US President Donald Trump shushes a journalist, as he makes a joint appearance with Vice President JD Vance (not pictured) in the Oval Office to announce a whistleblower program to encourage the public to report alleged fraud, at the White House in Washington, DC, US, October 20, 2026.
Dispatch editors say there has been an anti-Trump movement brewing inside the Republican Party since President Donald Trump first arrived on the scene years ago. But the enigmatic leader trampled all thought of dissent, buttressed by millions of fawning, MAGA voters prepared to turn on GOP lawmakers in an instant to please Trump.
But in the aftermath of a punishing Tuesday mid-term that ousted Republicans across the nation, Trump’s Trample Boots appear to be collecting mud on a shelf. Instead, the president looked old and defeated Wednesday while lauding his controversial ballroom. Now editors hope GOP fire-starters can rediscover their matches.
“There are scores of current Republican lawmakers who have long believed the party needed new direction, even if they’ve often been afraid to say so in public. We know this because they tell us in hushed, off-the-record conversations — conversations that have been taking place since Trump first arrived on the political scene more than a decade ago,” said Dispatch editors. “We hope the results of these midterms will embolden them to say in public what they’ve told us in private over the years.”
The beginning of the end of the Trump era is now here, reports the Dispatch. And what America needs is a return to the principles “the Founders enshrined in the constitutional order Trump and his allies tried to subvert.” But the principles of the conservative movement still need champions.
“We’ve pointed out many times before that America no longer has a limited government party. It needs one,” say editors.
MAGA leaders “often sneer” at principles of limited-government conservatism as “Zombie Reaganism,” say editors, but with the “electoral collapse of a populist right unmoored from any principles at all, conservatives would be wise to revisit the ideas that animated the nation’s 40th president.”
“[T]he thing about principles — the thing that the president and the motley band of grifters and opportunists around him, unsurprisingly, do not understand — is that they’re timeless. And, at the very least, elected officials devoted to re-limiting government might have been compelled to speak up when the president promised to spend more than $1 trillion on a fanciful bribe to keep his party in power,” said the Dispatch.
But speaking out in those moments “requires character,” they said. And “as the debate over the future of the right unfolds in the coming months, we hope that character somehow matters again in a way that it hasn’t to the party of Roy Moore and Ken Paxton and Donald Trump.”
The nation today faces many challenges, “many of them … of our own making,” concedes the Dispatch. “We will need not only wise leaders, but good ones, too.
“So, bring on the fight,” said Dispatch editors. “Good change is coming. Republicans can wake up and be part of that revival, or they can continue to suffer more humiliating defeats of the kind they experienced last night.”
