Two years ago, the right was celebrating a “cultural vibe shift” in American politics, ringing in the second election of President Donald Trump as a rejection of the liberal worldview and, for some, an excuse to go mask off with their nationalist and at times racist goals for the country.
But the mood among those same right-wingers could not have been more deflated on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, as voters handed Trump a crushing defeat in the midterm elections — repudiating Republican leaders who’d rubber-stamped the president’s sweeping expansion of executive authority, violent immigration crackdowns and a dragging war in Iran which spiked gas and grocery prices back home.
Political commentator Jack Posobiec, who declared in 2024 that Trump’s election win would “take America back,” offered a blunter assessment in a post on X as midterm results rolled in Tuesday evening.
“It’s going to get worse,” he said.
As the sun rose Wednesday on a Democratic sweep of Congress, governorships and state legislatures, the right was already drawing battle lines in what promises to be a contentious struggle for the movement’s future. The two camps: Trump loyalists, who insist the right should be focused on the threat of the ascendant left; and a furious cadre of far right-wingers who say it’s time to ditch the president entirely.
Intra-right infighting could nonetheless produce a political coalition aimed at pushing the mainstream conservative movement even further right, closer to an explicitly nationalist platform, as right-wingers look ahead to the 2028 presidential election.
The most important figure on either side of this debate is J.D. Vance, the vice president and Trump’s presumed successor until proven otherwise. In a lengthy X post, he tried to split the baby — he didn’t directly criticize his boss, but implicitly broke from Trump for the first time of his presidency, suggesting the party under Trump’s leadership had strayed from the principles of true Trumpism.
He pointed the finger at the Iran war, a favorite project of the pro-Israel hawks Vance is already feuding with, and rejected the idea that the Republicans should take a softer line on immigration enforcement.
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.
Members of the emerging post-Trump splinter group have already declared that Republican leadership needs to be liquidated and completely rebuilt following their midterm loss.
“The Republican Party needs all new leadership,” said right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh, who declared Tuesday’s elections a “political catastrophe” for the GOP. “None should be spared from blame, starting at the top,” he added.
Walsh has emerged as one of the harshest critics of Republicans in the hours after the midterms, slamming the party’s moribund congressional majority as “feckless losers” and accusing lawmakers of achieving “precisely zero” with the supposed mandate they claimed following the 2024 election. But he saved his most stinging remarks for Trump.
“Trump is now an 80-year-old lame duck with a Democrat Congress,” Walsh wrote in a post on X early Wednesday morning. “The immediate political task is to find the next leader of the party. It isn’t going to be Trump, and wouldn’t be even if Republicans won tonight. Time to look to the future.”
Walsh and other influencers from the online right argued that Trump had abandoned the “America first” agenda he and his allies championed and that right-wingers claimed got him reelected in the first place. And some were unambiguous in their anger at Republicans who they said had abandoned young white men.
“Trump made an intentional choice to side with existing asset owners at the expense of young men,” wrote right-wing poster Fugitive Caesar. “Republicans gave zero reason for young men to vote for them.”
The Young Republicans chapter in Texas — where the GOP suffered a series of humiliating defeats and handed Democrats the governor’s mansion and a critical Senate seat — said in a statement that the party needed to champion “nationalist immigration policy, nationalist foreign policy, nationalist economic policy.”
Fugitive Caesar called for a political coalition centered around the ideology of Bo French, the ill-fated Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner who courted young men on the campaign trail and drew broad criticism for his comments about Indian Americans.
“Old guard Republican establishment is dead. Permanently discredited,” the right-wing influencer wrote. “Young men are in despair. We’re going to do this the hard way.”
White nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, head of the far-right “groyper” movement, said as election results came in Tuesday night that the midterms were an “unequivocal” message that the Republican Party needed to be “built back from the ground up.”
“It cannot involve Trump, Vance,” he said. “It’s gotta be with the groypers.”
In the weeks leading up to the midterms, Fuentes had urged his followers to vote for Democratic candidates in a ploy to punish Republicans and accelerate the conservative political movement’s rightward shift.
But while some on the far right knifed Trump, others urged loyalty.
“Get ready for the wave of opportunists who turn on President Trump these next few days,” said right-wing media figure Laura Loomer, a fierce Trump backer. “Watch the grifters come out to abandon him as opposed to focusing their attacks on the DSA and jihadists who have pledged to destroy our country.”
British influencer Charles Cornish-Dale, known online as Raw Egg Nationalist, predicted that his fellow right-wingers would draw “all the wrong conclusions” from Republicans’ rout in the midterms “at every level,” starting with Trump.
“Prediction: the infighting we’ve seen over the last 18 months is going to look like a Sunday stroll in the park compared to what’s coming,” he added.
Loomer, who repeatedly declared that “America is over” Tuesday night as Democrats notched their victories, urged the president to use his lame duck status to go scorched earth on the left and to become “more vengeful” over the next two years.
“President Trump can seal his legacy by cracking down on the radical left,” she wrote in a post on X. “It can be done. He just needs people around him who aren’t going to restrain him for the sake of optics.”
Trump himself, meanwhile, has accepted none of the blame for the Republican Party’s defeat — despite his urging voters to “pretend” he was on the ballot and his efforts to railroad out stronger GOP candidates in key battleground states such as Texas and North Carolina.
He said in a post on Truth Social Tuesday night, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”