Trey Gowdy took to Fox News to tell JD Vance he picked the wrong culprit for the Republican wipeout.
His network has been itching to make that argument since the first returns rolled in.
And Donald Trump’s own political team built one chart that tells a very different story.
Trey Gowdy Says the Vice President Flunked the Autopsy
Former US Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) opened his Sunday Night in America monologue with a line that sounded like it came off a locker room wall. “Losing is a tough teacher. It’s so tough you only want to take the class once,” he said.
Then he turned his sights on the Vice President.
“JD Vance blamed the war in Iran. Or maybe the MOU, which read more like a surrender document,” Gowdy said.
He kept going. “Assume the conflict with Iran was unpopular. Being unpopular and being wrong are two very different things,” Gowdy added, before pointing viewers to a Fox News Voter Poll graphic that ranked government corruption at 54% and the cost of living at 49% as top factors in House votes, with the war trailing at 34%.
Gowdy pushed the point even further in a Fox News column a few days earlier. “There was no war with Iran. There were nights of strikes, a heroic pilot rescue, and blockades of the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote.
No war. Somebody should pass that along to the folks paying more than $4 a gallon at the pump and the truckers paying more than $6 for diesel. AAA figures put those prices up 35% and 69% from a year earlier.
Vance Said Out Loud What the President Already Admitted
Vance didn’t tiptoe around it after the returns. “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” he posted on X, and he listed what a pollster told him voters wanted: end the war, fix the cost of living, put America First, and change the country’s relationship with Israel.
President Trump didn’t scold him for it. He told reporters “a lot of people didn’t like his comments, but not me,” and added that voters “didn’t like the war” and “didn’t like the fact that gasoline went up.”
So the President and the Vice President read the tea leaves the same way. The cable host is the odd man out.
Donald Trump’s Pollsters Already Ran the Test Gowdy Pretends Nobody Can Run
Here’s the part Gowdy left on the cutting room floor. The New York Times got its hands on a slide deck that James Blair, who left the White House to run the President’s midterm operation, circulated around the West Wing over the summer.
One slide laid the Republican polling numbers right on top of the war calendar. The Democrat lead swelled while the bombs fell, shrank while talks over a memorandum of understanding moved forward, and then shot back up when the ceasefire collapsed.
That’s about as close to a lab experiment as politics ever gets. Flip the war on, Republicans sink. Flip it off, Republicans climb. Flip it back on, and the floor gives way.
And the slide spelled out the stakes in highlighter yellow. Republicans could hold the House only if Democrats led by about four points, it noted. “But that won’t happen without an extended ceasefire, Hormuz open & gas prices falling,” the slide warned. “A final result approaching D+10 would likely cost us the Senate.”
By the end of July, Democrats were up 10. The Times now estimates Republicans dropped the national House vote by about 13 points.
But the best detail sits a few paragraphs later. According to the Times, Vance negotiated the memorandum by mid-June, and Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio found that voters who knew about it backed it by 41 points. Sixty-seven percent of them figured it would bring gas prices down.
Gowdy calls it a surrender document. The voters called it the best news of the summer.
And the deal didn’t die of old age. The Times reported it fell apart under pressure from Republican hawks, US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) among them.
That would be the same Ted Cruz who ran as the Never Trump candidate in 2016 and who now looks like the favorite of donors pining for the pre-Trump party in 2028. Cruz has broken with Trump on tariffs, on negotiations with Tehran, and on the $5,000 rebate checks, and he has lobbed subtle digs at Vance’s America First foreign policy. Call it what it is: the neoconservative lane, paved right over the wreckage of the MOU.
Even Trump wondered about the road not taken. “If we never went into Iran, what do you think would happen in the midterms?” he asked privately, according to a person who spoke to him.
Rupert Murdoch’s Network Keeps Aiming at the Same Man
Gowdy’s case has a hole in it, and the hole is his own network’s poll. The same Fox News Voter Poll found roughly three in four voters called the war a crucial or major factor in their House vote.
Corruption and the cost of living don’t live in separate boxes from the war, either. When the Strait of Hormuz closes, the price of everything that rides on a truck goes up with it. Ask a farmer in the middle of the country filling a combine.
Echelon Insights asked Trump 2024 voters who have since soured on him what drove them away. Wars beat tariffs five to one, 15% to 3%.
But Fox doesn’t seem interested in that math, and the reason may not be complicated. Rupert Murdoch personally lobbied Trump in 2024 to pick Doug Burgum and steer clear of Vance, according to multiple reports at the time. At an October 2025 dinner where Trump asked him to size up Vance and Marco Rubio side by side, Murdoch was notably warmer toward Rubio, according to a book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
Rubio, of course, helped write the Gang of Eight amnesty bill in 2013. Murdoch, for his part, teamed up with Michael Bloomberg back in 2010 on a business coalition pushing a sweeping immigration overhaul, the kind that always seems to end with amnesty for illegal aliens.
Maybe that’s unfair to Gowdy. He’s a former federal prosecutor, not a Murdoch errand boy, and he may genuinely believe every word. But when the network’s biggest voices keep landing on the one Republican who tried to end the war, nobody needs to find a memo from the top floor. The pattern does the talking.
Republicans have watched this movie before. In 2006, with the Iraq War dragging on, plenty of party insiders blamed scandals and corruption for the beating. But George W Bush accepted Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation the day after the polls closed, which told everyone what the White House really believed. Two years later, Barack Obama rode the same war fatigue into the Oval Office.
The stakes this time run just as high. Democrats take the gavels in January, and they’ll pose as the peace party while their socialist wing pushes Medicare for All, amnesty, and war powers limits designed to tie the President’s hands for the next two years.
And the establishment wing would love nothing more than for Republicans to swallow Gowdy’s version, because that version lets the hawks keep their seats at the table heading into 2028.
Gowdy is right about one thing. Losing is a tough teacher. The Republicans who tune out Donald Trump’s own chart are lining up to take the class a second time.
Sources: Mediaite, “Fox’s Trey Gowdy Calls Out Trump Admin Blaming Iran War for Election Wipeout”; Fox News via WFMD, Trey Gowdy, “The midterms were a painful lesson that Republicans can’t skip learning”; The New York Times via The Philadelphia Inquirer, “‘I have seen the enemy, and it is us’: Inside Team Trump’s historic collapse”; Türkiye Today, “‘Maybe we could get asylum in Israel’: Trump team’s grim pre-election call”; NBC News, “Vance says the ‘real reason’ for GOP rout was anger over Iran war”; PBS NewsHour/AP, “Vance blames Iran war for GOP midterm losses”; DonaldJTrumpPolls.com, Fox News Voter Poll coverage; Axios, “‘Regime Change’ scoop: The night Murdoch was quizzed on Vance vs. Rubio”; CNN via ABC7, “‘You can help me win’: How Trump landed on JD Vance as his VP pick”; Breitbart, “Tucker Carlson Speaks Out Against Rupert Murdoch’s Efforts to Control Trump Through Veepstakes”; Business Standard, Iran war timeline; Echelon Insights polling of 2024 Trump voters.
