Megyn Kelly Tells Republicans to Win Without Daddy on the Ballot

Megyn Kelly spent Wednesday's episode of her show tearing into a president she had spent years defending, telling her audience that the Republican Party "is in ruins" one day after Democrats took back both the House and the Senate.

The former Fox News host, speaking on The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM and YouTube, told Republican officeholders they were going to have to figure out how to campaign without Donald Trump propping them up. Her words: they need to "learn how to win without daddy on the ballot."

Democrats flipped Republican-held Senate seats in states including Texas, Kansas and South Carolina on their way to controlling both chambers, according to Mediaite.

Kelly did not soften any of it. She called Tuesday a referendum on Trump personally, said his endorsement is now worthless, and accused him of refusing to accept a single ounce of responsibility for what happened.

"In the Image of No Man"

Her opening assessment of her own side was blunt. "This morning the Republican Party is in ruins, and maybe it needed to be," Kelly said.

What followed was essentially an instruction manual for life after Trump. "The choice now for Republicans is to reflect, rebuild, and reinvent in the image of no man," she said. "They're going to have to do it on their own. They're going to have to learn how to win without daddy on the ballot, and to find their ethical center, and not just be puppets of Trump, not to have their entire political world revolve around Donald Trump."

Kelly pointed to exit polling showing voters did not think Congress was doing an adequate job acting as a check on presidential power. In her telling, Republicans in the House and Senate got punished for behaving like an extension of the White House instead of a separate branch of government.

She put the message voters sent more bluntly. "The electorate that turned out, whether you were young or old, black or white, Hispanic, Asian, male or female, Republican or Democrat or independent, told the Republicans they were disgusted with them," she said, per Mediaite's account. "It wasn't like 'you're mildly annoying, we're not really in your camp anymore.' It was 'F*ck off, you have betrayed us. So, all bets are off now.'"

The Coattails Are Gone

For a decade, the simplest math in Republican politics was that a Trump endorsement decided primaries. Kelly told her audience that math is dead.

"You can't ride the Trump coattails anymore. They're non-existent," she said. "He cannot save you."

She went further with sitting lawmakers, telling them it was time to "get really honest" now that "Trump's power to primary you and threaten you has been eliminated." The party, she said, will have to go find a "new, charismatic, honest, ethical leader" of its own, HuffPost reported.

Kelly also knocked down the idea, floated by Trump himself, that Republicans would have cruised if he had been on the ballot. She argued he effectively was.

"He's Allergic to That Word"

The sharpest line of the segment was aimed straight at Trump's temperament.

"It's Trump's spin to say it would have been a landslide for Republicans had he been on the ballot. That's just not true," Kelly said. "Everyone knows he can't handle the truth about losing. He's allergic to that word."

She then ran through the list of people she said the president had faulted instead of himself. "Of course, he's blaming everyone other than himself," she said. "So far, he's blamed Fox News. He's blamed the Republican candidates themselves. He has not taken any of the blame himself."

Kelly, who built her television career at Fox News, brought up her old network's numbers as an early warning sign nobody read correctly. The ratings had "been in the dumpster," she said, calling that "a harbinger of things to come." Her read: "No one had any interest or appetite in anything related to Donald Trump." Voters, she said, told him the same thing at the polls, that they are "no longer interested in the Trump show."

The White House Blamed the Candidates

While returns were still coming in Tuesday night, CNN's Kaitlan Collins read on air from a text sent to her by a White House official.

"President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballots than the candidates did themselves," the official wrote, according to Collins. She said the mood inside the White House was defiant even as hand-picked candidates lost, and relayed a second line from the official: "President Trump was not on the ballot and it's proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot."

Kelly's answer to that argument was that Trump's name was on the ballot in every way that counts, and that the results amounted to "a referendum on him and his policies."

23 Minutes About a Reflecting Pool

One day before the election, Trump, 80, delivered a speech outside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. After a brief warning about the dangers of electing Democrats, he talked for 23 minutes about the renovations he made to the pool.

Kelly, 55, covered it on Tuesday's show, playing a clip of the president discussing how poorly Presidents Obama and Biden handled algae problems and holding up large printed photos of the pool under his predecessors. "The president seemed to really want to talk more about the Reflecting Pool itself than the election," she said, as The Daily Beast noted. At one point she simply said, "Oh, boy."

Her plea on air: "Mr. President, let's stay on message here. You need Republicans to get to the polls in droves to overcome the early voting advantage that the Democrats reportedly have."

Even then, she aimed most of her criticism at his staff rather than at him. Kelly said a bunch of Republican insiders had doubts about the location and worried it wasn't "a great story for Trump or for the GOP." She defended his motives, saying "Trump is a builder, and he loves projects like this," and that he genuinely believes he fixed a beauty problem in Washington that several administrations ignored.

Her verdict on the advisers who put him out there came with a dog metaphor. "It's almost like, just do not take the doggie to the dog park with the liver snaps," she said. "He is not going to be able to resist the liver snaps if you put them right in front of him."

What She Sounded Like a Few Weeks Ago

The distance Kelly traveled in 24 hours is hard to miss for anyone who watched her show through the fall campaign.

In the run-up to Election Day she defended Trump after he insulted CNN's Kaitlan Collins. She called Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff "despicable" for calling out Trump aide Natalie Harp and went after comedian Larry David for describing Trump's UFC birthday party as embarrassing, The Daily Beast reported.

By Wednesday she was describing herself as finished with the whole operation. She said she is "over the antics, the grift, the making money off of the backs of the American people who just wanted you to help them."

What came through most was disappointment rather than anger. "It's incredibly disheartening, and it's such a missed opportunity," she said of the midterms. "It's such a missed opportunity by this president who had the world at his feet, in his hands, who had so many of us believing in him."

Her break with Trump did not start Tuesday night. HuffPost reported that Kelly, once a reliable supporter, had been drifting away from the president and the MAGA movement over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, the Iran war, and the corruption she sees in his second term.

A Shadow of Its Former Self

Kelly told viewers Trump's legislative agenda is finished for practical purposes, because the new Congress has no reason to deal with him.

"He has absolutely no one who is going to work with him in the U.S. Congress unless he becomes a Democrat, unless he starts legislating like a Democrat," she said. She described many of the Democrats elected Tuesday as DSA types, more radical than the ones before them, and said she doubted they had much appetite for negotiating. "He will either bend to their will, or there will be no legislation that goes forward."

She added that Trump "has been hobbled by the events that happened last night, and the Republican Party has as well, and they did deserve it."

Kelly said core MAGA is "a shadow of its former self." Her reasoning: the movement has shown that "it is irrelevant unless Trump is on the ballot, and Trump will never be on the ballot again."

Her closing advice told Republicans to throw out the whole filing cabinet. "Forget about yesterday's factions. Forget about the old establishment. Forget about MAGA. Forget about neocon. Forget about non-interventionists," she said.

"You gotta rebuild, my friends. Start from scratch," Kelly said. "Figure out what worked in the past, and start cobbling together something ethical that bears some resemblance to a party with a moral center that understands the mood of the country."