Andrew C. McCarthy, a conservative National Review writer who once called the Russia investigation a plot to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, says Republicans’ midterm wipeout comes down to one thing: Trump.
“Yes, there is a single, silver-bullet answer to the question, ‘Why did we get crushed?’” McCarthy wrote in a column published Saturday. “The answer is Donald Trump — specifically, the president’s shameful, erratic, often reckless, always self-absorbed, exhausting, in-your-face-24/7 second-term performance — reminding people nonstop of all the reasons they disliked him the first go-round, but this time without the perception of rising prosperity.”
McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, wrote the 2019 book “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.” He dismissed the post-election finger-pointing over whether the Iran war or tariffs sank the party as “blame-shifting, not serious self-examination.”
“Republicans got their clocks cleaned this week because they made Trump the center of their universe, as if Congress did not exist other than as a presidential pom-pom squad,” he wrote. “Unleashed, Trump has governed like a lunatic.”
“I am not trying to be provocative,” he added.
McCarthy argued that Trump’s “secret sauce” had always been his “uncanny prowess at depicting his opponents as lunatics,” by siding with large majorities of Americans on issues like border security. That approach, he wrote, has run its course.
“Show’s over,” McCarthy wrote. “Yes, the Democrats are still lunatics. But in national politics, they’ve been in the wilderness for a couple of years… In the meantime, though, Trump became the frighteningly crazy guy who made the sidelined Democrats seem comparatively stable.”
He then went through a long list of grievances. He cited Trump’s pardons of roughly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants and what he called “a thriving pardon industry that enriches Trump-connected lawyers, lobbyists, and PACs.” He also pointed to Trump’s Oval Office clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his threats to annex Greenland and his “maniacal campaign” against Canada.
He also faulted Trump’s “gratuitously draconian and frequently illegal” immigration enforcement, his Justice Department’s “patently meritless cases against the president’s political enemies,” and a push to put his name on everything from the Kennedy Center to battleships to a proposed “Trump Reflecting Pool.”
“Virtually every day there is some stupefyingly insane action or announcement,” McCarthy wrote.
He said Trump’s social media posts are “habitually juvenile, profane, nasty, and self-aggrandizing.” He pointed to the president’s Easter Sunday post warning Iran to “Open the F—–‘ Strait, you crazy bastards.”
“There is no surcease, and normal people in the country detest it,” he wrote.
McCarthy saved some of his sharpest criticism for the Trump family’s finances. He noted that Trump’s net worth has grown by “well over $2 billion” since his second term began, and that his sons have “ballooned their bottom lines by hundreds of millions of dollars,” much of it through crypto deals involving foreign investors with major business before the U.S. government.
He also pointed to MAGA’s double standard. When Joe Biden’s relatives cashed in on far smaller sums, he wrote, “MAGA Republicans on Capitol Hill brayed about ‘the Biden crime family’ and talked openly about impeachment.”
“You can tell yourself that Tuesday was all about the Iran war or the tariffs,” McCarthy concluded. “The cold truth, however, is that American voters previously turned on Democrats because the Joe Biden they championed did not appear to be functioning as president — and they didn’t like it; and this week, they turned on Republicans because the Donald Trump they champion has turned the presidency into something they don’t recognize — and they don’t like it.”
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