When the president’s eldest son went looking for the reason Republicans got wiped out, he landed on his own father’s war.
Donald Trump Jr., 48, pinned the Republican collapse in the Nov. 3, 2026, midterm elections on the U.S. war with Iran, in comments shared by TheBlaze on X. Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate. His diagnosis matched the one Vice President JD Vance, 42, laid out in a long post on X the morning after the vote.
“The Iran war is largely what shifted voter sentiment and caused this. It spiked fuel prices and changed their minds,” Trump Jr. said.
He rejected the idea that his father’s domestic agenda dragged the ticket down, saying the administration had driven poverty and crime to record lows while holding the borders secure. Voters felt the war in their wallets more than they felt any of that, he said.
“Every Word of This Is 100”
The feud started with a repost. On the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 4, Trump Jr. shared the vice president’s postmortem with his own followers and wrote: “Every word of this is 100 100 100.” By that afternoon the post had drawn more than 2 million views.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. In his telling, the cause was plain to nearly everyone, and anyone still backing the war owed voters an argument that giving up the Senate for six years had been worth the price.
On Nov. 2, two days before that post, Vance had rallied Republicans at the former Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, N.Y., while Trump Jr. was at a rally in Ohio.
The President Would Do It Again
Trump largely agreed with his vice president about what the war did to the election. He is not backing off it. Pressed on Vance’s take, the president said he would make the same call again, describing the war as the only long-term answer.
Trump told Fox News that people back his Iran policy but were not ready to accept the short-term hit of higher gas prices, a calculation he said he understood but did not share.
The president offered his own theory of the defeat: himself. Republicans would have won had he been on the ballot, he said, and the enthusiasm at his rallies never transferred to the candidates carrying his endorsement.
End the War, Then the Prices
Vance’s post put numbers behind the argument. A pollster he called “one of the smartest people I know in politics” told him the party would “lose the generic ballot by 13 points.” That pollster asked the Trump voters who had walked away what it would take to win them back. The top four answers, Vance wrote, accounted for almost everything: end the war, focus on the cost of living and inflation, put America First, and change the relationship with Israel.
Turnout was not the problem, he argued. The problem was where those voters marked their ballots.
Democrats now hold 54 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 44, a net gain of seven, with two races still uncalled. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico beat Republican Ken Paxton. In Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson unseated Republican Susan Collins. In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom led Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by 1,813 votes early Friday in a race still too close to call.
An ABC News voter poll found 34 percent of voters called the war crucial to their vote. Roughly 40% of House voters described themselves as angry about the direction of the country.
The verdict traveled. Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator, posted on X that American voters had rejected the war and that he endorsed the message they sent.
Trump Jr. saved his sharpest words for Republicans who deny the war’s role in the losses, calling that “disgusting, frankly.”