Everyone’s blaming Trump’s Iran struggle for the midterms massacre… however MAUREEN CALLAHAN confronts a much more sinister trigger, and warns: He’ll go down because the Mad King who squandered the best comeback in historical past

After Tuesday’s colossal rejection of MAGA, the onus rests on President Trump to deal with it – and deal with it well.

Alas, if Wednesday’s speech before the media is anything to go by, Trump remains in denial.

He is, it seems, unwilling to take the indisputable message sent by the electorate: We are suffering. Nothing has gotten better. If we have to vote the old bums back in to get through to you, Mr President, and your batch of bums, so be it.

But what Trump did and said upon losing historically – upon seeing perennially red states such as Texas vote Democrat James Talarico in as senator; Maine tossing stalwart centrist Republican Susan Collins after nearly 30 years for recent candidate Troy Jackson, a Democrat; South Carolina‘s Senate seat going blue for the first time in decades, rejecting Trump’s hand-picked candidate Senator Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham – does not bode well.

Not at all.

As votes were still being counted in Mississippi (which has been largely red since the 1980s), Trump stood before the media and spoke, at great length, about what was really on his mind: The new ballroom he’s building. The reflecting pool. The arc.

The new White House ballroom, Trump boasted at the top of his remarks, will be ‘just a tremendous structure, the likes of which has never been done. The ceilings are over 50 feet high. That’s like a five-story building… And then we’re doing the arc. Like the beautiful, the Arc de Triomphe, but better, more beautiful actually, much more beautiful.’

On and on he went: Gardens. A world-class golf course. How he has ‘beautified’ DC.

‘We just opened the reflecting pool two days ago,’ he rhapsodized. ‘And it’s magnificent.’

Magnificent?

Try enraging.

Dems won massively because the bulk of Americans are hurting and because they’ve been betrayed by Trump, who ran on getting manufacturing back to the US, bringing down prices and the cost of living and making America affordable again.

That last one was literally part of the 2024 Republican Party platform, item three, in all capital letters: ‘END INFLATION AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN.’

Tell that to the average American paying $70 two or three times a week to gas up their car, to get to a job that underpays them and is threatened by AI, who can’t afford groceries and is bracing for the cost of heating their home this winter, in large part because America remains at war with Iran, long after we were told we had disabled their nuclear capabilities.

Tell that to Millennials who have been priced out of a contracting housing market and who, even if they could afford a down payment, certainly can’t shoulder mortgage interest rates that have been sky-high at seven percent, give or take, for years now.

The AP Voter Poll, published on election day, found that 75 percent of the electorate feel the US economy is ‘not good’ or ‘poor’.

That language could describe how they feel about their personal finances. A March 2026 survey by LendingTree found that 37 percent of Americans didn’t have $500 in emergency savings.

The median balance sitting in 401(k)s and IRAs for Americans aged 65-74, according to Investopedia, is $257,000.

That’s nothing.

Four in ten Americans, according to that AP Voter Poll, said the economy was their number one issue, with the cost of gas and groceries most stressful.

Immigration, health care, wokeness – all ranked way at the bottom.

But what should really concern Trump was a new issue at the voting booth: Corruption.

Yes, the man elected in 2016 and 2024 to ‘drain the swamp’, who positioned himself as so wealthy as to be immune from bribes and graft – the opposite of what he called the Biden Crime family – has had his administration become an avatar of alleged corruption.

Don Jr’s second wedding celebrations were financed by a Russian oligarch, the money returned only after public outcry.

Former Don Jr fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, rumored to have been given an ambassadorship to Greece to go away quietly, has since been removed after her alleged plea to a Trump mega-donor to ‘get this done for me today’ – ‘this’ being the covering of $100,000 in debt she racked up with American Express.

Former Trump lawyer Alina Habba – who, while serving as a federal prosecutor, signed a $50 million deal with relatives of a Venezuelan banker, who Trump later pardoned – was publicly rebuked by the president. (For whatever that’s worth.)

Not to mention Trump’s latest apparent preoccupation: The revolving door of younger, attractive, politically inexperienced women soldered to his side, Natalie Harp the latest.

And Trump’s disastrous appointment of Katie Zacharia, who lasted five days as White House press secretary, underscores what seems to be his fundamental unseriousness as he enters the last half of his last term.

Is this really how he wants to go down in the history books? As the president who squandered the greatest comeback in modern American history? Who has closed his eyes and ears to information, polling and data he doesn’t like?

Judging by Trump’s behavior on election night, it’s quite possible. As his staff gathered in the White House’s East Room, Trump was reportedly siloed upstairs, in his private residence, with only Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and the aforementioned Harp.

The First Lady was not there. Marco Rubio made himself scarce.

A senior White House source told the Daily Mail that it was ‘a very dark scene’ as Trump watched the returns and that by 11pm, Trump was ‘watching Fox News, barely uttering a word and paralyzed into silence.’

He later took to Truth Social to blame Fox News for these catastrophic losses. He was not nearly as philosophical and measured as he was in 2024, after he was shot in Butler, and spoke at the Republican National Convention of the need for unity.

Will he take this loss with the gravity it deserves? Will he call, once again, for unity, and make it clear he looks forward to working not just with the other side, but for the American people?

Will Trump say that he has heard his fellow Americans, and understands?

If he is to save not just his presidency, but his legacy – to not go down as The Mad King – he must.

Because to insist, as he did, that ‘we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE,’ but ‘I wasn’t on the Ballot’ is to deny reality.

Trump – and MAGA – were on the ballot. And they lost. Bigly.