Trump is now under tremendous internal pressure over what to do in response to his epic humiliation by US voters, including critically many who had been in his MAGA base. It is unfortunately necessary to ponder the metal state of the fabulously erratic and impulsive president. Even with his habit of denying past statements and actions, he has a few consistent behaviors. One is his desperate need to dominate. Another is his off-the-charts dysfunctional responses to humiliation. A fresh one:
Thank you for your attention to this matter. https://t.co/Q1ZGYM7idV
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 4, 2026
And ZOMG, the White House compilation includes a Leonardo DiCaprio from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, about the real life pump-and-dump-fraudster Jordan Belfor talking himself out of a settlement of criminal charges:
We aren’t going anywhere. We play for the United States of America. 🦅
Lock in, patriots. We’ve only just begun. https://t.co/3M5GMWf2iQ
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 5, 2026
See the pertinent segment from the movie:
The real Belfort eventually did knuckle under but still did time. From Wikipedia:
Jordan Ross Belfort is an American former stockbroker and businessman who pleaded guilty to fraud and related crimes in connection with stock-market manipulation and running a boiler room as part of a penny-stock scam in 1999.[3] Belfort spent 22 months in prison as part of an agreement under which, becoming an informant for the FBI and wearing a covert listening device (“wire”), he gave testimony against numerous partners and subordinates in his fraud scheme.
Have we been duly warned that despite the bravura, Trump will opt for an exit, even if at some personal cost, or is this just messaging of the day?
Trump’s loudly proclaimed plan to give Iran anther big thumping after the midterms was in no small measure acting out on those two core ego drivers. But not just Trump but even members of this team who should have known better seemed utterly surprised by the midterm wipeout, as opposed to having seen it as a possible outcome. Unless the Democrats completely blow it (which is not impossible), they are set to run the table for at least the next three election cycles, and perhaps longer.
The latter two will no doubt play a significant role in how Trump rationalizes his defeat and copes with his coming considerable loss of freedom of operation. As Judge Napolitano pointed out in a fresh talk with Glenn Diesen, when a party has less than 200 seats in the House, it cannnot get anything done. It is not just that it has too few votes to advance legislation. It is also that it has too few seats on committees to have much influence their debates.
On top of that, there is an open question as to how severe Republican infighting will become and how hard they will try to distance themselves from Trump. Trump’s interventions in the election made matters worse. All of his hand-picked candidates lost. And as John Kiriakou described long-form, Trump backed jerrymandering based on the misguided premise that the midterms would be a Republican romp. That resulted in larger losses in the House.
However, where Trump will retain the most freedom of action is in his warmaking. We don’t have clear signs of how Trump will respond to the considerable change in his standing, particularly the near-certainty of intense investigations into pretty much everyone in his his cabinet, as well as members of his inner circle like Steve Witkoff. Hegseth is set to be impeached. I wish the incompetent and arrogant Scott Bessent was also in the impeachment line of fire, but he does not seem to be a high priority, even with him escalating with Iran in the face of voter rejection and even a Trump reassessment:
As we have said many times, under Operation Economic Outcast, you are either with us or against us. We know where you are, and we will sanction those who continue supporting the Iranian regime, whether by land, sea, or air.
— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) November 4, 2026
Trump is begrudgingly admitting that the Iran war was central to the Republican rout, even though he is now blaming voters, contending it was still necessary to go after monstrous Iran, but voters were unduly attached to cheap gas and affordable food. In a public effort to herd Trump into a less self-destructive course of action, Vance admits that many MAGA voters turned on Trump over his betrayal:
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was “composition”—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we’re going to shock the world? “No,” he told me. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
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 IsraelOur voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
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.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) November 4, 2026
From the body of the tweet:
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points…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
It is possible that Trump will throw Hegseth and other Iran hawks under the bus and attempt a retreat:
BREAKING: Donald Trump and his top White House aides are reportedly preparing to directly blame Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the Republican midterm defeat, along with military commanders who pushed for war with Iran, per CNN and CBS News.
“Trump, always one to crowdsource an opinion, has asked allies about their thoughts on Hegseth’s performance of late,” sources told CNN.
CBS News also reports that Trump believes the election results would have been entirely different without the Iran war. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine and CENTCOM commander Gen. Brad Cooper are also reportedly facing scrutiny as Trump looks for someone to blame for the Republican midterm defeat.
