MAGA media scrambles to form a circular firing squad

Forty-five minutes before the first polls closed on Tuesday, Greg Gutfeld was still doing what Fox News does best, acknowledging reality just long enough to replace it with a culture-war hallucination. “Gas prices are so high, I’m going to vote for the party that wanted to trans my kids,” he joked on “The Five,” adding that he didn’t see Democratic wins on the horizon. “There is no blue wave materializing,” Clay Travis, the Outkick founder and Fox contributor, posted at 3 p.m. EST, adding that Republicans were surging in Florida and the polls were about to be proven wrong yet again. 

Then the polls closed, and MAGA’s delusions were pulverized. The country that right-wing media had spent two years describing as angry, ascendant and permanently realigned voted in an avalanche that crushed years of manufactured MAGA hype. American voters told the president to take his $5,000 “Trump Dividend” checks and shove them. Elon Musk, who moved to Texas to get away from Democrats and then spent a reported $150 million to deliver the Lone Star State for Republicans, saw his early Tuesday post urging people to vote red disappear from his profile by Wednesday. 

The country woke up to results that few expected — and a long list of historic firsts. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman governor in American history. Michigan sent Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to Washington as the first Muslim senator. New Hampshire elected Chris Pappas as the first openly gay man in the Senate. New Mexico made Deb Haaland the first Native American woman governor, and Peggy Flanagan became Minnesota’s first Native American woman senator. Texas elected Gina Hinojosa over three-term Gov. Greg Abbott — the state’s first Latina governor and its first Democratic governor in more than three decades. Ohio got its first woman governor in Dr. Amy Acton. South Carolina tapped Dr. Annie Andrews as its first elected woman senator. Democrats won a Senate seat in Kansas for the first time in 94 years. While votes are still being counted in key races, solid majorities in both the Senate and House are assured, and Democrats are set to make Hakeem Jeffries the country’s first Black speaker. 

Even the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid and a loyal Trump house organ, refused to mince words on its front page: “Trump suffers historic rebuke as Dems romp in midterms,” with “BLUE TSUNAMI” blaring beneath it. On “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning, Ainsley Earhart warned viewers that “your wallet and your way of life” are now in the crosshairs. 

It is no surprise that Trump 2.0, stripped of its previous establishment Republican guardrails like Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, has culminated in such total structural collapse. The deeper truth the conservative media apparatus could never say out loud is that MAGA was always a Trump-specific phenomenon. It does not transfer to his imitators, and it only ever worked when the economy let voters treat Trump as entertainment. Right-wing media spent years confusing its ability to dominate a conversation with its ability to represent a country. When Tuesday’s returns exposed the difference, its leading voices reached for almost everything except accountability. They blamed immigration. They blamed insufficient restrictions on voting. They blamed each other. Alex Jones even decided Trump might secretly be a Democrat.

For the network’s election night coverage, Fox News seated former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio between two of Trump’s former press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt, and he told them to their faces that they were “missing the plot.” He said, “The American people are looking at a war they do not believe in, and they did not authorize. They’re looking at prices that are making it impossible for middle-class people, let alone working-class people, to live.” 

Trump, watching at the White House, raged on Truth Social — “Why does FoxNews have deBlasio” — and seethed at the panel’s lone liberal: “I can’t stand Jessica Tarlov’s voice — DUMB AS A ROCK, but it’s the voice that gets me.” After Gutfeld read the president’s text on air — which is as good a diagram as exists of what Fox News is now: a suggestion box the president monitors live — Tarlov answered on X, not on Truth Social: “Reality is a tricky thing,” and the president “should get better at dealing with it.” 

On Newsmax, things were somehow worse. Political strategist Dick Morris argued that Trump’s problem was effectively excessive success: He had solved the major problems that would otherwise motivate Republican voters. The influencer ecosystem, meanwhile, went straight for the circular firing squad, and every faction picked a different target. 

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Jones, livestreaming as the returns buried his movement, said Trump himself is the plant: “I think he’s a Democrat. I’m 100% at war with Trump. He’s not that r*tarded. He did this on purpose. I think he’s the ultimate Democrat sleeper cell and he works for them.” Benny Johnson and Libs of TikTok reached for the great replacement theory, and Fox’s Lawrence Jones supplied the broadcast version, surveying Texas and concluding, “Texas, there is a lesson here. Don’t be so welcoming.” 

So much for celebrating people voting with their feet and the U-Hauls leaving California. 

Laura Loomer went straight doomer: “America is over and so is the American Dream.” Others blamed Sen. John Thune for failing to pass the SAVE Act and shrink the electorate further, as though the answer to such a broad repudiation were fewer voters. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro posted the “everything is fine” fire GIF — “Just checking in to see how things are goi—” — and the Federalist’s Sean Davis answered with the hot-dog-suit meme, the one where the man in the costume insists everyone else is the problem.

The recriminations got personal fast. Rep. Nancy Mace told Fox’s Mark Levin to “STFU,” blamed his “beloved” war for the losses and called the night “devastating . . . for the hard-working American who can’t afford to buy a home, or fill their tank with gas or put food on the table.” Levin returned fire: Mace was a “washed up political loser” and “one of the most mentally unhinged POS to ever be in Congress.” She was angry, he said, “because you’ll actually have to now work for a living . . . Good riddance, crackpot.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gloated that with governors’ races lost in Texas and Ohio and Georgia, the Sunshine State would stand alone among the ten most populous states with a Republican governor. And Katie Miller — podcaster, administration wife, professional MAGA explainer — told CBS’s Norah O’Donnell that she had not voted at all. “I did not vote in Virginia because in Virginia when you vote, you dox your own address, and so I prefer my own safety and security over giving that up.” 

In the end, the movement’s loudest voices spent the cycle performing for each other. Some of them couldn’t even be bothered to vote.