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This evening, Republicans have ben consumed by infighting ever since Democrats’ historic midterm victory, with one senior White House official reportedly saying the president is “finished.” Meanwhile, MAGA leaders, including the head of the Heritage Foundation, are now admitting that the AI industry and data centers were chiefly responsible for voters backing Democrats. On Capitol Hill, the incoming Democratic majority is already making plans to investigate Trump fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, who the president weirdly calls his “princess of darkness.” And in Kansas, Democrat Cindy Holscher just won the governor’s race despite Trump winning the Sunflower State by a double-digit margin just two years ago.
One more thing before the news: the far-right billionaires who spent the last 18 months pouring money into Republican campaigns may have come up short last week, but now they’re about to pivot to spending money to win the war for your mind. That means Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk’s algorithms will be flooding your feed with disinformation, while networks owned by David Ellison and Rupert Murdoch throw everything they can to disrupt the new Democratic majorities.
GOP Consumed by ‘Feuding and Backstabbing’ After Midterms
The Republican Party is now in a state of open warfare with itself after Democrats sw embarrassed them in the midterms. According to Zeteo, various Republican operatives, pollsters, elected officials and White House personnel are all describing a party and an administration quickly succumbing to chaos.
Reporters Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez wrote that GOP infighting is expected to worsen, and get ugly faster than many of the president’s critics expected. According to the report, Republicans are “already starting to eat each other alive,” and some of them are even “doing it on live television.”
One senior Trump administration official told Zeteo that the MAGA movement “self-immolated” after the GOP’s blowout defeat. This week, that same official told the outlet, “The president is finished” and that “the next two years are gonna be a joke.” The official added that the president’s accomplishments over the last two years could be easily reversed and that his second administration could end up being a total “waste.”
It isn’t just people speaking on background who are heaping criticism on the president for last week. Conservative pollster John McLaughlin, who’s worked for Trump since his first presidential campaign, said Republicans “forgot what won the 2024 election.” Marc Short, who was chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, said the midterms represented “complete Armageddon” for his party.
Zeteo also reported that multiple influential figures within the party are pinning the blame for losing both chambers of Congress and multiple state legislatures squarely on Trump. However, almost none of them are saying so publicly. The outlet reported those Republicans are afraid of death threats and of being cast out of the GOP by what it described as a “personality cult masquerading as a federal government.”
MAGA Leaders Blame AI and Data Centers for Turning Voters Against GOP
Meanwhile, some of the key architects behind Trump’s second-term agenda are pointing the finger for the midterms at both the artificial intelligence industry and the data centers that power it.
Kevin Roberts, who is president of the Heritage Foundation and co-author of its infamous Project 2025 playbook, told the Financial Times that conservative voters were by and large“apoplectic about data centers.” He went on to admit that Democrats did “a brilliant job, politically speaking, of taking that issue from the right.”
That’s a stark conclusion of the election, considering Trump’s openly pro-data center statements leading up to November. Back in August, Trump proclaimed that opponents of data centers would doom their communities to be “backwards and poor.” He’s also resisted all efforts to regulate the AI industry, and his party has unabashedly accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations from AI executives like Elon Musk and other tech billionaires.
Tell Congress: Pass the AI Data Center Moratorium Act!
Roberts, who also made sure to acknowledge economic fallout from Trump’s war with Iran, said Republicans made “an under-appreciated mistake” in shrugging off voters’ concerns about the AI industry’s power and influence at all levels of government. He told the Financial Times that Silicon Valley executives “feel like they can jam down our throats whatever the hell they want,” and insisted that the Heritage Foundation doesn’t trust them.
He’s right in that voters’ hatred of AI played a role in the midterms, particularly in Texas. Democrats like governor-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned against building new data centers and ran on curbing the influence of billionaires like Musk, who spent roughly $225 million of his own money in a largely fruitless effort backing Republican candidates in the Lone Star State.
Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy also heaped criticism on Big Tech during an event at the Heritage headquarters this week, saying voters were revolting over AI executives telling them they’d lose their jobs and have “this big box in your backyard” whether they liked it or not. Roy said Americans rejected that argument at the ballot box, and said he was “kind of with them.” He pointed the finger at the Republican establishment that “embraced corrupt people at the top of the ticket, too often,” though he refrained from uttering Trump’s name when making that argument.
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson said concerns about AI were the “background music of this midterm.” She warned her party it will continue to be “a huge issue in 2028.”
Democrats Planning to Investigate Trump’s ‘Princess of Darkness’
Democrats on Capitol Hill aren’t wasting any time as they prepare to take power in January. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Congressman Robert Garcia of California and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut announced a new probe into Meredith O’Rourke, who is one of Trump’s top fundraisers. The president himself has referred to her as his “princess of darkness.”
Warren and Garcia are in line to chair the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations and the House Oversight Committee, respectively. According to the Wall Street Journal, their joint letter says O’Rourke’s fundraising activities reek of “potential corruption.”
O’Rourke has been the key point of contact for companies who are donating to build Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom — which is being built where the bulldozed East Wing used to stand — his presidential library and his affiliated political action committees. The Journal reported that O’Rourke typically asks donors to give anywhere from $5 million to $50 million, emphasizing that “the boss wants this money.”
The letter is focused particularly on donations from companies like Capital One, SoftBank Group and Lockheed Martin, along with the favorable treatment those companies ended up getting from the Trump White House. Lawmakers are demanding a full list of every donor O’Rourke reached out to, how each one responded and how much she’s being paid to head up the operation. They’ve given her a hard deadline of November 25 to respond to their request.
A spokesperson for O’Rourke and Trump dismissed the accusations as “absurd, baseless and full of hypocrisy,” and maintained that Trump “can’t be bought.” The White House has been warning Democrats that conducting any investigations into Trump could lead to criminal charges. That’s not only untrue, but a telling statement that reveals how much this president fears attempts to hold him accountable.
Democrat Projected to Win Kansas Gubernatorial Race
Our final story this evening: Democrats just pulled off one of their most impressive wins of the entire 2026 cycle. Decision Desk HQ is now projecting that Kansas state senator Cindy Holscher will win the Kansas gubernatorial race, keeping the office in Democratic hands for at least another four years.
Holscher prevailed over Trump-endorsed Republican Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson with just over 50 percent of the vote to his 49.6 percent as of Wednesday evening. She’ll be sworn in after term-limited Democratic Governor Laura Kelly leaves office in January.
Kansas was supposed to be the GOP’s best shot at flipping a gubernatorial seat this year, given that Trump won the state by 16 points just two years ago. Going into the weekend before Election Day, Decision Desk HQ still gave Masterson a 65 percent chance of winning. But the race tightened as Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton — a pastor — mounted a surprisingly strong challenge against incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, and ended up being the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Kansas in nearly 100 years.
Holscher was the progressive candidate in the Democratic primary, beating an establishment rival who had Gov. Kelly’s support along with the endorsement of former Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius (who also served as Health and Human Services secretary in the Barack Obama administration). In the general election, Holscher ran an unabashedly populist campaign. Holscher called for a moratorium on new data center development and ran on expanding Medicaid and increasing funding for special education.
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