It was the morning after the midterm elections, and Jeff Flake couldn’t stop laughing. Not necessarily a mean laugh—Flake, who is preternaturally good-humored, tends to chuckle amiably through most conversations. But I thought I detected a quantum of vindication or glee in the voice of the former senator from Arizona.
I’d called Flake to ask what he made of his party’s historic electoral meltdown. “It feels literally like a 10-year fever just broke,” he told me. “I’ve been saying to my wife, It’ll break. It’ll break, and she’s been saying, When? When? When? And it looks like it has.”
During the first Trump administration, Flake distinguished himself as one of Capitol Hill’s most outspoken Republican critics of the president—of his character, his policies, and his coarsening of America’s political culture. Flake was heartbroken by his party’s craven accommodation of Donald Trump and routinely called it out. “One day in the not too distant future,” he’d predicted in 2019, “Republicans will wake up and say, ‘We did this for this man?’”
Flake believes that day has finally arrived. “Republicans have to be asking themselves, ‘What did we get out of this?’” he said. “Twelve trillion dollars added to the national debt during the two Trump terms so far? Our trade deals in tatters? Our allies don’t trust us? China has not been restrained?”
Yes, Flake conceded, the border has been secured (though many of Trump’s immigration policies could be undone by a swipe of his successor’s pen). And yes, the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority (though any Republican president would have achieved that, and the current 6–3 majority owes more to Senator Mitch McConnell than to Trump). But the trade-off for even these qualified accomplishments, Flake argued, has been that “the party has lost its soul.” He pointed to the “sickening” crony capitalism that dominates the president’s orbit, and to the GOP’s continued support for Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
[Eugene Robinson: The end of the Trump era]
And now, after thoroughly remaking the party in his image and purging it of anti-MAGA dissidents such as Flake, Trump has handed his party a generationally devastating midterm wipeout. “That’s what I think Republicans looking in the mirror are saying: ‘We did this for this man? Was it worth it?’”
I reminded him that one of those Republicans, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, once derided Flake’s principled resistance to Trump as feckless and self-defeating. No one is putting up statues of Jeff Flake in the Capitol, McCarthy had sneered in an interview with my colleague Mark Leibovich. (It bears mentioning that McCarthy said this in between licks of a chocolate-ice-cream cone while showing off pictures of himself on Air Force One. It bears further mentioning that McCarthy was shortly thereafter stripped of the speakership and defenestrated from Congress while Trump passively watched.)
I asked Flake whether he now sees McCarthy’s MAGA chest-thumping in a new light, given the GOP’s electoral collapse. He laughed again. “I’m not sure many statues are going to be erected to anybody who was part of this,” he said.
Forgive the Never Trump Republican a little gloating this week. It’s been a long decade.
Eleven years ago, when Trump first entered the presidential race, critics such as Flake—who regarded the reality-TV host as a dangerous, know-nothing con man—composed the great majority of the GOP establishment. But once Trump started rising in the polls, winning races, and accumulating power, the number of Republicans willing to acknowledge the emperor’s nakedness rapidly dwindled.
Those elected officials, political strategists, and conservative commentators who remained clear-eyed arrayed themselves under the “Never Trump” banner. In op-eds and interviews, they tried to persuade their fellow Republicans to return to their senses. They railed against Trump’s malformed psyche and broken moral compass. And almost all of them, at various points, made dire predictions about the consequences of their party’s affiliation with Trump.
For a long time, those predictions did not look especially prescient—not in November 2016, when Trump shocked the world with his upset victory, and not in 2024, when he stormed back into office despite the many political obituaries that had already been written about him.
But the devout core of the Never Trump faithful clung to their belief that Trump’s political project would eventually collapse and bury his party in the process.
On Tuesday night, they got to see their prophecies fulfilled.
“Trump has brought a Chernobyl level disaster to the Republican Party tonight,” Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant who advised former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s primary campaign in 2016, posted on X. “Tonight the Trump Show was finally cancelled. #BoxOfficePoison.”
[Adam Serwer: Even where MAGA won, MAGA lost]
“Bad policy, bad character make bad politics,” Mitt Romney, who as Utah’s junior senator voted twice to impeach Trump, posted on X. “Hoping for a course correction, for the country and for my party.”
Joe Walsh, a former Republican representative from Illinois who supported Trump in 2016 before turning on him and leaving the party, posted on Bluesky, “No political party and no president have ever deserved an electoral thumping and a complete political repudiation more than this political party and this president deserve.”
Mark Sanford, the former representative from South Carolina who mounted a quixotic bid for the Republican nomination in 2020, told Semafor that Tuesday night was “a Waterloo moment for Trump.” In his newsletter, Adam Kinzinger, another representative driven from office for his opposition to Trump, effused alliteratively about the comprehensive beatdown his erstwhile colleagues took on Tuesday: “They got spanked in Senate races. Hammered in House races. Gutted in governors races. And lit up in legislative races.” Bill Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, which died during Trump’s first term, was moved to quote Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton while declaring, “Election Day 2026 was the true celebration of our 250th anniversary.”
The mood in the Never Trump media seemed to hover somewhere between ebullient and bloodthirsty. In The Bulwark, a publication founded by Weekly Standard alumni, Jonathan Last celebrated the prospect of pursuing charges against the alleged crooks and criminals in the president’s orbit. “Lawyer up, bitches,” he wrote, before listing various categories of people who may soon face congressional scrutiny, including Trump donors, business partners, and DOGE employees. “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: Get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.”
Meanwhile, at The Dispatch, another redoubt of Never Trump conservatism, editors were exultant but restrained. “The electorate has rendered its judgment of Donald Trump his MAGA-fied Republican Party: No more,” they wrote in an editorial that welcomed the coming GOP civil war. “The fight for the right starts now.”
Not every Republican who pegged Trump as a corrosive, party-destroying force was celebrating vindication. When I called Peter Meijer, who served a term in the House representing Michigan’s Third Congressional district, he seemed to be in a contemplative mood. “I think my ratio of condolence to congratulations calls was about 10 to one,” he told me.
Meijer is not a Never Trumper. He has voted for the president, and supports many of his policies. But after January 6, 2021, Meijer committed MAGA apostasy by voting to impeach Trump. He lost his next primary to a far-right MAGA devotee. But he told me that Tuesday’s election ended the careers of some genuinely good public servants. “Looking at the class I came into Congress with, a lot of whom are reasonable, good, governing types—they just got wiped out in this wave.” His voice took on a poetic tone. “Swept out to sea as the tsunami receded.”
Meijer seemed less eager than others to indulge in Trumpenfreude. He was worried about Democratic overreach. And he noted that the president’s doomsayers had been wrong plenty of times before. But when I asked him what he thought of Trump’s claim that Republicans lost only because Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot, Meijer seemed to lose his patience.
“This was an anti-Republican wave, and he’s the leader of the Republican Party,” he told me.
He went on to cite all of the ways that Trump had hamstrung his party—the refusal to develop legislative relationships in Congress; his unseemly cryptocurrency profiteering; and the appearance of corruption in much of his other dealmaking while in office.
He sighed. “It’s like, what the hell are we doing, guys?”
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