The Fox News host whose audience includes the president has spent the days since a Republican wipeout telling his own party that its biggest danger is itself.
Sean Hannity, 64, returned to the midterm losses on his Fox News show on Monday, Nov. 9, 2026, framing the defeat as “a real civics lesson” and drawing online accusations that he was “spinning” and taking “copium.”
“Obama, Clinton, Ford, Reagan all suffered huge midterm losses. And guess what? Even as far back as Johnson, Eisenhower, FDR, midterm losses were greater than last week’s blue wave. In other words, what happened during this year’s midterms is not unprecedented. As a matter of fact, it’s kinda more normal than not,” Hannity said on his show.
One viewer asked online, “What stage of grief is this?”
Stay Away From Circular Firing Squads
Hannity aimed his warning at Republicans picking through the wreckage rather than at Democrats in a monologue on “Hannity” on Wednesday, Nov. 4, telling them not to turn on one another.
“My message tonight is all hands on deck, stay away from circular firing squads, finger-pointing, blame,” he said. He added: “Allow Democrats to show their true colors as they are now doing; have real answers on the other side.”
Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate in the Nov. 3 midterms. Hannity has named a single cause for the losses: the war with Iran.
Fox anchor Bret Baier asked him on Tuesday, Nov. 3, whether the results would have been different had the war with Iran not been on voters’ minds. Hannity answered with no hedge: “I think 100 percent, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”
The underlying economy is solid under the administration, Hannity argued, but that carries little weight when voters don’t feel it. Voters want the border secured, he said, and they disliked much of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement footage Democrats played up during the campaign. Unhappiness with the Iran war and its economic effects, he said, is now the stronger force.
Hannity was among the outside advisers who quietly pushed President Donald Trump on voters’ cost-of-living pain during the campaign. On his radio show on Nov. 4, he listed the pressures he said moved voters — rising fuel costs, the Iran conflict and impatience with the pace of the recovery — reacted to the victory speech of Michigan Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, then turned to whether his party can rebuild before 2028.
A Defense Resting on the Calendar
Hannity built his defense of the party on history during Fox’s election coverage, alongside Harris Faulkner and Larry Kudlow, arguing that midterm wipeouts are predictable and that the more dominant a president’s personality, the more brutal the loss.
Ronald Reagan won in 1980, took a beating in the 1982 midterms and carried 49 states in 1984. Bill Clinton beat a sitting president in 1992, suffered a major defeat in 1994 and won re-election. Barack Obama won in 2008, met the Tea Party in 2010 and returned to office two years later. The exceptions are rare, Hannity said, pointing to elections shaped by the Sept. 11 attacks and World War II.
He also allowed that Republicans have lessons to take from the night.
“I Have Seen the Enemy”
Leaked accounts of the campaign’s final stretch describe a video call with more than two dozen advisers less than a week before Election Day, where the conversation ran to gallows humor about funerals, prison and pardons.
James Blair, the former White House deputy chief of staff steering the midterm effort, said on that call, “I’m getting my affairs in order,” and suggested everyone else get their affairs in order too.
On an earlier pre-election call, Blair mocked the Republicans his team was working to elect. “I have seen the enemy,” Blair said. “And it is us.”
Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, said on a pre-election video call, “Maybe we could get asylum in Israel.”
Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesman for Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, rejected the leaked quotes as invented gossip and disparaged the people circulating them. Blair will temporarily leave the White House.
If His Name Were on the Ballot
Trump began assigning blame before a single vote was counted. Five weeks before the election, he posted on Truth Social that his base should pretend his name was on the ballot.
After his final pre-election speech, at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Trump told The Wall Street Journal that a bad night would not be his fault, pinning the blame on his absence from the ballot. Before the polls closed, he asked what the midterms would have looked like if the United States had never gone into Iran.
On election night, Trump told the Journal he knew the war had played a part. He also spent the night posting on Truth Social about Fox’s midterm coverage, complaining that the network spotlights Democrats too much and his own accomplishments too little — a day after he sat for an exclusive interview with Hannity on Monday, Nov. 2, the eve of the vote.
Once the votes were counted, Trump posted that the party would have won had he been on the ballot. A White House official said Trump was not on the ballot and that Trump voters turn out when he is.
The next day, Nov. 4, Trump spoke to reporters at the construction site of the East Wing ballroom at the White House as the final steel beam went up.
Trump has been sounding out allies about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s performance. A growing bloc of Republicans accuses the hawkish Hegseth of steering the president into Iran with no way out. Rep. Thomas Massie filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth on Monday, Nov. 9, and the House scheduled a procedural vote on the resolution for Tuesday, Nov. 10.
