Exceptionally bright, well-informed and highly articulate. Probably not whom you would send out to negotiate with Democrats if you were looking to be conciliatory.
BREAKING: President Trump announces Stephen Miller will become his new White House chief of staff starting Monday, replacing Susie Wiles.
Miller, currently Trump's deputy chief of staff and a longtime trusted adviser, is set to take over one of the most influential positions in the administration.
Trump thanks Wiles for her "outstanding service" and says she will transition to his political operation.
Download the FOX News app for the latest details: foxnews.com/download?intcmp=…
Brit Hume retweeted
Today is my last day as White House Chief of Staff.
Serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime. I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First.
More than anything, I’m grateful for the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will.
Brit Hume retweeted
U.S. employers created a surprising 165,000 new jobs in October and the unemployment rate dipped to 4.1%. apnews.com/article/jobs-infl…
Don't miss this, from the great @MichaelBarone.
FULL STORY:
tinyurl.com/3hb45hkz
Brit Hume retweeted
I am proud that @BillHemmer and @BretBaier are friends. They did as good a job as could be done last night — fair and balanced. To any honest person, “spin” meant what it normally means, let’s go around the national map and assess. It was not “let’s skew the coverage.” Jeez.
Brit Hume retweeted
Everyone claims to want people fed, housed, educated, and treated with dignity. That's the easiest moral position imaginable, requiring neither thought nor effort.
The sincerity of that commitment is revealed by whether you're willing to examine what actually achieves those outcomes, what undermines them, and at whose expense.
By the socialist standard, even forced labor can be justified in pursuit of these goals, and even policies producing the opposite results can be defended as virtuous.
Virtue signaling earns applause for good intentions. Genuine concern demands understanding, evidence, and results. Far too many seem content with the applause.
Brit Hume retweeted
One of the more interesting stories from yesterday will be how Florida and Texas - two states with similar political climates - ended up with such different results. A big part of that comes down to the GOP leadership in each. There were missteps in both, but...
One state kept at least a slight buffer of regional independence from the White House's political operations, succeeded in keeping sleaze like Fishback off its ticket, kept state and local government focused on relatively conventional conservative issues, and managed to keep enough Hispanic voters in the coalition to win.
The other state tried to turn itself into MAGA central, tried to import JD Vance style economic populism into a part of the country that wanted nothing to do with that, made sleaze like Paxton the face of its statewide campaign, and actively drove Hispanic voters (as well as other minorities as per Bo French) out of the coalition by sticking them in the eye in the months before the election.
J.D. Vance's take on the GOP midterm debacle is getting some seriously bad notices from some noted conservatives. There was this from @KimStrassel
This is a total hoot.
About the only thing it gets correct is that 2024 Trump voters were "pissed." As the polls spell out, very clearly, they were angry about tariffs--a word weirdly not found in this post, but which exit polls showed 65% of voters dislike. There's a straight line between those punishing costs and Senate losses in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio (farm areas) and beyond.
Angry the WH instead spent this past year talking about ballrooms and the Kennedy center. Frustrated by the complete absence of a next-two-year agenda (85% are concerned by healthcare costs. Where is the GOP plan?)
They are also unhappy about the war, though the numbers might be different if the president been clear about an exit strategy. And not sure where the "smartest" (and most anonymous) pollster in the world got the Israel argument. Exit polls show that of the 51% of voters who said our support for Israel was "too strong," only 19% of even that subset of respondents were Republican. The vast majority of GOP voters said our support for Israel was "just right" or "not strong enough."
Amusing to claim the problem here was traditional conservatives, as they were sidelined. Tillis was run out of the party, dooming NC. As was Cornyn. The WH had a pure expression of its second-term Trump/Vance agenda and loyalty in its chosen candidate of Ken Paxton. That would be the smoking carcass sitting on a 12-point loss in. . . Texas of all places. Meanwhile, who exactly is even talking about "asylum"? That's just a smear-y effort to preemptively shut down valid criticism.
The GOP strength has always been in its coalition--free-marketers, defense hawks, cultural conservatives. Trump's first-term success came from largely following that Reagan playbook. The second-term leaned into me-too progressive populism--at the veep's urging--and it ain't working.
