Yesterday, the Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan reported a quote from a (one assumes Vance-associated) “National GOP operative” licking his wounds after the Scanners-like spontaneous cranial explosion of the Republican Party, inflicted on Tuesday by an electorate unleashed by the psychic powers of the ballot box. “People will try to overcomplicate this, but its really simple: This is 100% because of Iran. It’s all in the data and has been since a week after the war started. The economic anxiety is directly correlated with the war. We got our asses kicked because of it.”
Would that it were really that simple. We all know why operatives like these wish to fob responsibility for this wipeout on the sole aspect of Trumpism they are willing to venture even partial opposition to. But Trump’s job approval averages tell an unmistakable story: His disapproval numbers only begin to truly crater in April 2025, once “Liberation Day” was announced.
The story of the initial collapse of the Trump administration must — no matter how much some may approve of the policy — therefore be a story about a broad tariff regime instituted with imperial arbitrariness and open abuse of constitutional powers, not one of the Iran war. Our misbegotten Middle Eastern adventure in March 2026 is only where the bottom truly dropped out, the breaking point where Senate seats like South Carolina and Mississippi finally came onto the board. But there is much more to it than that.
The administration was underwater and had been rejected by the voters long before then, and one of the most important (and least discussed) reasons was that Americans of all stripes have become disgusted with the naked, celebratorily selfish corruption that Trump and his administration have come to be synonymous with. A full 90 percent of voters in exit polls cited “corruption” as one of their crucial voting issues — and they weren’t thinking about Somalians in Minnesota.
Never before has a United States presidential administration been so openly engaged in corruption both public and private, nor reveled in it with such unanswerable abandon. Why mention the Harding or Grant administations as watchwords for graft anymore, with Trump’s list growing ever longer? This is a man who inaugurated his second term in office by purchasing a 49 percent stake in a UAE-based cryptocurrency venture named World Liberty Financial, accepting a new “Air Force One” jet from the Qataris, and issuing a pardon to the Chinese founder of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange — which he now trades on. What was he going do to top that, let a Russian oligarch pay for his son’s wedding just before taking a pointless oil bribe to switch sides in the Ukrainian war?
All around him, those in his administration seem to be taking similar cues: Kristi Noem’s operation at the department of Homeland Security, conducted primarily through the auspices of her secret lover and informal bagman Corey Lewandowski, is only the most prominent example. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s trashy plays at bribery chased her out of the ambassadorship of a country notorious for its shady business practices. And — in a headline perfect for the week before the election — former Trump lawyer (and now mysteriously married) Alina Mildon (nee Habba) used her presidential connections to snag a $50 million pardon deal for a client. Trump’s reaction? Outrage — and a demand that she donate at least portion of it directly to his “presidential library fund.” Trump, like Don Fanucci in The Godfather II, must be allowed to “wet his beak,” and get at least a taste of what others are taking under his name.
It’s the inescapable omnipresence of Trump’s corruption — the way it governs his view of the world, infects his underlings, informs the way he conducts foreign policy even — that has fatally inured his MAGA followers to the effect it has had on everyone else. While it may be the tariff regime and the Iran war that ultimately brought Trump down, what made it impossible for him to recover was the in-your-face, omnipresent stench of his corruption: When fused with Trump’s performative cruelty and forever-online distractability, it solidified the image of him of an over-the-hill crime boss fading in Lear-like dotage — not so Tiberius on his island resort of Capri so much as Al Capone rotting away with VD on his private Florida resort.
If voters believed Donald Trump to be a virtuous yet hapless man — say, a modern-day Jimmy Carter — the GOP’s base would not have rebelled against him the way they did on Tuesday. But there is no point in keeping faith with a president clearly uninterested in keeping faith with you.