For the past 11 years, Republican leaders have talked — sometimes loudly, sometimes softly — about divorcing themselves and their party from Donald Trump.
Some publicly urged voters in 2016 not to back their party’s nominee. Others voted to impeach him after his lies about a stolen election inspired a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A few tried to run against him in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Through all those episodes, Trump’s control of and personal identification with the party only grew stronger.
Now, as Republicans reckon with a historic rout in Tuesday’s midterm elections, calls to extirpate Trump from the right’s politics are resounding more forcefully than at any point since the first of his three presidential bids. But in a party that has, over the intervening decade, remade itself to a once-unimaginable extent in the president’s image, GOP leaders and activists are finding that creating a “post-Trump” party is easier said than done.
“It’s like the event horizon of a black hole,” said one Republican operative, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s midterm fortunes and future. “Trump exerts this huge amount of gravity. And beyond that, you know it’s going to be different, but you don’t know what it’s going to look like.”
The operative, who supports Trump’s agenda and the MAGA movement, said the party must eventually find a way to ease itself out of Trump’s grip but that doing so will pose philosophical, political and even logistical challenges — down to the level of scheduling considerations for a national convention that is still two years away: “Is Trump going to tolerate not being the final speaker at the RNC? I think that’s an open question.”
Trump demonstrated this week that he and his second-term agenda are now a powerful electoral liability, causing his party to lose statewide offices once deemed unassailable in Republican strongholds such as Texas, Iowa, Kansas — and even potentially Mississippi, where a Democratic Senate candidate was narrowly leading on Thursday night with votes still being counted. Republican losses, the worst a party has suffered in the midterms since the post-Watergate election of 1974, have been widely attributed to voters’ anger over the president’s record during his second term — including the invasion of Iran, the failure to tame inflation and questions about the enrichment of Trump’s family and friends.
“We can say, without hyperbole or gloating: This is the end of the Trump era,” the podcast host and longtime Trump frenemy Tucker Carlson declared on Wednesday, saying there was “no coming back for a generation” from the damage the president had done to the Republican Party.
Yet the fundamental laws of the political universe Trump has constructed around himself — and that have preserved his stature through a series of what many expected to be career-ending scandals and governance failures — have not changed.
He sits atop a campaign spending juggernaut, MAGA Inc., that has raised nearly $450 million this cycle and as of mid-October had more than $164 million on hand. Notwithstanding some dissident voices such as Carlson’s, he retains the support of most right-wing media outlets. Major conservative institutions have explicitly aligned themselves with Trump’s movement, as have a new generation of young Republican staffers and activists for whom Trump’s caustic blend of nativism, populism and strange internet memes is simply what right-of-center politics in the United States looks like.
Perhaps most important, despite his low approval rating, Trump has so far kept up his ability to connect with the party’s base and to shape the outcome of primary elections. That was painfully evident to his party on Tuesday, when his handpicked nominees went down to general election defeats in South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas. Earlier this year, Trump also backed successful primary challenges against Indiana state legislators who opposed his calls to redraw the state’s congressional districts in a way that would favor the party.
These were just the most recent steps in Trump’s gradual extinguishing of meaningful resistance to his priorities inside the GOP, a process that has left the party with few credible messengers for an agenda that departs from his. The already scant group of such figures will shrink further when the new Congress is seated in January; of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump during his 2021 impeachment trial, only one, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, will still be in office.
“We’ve never seen a political figure dominate a party to the degree that Trump has over the past 10 years — certainly not in modern times,” said Bob Good, a former Republican congressman from Virginia. He supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race and was purged from the party as a result, with Trump backing a primary challenger who unseated him. “Trump is the party. The party is Trump. Trump is the agenda. The agenda is Trump.”
That is why it can be so tough to imagine what Republican politics without Trump would even be about, Good said: “I think it’s very difficult to say today, what does the party stand for?”
Republicans need to recover parts of the ideological consensus Trump sought to disrupt, said Don Bacon, a moderate Republican congressman from Nebraska who is stepping down from a seat that a Democrat won this week. That includes an aggressive stance toward adversaries abroad and “the free market principles of Reagan.” (Bacon has criticized the Trump administration’s tariffs.) He said figures such as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (who ran unsuccessfully against Trump in 2024), Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp or former Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin could be fitting standard-bearers for that tradition in 2028.
But others, closer to what is now the populist mainstream of the American right, are deeply skeptical that the future of the GOP rests with a fleece-wearing, Chamber of Commerce-approved Republican ready to resurrect a more genteel strain of conservatism.
“What that wing of the party is selling, there is no constituency for,” said a former official in the first Trump administration, who requested anonymity in order to speak frankly about the president’s record. It would be a mistake to read the results of the midterms as a referendum on the core of Trump’s populist agenda, such as immigration restriction or economic protectionism, the former official said; rather, voters were expressing anger at deviating from the agenda.
“I think the rebuke here is that we asked for America First, and you gave us this oligarch-first, gold-filigree-in-the-Oval-Office b——t,” the former official said.
Doubling down on Trump’s stated agenda while (gently) criticizing the president’s diversions from it appears to be the strategy adopted by the figure many have predicted will be his successor atop the GOP: Vice President JD Vance. In a long X post the day after the election, Vance blamed the midterm results on the Iran war even as he made gestures of deference to the commander in chief who chose to launch it.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. “The president himself said so last night.”
Curt Mills, an ally of Vance’s and executive director of The American Conservative magazine, said some version of this balancing act — which he described as “keep the principles, oppose the war, and tacitly support Trump” — is probably a stance that will be adopted over the next two years by conservatives seeking to shape the party’s future.
“I don’t think Trump’s going to be dumped,” Mills said.
This week’s elections notwithstanding, he added, “Trump is the girl we went to dance with.”
Natalie Allison, Ian Ward and Lydia Sidhom contributed to this report.
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