The weird thing is that the veep remains more obsessed with remaking the party than with winning. Winning will require a lot better understanding of what happened yesterday than what is on offer in this alternate-universe view.
Then there was this from @AriFleischer
Mr. Vice-President,
Please allow me to present a different perspective.
The problem was not the Iran War. It was the cease fire.
If you start a war, you need to win it and finish it – otherwise don’t start it.
This war should have been over six months ago, with the Strait of Hormuz wide open and oil flowing. The second and third tiers of Iranian leadership should have been destroyed, and we should have supported the pro-western forces who could have taken leadership. We stood on the brink of a new, more peaceful Middle East - and then we blinked. We had a chance not only to deny Iran nuclear weapons, but to get rid of the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism.
Instead, we had a cease fire, which was followed by months of will we or won’t we finish the job. Every day was a different message. There still is. Is the war over? Is it about to begin? No one knows. There is confusion and inconsistency.
In June 2025, America was not involved. This was an Israel vs Iran issue.
No one forced the United States to attack Iran then, or in February of 2026. It was a decision made by President Trump. In my opinion, it was the right decision.
Once the decision was made, we should not have stopped until the regime fell. But instead, you negotiated a cease fire that didn’t last, didn’t work and left us in no man’s land, with higher prices and our troops still deployed.
Our troops could have been home, the Navy returned to its bases, a peaceful regime in place , new alliances forged, and gas prices below $3.00 a gallon.
No, Mr. Vice President. It’s not the war. It’s the so-called cease fire.
Vance never supported the war and his view on it led him to being hornswoggled by the Iranians into a deal they would never live up to, and didn't.
“I wouldn’t call it a war.”
JD Vance said that in September when asked whether the Iran war would be over before the midterms.
He said there was no active shooting, with major combat long over.
Today he says the war cost Republicans the midterms and the “I told you so” crowd was right.
The effort to quiet the war began in June, when Vance sold a 60-day deal that collapsed in 3 weeks.
What followed was a blockade and sanctions, with the admin seeking to avoid major escalation before Election Day. Iran kept threatening shipping anyway and Republicans paid for it.
Now the people who sold the quiet war call the result proof the war was wrong to begin with.
Suppose Trump had secured the Strait, broken Iran’s ability to disrupt shipping and set their nuke program back years, all inside 6 months.
Do Republicans still lose Senate seats in Texas and Kansas?
If victory was impossible, name the constraint that made it so. “Iraq” and “neocon” aren't constraints.
The election is a verdict on the war Trump fought. A finished war was never on the ballot.
Brit Hume retweeted
Understand the implications of what happened in Texas last night.
Gina Hinojosa has called on Gov. Abbott to end state & local cooperation with ICE & she can order that on day one.
Hinojosa voted against the 2017 SB 4 as a TX state rep. The bill was essentially a sanctuary cities ban and required TX law enforcement to cooperate with ICE detainers. She then voted against another SB 4 in 2023, which made it a state crime to cross illegally into Texas.
Should there be another border crisis in coming years, there will likely be no resistance from Texas at the border. No Texas DPS, no TX National Guard, no razor wire or water buoys, and no Operation Lone Star, which Hinojosa called a “dog and pony show” and “political theater”.
Remember when 15,000 Haitians surged illegally into Del Rio, TX in 2021 under the international bridge? That was only stopped because Texas DPS responded on Abbott’s orders and physically blocked further crossings by lining up their cruisers to form a wall. The Biden Border Patrol was caught off guard and offered almost no resistance, except for some horseback agents who were falsely slandered for “whipping”.
Additionally, because Republicans failed to pass any legislation codifying President Trump’s border security measures, if Dems take the White House in 2028, that Dem president could, if he/she wants to, reverse every single Trump border security policy immediately upon taking office because they were all done at the executive level, and they can order Border Patrol to go back to a passive catch & release policy like we saw under Biden.
All true, alas.
