US President Donald Trump speaks as the final steel beam goes into the ballroom, at the White House in Washington, DC, US, November 4, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
On Wednesday, following the GOP’s historic midterm trouncing, party insiders revealed what they think went wrong: President Donald Trump hired the “dumbest people” to manage the campaign. According to sources who spoke with the Intelligencer, this could bring about a “reckoning” in Trumpworld.
“Susie Wiles, James Blair, and Chris LaCivita have proven themselves to be historic: losing South Carolina, Texas and Kansas,” one GOP strategist told the Intelligencer, naming three of the key members in President Donald Trump’s inner circle who played central roles in running White House midterm efforts. “Trump has truly hired the dumbest people.” According to the strategist and other Republican operatives, those in the president’s orbit had become “out-of-touch party elites getting rich while the rest of them staggered under catastrophic losses.” According to one Republican operative, who had conducted polling in nearly every competitive House district, blame should also go to National Republican Senatorial Committee Director Richard Hudson, who lost his North Carolina seat in a surprise upset to Richard Ojeda. “Absolute embarrassment for Richard Hudson, Hudson’s NRCC, and the White House,” said the operative. “They hand-picked a lot of their candidates, took huge swings, such as starting the redistricting war, and it all blew up in their faces.”
Then there was the president himself. Republican staffers told the Intelligencer that they were “mortified by a president they readily admit couldn’t have been more distant from voters’ concerns, which revolved around high prices stoked by an unnecessary war in Iran.” One Trump-aligned strategist asserted that “it boils down to significant messaging failures across the board, failing to understand what’s important, in some cases just bad candidates... Significant unforced errors.” Still another operative, reflecting on the fact that the GOP’s electoral bottom truly fell out following the Dallas midterm convention, agreed that messaging was the key issue, saying, “I don’t think it was because of the convention, but that convention coincided with when voters started paying attention and what they saw was Trump focusing on everything except their own bottom lines and what would make their lives and their families’ lives better.”
Then Trump’s closing pitch in front of the Reflecting Pool, where he spent most of his time ranting about disproven vandals and his unpopular renovation projects, was the final nail in the coffin. “I think things like that are emblematic of what voters are frustrated by," explained one operative. "Trump focused on vanity projects instead of continuing to focus on affordability and growing the economy.” During the Reflecting Pool speech, a Republican official leading one of the top Senate campaigns sent the Intelligencer reporter a text that read simply, “Really something.”
One insider noted that the numbers show just how angry voters across the political spectrum were over the whole thing, saying, “Across the board, the shift among this demo that voted strongly for Trump is alarming, 30 to 40 points in a lot of places.” Such abysmal failure, asserted one Republican pollster, should bring a “reckoning in Trumpworld,” arguing, “In any civilized society, we would set them on an ice float and push it out into the middle passage. But they’re like cockroaches.” Now, with the GOP forced to recover from overwhelming defeat, the pollster admitted, “We’re at rock bottom.”
