On Sunday, a Fox News host put the Trump administration on blast for its inability to face the real reasons the GOP was devastated in the midterms last week. According to Trey Gowdy, while President Donald Trump and his officials keep trying to chalk the loss up solely to the Iran War, polling shows that Americans had other complaints.
“Losing is a tough teacher,” Gowdy said on Sunday Night in America. “It’s so tough you only want to take the class once.” He went on to say, “Election night was a historic victory for Democrats, a rebuke for Republicans, or something in between. Forensic pathologists are out in full force with their autopsies. JD Vance blamed the war in Iran. Or maybe the MOU, which read more like a surrender document. Maybe it was a failure to explain why conflict with Iran was necessary in the first place. Assume the conflict with Iran was unpopular. Being unpopular and being wrong are two very different things. Only one-third of voters listed Iran as the reason for their vote! Affordability and corruption were cited by far more voters.”
According to one poll by CNBC, voters ranked corruption their top concern, followed by the cost of food and groceries, protecting democracy, the price of gas, immigration and border security, Iran, and the cost of housing, consecutively. An AP poll found that the economy and the state of democracy were top issues, with roughly half of all voters saying that government corruption was “crucial” to their vote. Vance had issued a statement following the midterms heaping blame on the war, and Trump agreed, saying on Sunday that “a lot of people didn’t like his comments, but not me. He was right, other than one thing: he should have made one other statement, one statement that I think is very important. ‘If you had it to do again, would you do it again?’ The answer is yes. I can tell you, if I had it to do it again, this, historically — for history, will go down as one of the best things we ever did.”
This isn’t the only time a Fox host has directed criticism at Trump in the wake of the GOP’s midterm disaster. Last week, Laura Ingraham aimed her comments directly at the president during her show, advising “cut your losses” regarding the war, so he could “move on” and “focus on the voters’ desires.” In her estimation, the “Trump coalition” abandoned the GOP in the midterms because “they want higher living standards, lower gas prices, and an end to endless wars in the Middle East.” In that context, she said, “The president is going to have to do some hard thinking.” According to another Fox analyst, voters are “angry” because “they’ve looked at the direction of the country, and they feel like cost of living hasn’t been addressed. They don’t feel like Donald Trump has a plan… They feel like he’s fighting for his best interest. And he was a big reason [for the losses]. He asked people to act like he was on the ticket, and they did.”