No One Matters to Trump But Trump
His
self-serving treatment of last week’s elections shows his disregard for his
party.
Nov 10, 2025
President
Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to the White
House on November 2, 2025 after taking off from Palm Beach International
Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
ON
TUESDAY NIGHT, Fox News kicked off its 10 o’clock hour with a gloomy update:
Democrats had swept the elections in Virginia, New
Jersey, and New York City. But Donald Trump had an answer. At 10:05, he posted his retort on Truth Social:
“‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT
REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”
Any
other president might have had the grace to praise his party’s candidates or at
least keep his mouth shut. Not Trump. He viewed the GOP’s debacle as an
opportunity to promote himself.
Fourteen
minutes later, as more bad returns poured in, Trump touted the performance of
the person he really cared about. “JUST OUT,” he announced. “The 60 Minutes interview of Donald
J. Trump, on CBS, Sunday night, was the highest rated 60 Minutes IN YEARS!”
This
is a big and growing problem for the GOP: Trump doesn’t really care about his
party. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
The
president’s critics have often diagnosed him as a narcissist. But his supporters, too, have felt
the sting of his indifference. Two months ago, on the morning after Charlie
Kirk’s assassination, a reporter outside the White House told Trump,
“My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir,
personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half?”
“I
think very good,” Trump replied nonchalantly, turning to a subject that
interested him more. “And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks.
They’ve just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.”
This
pathological solipsism makes Trump incapable of patriotism. He thinks America
without him is worthless. On September 23, he stood in front of the United
Nations General Assembly and declared that
in the years between his presidencies, the United States was “a laughingstock
all over the world.” A week later, in a speech to American generals and
admirals, he boasted that Vladimir Putin and the king
of Saudi Arabia had told him America was “a dead country” before his election
but was now, thanks to Trump, the “hottest country in the world.”
In his
interview with 60 Minutes on October 31, Trump bragged that
Chinese President Xi Jinping had promised not to invade Taiwan “while President
Trump is president.” Whatever happened to Taiwan after Trump left office was,
implicitly, not his concern.
IN
LAST TUESDAY’S ELECTIONS, Trump’s regal apathy made him all but useless to his
party. He never campaigned in person for Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican
nominee for governor of New Jersey. He never even endorsed Winsome Earle-Sears,
the party’s nominee for governor of Virginia. But Trump had plenty to say about
himself. Two days before the election, he posted, “I’M GETTING READY TO WATCH PRESIDENT
DONALD J. TRUMP (ME!) ON 60 MINUTES.”
On
Wednesday morning, hours after the Democratic sweep, Republican senators went
to the White House for a breakfast with Trump. He used the occasion to distance
himself from the losers. In fact, he bragged that the party’s losses
underscored how special he was. He repeated what
he had written on Truth Social: that according to pollsters, “the biggest
factor” in the GOP’s defeats was “that I wasn’t on the ballot.” Trump said he
wasn’t sure the pollsters were right, “but I was honored that they said that.”
Later
that day, in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Trump further distanced
himself from Earle-Sears. “I didn’t think that Virginia was going to do very
well,” he explained. He told Baier that he “didn’t
endorse her” because “my endorsement means a lot to me.” By withholding his
support for the nominee, Trump undercut his party. But he protected what
mattered more to him: his win-loss record as an endorser.
Also
on Wednesday, speaking to business executives in Miami, the president returned
to his theme that America without him was a joke. He scoffed that
prior to his election, foreign governments “were laughing at our country.” But
now, thanks to him, “We’re respected by everybody,” he clucked, pointing to the
way foreign leaders fawned over him. “You see the way I get treated.”
Meanwhile,
Trump was getting the same royal treatment at home. On Thursday, speaking to
reporters in the Oval Office, he noted that his administration’s new website to
connect consumers with low-cost prescription drugs would bear the name TrumpRx.gov.
“They want to use my name,” he said,
pretending he had nothing to do with the idea. “It’s got my name on it.”
In his
Oval Office remarks, the president again cited his party’s election defeats as
evidence of his superiority. Republican leaders in Congress were telling the
press that the defeats were predictable because
the states and cities that had voted on Tuesday leaned Democratic. Trump
discounted that excuse. “They weren’t very Democrat when I ran a year ago,
’cause I did well in those areas,” he crowed.
On
Friday, as he hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the White House,
Trump lauded his fellow authoritarian and dissociated himself from the GOP’s
losing candidates. “I was not much involved” in the elections, he told reporters.
“I didn’t support Virginia, the candidate. Didn’t do a lot of support for the
other candidates. . . . I wasn’t involved in that stuff too much.”
Regardless
of whether he truly wasn’t invested in the elections, it’s clear that he’s
quite interested in putting his name on the new stadium of the Washington
Commanders. On Saturday, ESPN reported that Trump, through
intermediaries, was lobbying the team’s owners to name the stadium after him.
Far from disputing the story, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said
it was a lovely idea.
This
is the legacy Trump wants. Through fiat or coercion, he’s trying to engrave his
name on the Kennedy Center, visas, savings accounts, and anything else he can
soil. But his real legacy will be all the people he betrayed or neglected in
pursuit of his vain and vulgar notion of immortality. And that includes his
party.
