Trump Betrayed His Voters on Behalf of a Foreign Country. This Is Why Republicans Will Get Crushed.

Tucker Carlson (0:00)

So things are not looking good for Republicans. The midterm elections are less than two months away, first Tuesday of November, and the polling suggests, to the extent you can believe the polling, that Republicans are definitely going to lose the House of Representatives. They hold by a tiny margin, but also, and now looks likely, the United States Senate. And, you know, again, it's impossible to know what the future holds, but if you had to bet on it, if you were trying to make a fortune on Polymarket, you would probably bet that Democrats walk away in less than two months with both houses of Congress, with control of the legislative branch.

So what does that mean, and what's likely to happen after? Well, again, we don't know. You can imagine all kinds of things, but some things seem more likely than others. One, Democrats probably will initiate some kind of proceeding against the president and against people who work for him, maybe an impeachment against him. Certainly, a lot of people who work at the White House are going to get subpoenas. There may be criminal actions or an attempt to initiate criminal actions. There's going to be a explosion of partisan fighting in Washington because the party that just took the House and Senate is going to be under pressure from its voters to do something once they got there. People voted Democrat because they're mad at Trump, and so they're going to expect their representatives to punish Trump in some way. So you can just imagine that the second two years of the second Trump administration will be, at least on domestic matters, pretty absorbed by political fighting. So how does the president respond to that? Well, again, we can't know, but if we had to guess, he'll likely respond like previous presidents have responded, and that's by turning his attention outside the country. Well, of course, he already is totally absorbed in what's happening outside our country because we're now fighting two wars against near-peer adversaries, Russia and Iran, and we're not succeeding in either war. So you can imagine President Trump in frustration or out of a kind of natural desire to exert power, doubling down in both of those conflicts, committing ground troops, for example, just guessing here, in Iran, accelerating rather than pulling back. Because the one thing you know, no matter how much Democrats say they hate Donald Trump, they will not try to restrain his unconstitutional power, the power he's assumed, to declare war without approval from Congress. Like the president now possesses the power to commit troops wherever he wants, despite the fact that the Constitution prohibits that. Lots of presidents have used that power, therefore it exists and probably always will. And they're not going to do anything about it, because ultimately they agree with them. They may hate Trump, but they're neocons just like he is. So they support what he's doing in Iran. Maybe they don't think he's doing a good job of it, but the idea of a regime change war against Iran, the Democratic leadership is for that. Chuck Schumer has said he's for that.

So it seems probable, at least, that if Trump gets impeached, we will have an acceleration in the war against Iran, and maybe in the war against Russia.

And at that point, we'll all be so caught up in that disaster that we probably won't have a chance to think about why did power change hands so dramatically in the midterms? And you'll hear people say, well, that always happens. You know, the president's party tends to lose seats in the midterm elections. And of course, that's true. Haven't checked the numbers, but it seems even more true in the second term. So this is just kind of conventional. This is what happens.

But it's not exactly right. That's not the only reason. People don't vote against the president's party just because they always have in the past.

President Trump won a larger share of the popular vote than any Republican president in a long time. He came into office more popular than a Republican president had been, certainly much more popular than he was in the first term. And now, he's deeply unpopular. So something changed, and it's worth pausing just for a minute to think through what that is.

Why is it that Trump, who a year and a half ago was popular and probably could have done a lot of different things, is now looking at a total wipeout and likely impeachment? And if you had to sum it up in one word, that word would be betrayal.

So in other words, it's not just that Trump was elected president and didn't do a very good job, we just saw that with the last president, we elect the guy and oops, turns out he has dementia. No, this is a different thing. This is the process of electing a president on the basis of promises he'll do one thing and then watching him do exactly the opposite on purpose, not forced to. There was no reason that Trump had to sell out his voters. There was no economic reason, there was no strategic reason, he just decided to. Now, why he decided to is a whole separate conversation that historians, one hopes, will get to the bottom of at some point.