Donald Trump Jr. stumbled onto an uncomfortable truth about the GOP’s midterm disaster in a surprisingly candid account of what went wrong.
President Donald Trump’s 48-year-old son got straight to the chase on his Triggered podcast, declaring, “Our side got smoked on Tuesday.”
“We lost the House, we lost the Senate. Texas just elected a Democrat senator, a Democrat governor, a Democrat attorney general, and really—other than here in Florida—Republicans got demolished up and down the ballot,” Don Jr. said. “So the question really becomes why, and ultimately what, comes next.”
After waxing on about the electorate’s lack of party loyalty and the Trump administration’s supposed “wins,” Don Jr. eventually pointed the finger at his father’s war with Iran.
“Whether you think it was the right decision or not, the Iran War is largely what shifted voter sentiment and caused this wave, right?” he said. “It jacked up the price of gas. That’s the thing that people feel most immediately in their pockets, and it—it changed their minds.”
Don Jr. stopped short of naming his father, at one point even suggesting Republicans would have fared better had the president been on the ballot in a bizarre lapse of logic.
He did, however, call out Trump’s campaign promise to keep the U.S. out of new wars only to launch one himself.
“We also campaigned on not getting into these things, and we don’t have to debate whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing. I don’t have any of the details. I’m not privy to any of that in terms of the intelligence. But it was definitely something after Afghanistan and Iraq that we probably didn’t want to be into,” he said.
He continued, “I bring this up mainly just to say that we’re only going to rebuild if we’re actually honest about what happened.”
But by the time Don Jr. asked, “So what comes next?” he had nothing to say about urging his father to end the war, instead telling Republican candidates they would simply need to “work harder” in 2028.
Throughout the episode, Don Jr. repeatedly returned to Vice President JD Vance’s blunt assessment on X that the Iran war had cost Republicans at the ballot box.
The pair seem to have forged a political alliance, hitting the campaign trail together in Ohio and New York in the days before Republicans suffered their disastrous Election Night.
The election is poised to have real consequences for Don Jr. In a new report from The New York Times, the newly blue Congress is expected to prioritize investigating Don Jr., particularly his relationship with a Russian oligarch tied to the Kremlin and his venture capital firm. The firm has scored a string of lucrative wins investing in companies that later benefited from Trump administration policies.
