Dean Blundell

Dean Blundell makes a pretty good recap of the awesome election. I am still in partial disbelief that the Dems routed the Guardians of Pedophiles so much. Now, Ted Cruz is the ONLY Republican in Texas to hold a statewide office! Ha! I don't know if Texas has ever swung so much in any election. A lot of this was due to Hispanics realizing that Trump lied to and duped them, and they decided to punish him by going back to Democrats. Now, if only the cultish white folks who still swear by Trump could finally see the light, but the problem with that is that quite a few of these cultish white folks are quite happy with everything that Trump has done, because most of them are still racist as hell. They will have to learn the hard way, or take their hate to their graves.

Inside the White House on the Worst Night of Trump’s Life: Silence, Whiskey and a Scapegoat Hunt

Leaked accounts from inside the residence show a president who went catatonic before taking Natalie Harp upstairs leaving guests to flee for local bars and no one touched the cheesecake. 

DEAN BLUNDELL NOV 5

Donald Trump ordered appetizers from the Cheesecake Factory for his victory party and then lost the House, the Senate, seven Republican Senate seats, five governorships, the entire state of Texas and the ability to form words, in that order. The sliders went stale in the East Room around 10 p.m. The president was upstairs in the dark. His staff were in a bar. This is the most satisfying thing I have written in two years, and I want you to enjoy every bite of it the way nobody enjoyed those Cheesecake Cafe eggrolls (Yes, they had it catered by the Cheesecake Cafe).

America just voted for its soul, and Trumpism lost. Both chambers. Texas. South Carolina. The accountability phase for the Trump Regime starts now, and we’re going to cover every subpoena, every hearing and every whiny Truth Social post together. You did this. We’ve waited three years for this night, and thousands of you joined this past week to be here for it. The price freeze was supposed to end last weekend, but the response has been overwhelming, so I’m extending it to FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6. I’d rather you be in the room when the reckoning starts than outside reading about it later. No ads. No owners. Just readers who decided fact-based reporting was worth protecting. Paid gets you unlimited access to every post, every chat and the smartest, kindest community I’ve ever been part of. Join before Friday and lock in your rate for life. Come with us for the reckoning. Thank you for being here.

The scene upstairs

Here is what White House insiders are now leaking to the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast and anyone else who will listen, because the first rule of a Trump disaster is that everyone inside it immediately starts talking.

Within an hour of the first results on Tuesday night, Trump retreated to the second-floor private residence with Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old aide who follows him around with a printer, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. He put Fox News on. And then, according to one source, he stopped speaking. Not quiet. Not sulking. Paralyzed. One insider described him as barely getting a word out. Another said the residence was “very, very dark” and called it a dark scene, which is the kind of thing you say when you want the reporter to understand you mean the lighting and the man.

Downstairs, Cabinet officials, advisers and MAGA hangers-on had gathered in the East Room expecting a party. Somebody had ordered platters of Cheesecake Factory appetizers. The word used by the Mail’s source for this plan was “delusional,” and I don’t think I can improve on it. By 10 o’clock, the trays were uneaten, and the senior people were gone, out the door and into the bars of Washington to drink and figure out who was going to get fired.

Nobody in that bar, I promise you, said the name Donald Trump. 

They told him he’d win

This is the part that should make you laugh out loud. Trump walked into Election Day with a 32% approval rating and Democrats holding a 9-point lead on the generic ballot. Those are not ambiguous numbers. Those are numbers you can see from space.

And his people kept telling him he was going to win anyway.

Susie Wiles was reassuring staff that Republicans would come out on top as late as September. Chris LaCivita, his former campaign manager, was feeding him the same line at weekly Thursday meetings. By Tuesday morning, West Wing staffers were apparently chatting about Republicans expanding their majorities in both chambers. Expanding. On the morning of the day they lost seven Senate seats.

One source summed up the whole building in four words: delusional right until the end.

Jason Miller, the longtime comms guy who has more illegitimate kids than Elon Musk, was reportedly sweating through his shirt as the networks called one Republican loss after another. I would pay real money for that footage.

How bad was it, actually

Let me lay it out, because the scale matters.

Democrats flipped Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. Seven. They sit at 54 seats, with Alaska and Mississippi still too close to call, which means it could end at 56. Susan Collins is gone after nearly 30 years. Sherrod Brown is back. Roy Cooper flipped North Carolina.

In the House, Democrats are projected to land somewhere north of 250 seats. Republicans had gerrymandered Florida and Texas at Trump’s request to protect themselves. Three of the redrawn Florida seats went Democratic anyway.

And then there’s Texas. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton, Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate, to become the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas in 32 years. Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott, a three-term governor, which nobody serious thought was possible a year ago. Democrats took the Texas attorney general’s office, the lieutenant governor’s office and the Texas House for the first time in more than two decades.

Five governorships flipped. Up to a dozen state legislative chambers. Pennsylvania’s Senate went blue for the first time since before 1994. Arizona’s legislature looks like it flipped for the first time in roughly 60 years.

This was not a correction. This was the country walking into the voting booth and telling the man upstairs in the dark exactly what it thinks of him.

The excuses, ranked by stupidity

Trump may have lost the ability to speak, but he never lost the ability to type. Here’s what came out of Truth Social while the residence lights were off.

Fox News bears responsibility for the losses. That one is my favourite because the man was literally watching Fox News as he posted it.

Greg Abbott became a RINO in the last six months of his political life, and that’s why he lost. Abbott, a man who spent a decade turning Texas into Trump’s personal test lab, is now a Republican In Name Only because he lost a race Trump’s candidate dragged him down in.

And then the big one. He wasn’t on the ballot, and if he had been, they’d have won in a landslide.

On September 28, this same man posted, in all caps, telling MAGA to pretend he was on the ballot. He spent weeks on stages across the country begging voters to treat the midterms as a referendum on him personally. They did. He got his referendum. He lost it by seven Senate seats.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported Wednesday that he’s saying the same thing behind closed doors: that this wasn’t a rebuke of him; it was a rebuke of his absence. He keeps pointing to rally sizes, telling allies he saw all those people and they just didn’t show up for the candidates. Holmes actually went to those rallies and interviewed the people at them. They were already Republican voters. There was no love to transfer. The crowds were the same crowds, and the crowds were never the country.

The scapegoat auction

So who pays? Because somebody has to, and it won’t be the guy whose name is on the building.

In the bar three streets from the White House, a consensus formed fast. Susie Wiles has to go. One senior official told the Mail that she took over the entire Trump apparatus and is the conductor of the orchestra, which is a polite way of saying the orchestra just played the Titanic’s final number. Trump was reportedly calling allies last month, asking who should replace her. He denied it. Nobody believed him then, and nobody believes him now. 

Then there’s Pete Hegseth. The Iran war was the single biggest anchor on this election. Voters ranked the war and the cost of living it detonated as their top concerns for months, while Trump called unaffordability a Democratic hoax and, according to reports, privately sketched out options for fresh strikes on Iran once the votes were counted. One insider told the Mail the night would have looked very different without the war and predicted Trump would ultimately hold Hegseth accountable. Republicans on the Hill are now saying out loud what they wouldn’t say in the spring: that Hegseth was the loudest cheerleader for going into Iran with no exit plan, and that he misled both the president and lawmakers on how long it would take.

Dean Blundell