It’s not just the war with Iran that’s turned into a foreign policy mess. The administration has effectively switched America’s side in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine; as noted in yesterday’s Washington Post column, just 3 percent of Americans are more supportive of Russia than Ukraine. Every chance he gets, Trump gushes about what good friends he is with Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un and gets into irate feuds with the government of countries like the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada. Eighty percent of Americans think positively of Canada. No one was clamoring for a big trade fight with our northern neighbor — particularly not any Republican who had to run for office in a state that borders Canada.
Brit Hume retweeted
Interesting result in TX-26 where Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) was re-elected.
Gill won Denton County, TX by +3.6.
Talarico won Denton County by +8.
Voters there said yes to Gill, but no to Paxton.
Apart from occasions like the day after Pearl Harbor, is going to war ever politically popular? Doing so is a huge political risk and the lesson of the Iran conflict is that if you go to war, you must win and quickly. It's also a good idea not to pronounce the war over and won before it actually is.
A stinging rebuttal to J. D. Vance and his admirers. Very much worth a read, especially on the Iran war.
Matt Walsh calls this the most honest assessment he has read. You should all read it. And then maybe you will see what honesty requires and that both of these men refuse to do it.
Start with Vance's method. A team of data analysts obsessing over electorate composition, pollsters asked to explain the loss after it happens, a survey handed to defecting voters asking what would bring them back. This is the technique of a pragmatist. A man of principle could not care less about polls. He cares about ideas and whether they are right or wrong, and he would rather lose every election in his lifetime doing the right thing than win a single one doing the wrong thing. He holds a standard, measures his actions against it, and knows before the returns come in whether he governed by it. Victory means nothing to him if the price is his principles, because a victory won by abandoning what is right is a defeat in everything that matters. That is not what is happening here. These men are asking the crowd what it feels because they have no idea what is true, then adjusting their convictions to match the answer. Ayn Rand named this method decades ago. When men abandon reason as their guide, the opinion survey becomes their substitute for thought.
Observe what the assessment leaves out entirely. Not one word about tariffs, a tax on Americans that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional and the administration reimposed under a different statute, running through two years of roughly 6% cumulative inflation. Not one word about roughly 30 government equity stakes in private companies, which is socialism practiced by the party that claims to oppose it. Not one word about a brand new universal entitlement, two trillion dollar deficits, or a 40 trillion dollar debt. "Focus on cost of living" appears as a polling answer with no causal analysis attached, because the causal analysis indicts their own record. The most honest assessment somehow misses every policy the voters threw them out over.
Then Vance's 4 conclusions which are out of context slogans which are meaningless as such. The reason we lost is the war. Half true and twisted. Hitting the regime that has waged war on us for 47 years was right and four decades overdue. What voters watched afterward was the goal line surrender, a so called deal championed by the appeaser Vance, who stood at Lake Lucerne praising the framework as the foundation for a final agreement while it waived Iran's oil sanctions and released $12 billion in frozen assets to a regime left standing, with our forces still taking fire in the strait. The failure is not that we fought. The failure is that we paid the enemy and called it peace while they still shoot at us to this day. And buried at answer four is the actual agenda, change our relationship to Israel. This disgusting faction of the Republican party that cannot define socialism while its administration practices it has one firm conviction, pushing away the only free nation in the region, our one reliable ally against the theocracy we are trying to buy off, just as Obama did. At least Obama dropped the pallets of cash for all to see.
This is why Republicans and Democrats keep winning in alternating cycles while freedom loving Americans lose a little more freedom each time. Both parties govern by the same premises, spending, controls, entitlements, state stakes in industry. Neither offers an alternative, so voters punish whoever stands closest to the wreckage while the wreckage keeps growing.
The pollsters then measure the anger and recommend sharper messaging, and Walsh pronounces the measurement honest.
Honesty is the refusal to fake reality. An assessment that evades tariffs, socialism, and a bought off theocracy while blaming the one thing done partly right is not honest. It is a crowd reading performed by men who long ago stopped checking their premises against anything but each other.
Quote: "The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night."
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
Brit Hume retweeted
President Trump says he will accept the midterm election results when asked by Fox News’ Bret Baier during an Election Night interview.
“Well, you’re going to accept all these races, right?” Baier asks.
“Yes. Yeah, why wouldn’t I?” Trump responds.
Tune in to Fox News Channel now for live midterm election coverage.
