Republicans zero in on their scapegoat after death-spiraling loss

Conservative writer Nick Catoggio says the Republican Party is in a pickle. They desperately need someone to blame for the party’s historic collapse last week, but the party is filled with “dead-end Trump apologist[s]” and can’t bring itself to put the blame where it belongs.

“You can’t blame the man responsible. Your political identity, if not your entire personality, rests on the belief that saving the country somehow required handing over the Republican Party to a corrupt authoritarian game-show host,” said Catoggio. “To fault Donald Trump for embarrassing the American electorate into painting the map blue would be tantamount to admitting you’re an imbecile.”

They also can’t blame J.D. Vance because nobody pays attention to vice presidents. And in any case, Republicans are almost as invested in Vance as they are in Trump. They also can’t blame House Speaker Mike Johnson, said Catoggio, because “Johnson is less an actual human being than a sock puppet with the president’s arm up his backside. Blaming him for GOP failures is like having a beef with Jim Henson and blaming Kermit the Frog.”

“To find a useful scapegoat for the GOP’s drubbing, you need to find a figure within the party who’s in a position of power yet isn’t ideologically aligned with the Trumpist project. There aren’t many of those left. In fact, there’s only one,” said Catoggio, and the knives are already out for him.

The big argument is that Senat Leader John Thune failed to pass the SAVE America Act, the Trump bill that would have required millions of Americans to produce proof of citizenship to register or reregister to vote. It doesn’t matter that Trump’s “own voters could have been hit disproportionately hard by the procedural burden” of it, Catoggio said.

Thune doesn’t take the blame, having run to Fox News and demanded: “what could we have done differently?”

That’s a shocking position for a leader after sustaining “the worst electoral beating since Watergate,” said Catoggio. “There’s nothing Thune could have done over the past two years to better serve his party or his country except stand around looking constipated while the president cannibalized legislative power, reducing Congress from a co-equal branch of government to a squalid Russian Duma?”

Thune gave Trump almost everything he wanted, Catoggio argues.

“On John Thune’s watch, Trump launched a major war without congressional authorization, nominated laughably unfit cretins to lead the government’s essential agencies, monetized the presidency for himself and every crony attached to him, and turned federal law enforcement into a vindictive joke. The Senate majority leader and his members did nothing about any of it and in some cases actively enabled him, like when it confirmed Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Cabinet positions,” he said. “… By doing next to nothing to stop the president from governing America like a lower-IQ Viktor Orbán, Thune ensured that blame for an electoral drubbing would fall squarely on Trump himself …”

But doing next to nothing also guaranteed that voters saw no difference between Trump and his party’s candidates for the House and Senate, he added.

“When I say that Republicans lost this election because of Thune, that’s what I mean. He and his members offered no vision of right-wing government distinct from Trump’s, so Americans quite reasonably punished them for the president’s sins,” he said “… That’s the way John Thune and his members wanted it. Blame them for the result.”