Trump Lost Us the Country. Now What?

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 06, 2026

The chin-stroking thoughtful types finally got the total repudiation of MAGA that they have wanted every day in the eleven years since the Great Orange One came down that golden escalator.

Or did they? First Things’ Rusty Reno makes the compelling case that what the voters really want is “regime change.” They were told in 2016 and 2024 that Trump was Hitler. They didn’t care.

They were told in 2026 that electing socialist James Talarico and Islamist Abdul El-Sayed would bring about the Wokeocalypse. Beyond even the Peak Woke of Bidenism. It would be the Woke Singularity! The Wokiest Woke you ever Woked! It would be so Woke that your eyelids would be kept open like the guy in A Clockwork Orange.

Again, the voters didn’t care. Per Reno, they took “a flyer” on Trump, and now on the coming Woke 2.0, because they just want a government that works. And they are going to keep voting for challengers outside the status quo, no matter how outré, until they get one.

Both theories, Reno’s and the “thoughtfuls,” have some merit. As for my own thoughts, let me start with the single most prescient thing I wrote all year long, from my March 6th column:

Where Trump does now remind me of Bush is that we who have sought to re-moralize America and to defend religious liberty—Christians, social conservatives, pro-lifers, pro-family activists—are once again yoked to the political fortunes of a foreign war. As with Bush’s Iraq War, so with Trump’s Iran War. If the ship goes down, we are going down with it.

Voila! Here we are.

Even had the Iran War—with its economic consequences and its broken promise of no new wars—not occurred, the Republicans still would have lost the House of Representatives this year. That’s normal. What’s not normal is the huge number of seats they lost and also the loss of the Senate. That was a choice, made the day Trump chose to initiate war with Iran.

Why did Trump do it? We’re told it was over nuclear weapons. Maybe. Or maybe Rubio let the cat out of the bag when he said it was because Iran was about to attack Israel. If so, I would have preferred Israel handle it themselves, rather than Trump taking us into a war that just handed Congress over to the most radical version of the Democratic Party that has ever existed.

The four horsemen of the Trump Apocalypse are Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, and Trump himself. Noem horribly mismanaged the deportations in her attempts at self-promotion. Bondi made the Epstein Files the disaster it is. Hegseth, who as SecDef ought to be closer to it than J.D. Vance or Tulsi Gabbard, failed his boss terribly by being far less prescient about the Iran War than them. What Noem, Bondi and Hegseth all have in common is a lack of competence for the positions they were given. And that’s ultimately on Trump.

On social issues, it’s not true that Trump did nothing for Catholics. He did a lot. His first week in office he issued an executive order reversing Biden’s transgender lunacy and requiring the government to recognize biological reality. This had repercussions even here in liberal Connecticut, where several medical institutions were forced to stop mutilating minors.

Trump pardoned Biden’s pro-life political prisoners, repealed Biden policy requiring “emergency” abortions in pro-life states, and abortions in military hospitals, temporarily stopped funding Planned Parenthood, ended the funding of research on tissue from aborted children, and reinstated the Mexico City Policy. He also established several new administrative agencies to defend religious liberty and he directed existing ones to address discrimination.

That said, Trump also let us down repeatedly and he has even attacked our priorities in ways that are unprecedented in the long history of the pro-life movement’s alliance with the GOP. He supports IVF. He refused to overturn the Biden executive order allowing pro-abortion states to bombard pro-life states with abortion pills via telehealth, thus making a mockery of the claim to have returned abortion policy to the states. He won’t fight the “shield laws” that make this mockery possible in the first place. Worse, Trump’s own Justice Department has sided in court with the pro-abortionists against pro-lifers who have tried to stop this subverting of the Dobbs ruling.

Where does this leave us? When J.D. Vance got some boos at this year’s March for Life, he responded directly to the crowd by seeming to hint that he was our man on the inside who would reverse these disappointments. He has yet to deliver. Ron DeSantis has the most pristine record of any major candidate for President but also, as we saw in the 2024 primaries, a charisma gap. Ted Cruz and Mike Pence are championed by NeverTrumpers who seem like their top priority is to lose with grace.

“Put not your trust in princes,” says the Psalmist. No kidding.