— The Hormuz Report (@HormuzReport) November 4, 2026
Robert Barnes also says that the magnitude of the wipeout is leading Trump to reassess what to do next in Iran, as shown by the fact that the big beautiful bombing campaign is on hold for the moment:
However, Israel has agency. Admittedly, the Trump loss is a shock and leading to some serious worries. The landing page of the Times of Israel:
And Jerusalem Post:
But Trump may try to square that circle by throwing Netanyahu under the bus while quietly backing Israel. A fresh banner headline at Times of Israel shows that Netanyahu support is eroding:
On Judge Napolitano, Max Blumenthal discussed at length whether Trump can divorce or at least distance himself from Israel. He is doubtful:
From a lightly-edited machine transcript:
Donald Trump at the last minute before voters went to the polls attempted something that I think is highly significant. He actually said, I think this was on Fox, that he was going to end $4 billion in aid to Israel. Obviously, he’s referring to, you know, transforming the aid into military integration with Israel, but he thought that this would appeal would work with voters because even Donald Trump recognized that Israel had become a strategic liability, a poison pill. and he was attempting the same con job that he pulled when he went to Dearbornne, Michigan along with I think Tom Barrack and some of his uh you know Arab-American team to cut into Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s base in a swing state where they had scarcely campaigned and promised an end to the Gaza genocide. That con worked momentarily because voters were so desperate to end the genocide in this heavily Arab-American district.
But it’s not working this time. It totally failed. Everyone has seen through it. So there’s there’s nothing that he can do to stop the bleeding.
The only rational course for him to take right now would be to completely isolate possibly in Belleview. I don’t know if that mental institution is still functional. Laura Loomer, who he praised as a great Republican strategist, Mark Levvin, Mark Dubowitz, who’s been advising Centcom chief Bradley Cooper and helped basically design the blueprints for this war through his Israel first think tank FDD and Mark Sisson at the Washington Post. Just isolate all of the figures that were Netanyahu’s proxies that helped get Trump into this war.
And I don’t know if he has the strength to do that. Also, Ben Shapiro, will Trump even will he do that? Will he clear the way for JD Vance? I don’t think he has it in him, and I don’t know if he can. He may be so compromised by how deeply integrated he and the White House and MAGA have become with Netanyahu’s Likud infrastructure that he can’t do the rational thing at this point.
But one thing is for sure, judge. It’s going to be much harder for Trump to do what we thought he was going to do, what Mark Levvin and Netanyahu were lobbying for several days ago, which is to launch a massive third allout assault on Iran.
On top of that, Blumenthal points out that Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jeffries are both AIPAC stooges, so the Democrat leadership is still loyal to the ethnosupremacist genocidal state. We’ll see if this is just posturing or if Schumer means it:
Chuck Schumer, who until today was the leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate, and is now the leader of the Democratic majority:
– Will you end the war with Iran? Will you use defense spending as leverage?
– Yes, we will end this war. Some Republicans are already on our side in this. The Founding Fathers of America also foresaw a way to punish presidents who start wars without consulting the American people, using the dollar as a tool.— Sprinter Report (@SprinterReport) November 5, 2026
The Bloomberg landing page also shows that investors hanker for an Iran war wind-down:
But Iran has not taken its foot off the gas (or here, the oil). At the top of Aljazeera’s Iran War live page:
- Iran’s IRGC says two oil tankers and a tugboat caught fire in the Strait of Hormuz after attempting to pass through an “unauthorised route”, while its electronic warfare units claim to have captured two US drones intact.
- Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has dismissed the idea that the outcome of the US midterm electionschanges anything, saying US hostility towards Iran will persist.
However, Robert Pape contends that Trump will escalate. Keep in mind that Pape’s scenarios have consistently failed to acknowledge US weapons depletion, strained logistics due to Middle East base destruction, and exhaustion of the troops. Nevertheless, from Trump’s Humiliation of a Historic Scale — What Comes Next in Iran (emphasis his):
strong>IMPLICATION 1: THE LEGACY TRAP
Trump cares about his legacy as much as anything in politics. Tuesday told him the Iran war is how history will judge him. Presidents recover from midterm losses. They do not recover from losing a war. If Iran comes out of this war stronger than it went in, with Hormuz in its grip and its nuclear capacity intact, the defeat of Nov. 3 becomes a permanent verdict: the president who lost a war to Iran, and lost his party with it.His own advisers are already blaming the war, and MAGA’s “no more wars” wing is turning on the loyalists who backed it.
Fear for his legacy could push Trump toward a deal he can sell as a win. In an Escalation Trap, though, the fastest way to avoid looking like the loser is to escalate.
IMPLICATION 2: THE JANUARY CLOCK
Until Jan. 3, Trump controls the political timetable. After Jan. 3, Democrats do.Hakeem Jeffries has already promised to “bring accountability to those who have visited unprecedented corruption on this country.” Trump answers with his veto: “Otherwise I’d just veto everything.” Vetoes can block bills. Hearings, subpoenas, war powers votes and the war’s budget stay with Congress.
That makes the next 60 days the last window in which Trump can make dramatic moves abroad on his own schedule.
THE BIG WINNER: IRAN
Trump is not the only one reading the results. Tehran is reading them too, and it sees a winner: itself. “Trump lost in war and politics, and we will inflict further defeats on him,” said Iran’s judiciary chief. Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, posted: “Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message.” Iranian officials say their core demands will not change.
