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Donald Trump long ago promised Republicans that, with him as their leader, there’d be so many wins, they’d tire of winning. He didn’t say the wins ultimately would be Democrats’.

In the wake of a wipeout for the ages, is the Republican Party so tired of Democrats’ winning that it will finally quit Trump? Don’t count on it. Yet. But that question will define the 2028 presidential election cycle, which began the day after Republicans’ rout — and President Trump’s much-deserved rebuke — in Tuesday’s midterm elections. For Republicans, keeping the garishly gilded White House after 2028 just got a lot harder.

Trump promised retribution. The American voters took theirs. Vote as if I’m on the ballot, Trump said at his campaign rallies, and voters did. Yet Trump predictably blamed others, the Republican candidates themselves, for the losses even though he hand-picked many of the biggest losers (“losers” in every sense of the word; candidate quality matters).

Trump was right about one thing: For a century, the party of the president typically has lost seats, in Congress and governorships and statehouses, as voters send a message to the White House of dissatisfaction with its direction. Bill Clinton had his “drubbing” in 1994, George W. Bush his “thumping” in 2006 and Barack Obama his “shellacking” in 2010. Yet each president, by those words, acknowledged that the voters’ message was to them and conceded their responsibility for their parties’ losses. And each one changed course somehow.

Not Trump, though his spanking (yep, that’s a nod to his bizarre late-campaign obsession with men’s butts) was more pronounced than his predecessors’. Nor does change seem to be the inclination of the party he still controls more fully than any president before him.

Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who in January will forfeit power and House control to current Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, vowed that House Republicans will “double down” on the agenda voters so decisively damned. Former Trump press........

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