by Matt Kane
The real takeaway from Tuesday is going practically unnoticed in mainstream media.
Tuesday’s midterm results set off a wave of Monday morning quarterbacking from pundits and Republican politicians, many of whom are already looking past the remainder of President Trump’s historic term to position themselves for the 2028 nomination. There is no sugarcoating the results: Republicans lost convincingly. But beyond the doomsday messaging, the less recognized causes of defeat, and the reality that the results will have little impact on Trump’s effectiveness have been largely missed.
First, although much was rightly made about the historic trends regarding an incumbent president’s party in previous midterm elections, that narrative has since been wrongly discarded. Instead, more controversial narratives — such as who in the president’s Cabinet is suddenly in the hot seat — have been overemphasized to generate more clicks and views.
Second, though President Trump stood by Vice President J.D. Vance’s assessment that the war, and subsequent increased fuel prices, played a key role, he also noted Republicans would have won if he had been on the ballot, and his presidential victories prove this. Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 ushered in majorities in both chambers, and likely would have in 2020 if a fair and accurate result had occurred. In contrast, Republicans “underperformed” in 2018, 2022, and now 2026 despite Trump’s ever-increasing popularity, irrefutably proven by consistent increases in vote totals across his three presidential elections.
The less recognized reason this trend recurs is that the “Republican” Party is actually two ideologies — Republican and MAGA — operating under one name. Republicans are said to “underperform,” a term defined as “to perform less well than expected.” Given the nation’s evident love for MAGA but lack of an appetite for do-nothing Republicanism, their repeated uninspiring showings are not an underperformance, but rather one that is to be somewhat expected.
Therefore, if it was primarily about gas prices, as the vice president and others assume, Republicans would have won far more seats in 2022, when prices were at record highs going into Election Day. That election also followed the Afghanistan withdrawal, a wide open border, and more. But that was not the case, because not all Republicans are MAGA.
Lastly, perhaps the most important issue — yet one that has received virtually no mention — is the lack of security in our election processes, making some results less than completely trustworthy. Aside from Trump in 2020 and 2024, and Ted Cruz in 2024 thanks to Trump’s coattails, James Talarico received more votes than any other candidate in Texas history.
Trump’s and Cruz’s totals can be plausibly explained: an extremely popular president in high-turnout elections carrying a down-ballot candidate with him. The same cannot be said for Talarico’s. This was a midterm, when turnout is generally 30 percent lower than in presidential elections, in a state that has not voted for a Democrat in a statewide election in more than thirty years. Talarico also ran on a platform antithetical to traditional Texas values on God, oil, LGBT issues, and more. Yet the reported totals indicate he received more support than Texas native President George W. Bush during his election victories, and even presidential candidates from his own party, such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in the last two general elections. It is suspect, to say the least.
Taken together, it’s hard to treat the results as a rejection of Trump’s agenda.
Since Tuesday evening, “right-wing” media have demoralized many about Trump’s final two years, but very little will change in practice within the Executive Branch. Republican majorities were undoubtedly preferable, but Trump was never depending on Congress to make the second half of his term successful. Due to the ideological split within the party he revived from the ashes in 2016, Trump has seldom been able to rely on congressional Republicans to advance the agenda voters elected him to enact, leading him to rely heavily on executive orders.
For example, Trump needed Congress to pass two key pieces of legislation. The OBBB — which made his first-term tax cuts permanent while removing taxes on tips, Social Security, and overtime — was signed into law after unnecessary infighting on July 4, 2025. Yet by the time the Iran incursion began in March, Republicans had allowed roughly seven months to pass without enacting the SAA, which would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote, required photo ID to vote, and greatly curtailed mass mail-in voting, measures that virtually every demographic supports.
Since they refused to pass Trump’s lone key remaining piece of legislation, it is possible that Trump, identifying their ineffectiveness at best or deliberate negligence at worst, asked himself the same question much of MAGA did: How important is it to preserve a majority if it refuses to wield the power it currently possesses? He may ultimately have determined that sacrificing a largely useless majority was a comfortable price to pay for preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Ironically, their inaction made Republican retention of Congress even less likely for two reasons: Voter fraud — which exclusively benefits Democrats — was allowed to persist, while that same inaction simultaneously angered voters and made congressional Republicans even more unpopular.
Almost unbelievably, Trump has already delivered on an astounding amount of campaign promises, not even halfway through this historic term. He ended the border invasion and launched the largest deportation effort in American history. He deployed the National Guard to major cities as the nation experienced an 18-percent reduction in murders, bringing the murder rate to its lowest level in recorded history. He also reworked countless trade deals that will make America more prosperous long into the future, even well beyond the conclusion of his term.
This is in addition to perhaps less important, but ultimately noteworthy in terms of restoring the spirit of American exceptionalism, beautification projects that have, in some instances, cleaned or added to landmarks in our nation’s capital, or, in one instance, resulted in the creation of a new one. All of this was done with the stroke of a pen while Congress spent much of the year on recess.
Without the expectation among voters that he work with Congress, or a potential re-election to concern himself with, Trump can set his sights fully on more executive orders to deliver on his remaining priorities. These include bringing a complete end to the war in Iran, which will be the catalyst for bringing down gas prices and inflation — something he already proved himself capable of addressing by the one-year mark of this term after inheriting an affordability crisis from Biden. Other priorities include further mass deportations and the continuation of negative net migration, which occurred for the first time in fifty years, as well as continued renegotiation of unfair trade agreements.
Once more, all can be accomplished exclusively through the Executive Branch, and all will go a long way toward cementing his place as one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history.
Donald Trump is an innovator. This was on display during his first term, when Democrats refused to provide his requested funding to continue the border wall, prompting him to declare a national emergency at the southern border. This allowed him to use funds already approved by Congress for the military, since border protection was considered a military-related necessity. If his remaining initiatives face similar roadblocks, we can expect more innovative thinking to deliver for the American people.
There was only little celebration when Republicans won back the House in 2022, because Joe Biden was still the “president.” Conversely, since President Trump is in office, there should be little pessimism now. It is true that he will be a term-limited president presiding over his final two years without majorities. But the term “lame duck” is synonymous with ineffectiveness, fecklessness, and defeatism — all qualities antithetical to the man Trump has long proven himself to be, whose defining quality may just be that of a fighter.
Image via Pixnio.
Matt Kane
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/11/the-midterms-won-t-make-president-trump-a-lame-duck/
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