Those demands add up to a path to regional hegemony. In my assessment, Iran will insist on keeping the near-term capacity to build a bomb, refusing widespread inspections, holding leverage over Hormuz, and in the end getting US forces out of the region. After Tuesday, Iran wants that more than ever, because it can see Trump weakened and his clock running.
That is why Trump cannot easily say yes to a deal with Iran. Anything short of the 2015 deal reads as losing the war, and a deal on Iran’s terms springs the legacy trap. Iran can also wait, because the January clock runs on Trump, not on Tehran. “Yes” on Iran’s terms looks like permanent historic defeat. So does no deal.
Pape ignores Robert Barnes’ warning, and keep in mind Barnes (with MAGA pollster Richard Baris) were alone in accurately predicting the scale of the Republican rout: that the only way for Trump to escape removal from office if the Democrats get 55 seats in the Senate (they are now at 54 with two still being counted) is to retreat bigly from Iran and Ukraine. Being impeached and removed is an even worse stain than losing a war. And Pape seems to presuppose that the US has a record of victories after World War II (and there Allied victory rested disproportionately on Russian sacrifice). The US success tally is thin: yes, the 1990-1991 Gulf War but the later Iraq was a battlefield win and a strategic failure.
Briefly on Ukraine: Many Democrat party grandees and some members of the PMC still hate Russia with the passion of a thousand burning suns, even though voters have loudly said they want more butter and fewer guns. As David in Friday Harbor reminded readers in comments on a post on the Ukraine war backstory (emphasis his):
First and foremost in the performative Putin-hate of the Democrats is their comprehensive and all-encompassing corruption. Not merely the obvious pay-offs to the Biden Crime Family during the then-Vice President’s “viceroyalty” in Kiev, but the Clintonite “Harvard Boys” who set out to loot the former USSR until Yeltsin pulled a fast one on them and appointed a cop, Putin, to rein-in the oligarchs who were bleeding Russia dry. The “Harvard Boys” could never forgive Putin for slowing down their gravy train. Donald Trump (still ostensibly a Democrat at the time) pulled himself out of bankruptcy laundering this money while the IRS and FBI looked the other way; a dispute over his practices caused the falling-out with Jeffrey Epstein.
Congress can constrain a bellicose president but they cannot initiate or escalate conflict. Admittedly, as several commentators have pointed out on Judge Napolitano shows, keying off the fact that John Kiriakou described how the CIA can and does fund itself from outside sources (from drug-running to handouts from interested parties), that the CIA has been undermining Trump’s occasional efforts to wind down the Ukraine conflict, so the CIA will carry on. But the European backing, already budget and weapons constrained, is producing a Trump-level voter revolt, albeit across a broader front. From former UK diplomat Ian Proud in The Iran war killed Trump’s Presidency: the Ukraine war will kill European mainstream governments:
Foreign policy must serve a country’s core interests, or it fails. Those interests are always the same.
- Is your border secure?
- Are your people safe?
- Is your country growing more prosperous?
Everything else is incidental. Values, feeling bad about Ukraine, in the final analysis, voters are uninterested.
Iran is thousands of miles from the United States. It does not threaten American territory. The idea that it poses an existential threat to ordinary Americans has never been credible. The war made Americans poorer. That is why it failed.
The same lesson applies in Europe. For nearly five years the mainstream parties have treated the war in Ukraine as a moral crusade that ordinary people must simply pay for. Most Europeans know little about Ukraine or Russia and care even less.
For a while governments managed consent with the daily carpet bombing of propaganda. That is now wearing thin.
Europeans do not feel safer because of the war. They feel poorer. Energy costs are high, industrial jobs are disappearing in Germany, debt is rising in Britain, and public services are strained in France.
When German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said she did not care what her voters thought and would put Ukrainians first, she epitomised where Europe has gone badly wrong; it lost sight of its core strategic interests.
Values and being kind to Ukraine aren’t core strategic interests.
The globalists got away for it for a few years but voters have now noticed.
Support across Western Europe is shifting toward parties that prioritise domestic priorities and interests. Germany has seen cost-of-living protests. France has protests over schools and services while money continues to flow to Ukraine. Britain has just sent another £10 billion to Ukraine while debt interest approaches £109 billion a year. Poland’s government is already nervous about the next elections and Tusk’s government tried to orchestrate a constitutional coup….
The Ukraine war is a war of choice.
The longer it continues without clear benefit to ordinary citizens, the harder it becomes to justify….
There is still time for mainstream parties in Europe to change course and put domestic conditions first. I see little sign that they will.
They are badly advised, reluctant to admit failure, and, in Europe’s case, structurally unable to coordinate a coherent strategy across 27 governments plus the Commission.
Wars are not won by committee (as I have pointed out countless times already).
The last point above I presume is an allusion to the fact that US leadership and coordination is essential to NATO operations, and for the EU to set up a NATO wannabe of its own is an impossible lift. But that won’t stop the European Commission from trying.
Stopping here for today. See you tomorrow!
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