Republicans Start To Point Fingers At Trump After Severe Midterms Loss

President Donald Trump’s allies on Wednesday tiptoed their way toward once unthinkable territory: blaming the president.

The unusual candor followed sweeping GOP defeats across the country, a repudiation of the president that matched some of the party’s worst fears. Some pointed to the Iran war and its effect on gas and grocery prices. Others pointed to the president’s demeanor.

“There's a little bit of a reckoning in the Republican Party about where they go,” said Matt Dole, chair of the GOP in deep red Licking County, Ohio. “I think you're going to see a part of the Republican Party advocate for a return to normalcy, which is not repudiating Trump's ideology and policies, but will repudiate Trump's style.”

“It sounds a little ironic,” failed Maine Republican Gov. candidate Bobby Charles told POLITICO. “but I am nevertheless optimistic for the future because Trump's going to be gone in two years.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump and his advisors, meanwhile, blamed a myriad of factors, including Fox News, RINOs and “lazy” candidates — even as the party resoundingly lost both chambers of government and the blue wave rolled through deep red Texas, South Carolina, Iowa and Kansas.

Trump singled out Texas GOP governor Greg Abbott, who he called a “RINO,” and absolved himself of blame, claiming Republicans would have won “in a landslide” had he been on the ballot.

Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s adviser Alex Bruesewitz blamed the GOP’s poor performance on candidates he described as “uninspiring, lazy and thoroughly ineffective communicators” — explicitly calling out Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), who struggled throughout the course of his campaign to gain traction against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff.

The Collins campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One GOP operative working on multiple midterm races said it was a "lazy excuse" to blame candidate quality. "This is more than just one lazy candidate here. I mean, the chair of the … NRCC is losing his election.”

Still, other Republicans turned their ire on the GOP-controlled Congress.

“The Republican Party needs to have a conversation with itself about how to listen to the voters and present meaningful policy reform that impacts their lives,” said Gina Swoboda, the former chair of Arizona’s Republican Party and a longtime Trump ally. “This Congress did not do a single thing that I can name that meaningfully impacted the working class and middle class.”

Bruesewitz expressed dismay that some of those candidates boarded Air Force One and left their states five days before Election Day, after Trump had traveled to campaign for them.

“They’re so dependent and so reliant on the president,” Bruesewitz said. “The president’s strength has allowed Republicans to coast for a decade. His endorsement has cleared the field for them in their primaries and oftentimes in general elections. Most of them have never had to fight in a tough race, so they forgot the basics of campaigning and communicating in a digital era.” Top Trump officials had already hinted at that plan in interviews with POLITICO in the lead up to the election.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond, who have been preparing for the bloodbath and recriminations, were not buying it. They argued that flat characterization of Republican candidates as lazy could not possibly be applied to every vulnerable Republican who lost — and that Trump and the aides around him ought to look in the mirror.

But tellingly, they refused to put their name behind it.

"We are beyond candidate quality. It's a bloodbath," one senior Senate GOP official said. “Trump did this.”

A Republican operative working on swing state campaigns said Tuesday was a perfect storm “of just incompetence.”

“The people in the White House didn't do anything to stop him from engaging on things that were actively making everything worse because he was ignoring what the voters were caring about,” the operative said.