunity for Republicans to show humility and their governance bona fides, if they can take it.
Or better yet, seize it, as they have not done previously. They need to hold the Dems’ Birkenstocks to the bonfire of their shouts and promises, which that disorderly band so glibly made to sympathetic media.
You know, Medicare for everyone, open borders, defund the police, cut back national security, universal daycare. Nail them to these ruinous policies, or to their failure to pursue them as promised in the ads.
It’s now Democrats’ responsibility to address “affordability,” whatever that word means. They have made many impossible promises. But in their desperate gasping and grasping for power, they have taken into the party many socialists and Muslims, including a radical Muslim supported by the Muslim Brotherhood who opened his United States Senate victory speech in Arabic.
Their adopted party would be wise to remember the Russian fable about the scorpion and the frog that teaches vicious creatures cannot resist hurting others despite their hollow vows or disposable promises.
These new folks are not prepared to bide their time as junior members on the varsity bench. They have an extremist, anti-Israel agenda and will push it aggressively with 2028 looming soon. Remember the serious internal GOP problems in 2010 when the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus showed up?
Now that the undemocratic extremists got into the Democrat tent, look for serious internal challenges from the hard left. We need to highlight these conflicts.
Don’t think for a minute that these newcomers and the existing Squad members will be happy or obedient under the ineffective leadership of two Brooklyn nebbishes, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. They will soon be discarded.
Many experienced old-timers like Dick Durbin and Nancy Pelosi, who single-handedly picked the 2024 ticket, will be gone. That’s good for the country, bad for moderating or controlling the radicals.
There’s a large bundle of younger energies, numerous and impatient ambitions, and, fortunately for us, much inexperience among the arriving Democrat caucus members. They see rising poll support for socialism and believe their time is now to set the tone and campaign themes for even greater gains in 2028.
Cooperation with the White House is not on their dim minds. Confrontation is. So, count on more show-trial impeachment efforts and useless committee hearings on "scandals" among Trump supporters. Let's help voters see this squandered time of hollow revenge.
Trump has vowed to use his veto power liberally, adding, “And there’s not a thing they can do about that.” It would be helpful too if Republicans in Congress, who display such a fondness for long recesses, got some testosterone shots immediately to pass the SAVE America Act and judicial nominees before January, when Dems get the gavels.
It’s hard to believe that so many voters in so many places, the ones who astutely saw through Kamala Harris’ flimsy veil of credibility, missed the newcomers’ empty promises of free stuff and their ominous threats. Or maybe this time, some supporters wanted to send congressional Republicans a message.
It worked in New York City last year. Nationally, to me, the results suggest a wave of TDS, of voting against President Trump and his party, which is historically typical for midterm results.
We should have learned in 1976 and 2020 that voting en masse for someone only because you are against someone else almost always elects turkeys. They’re not closely examined. Their sole credential is not being from the other party.
This time, some GOP candidates were handpicked losers. Texas leaps to mind.
No one ever outworks Trump. He labored hard as usual and campaigned all over to fight the tide.
He had ample significant achievements to sell – a strong job market and economy, and not just in stocks. Energy independence again. A restored military rescued from the corrosive weaknesses of DEI. A closed border and more smart-wall going up daily. Ongoing arrests and deportations of illegals intentionally admitted by Democrats.
Trump had a top-ranked TV reality show for good reason. He could have been more disciplined with talking points in his hour-long rally speeches to MAGA crowds. They were already convinced; they just wanted to be entertained.
It’s ironic that a major gripe of voters this time was that Washington wasn’t listening. That was the heartland message Trump heard so clearly and used so effectively in 2015-16 when he took on the D.C. establishments of both parties and rode to an historic victory.
In the end, I believe Trump and Israel’s joint destruction of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program for now is likely to be his most important and lasting accomplishment. Unlike hundreds of Executive Orders, which can be reversed by any succeeding POTUS.
Mutually Assured Destruction, which worked perfectly preventing a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, doesn’t really work against religious zealots who believe jihad death takes them to a good place.
Those zealots had almost achieved their WMD goal. After multiple decades of killing thousands of Americans and others in individual attacks, no one can doubt they would have launched an Armageddon or three if they could. Remember Barack Obama killed our plans for a missile-defense system against Iran's U.S.-bound ICBMs over Eastern Europe.
No modern president had the courage and will to take on Iran's nuclear weapon ambitions — until Donald Trump. The mistake was adding regime change to the agenda.
Iran’s mullahs, like the communists before them in Vietnam, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and today’s Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, don’t give a blink about countless deaths on their side.
They know that if they can drag any conflict out long enough, sacrificing lives and offering bogus, drawn-out negotiations that sound good in media but go nowhere, impatient voters in democracies will throw out their own leader. For Tehran, these midterm results were a priceless first step.
Trump acknowledged last week that the war and resulting elevated gas prices played a role in GOP defeats. But he said that preventing Iran from obtaining and delivering a nuclear weapon was worth the price. Iran was close.
“If I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again,” he said, “because long-term it’s the only answer.”
Like all of us, he's imperfect. But thank God for him.
Now, as for handling defeat with that football team on the faraway field long ago and moving on, we did come back and win the rest of that season’s games. And the Coach said to me, "That’s what I meant."
