Trump and MAGA Lost, but Big Government Notched Another Victory

There's no reason to think the state will shrink, which is really bad news.

It's impossible—and unwise, regardless of your ideology—to read the midterm elections as anything other than a stinging, unambiguous rebuke of President Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda, including tariffs, unprecedented peacetime government involvement in businesses, ugly mass deportations, grandiose levels of personal corruption, and late-breaking obsessions with the male body and algae. Despite historically low approval ratings, Trump urged voters to "pretend I'm on the ballot" and reaped the whirlwind.

Vice President J.D. Vance, the presumed heir to Trump's greasy and tarnished throne, is doing his damnedest to suggest that the only reason Republicans "lost is the war." In a long post on X, the teller of tall tales invokes two anonymous sources—"the smartest data guy" and "one of the smartest people I know in politics"—to assert that none of the many other things that the Trump administration did to make things more expensive and everyday life seem more precarious played a role in a gigantic wipeout. It's true that the war with Iran is an epic, unfinished disaster and, arguably, a departure from Trump's campaign promises to forego dumb wars. But it's absolutely of a piece with the president's "L'État, c'est moi" way of being.

Certainly, Vance's unwillingness to disregard basic reality is nothing new. While promoting a false story about Haitian migrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, in 2024, he said, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do." Right before the midterms, he changed his pitch slightly, this time claiming he'd seen a story about "illegal immigrant Somalis who are coordinating to flood the polls and drown out your vote." And when the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, met with widespread disgust for running a putrid, misleading, and ineffective ad featuring Democratic challenger Amy Acton's estranged mother, Vance lost no time in announcing he was "a little bit disgusted" by Republicans who criticized their own party member.

That's the worldview that took a pounding in the midterms, and if Trump and Vance either can't or won't admit they and their fellow MAGA types lost because of the effects of their agenda, that's their problem.

But who or what won the midterms? This is where things get deeply troubling, especially if you care about limited government, reduced spending (especially deficit spending), and less regulation.

The Democrats don't have a unified agenda, and neither do the Republicans who managed to stay in office. But one thing is clear: Nobody in politics is even gesturing toward cutting the overall size, spending, and scope of government. It seems likely that, as Joe Biden did after succeeding Trump in 2020, Democrats will keep many or most of Trump's tariffs. Who among them talked about giving back government shares in the tech companies that Trump extracted? While relatively few campaigned on a straight "Medicare for All" platform, many of them are pushing a "Medicare for More" people agenda.

The only thing we can bet on for sure is that the federal government will almost spend more money next year than this year. In the fiscal year that ended in September, the federal government spent about $7.4 trillion, up 6 percent from the previous year. The deficit was $2 trillion, up 12 percent from 2025.

"Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending," Milton Friedman counseled decades ago. He knew how endlessly increasing the national debt destroys economic growth and yields nothing but all sorts of misery. The defeat of Trump and his MAGA agenda is a good thing, but if it does nothing to change the economics of everyday government, the midterms will be one more squandered opportunity to alter the direction of the country.