Buck Brief - 3 Reasons the GOP Got its Butt Kicked

Buck Sexton (0:00)

So why did we get our asses kicked last night in the election, everybody? We gotta talk about it. It's the last day I'm going to talk about it, this day, today, because I don't think it's helpful going forward to dwell on this. So I'm just gonna break it down for you straight up. I see it as three basic problems, foundational issues that led to an extremely disappointing outcome here. The worst outcome, I think, actually worse than imaginable. I thought it was going to be bad. I didn't think it would be this bad. And this is going to have reverberations, not just for the next two years of Trump's presidency, but well beyond that, because of the six year Senate terms involved in some of these races. So let's just do this. Let's get into what went wrong. First thing, and it's the most obvious thing, and it's true, it's the Iran War. Now there's many different ways that people want to discuss this and they want to get into this debate. Here is the most fundamental problem. It's not, oh, but we should have stopped it or shouldn't have stopped it or it went on too long or it was on behalf of Israel and not America first. But those are all things that are part of the discussion. Here is the fundamental problem. A central straightforward promise of Trump in 2024 with his incredible resurrection, really, politically and his sweep back to power. A fundamental straightforward promise was no new Middle East wars. Period, full stop, that's it.

So much so that he was mocking other foolhardy Middle East adventurism, if you will. It's a very euphemistic way of talking about it, but that was clear. No more Middle East wars. He promised people, they voted for him. He broke that promise. Now I understand there actually is a case that sometimes a promise has to be broken. You know, I could give someone my word that I'm not going to, you know, tell anybody what they tell me. But if they tell me they're going to harm themselves, like engage in self harm, you know, if they're suicidal, it's moral for me to break that promise and make sure that they get help, right? This is an exam. Another example would be mandatory reporters. Somebody could tell you, hey, you got to promise me you're not going to tell anyone something. Okay, fine. And then they say, oh, you know, my husband is being abusive toward, you know, physically abusive toward our child.

Actually, we're going to tell we're going to break that promise because it's more important to defend and protect that child. I bring this up just because I understand that promises can be broken with good reason. The voters didn't care and they didn't think this was a good enough reason. The voters that we needed. And there's no question the word here is ass kicking. Extinction level event is what Ron DeSantis called it. A like a meteor hitting instead of a wave hitting us. All of this is true. We lost Texas. We got crushed in Texas by double digits.

We got destroyed in every swing state. This was an abomination of a midterm election for us as bad as it could possibly have been. And it really, first and foremost, wasn't about the individual candidates. The Republican Party brand, really, the Trump America first brand on this issue at this time was a huge drag. Everybody who is being honest and pay attention can see this and knows it.

So that's point one. The Iran war was a disastrous decision. Whether you, oh, but they have nukes. Oh, we have to stop them. Oh, Iran's a big problem. Whatever, however, you want to try to get at that. The faith was broken with the voters we needed the moment Trump decided to go in and do this and have a sustained air campaign against Iran for regime change. We're not dumb. We know they were trying for regime change. It did not work. We have not gotten the deal that we said we would get. Iran has not agreed to some ironclad deal with inspections that would prevent them from getting a nuke, etc, etc. But you don't even have to get into all of that. Trump promised no new war in the Middle East specifically, but no new war. And he gave us a new war and it was not a good outcome. If he had if he had buttoned this thing up in 30 days and everything was great and everything happened the way we had planned, maybe, maybe the base who felt betrayed would have forgiven him for it, but they didn't. And it didn't happen that way. So that's point one. Point two. Trump said that he would bring down prices.