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Vice President JD Vance was resolute Wednesday: "The reason we lost is the war."
President Donald Trump offered a more diffuse take to Fox News early that morning. Iran was partly to blame, but so were sky-high gas prices and the absence of his name from midterm ballots. (On Tuesday evening Trump wrote that Fox News bore some responsibility, for interviewing Democrats.)
These pronouncements from the Republican Party's two standard-bearers did little to quell the finger-pointing from right-wing influencers and media personalities after the massive blue wave on election night.
By Wednesday morning, the party's media firebrands sought not only answers but also scapegoats. Commentators and influential right-wing personalities offered sharply different accounts of what went wrong. Some, like Trump, blamed the war in Iran and the economy, while others pointed to Republican leaders in Congress or the president himself. Still, others accused fellow conservatives of misleading voters and undermining the movement.
Their competing explanations - and their efforts to pin responsibility on one another - exposed deep fractures in an online ecosystem that has long been one of Trump's most powerful political assets.
Jack Posobiec, who hosts "Human Events Daily" on the right-wing network Real America's Voice, said voters disapproved of foreign involvement in Iran and Ukraine, and suggested Republicans focus on prices and wages rather than GDP and the stock market.
John Solomon, a former Washington Post reporter who chairs Trump's Government Transparency Task Force, blamed the high cost of living. "Americans punished Republicans for failing to finish the job of taming inflation and fixing an economy about to be transformed by artificial intelligence," he wrote on his website Just the News.
Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer who boasts a close relationship with Trump, pointed to an array of culprits: She blamed TikTok and podcasts and foreigners and undocumented immigrants and what she called the "Islamic communist takeover of America."
While most resisted blaming Trump directly, even as they fingered the war in Iran, podcast host Matt Walsh said the president is personally responsible for the midterms shellacking.
"Trump launched an unpopular and pointless war," he wrote on X. "Gas prices are too high. People can't afford groceries. Trump abandoned the American First message. This is why Republicans are getting crushed. It's very simple."
More blame was directed at Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune for failing to enshrine Trump's agenda into law. "The President issued over 200 executive orders, but Speaker Johnson and Leader Thune did virtually nothing to turn that agenda into lasting law," said right-wing media personality Breanna Morello. Johnson said Wednesday he won't seek the House Minority Leader position.
Jim Hoft of the right-wing website Gateway Pundit blamed Thune for not passing the Save America Act, which would require stringent requirements for voters.
But many instead focused their ire on one another.
Joel Berry, the former managing editor of the satirical website Babylon Bee, railed against "every freak show podcaster" including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens for "demoralizing" listeners. Their message, he said, was that "the GOP betrayed them, Trump is controlled by the ‘Epstein class,' that their vote doesn't matter, and that they have no agency or sovereignty over their lives or their nations politics."
After the Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro posted a meme responding to the poor election returns coming in for Republicans on Tuesday night, Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the conservative outlet the Federalist, responded that Shapiro himself was at fault.
"Congrats. You set that fire. You demanded the war that torched the GOP this election. You said it would be easy. You said it would be over lickety-split."
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Previously:
• Ross Douthat joins Bari Weiss's revamped '60 Minutes' after spate of firings
• Prez's fresh mocking of CNN reporter renews calls to end correspondents' dinner
• Voice of America's exiled journos must find meaning in work outside newsroom