GOP returns to Capitol Hill bruised, but still stuck on Trump

Republicans streamed back into the Capitol this week for the first time since voters walloped them in the midterms. The mood was raw. Members met behind closed doors to dissect what went wrong and combed the calendar for whatever agenda they can jam through before Democrats take the House and Senate in January.

Rep. Richard Hudson, who chairs the House GOP's campaign arm, had expected a victory lap. Instead, he's packing up. Voters, he said, wanted to send a message because gas and everyday costs felt too high. The mistake, in his words, was that Republicans never showed they cared about that — or about them.

The self-audit got blunter. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri listed the abandoned: rural healthcare, pro-lifers, the poor, working people. Run that playbook, he said, and you get your butt kicked — and you deserve it. Boebert, who is trailing a Democratic challenger in a district Republicans carried by more than 18 percentage points in 2024, put it flatly: the American people let them know they failed. Rep. Virginia Foxx, also trailing, said nobody would listen when she warned she could lose.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spent the final weeks insisting the polls were wrong, said this week that voters made the wrong choice. Democrats flipped more than 40 Republican-held seats, putting them on track for their strongest majority since Barack Obama's early presidency. House Republicans answered by electing Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as their next leader — a House Freedom Caucus co-founder, Judiciary Committee chair, former Oversight chair and close Trump ally. Rep. Brian Mast said the way Jordan fights says a lot about where the conference is.

The Senate went softer. Hawley and a handful of conservatives spent hours in the Old Senate Chamber pushing to delay leadership elections, but nobody stepped up to challenge John Thune of South Dakota. Republicans ultimately backed Thune without even a voice vote. Hawley's take on the job: it's a bad one. Sen. Bernie Moreno, also tapped to lead the party's 2028 comeback effort, said simply that they'd let their leader be the leader.

If anyone expected a Trump reckoning, they didn't get one. House Republicans overwhelmingly shut down an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, with only Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie breaking ranks. Massie's read afterward: the conference still hasn't broken from the spell of Donald Trump, and he still controls it. Thune attributed the losses to a combination of things rather than blaming the president, and few echoed Trump's social media claim that the election had problems. Conceding a tight Mississippi Senate race, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said she would respect voters' decision.