Opinion: Miranda Devine Tells Trump to 'Look in the Mirror' After the Midterm Rout, Citing His 38 Percent Approval, 'Dud' Candidates and Gas Prices
The New York Post columnist says Democrats will chase payback and may overreach before 2028, but that Trump cannot treat the loss as someone else's. This is her opinion, and we have not checked every claim in it.
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine argues that Democrats will go after Republicans in the new Congress, and that President Trump cannot say the loss was not about him.
The payback case. Devine says "payback is the first priority" for Democrats. She points to Michigan Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, whose victory speech she calls gloating and who she says addressed Vice President JD Vance as "habibi" who will have to eat crow when he swears him in. She cites Minnesota Sen.-elect Peggy Flanagan saying "We will rip ICE apart," and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., talking about impeaching Trump.
Musk. She says Democrats and allies have threatened Elon Musk and "greedy billionaires," and cites NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway calling Musk a "traitor to the West" and saying, "We lined up the Rosenbergs against a wall." That is her account of his words.
The silver lining. Devine writes that Democratic hubris "will surely lead them to overreach and turn off a volatile electorate before 2028," and doubts incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries can keep a "radical socialist" caucus on message. She says Democrats hid a party split during the campaign, and describes the party's treatment of Rep. Haley Stevens, who appeared with her Republican opponent in Michigan, as brutal.
The case against Trump. "President Trump can't pretend the electoral rout wasn't a referendum on him and his smashmouth politics that needlessly alienates people," she writes. She says he "told voters to pretend he's on the ballot" and "handpicked dud candidates," and cites exit polls showing his approval at 38 percent, the lowest for a president in almost 20 years, with voters blaming him for high prices and gas costs and calling the Iran war a mistake.
Gas prices. She quotes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who said in May that gas would be the "biggest single factor" and, on Wednesday, that gas averaged about $4.55 a gallon on Labor Day, "what that meant was every American would be angry."
Why it matters here. This is a conservative columnist arguing that Trump should own the result. It sits next to Vance's view that the war caused it, and next to Cruz and Curtis, whom we covered.
What we could not check. The page we received ended after the Gingrich quote, so we read the first part of the column, not the full text. We did not check the exit poll figure, the Galloway quote or the El-Sayed speech. This is opinion, and the views are Devine's, not ours.