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heyOne year to the day of his second presidential victory, one year before and the morning of the crucial midterm elections his party suffered a big loss In Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, chairman donald trump Indicated that he has no intention of listening to the voters.
While hosting members of the Senate Republican conference for a breakfast meeting at the White House, Trump took no responsibility for the landslide defeats of gubernatorial candidates Winsome Earl-Sears, Jack Ciattarelli or others. GOP Candidates on ballots on Tuesday.
Instead, he claimed that the “biggest factor” in his defeat was that he was not running in a presidential election year and suggested that the heavy loss was predetermined.
Trump said, “The victory last night was not expected. I don’t think it was good for the Republicans. I’m not sure it was good for anyone, but we had an interesting evening and we learned a lot.”
He also suggested that now the record-breaking 36-day government shutdown – the longest in American history – was a “big factor” that was “negative for Republicans” and called on Congress to “bring the government back down soon, and really immediately.”
But the president’s concession to furloughing millions of federal workers at home or forcing them to work without pay for more than a month could be a bad look for Republicans — especially in Virginiahome to countless civil servants — was not a prelude to the kind of bipartisan talks that have ended prior funding impasses.
Instead, he offered a solution that shows absolutely no understanding of what voters were trying to tell him in last night’s election returns. Rather than admit that a problem exists, he encouraged senators to blow up the few remaining levers of power that Democrats currently have by eliminating the upper chamber’s 60-vote threshold for most legislation.
Trump said, “I think it’s very important, we have to move the country forward. And the way we’re going to do it this afternoon is to end the filibuster.”
It’s an idea that is almost certainly dead-on with most of the Senate GOP, many of whom have long opposed eliminating the supermajority requirement because it provides a useful check against Democrats when the GOP is out of power and forces senators to compromise when writing legislation that requires broad, bipartisan support to pass.
Majority Leader John Thune, who has served in the upper chamber for two decades, acknowledged this earlier this week when he told reporters that the so-called “nuclear option” does not have enough support to garner 51 votes (or 50 with the support of Vice President J.D. Vance), which would require changing the Senate’s standing rules.
While Trump appeared to concede the point when he told senators it was “possible” that they would not repeal the filibuster and said he would follow their wishes, his justification for making the request revealed that he lacked an understanding of the previous night’s results.
By eliminating Democrats’ ability to block legislation by requiring a bill to get 60 votes, he said, Republicans would be able to use their current unified control of Washington to pass a laundry list of GOP proposals that would oust Democrats from power for a generation.
“They’ll probably never be able to get into power, because we’ll have crossed everything that you can imagine that’s good and everything that’s good for the country, and there will be no reason to [to elect Democrats],” He said.
“If you don’t end the filibuster, we won’t pass any legislation.”
For example, he suggested passing a national voter ID law in response to last night’s California special election, in which voters approved a ballot measure to temporarily change the state’s congressional map in response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas.
He said, “We should pass all the things we want to do to make sure our elections are safe and secure, because California is a disaster. Many states are disasters.”
What remains unsaid is that the legislation Trump wants to pass the Senate after eliminating the filibuster is almost entirely blatantly partisan — and deeply unpopular with the majority of voters who will decide whether to maintain unified GOP control over Washington a year from now.
But 10 months into Trump’s second term, it’s clear that either he doesn’t understand that things that routinely get struck down because of the Senate supermajority requirement are unpopular — or he doesn’t care, because he’s been told that the proposals are popular among his most ardent supporters.
At the moment, MAGA loyalists appear to be the only ones still engaged in completely destroying and rebuilding the government and country in their image.
Last night, Democratic candidates in both the Garden State and the Old Dominion swept bellwether counties where they had made significant gains by huge margins just a year ago. Latino voters and non-college-educated voters, who formed the basis of his victory over then-Vice President Kamala Harris in seven swing states last year, swung back toward Sherrill and Spanberger by significant margins.
Even Jason Jones, the struggling Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, defeated his GOP incumbent opponent despite his history of disturbing and violent rhetoric about Republicans in the state legislature — and their children.
It was a clear sign that after ten months of DOGE layoffs, massive tax increases imposed by executive order, masked ICE and CBP agents and officers pulling non-white people off the street without warning, retaliation against Trump’s opponents, and no meaningful action to address the affordability issues he was elected to address, voters want him to change course.
It’s a message that one of Trump’s predecessors, Barack Obama, understood well.
After what he called “shellacking” by his party in the 2010 midterm elections, he suggested that this was because he had lost touch with voters while implementing an agenda on which they did not fully agree.
“There’s an inherent danger in being in the White House and living in a bubble… sometimes we forget the ways we connect with the people who brought us here in the first place,” he said.
Trump’s call to abolish the filibuster after last night’s results shows that he, like Obama, is trapped in the same “bubble.”