Outgoing Republican Rep. Chip Roy (Texas) spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s event, “The Forum,” where he lashed out at the GOP for picking horrible candidates who can’t get elected even in red states.
Politico reporter Samuel Benson was on hand at the Maryland convention center where he relayed, “Outgoing Rep. Chip Roy goes gloves-off re Ken Paxton.”
Roy told the audience, “I’m p—— off at a Republican establishment that embraced corrupt people at the top of the ticket too often. You can’t win an election and beat corruption when you put at the top of your ticket in Texas someone that we knew to have massive issues … we spent $500 million trying to chase winning that one race at the expense of all the others.”
Roy has been pointing fingers all week. In a brief appearance on Newsmax, he blamed the Senate, saying that if they’d simply passed Trump’s SAVE Act, Republicans could have won.
“The Senate didn’t get the job done. They didn’t pass the SAVE America Act. They didn’t pass the Congressional stock trading ban. They haven’t done what we need to do on health care. Let’s all stay here, bind together, and get the job done between now and January 3,” Roy told Newsmax.
Roy is only the latest in a line of Republicans willing to speak out about the 2026 midterm failure and place the blame at the feet of their own party.
Vice President JD Vance, for example, blamed President Donald Trump’s war in Iran for jacking up fuel prices. He thinks that Republicans switched to vote for Democrats instead of simply staying home to vote. His governor, Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) agreed with him.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is among those outgoing lawmakers alleging that his party clearly isn’t getting the message. In an op-ed following the election, he wrote that Trump is “misreading the mandate” from 2026. He blamed Trump for tariffs, “hyperaggressive immigration enforcement,” the Iran war and distracting projects such as the Reflecting Pool renovation.
A dejected Ted Cruz told his podcast audience he too blamed tariffs, the prolonged Iran war and Republicans’ failure to address voters’ cost-of-living struggles.
Meanwhile, anti-Trump former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) made it clear that he too believes that the election failures were of the GOP’s own making.
“Bad policy, bad character make bad politics: erratic tariffs, impulsive Iran war, blanket pardons, apparent corruption, weaponized justice, ICE brutality, mountainous deficits, hiding Epstein, abandoning allies and coddling enemies. Hoping for a course correction, for the country and for my party,” he wrote on X the following day.