Midterm Blowout Was A Feature Of Neocons’ Bid To Undo MAGA

Republicans’ worst midterm showing in half a century has clear authors: the neoconservative pundits who cheered America into a nine-month war with Iran and now refuse to take any responsibility for it.

Mark Levin, Marc Thiessen, Ben Shapiro, and the commentators across Rupert Murdoch’s media empire promised a short war that wouldn’t touch the price of gas. Voters got the opposite, and three out of four said the war was a “crucial” or “major factor” in their vote. Now the same voices are blaming everything but the war and turning their fire on Vice President J.D. Vance in an obvious and dishonest attempt to keep him from the 2028 nomination. After Nov. 3, whatever credibility they had left on foreign policy on the right is gone, and they must never again be treated as serious voices on these matters.

Nevertheless, they insist, “It’s not my fault.” Polls hadn’t even opened for last week’s Election Day, and Fox News commentator Mark Levin was preemptively making clear to the world that he had nothing to do with Republicans’ impending catastrophic losses.

“It’s not because of the Iran war,” Levin said. “It’s not because of the price of gasoline.” And it certainly wasn’t because of Levin’s years of trying to convince anyone within earshot that America should get bogged down in yet another highly unpopular war in the Middle East.

He was hardly alone. Thiessen agreed it wasn’t the war. Instead, Thiessen suggested it was the June memorandum of understanding negotiated by Vice President Vance — at President Trump’s direction — “that cost Republicans” the midterms.

If only America had bombed Iran more, Thiessen whined — if only the administration had been less serious about ending the costly war and returning its attention to a domestic political agenda — the GOP might have suffered less of a humiliating defeat than the bloodbath that unfolded on Nov. 3.

Thiessen’s delusion runs deep: “[I]n April,” he claimed, “America was just weeks away from achieving its military objectives in Iran.”

It is a comforting argument for the neocons — so comforting that Thiessen repeated it at least 10 times over the spring and summer, assuring voters from March to August that America was just weeks away from victory.

Now, Thiessen and Levin’s endless excuse-making is receiving the ridicule it deserves. But their refusal to learn any lessons from the midterms points to a broader reckoning that must follow the midterms blowout. Specifically, the midterms proved once and for all that the bankrupt ideology evinced by warmongers such as Thiessen, Levin, Shapiro, and Murdoch’s media has come within a knife’s edge of destroying the America First movement Donald Trump built.

Whatever shreds of their credibility on foreign policy that remained are gone. The decision by President Trump to pursue a memorandum of understanding likely saved the Republicans 15-20 House seats that were decided by 1 percent or less of a vote difference.

And to be clear, many of these neocons never pretended to be America First to begin with. During the 2016 primaries, Levin made a big deal out of his refusal to ever vote for Trump if he became the nominee, only to later cave to pressure and reluctantly vote for Trump in the general election. Shapiro was similarly a Never Trumper in 2016 — he wrote an op-ed titled, “I will never vote for Donald Trump” — then pretended to be friendly to the president during his first term before throwing him under the bus after the 2020 election and endorsing another candidate.

Thiessen and others, such as Ari Fleischer, are ex-senior George W. Bush staffers and doctrinaire neoconservatives who have openly criticized the president on all sorts of core policy areas, from trade to the James Comey indictment.

Not everyone saw the movement President Trump was building at first. For some it took time to understand and get on board, and that is understandable. But the only reason these people did not join the mainstream Never Trumper class, represented by clowns such as David French and Alyssa Farah Griffin, is that they saw the president as a convenient vehicle to smuggle in the one issue they care about above all else: overthrowing the regime in Tehran. They held their tongues on some issues and played nice with Trump after he won so they could later cobble together sufficient influence to advocate for war.

But their ruinous worldview has placed the Republican Party in its most perilous position in living memory. The Democrats are on track to win their biggest midterm popular vote share in a half century; as of this writing, they could take 260 seats in the House and up to 56 in the Senate. And all this for a war that the neocons said would be over in two weeks and that wouldn’t affect the price of gas — but which is driving historically high gas prices and is in its ninth month, with no end in sight.

To be sure, Trump is an amazing president. He will be remembered for delivering the most successful domestic policies of a Republican president in modern American history, from his sealing of the border and commitment to law and order, to his efforts to dismantle DEI and the deep state. On Iran, the president made a difficult choice with the best information he had. Part of that process involves getting different perspectives, and some of those perspectives were unfortunately misleading, but those are always risks when making a choice like this. When different positions are argued, someone will invariably be wrong. No one should envy any president who must make these choices.

But the neocons were quite clearly wrong, and having delivered this midterm disaster, those who pushed or misled the president into war are now looking ahead. They’re going all in against Vance, and they are willing to attack the logical strategic pivots the president made all summer to do so. They’re pulling out all the stops to prevent Vance from becoming the Republican nominee in 2028 because they know he’ll have no interest in their failed, has-been ideology.

Those debates can play out, and the electorate can weigh in on them later. But it’s abhorrent behavior for the neocons to lead a party to electoral defeat, refuse to take responsibility for it, trample on the president all summer leading up to an election, and then use their failure as a dishonest foil to try to avert the ascension of a candidate they see as unfriendly to their neocon agenda. Their commitment to the ruse is so substantial that it would be no surprise if one of the responses to this piece is to suggest that its use of the term “neocon” is coded antisemitism. That it is a preposterous claim won’t matter to them; their agenda is foreign wars, and many will level accusations like that because that tactic has worked for them in the past. It won’t work this time.

Their latest desperate attempt at relevancy is to claim that the Republican Party would have won the election if not for the memorandum of understanding. It is hard to fathom how disconnected from reality, how illogical, how irrational, or how dishonest someone has to be to believe that or sink to that low to salvage their reputations.

But even the darkest clouds have silver linings. As the fallout of this midterm election continues to take shape, the reputational destruction of these war cheerleaders (most of whom have never been in combat themselves) will become ever clearer. After last Tuesday’s disaster and their dishonest treatment of the president and vice president, they must never again be viewed as credible figures on the right.

Wade Miller is executive director of Citizens for Renewing America. He is a combat veteran who served in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantryman and has spent more than a decade working with the conservative grassroots movement, campaigns, and public policy development.