In the ten days since the 2025 elections, Donald Trump has been hit by a string of political setbacks that have shaken his allies, split parts of his base, and put new pressure on an administration once seen as remarkably durable. A bruising Election Day, in which Republicans were routed up and down the ballot, quickly gave way to internal blame games, ideological fractures, and the resurgence of a scandal Trump had long hoped was behind him.
The alarms went off immediately. On November 5, Democrats scored sweeping wins from New York City to Georgia. In Virginia and New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill captured governorships by comfortable margins that made their victories look almost inevitable. In New York, far-left City Councilman Zohran Mamdani defeated former Democrat-turned-independent Andrew Cuomo by 12 points. Further down the ballot, Democrats prevailed in Pennsylvania’s judicial races, Georgia’s utility board contests, and ballot measures in Maine and California.
“We got our asses handed to us,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a close Trump ally running for governor in Ohio, admitted on X, summing up the mood in blunt terms.
Trump Looks for an Escape Hatch
Trump moved quickly to dodge responsibility. “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT,” he wrote on Truth Social, blaming the month-long government shutdown, weak Republican candidates, and poor campaign messaging. In a Fox News interview the next morning, he complained, “It’s no good if we do a great job and you don’t talk about it,” shifting the focus to individual candidates—particularly in states where he hadn’t campaigned.
But voters appeared to be reacting to something larger: a sense of unease about the country, and especially the economy—an economy that now sits squarely on Trump’s shoulders, despite his attempts to pin ongoing troubles on his predecessor. Exit polls in Virginia and New Jersey found nearly two-thirds of voters “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the direction of the country. Republicans even lost the Virginia attorney general race to a Democrat who had once fantasized about killing his political opponent and their children, a result commentators across the spectrum pointed to as evidence of deep frustration with the status quo, particularly on affordability and inflation.
“Trump is now in a position where he’s defending high prices while trying to convince people things are getting better,” said Lawrence J. White, a professor of economics at NYU Stern. “That’s a hard place to be politically.”
Cracks in Latino Support
Nowhere was the shift clearer than in communities where Trump had previously overperformed. In Passaic County, New Jersey—where 42 percent of residents are Hispanic—Democrats turned a three-point Republican advantage from 2024 into a fifteen-point win. In Manassas Park, Virginia, where Latinos make up 46 percent of the population, Spanberger won by forty-two points, doubling the Democratic margin from 2024.
“They’re starting to feel what the rest of the country is feeling,” said Mike Madrid, a former Republican strategist who focuses on Latino voting patterns, in an interview with Newsweek. “There was always this idea that Trump had unique appeal to Latino working-class voters. That was true to a point. But he’s not delivering. And once that stops, that support begins to crack.”
Trump’s “Biden Moment”
The backlash wasn’t limited to Latino-heavy areas. In the week after Election Day, Trump’s usually steady approval ratings took a noticeable hit. A University of Michigan survey showed consumer sentiment slipping toward near-recession territory, while an Economist/YouGov poll found 62 percent of independents saying the economy was “getting worse,” the highest share since mid-2022.
Inside the White House, nerves frayed. Aides had spent months trying to blame lingering economic problems on Biden-era policies, but that argument was no longer landing. While Trump was marking some foreign-policy wins—from the Gaza ceasefire to new investment commitments—he had allowed kitchen-table issues, which polls consistently show drive public approval, to fall into the background. In another Fox News interview, Vice President JD Vance again pointed to the Biden administration and illegal immigration as culprits for the country’s economic stress, arguing that the United States had “inherited this terrible inflation crisis from the Biden administration” and that Trump’s economic strategy—anchored in tax cuts and broad tariffs—simply needed more time to bear fruit.
MAGA Base Begins to Rebel
By November 6, frustration within Trump’s base was increasingly public. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the midterm results “a major wake-up call,” criticizing Republicans for failing to respond to voters’ anxieties about high costs and the shutdown.
Trump fired back. “I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” he told reporters. “She’s a nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think.”
Senator Ted Cruz warned that Republicans and center-right voters were at risk of becoming “complacent,” arguing on Fox that the party was underestimating the depth of voter dissatisfaction.
H-1B Firestorm on the Right
Trump’s effort to regain control of the story with a Fox News primetime interview on November 10 quickly misfired. In a sitdown with Laura Ingraham, he was pressed on whether the U.S. should keep issuing H-1B visas for foreign tech workers—a long-standing flashpoint among his supporters.
Trump surprised many by defending the program, saying that the U.S. needs to “bring in talent” and lacks certain high-tech skills domestically. When Ingraham countered, “We have plenty of talented people here,” Trump answered: “No, you don’t.”
The backlash on the right was swift. MAGA influencers accused him of straying from his “America First” doctrine. On-again, off-again allies like Ann Coulter and other far-right voices denounced the remarks as an insult to American workers. By the next day, aides tried to clarify that Trump was criticizing the U.S. education system, not American talent itself—but the damage was done.
Then the Jeffrey Epstein scandal roared back into the headlines.
Epstein Files Reignite Old Questions
On November 12, just after the shutdown ended, the House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 pages of documents related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019. Among them was an email from Epstein to author Michael Wolff claiming that Trump “knew about the girls.” Other messages suggested Trump had hosted or spent time with women linked to Epstein at his private properties.
None of the allegations were substantiated, and Trump’s past association with Epstein has already been widely reported. Still, the optics were politically toxic.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the release as a “Democratic hoax” and pointed out that Virginia Giuffre—one of Epstein’s victims who died by suicide earlier this year—had previously cleared Trump of wrongdoing. Even so, some Republicans broke ranks.
Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, and Thomas Massie backed a bipartisan petition demanding a full House vote to release all Epstein-related documents. According to the New York Times, Trump personally called Boebert to urge her to reconsider, but she did not budge.
A Week Defined by a Scandal, Not a Shutdown
What the White House hoped would be a victory lap marking the end of the shutdown instead became a week dominated by the Epstein saga. Trump’s supporters were demanding answers, and the headline that eight Democrats had buckled to end the shutdown without securing an extension of Obamacare subsidies quickly slipped from view.
On Friday, Trump tried to flip the script by announcing he had asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Epstein’s ties to former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Democrats. The move kept the scandal alive in the news cycle for yet another day.
Next week, the House is set to vote on a measure requiring the Justice Department to release the full Epstein dossier, including thousands of unclassified documents, memos, and internal communications. The vote was triggered after Massie’s discharge petition reached the 218 signatures needed to bypass Speaker Mike Johnson.
“We might as well just do it,” Johnson told reporters.
