Megyn Kelly urges Republicans to rebuild without Trump on the ballot

Megyn Kelly told her audience on Wednesday that the Republican Party is in ruins and will have to learn to win without Donald Trump on the ballot, a day after Democrats took both chambers of Congress.

The remarks came on Wednesday's edition of The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM, Mediaite reported. Kelly, a former Fox News host, had spent six years firmly in Trump's corner, by The Daily Beast's account, and defended him through the closing weeks of the campaign.

Democrats swept seven Republican-held Senate seats, at least 24 House districts, five governorships and as many as 12 state legislative chambers, CNBC reported Wednesday, citing Associated Press data. Republicans had not flipped a single Democratic-held congressional seat, governorship or state legislative chamber.

What she told Republicans

Kelly argued that voters punished Republicans for failing to exercise their constitutional responsibility to check presidential power, pointing to exit polling. Congress is the first branch and was supposed to act as one of the separate powers the founders envisioned, she said, and the electorate that turned out told Republicans it was disgusted with them.

Trump's domestic legislative agenda is effectively finished, Kelly said, because no one in Congress will work with him unless he starts legislating like a Democrat. Many of the Democrats elected Tuesday are more radical than their predecessors, she said, and Trump will either bend to their will or no legislation will go forward.

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.

What is left of core MAGA is a shadow of its former self, Kelly said, because the movement has shown it is irrelevant unless Trump is on the ballot, and he will never be on the ballot again. She told Republican lawmakers it was time to get really honest now that his power to primary them and threaten them had been eliminated.

Trump has been hobbled by what happened on election night, she said, and so has the Republican Party, and in her view both deserved it.

What the returns show

In Kansas, voters elected their first Democratic U.S. senator since 1932, ending a 94-year losing streak for the party, CNBC reported. Democrats toppled three-term Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas and took a Senate seat there that had eluded the party since 1988. The wave broke decades of Republican dominance in states the party had counted as safe.

Republican-held Senate seats also fell in Iowa, South Carolina and Ohio, along with Maine and North Carolina. Democrats won governorships in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Nevada, all states Trump carried in 2024, giving the party a majority of the nation's governorships for the first time since 2010.

Kelly said Trump has blamed Fox News and the Republican candidates themselves and has not taken any of the blame himself, according to The Daily Beast's account of the show. She said the network's ratings had "been in the dumpster," which she called "a harbinger of things to come." Voters said the same thing at the polls, she added: they are no longer interested in the Trump show.

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. Everyone knows he can't handle the truth about losing. He's allergic to that word.

Trump effectively was on the ballot and the election was a referendum on him and his policies, Kelly said, telling his supporters that his coattails are non-existent and that he cannot save them.

The Reflecting Pool speech

Trump, 80, spoke outside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday, the day before the election. He briefly warned about electing Democrats he called dangerous, then spoke for 23 minutes about his renovations to the pool, The Daily Beast reported, displaying printed photographs of how it looked under Presidents Obama and Biden.

Kelly, 55, played the speech on Tuesday's show and said the president seemed to really want to talk more about the Reflecting Pool itself than the election. She told him on air to stay on message, because he needed Republicans at the polls in droves to overcome the early voting advantage Democrats reportedly had. She called him a builder who loves projects like that one.

She did not fault Trump for the speech at the time, blaming his advisers for letting him appear at the pool over the doubts of Republican insiders who thought the location was not a good story for him or the party.

Kelly had spent the closing months of the campaign defending him. She backed Trump after he insulted the journalist Kaitlan Collins, and she called Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff despicable over his criticism of Trump aide Natalie Harp. She also criticized the comedian Larry David for calling Trump's UFC birthday party embarrassing, according to The Daily Beast.

The rebuild and the map

Kelly told Republicans to forget yesterday's factions, the old establishment, MAGA and the neocons, and to start from scratch. The party should figure out what worked in the past and cobble together something ethical with a moral center that understands the mood of the country, she said. If it wants to survive it will need what she called a "new, charismatic, honest, ethical leader."

Her break with the president did not begin on election night. Kelly has soured on Trump and the MAGA movement over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, the Iran war and corruption during his second term, HuffPost reported.

A White House official texted CNN's Kaitlan Collins on election night to say Trump had done a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballots than the candidates did themselves, Collins said on air in remarks reported by TheWrap. She said the mood at the White House was defiant, and relayed the official's line that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot.

The losses came despite a redistricting campaign carried out at Trump's urging. Republican lawmakers spent months redrawing congressional boundaries in Texas, