Today, Explained · · Transcript & summary by WhipScribe
It lays out, within days of the vote, the competing stories Republicans are telling themselves about the 2026 midterm loss and who each story would help in 2028.
Tap a chapter to open that moment in the transcript; the link to it is copied for you.
“The blame game is beginning.” Andrew Prokop · at 2:29 — open in the transcript →
“He's super competent, but not charismatic.” Rod Dreher · at 20:06 — open in the transcript →
Republicans lost the 2026 midterms by a margin the episode calls the biggest congressional landslide in half a century, with even Mississippi competitive. The question on the table is whether MAGA can survive the defeat, and who on the right gets to define what the defeat meant. Vox's Andrew Prokop frames the aftermath as a contest over the explanation itself, because whichever story Republicans settle on will steer the party toward 2028.
The explanations divide along old fault lines. Free-market conservatives such as Utah senator John Curtis pin rising prices on tariffs and deficit spending and want a return to spending cuts and free trade. National populists answer that the 2025 majority wasted itself on a tax cut weighted to the rich, paid for with Medicaid and SNAP cuts. J.D. Vance blamed the Iran war, a jab at the hawks inside his own administration, while Erick Erickson and Ron DeSantis listed corruption, deportations and Trump's building projects. Trump himself spent the days after talking about his ballroom.
Rod Dreher, the writer Vance credits with pulling him into politics, gives the bluntest verdict: MAGA is Donald Trump, and it failed to govern. He traces that failure to decisions made on instinct and appointments made on loyalty, starting with the April 2025 tariffs. He still hopes Vance can champion a pro-family national conservatism, but warns that Vance must break with Tucker Carlson and the extremist fringe, that Marco Rubio carries the same administration baggage, and that DeSantis may be the one national figure untouched. His advice to congressional Republicans is to stop deferring to a president who shows no loyalty in return.
A conservative writer of books, a contributor to the Free Press and author of the daily newsletter Rod Dreher's Diary. J.D. Vance has credited him with convincing him to enter politics, and his new book is Weimar America.
Rod Dreher told Today, Explained that the 2026 midterms were a referendum on Donald Trump and that Trump failed it. In his view MAGA had some good ideas and was right to sweep away the old Republican establishment, but it could not deliver good government, and no amount of charisma makes up for that. Because MAGA is inseparable from Trump, Dreher says, it cannot outlive him as a movement.
Rod Dreher blames Trump's habit of deciding on gut instinct instead of expert advice, and of promoting people for personal loyalty rather than competence. He dates the decline to April 2, 2025, the Liberation Day tariff announcement, which he says was not thought out. He adds that Trump signed executive orders without turning them into legislation, and he calls the Iran war the symbol of every disaster of Trumpism.
Vice President J.D. Vance said online that Republicans lost because of the Iran war, and challenged anyone who thought losing the Senate for six years was worth it to argue so openly. Vox's Andrew Prokop reads it as Vance distancing himself from an unpopular choice ahead of 2028 while continuing his long fight against the party's foreign-policy hawks.
Andrew Prokop of Vox says nearly every Republican now concedes the party did too little on affordability, but they disagree on why. Traditional free-market conservatives blame Trump's tariffs and deficit spending for higher prices and interest rates, and want spending cuts and free trade back. National populists say tariff effects are exaggerated and the real failure was a 2025 agenda built around a tax cut mostly for the rich, paid for by cutting Medicaid and SNAP.
Rod Dreher says Ron DeSantis, the outgoing Florida governor who lost the 2024 nomination to Trump, could be the strongest outside candidate for 2028. Dreher calls DeSantis competent but uncharismatic, and says his rational critiques of MAGA since the midterms stand out because he is the only national Republican figure not tainted by Trumpism. Andrew Prokop notes that a week earlier DeSantis was treated as a has-been.
Rod Dreher, a former friend of Tucker Carlson, says Carlson has become an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist over the last couple of years. He notes that Carlson was key in getting Trump to pick J.D. Vance as his running mate, and argues Vance cannot stay a credible party leader until he addresses what Dreher calls the Tucker Carlson problem. Dreher does not expect Carlson to run for president.
Rod Dreher, a personal friend whom J.D. Vance credits with drawing him into politics, ties his support to the national conservatism movement started by Yoram Hazony. Dreher describes it as putting national sovereignty and interest first, joined to cultural conservatism and economic reforms that make raising families easier. He says Vance can win if he champions pro-family economics, social conservatism and no new wars, though the midterms have badly dented his standing as Trump's natural successor.
Rod Dreher says congressional Republicans have nothing left to lose and should stand up to Trump and establish their independence. He points to Texas governor Greg Abbott, whom Trump called a RINO as soon as Abbott's re-election loss was called, as proof that Trump repays loyalty with none. Dreher argues a Trump endorsement in the 2028 primaries would be the kiss of death.
Our own transcript of the public episode, with a timestamp about every 90 seconds. Tap a timestamp or the link button on a paragraph to copy a link that opens this page there.
0:00The MAGA movement dominated and defined the last decade of politics in the United States. And then on Tuesday, it crashed and burned so spectacularly that Mississippi is in play. Democrats didn't just win. This was the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years. President Trump, hours after this collapse that will define his legacy, talked about his ballroom for almost an hour. It's drone-proof, it's missile-proof, it's bullet-proof. If you're a MAGA Republican and you want to win an election ever again, you have got to figure something out. Today on Today Explained from Vox, can MAGA resurrect itself and does anyone even want that? Or is the movement dead? Support for Today Explained comes from Anthropic, the team behind Clawed.
1:04Anthropic is a public benefit corporation founded on a hard question. That question is, how do we make sure AI goes well for people? They're working on it, publishing what they find, even when it's uncomfortable. There's hope in hard questions. Ask your hard question at clawed.ai slash today explained. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot A-I slash today explained. Support for the show comes from Walmart. Walmart keeps prices low for 150 million Americans every week. They help families save on food, clothing, school supplies, and countless other necessities in every aisle. According to them, Walmart's great value product line saves shoppers up to 35% every year compared to national brands. This means families have more to spend on pizza nights, birthdays, and all the moments that matter.
1:51Because when Walmart says save money, live better, they mean it. Learn more at walmart.com slash save money. this is today explained i'm andrew prokop senior politics correspondent vox all right so republicans lost very very big on tuesday you spent the day yesterday talking to conservatives. You looked at what was happening online. How's everybody doing? The blame game is beginning. And what's unfolding is actually something more akin to what I would call narrative warfare. Because after a surprising result like this, when a party gets such an unambiguously terrible showing, just a really brutal defeat. There's an element of genuinely trying to come to terms with what happened and what the voters were saying and what they wanted.
2:55But probably more important, there is a self-serving element of how can I use this to best help my cause, my faction, my own political ambitions in the case of politicians? The battle to explain, the battle for Republicans to explain to themselves why Republicans lost so badly, because the answer to that question will help determine where the party goes in the future. So people have a lot of stakes in what that agreed upon narrative turns out to be. If you were watching and listening what voters said when they exited the polls on Tuesday, I was watching a lot of that Tuesday evening. A thing that came up again and again was affordability, the price of gas, the price of everything. In fact, how are Republicans
3:42thinking about affordability and that very specific critique 24, 48 hours after this this trouncing? I think pretty much everyone is ready to say affordability is a problem. We didn't do enough on affordability, but that is where the consensus stops. What exactly did Trump do wrong on affordability? And what should Republicans be doing instead? Those are the questions that people are already arguing over. And there is a split that we can already see in the party between two camps. the traditional free market conservatives versus the populist right. And the traditional free market conservatives, they are really putting the blame on the tariffs. They are saying, oh, look at these tariffs. They drove up prices.
4:36Deficit spending led to higher interest rates. What the Republican Party needs is to go back to, you know, the good old free market dogma, spending cuts, free trade and all that. It's time for Republicans to return to the principled conservative values that once defined us and that we've steadily abandoned over the last decade. Senator John Curtis, Utah. And so Trump's attempts to create a new economic policy for Republicans just ended up making things worse. On the other side, you have the more MAGA-friendly national populists who are saying, OK, Trump didn't handle the tariffs perfectly. They'll admit that. But the impacts of the tariffs are exaggerated. The real problem is that Republican
5:25economic policy did not do enough to help middle class people, working class people. Because what did Republicans do with their majority in 2025? What was their big priority? It was just to pass a big tax cut, mostly for the rich, while paying for it by cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits. They did not really think creatively, try to do a sort of policy agenda that would actually, you know, help families. So instead of going back and rediscovering the free market dogma, we need to reject it harder. We didn't do anywhere near enough to actually address the problems that voters have. Hmm. One person you could imagine making that argument would be Vice President J.D. Vance. However, however, when he talked about the loss yesterday, primarily online,
6:17he blamed the Iran war. And a lot of people were shocked that he came out and basically subtweeted his own administration. The reason we lost is the war. If you'd like to argue it was worth it that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. Tell me about what position we see the vice president, obviously going to be a contender in 2028, taking right now. This is some real narrative warfare in action because J.D. Vance has long been part of a group of Republicans who really hate the party's traditional hawkish foreign policy establishment.
7:05And Trump sided with really the more traditional hawkish faction of the party that is always saying, oh, we're not tough enough abroad. We can fight more wars. He sort of bought that argument. He launched the war in Iran. And now, many months later, it's widely viewed as a debacle. So Vance's statement, in addition to perhaps setting himself up for 2028 and trying to come up with an issue where he can sort of distance himself from the administration's unpopular choice, he is also continuing to fight this battle that he has long been fighting against his rivals within the party, the foreign policy hawks. One of the dynamics that we've seen over the past decade is that Republicans typically protect President Trump.
7:57So they will act like the tariffs are four dimensional chess. They will act like the, you know, Husted's ass thing is cute. I'm studying his body. I've never studied the body of a man before. It's not my thing. After this week, is anyone just coming right out on the Republican side, on the conservative side and saying Donald Trump is to blame here? There is still a lot of caution about criticizing Trump personally or even using his name saying Trump did this, especially among people who hope to hold elected office in the future. But what we are seeing is now more of an effort in some circles to reject what you might call Trumpism, all of the Trump-specific changes to the way the Republican Party acts,
8:48the way they talk, and certain things that it does. There's a post by the conservative commentator Eric Erickson that kind of summed this mindset up. He wrote, It was gas prices. It was the war. It was also the corruption, the incompetence, the tariffs, the playing nice with Russia, the impression of cruelty, it was also the corruption, the incompetence, the tariffs, the playing nice with Russia, the impression of cruelty, the overly aggressive deportations, the accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic, the arrogance, the ballroom, the reflecting pool, the golf courses, the arch, the Qatari 747, the aggressive redistricting push, the threats against enemies. So he's really going all saying all of these
9:26things Trump did. And these are all very clearly Trumpy things. They have led the party astray. I think you can also look at Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. He, of course, ran against Trump unsuccessfully in the 2024 presidential primary. He may be preparing another shot in 2028. And he has been very vocal about the failures, in his view, of the administration that led to this electoral disaster for the GOP. Let's just be clear about what happened last night. This is close to an extinction level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last hundred years. He thought under DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the administration's approach to immigration just created unnecessary conflicts, these like pitch street battles and in blue
10:27cities. And he also talked about corruption. This swamp here is the worst it's ever been. When I got elected to Congress in 2012, the first thing I did, I sold all my stocks. I've never traded a stock in elected office, not one time. And he's positioning himself, of course, as an alternative. He says, you know, he didn't trade any stocks while he's been in office. And he's lost a lot of money for that because he said, I used to be really good at trading stocks, but, you know, I'm so self-sacrificing that I did it for the country. And that's the kind of ethic we need to bring back. Yeah. And this is very interesting because a week ago, nobody was talking about Ron DeSantis. He was sort of a national has-been. And now
11:08you see analysis on TV, everybody's eyes are kind of whipping over to Florida like, oh, DeSantis sounds good. So question being, how has Donald Trump responded to all this? He's getting it from all sides, maybe not, to your point, as harshly as he might have been expected to get it. But how's he responding to the critiques of Trumpism and MAGA? Well, he basically did a big press conference that talked about his D.C. beatification initiatives. So, you know, he's focusing on what the voters really care about. Why does Trump spend time on the White House? Well, first of all, it's very little time. Second of all, I like it. It's good. For me, it's relaxing. For somebody else, it's the opposite. But of all, it's very little time. Second of all, I like it. It's good. For me,
11:50it's relaxing. For somebody else, it's the opposite. But for me, it's real. I love construction. On one hand, he's he's pretending not to be chastened. He's doing posts like if I was on the ballot, Republicans would have won in a landslide. And, oh, you know, all these people who lost, they were just losers. And I think he does, at other points, sound pretty chastened and perhaps disappointed. We haven't seen a lot of defiance yet. I'm sure that will come, you know, when the hangover wears off. But for now, he's not really engaging with much second guessing for what he did wrong, but he's not like being utterly defiant either. It was a pretty big and embarrassing defeat for him. That's Vox's Andrew Prokop.
12:44When we come back, the conservative writer who convinced J.D. Vance to get into politics on whether his friend and the MAGA movement have any kind of future. Support for this show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Most good ideas start half-baked, a hunch, a rough sketch, a question you can't quite put into words. You don't need to know where to start. You can just bring Claude what you have, and it works to help you shape it, question it, and find that first step. You can try it at claude.ai slash todayexplained. That's Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You've heard of Claude.ai slash Today Explained. That's Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You've heard of Claude, right? From Anthropic.
13:35Support for Today Explained comes from NPR. We do what we can to stay on top of the news every day. And we know that keeping up can be a lot. Perhaps you are interested in the NPR Politics podcast, 15 minutes. Stay in the loop every weekday. What are they covering right now? Midterms, housing, health care, ICE, immigration, America's role in the world, the debt, the debt, the debt. Rather than doom scrolling, tune into the dulcet tones of NPR political journalists. Experience smart, straight talk, no hyperbole, clarity without judgment, giving you a better understanding of how the balance of power might shift without stressing you out. When there's a big political story, I want to know what Mara Liason has to say about it.
14:22Tamara Keith, what does she have to say about it? Danielle Kurtzleben, what does she have to say about it? Danielle Kurtzleben, what does she have to say about it? Listen now to the NPR Politics Podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. Support for Today Explained comes from ServiceNow. ServiceNow says AI was supposed to handle the parts of the job that you hate. Instead, it just describes them, suggests what to do about them, and then leaves you to do it. What? That's not help. That's homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They say they're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. Cases get resolved. Requests get processed.
14:58Loops get closed. And most importantly, they say no extra work for you because when you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do, the work that requires a person with ideas and judgment and, you know, a pulse. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. This is Today Explained. I'm Rod Dreher. I am a writer of books and a contributor to the free press, and I write a daily substat called Rod Dreher's Diary. Before the midterm results even came in, you wrote that Republicans were likely to be shellacked and that they had nobody to blame but Donald Trump and themselves. What do you think it is your fellow conservatives need to admit today? Yeah, that MAGA is over.
15:51It's done. It's been a failure. It brought Trump to power twice. I think there were some good ideas in MAGA and certainly the old Republican establishment, the pre-Trump establishment needed to go. But MAGA couldn't deliver on good government. And if you can't deliver on good government, it doesn't matter how charismatic the leader is, it's not going to work. And I think that there can be no doubt after this week's election that it was a complete referendum on Donald Trump. And he failed. And we have to go build from there. Why couldn't MAGA deliver on good government? Because, not to sound too Elizabeth Holmes about it, but couldn't is a word. It's a word choice, right? Right. You supported Trump in 2024.
16:36At the time, you wrote that you were aware of some of his failings. I think many people who voted for Trump were aware of some of his failings, but he had a mandate. Yeah, he did. He had the popular vote. He had the House. He had the Senate. Why couldn't MAGA, his movement, deliver on good government? I think it all comes down to the fact that Trump made decisions based not on rational calculation, by listening to expert advice, but on gut instinct. I think that the wheels began to fall off of the Trump train on April 2, 2025. That was the so-called Liberation Day when Trump announced these wide tariffs. They weren't thought out at all. They just came out of his gut. And that set a pattern, Noel,
17:20for the way Trump made decisions. Plus, he promoted people not based on competence, but based on loyalty to him, personal loyalty. And I think this administration has gone from one crisis to another because of that, because Trump doesn't have a theory or practice of governance. Note well, too, that when he came into office, he signed a bunch of executive orders. Some of them did things that I thought were really good, but he didn't turn them into legislation. Now, this is a guy whose party held both houses of Congress and the White House, yet he just sailed right along as if he was going to be president forever. And then, of course, this gets us to the Iran War, which was another gut instinct thing by Trump, which became the symbol
18:06for all of the disasters of Trumpism. Conservatives have to figure out what comes next, right? Oh, yeah. Can MAGA be divorced from Donald Trump? Can it exist without Donald Trump? No, MAGA is Donald Trump. Donald Trump himself said so. The challenge is going to be, how does the Republican Party rebuild and get and regroup for 2028 with Trump still in the White House? I mean, think about it. They're fighting a two-front battle now. They're going to have to fight the Democrats who are energized, who are going to come in and make the next two years justifiably, I would say, about investigating Trump administration corruption. But they're also going to have to fight Donald Trump himself. Sitting in the White House, he's not going to
18:50shut up. He's not going to do what is best for his party. He's going to try to salvage his legacy. Okay, so it's not, if we say MAGA is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump at the moment appears to be finished, right? What is the next conservative movement? Where do conservatives go from here? Well, the next few months are going to be really interesting in this respect. Till now, everybody on the right has thought that J.D. Vance, the vice president, is Trump's natural successor, even though he hasn't announced whether or not he's going to run. I think that has now been called severely into question. And I say this as someone who's a personal friend of the vice president and would like to see him be president one day. Nevertheless,
19:36even though he strongly opposed this war, the Iran war from behind the scenes, he and Marco Rubio and everyone else in this administration is tied to it and all the other failures of Trumpism. So who does that leave on the outside? I was very surprised in the past 24 hours to see and hear Governor Ron DeSantis, the outgoing governor of Florida, who, as we all remember, ran against Trump for the Republican nomination, never stood a chance. He's not charismatic. He's super competent, but not charismatic. And so Trump won the 2024 nomination. Well, now DeSantis has already coming out, making strong, clear, rational critiques of MAGA and Trumpism. And I think that DeSantis could be the outside candidate who has
20:28the best choice because he's the only national Republican politician not tainted by Trumpism. J.D. Vance, a friend of yours, he's credited you with getting him involved in politics, convincing him to get involved in politics. You say you'd like to see him be president. I think a legitimate question following what we've seen over the past two years and then last night is, why? Why do you want J.D. Vance to be president? Well, J.D. Vance has been associated with the national conservatism movement, as have I, the movement started by Yoram Hazzoni, which has been about prioritizing national sovereignty, national interest, a cultural conservatism that is also in favor of economic reforms to make it easier to raise families. J.D. Vance has been the avatar
21:15for that sort of conservatism. I see the bones of this kind of conservatism within Trump and MAGA, but it got completely crushed or moved aside by Trump's own obsessions. If J.D. can go back to the man I think he is deep down and start to champion this sort of thing, a more of an economic liberalism, pro-family economic liberalism with social conservatism and no new wars, if it's possible for any Republican to claim that now, then I think he could have a chance. I think he is a good man. I have criticized him publicly in print as a friend for not separating himself from the bigots on the dissident right, the anti-Semites and the white nationalists. this extremist crowd is going to make a bid for
22:05power in the rubble of MAGA. And I think whether it's J.D. or whoever becomes a Republican standard bearer is going to have to face them down. So we've talked about J.D. Vance. We have talked about Ron DeSantis. They represent different things within conservatism. Tucker Carlson represents something else within conservatism. I think it's something you don't like very much. And then there's Marco Rubio, who represents something that we were all familiar with from the early aughts. Marco Rubio is maybe a man without a place right now, but he could be a man with a place if conservatives made some choices. What do you think of these two other boldface names as we head into 2028? And is there anybody you think we're missing? Well, Tucker Carlson has beclowned himself,
22:52and it's really sad. As someone who used to be friends with him, I thought he was a sensible, interesting commentator who often said a lot of common sense things. But sometime in the last couple of years, he sort of lost his mind and became anti-Semitic and just a crazy conspiracy theorist. A lot of people are worried about his influence on the vice president because they've been close for years. Tucker was key in getting Donald Trump to choose J.D. Vance as vice president. I have no inside knowledge of that at all, but it worries me as well. I think J.D. is his own man, but it's going to be very hard for J.D. going forward to maintain a credible, maintain viability as a potential Republican Party leader until and unless he addresses the
23:39Tucker Carlson problem. I don't think Tucker's going to run for president. If he did that, he could only be a spoiler, and I don't think he actually wants it. I think that in Marco Rubio's case, he's been a real chameleon. He was against MAGA. He was the neocon's neocon for a while, but he has been a faithful servant and ex-executor of Trump's foreign policy. And for some reason, it doesn't seem to have stuck to him the way it has stuck to J.D. Vance. I'm not sure why that is. But, you know, again, with all of these guys who have been part of the Trump administration, it's going to be very, very hard to cut that albatross from around their neck. In order to get things done in this country, Congress has got to do its job to get things done.
24:27One of the dynamics that we've seen in the Trump era over the last decade is that Republicans in Congress don't want to stand up to Donald Trump. They don't want to cross him. So results are in. Once again, President Trump, it's not looking good. What should Republicans in Congress do? Should they finally grow a spine and say, look, we don't have to obey every single thing President Trump says? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, what do they have to lose now? Trump has never been loyal to anybody who's pledged loyalty to him. I noticed that Greg Abbott, the three-term governor of Texas, who lost his bid for re-election, no sooner had the election been called than Trump put out a statement calling him a rhino,
25:17said, you lost because you were a rhino. I mean, Trump is not loyal. And so there is nothing in it left for Republicans to stick with him. He's not going to be a factor in 2028. Maybe they want his endorsement in the 2028 primaries. Really? After this? That would be the kiss of death. So Republicans in Congress are now going to have to find a spine and stand up and establish some independence. If they had done that earlier, we might not be in this situation today. Rod Dreher, his new book is Weimar America, a warning for a decadent democracy. Hadi Mouagdi and Danielle Hewitt produced today, Jolie Myers edited, David Tadashor is our engineer, and Gabriel Donatub checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you. treatment this year. And every six seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000.
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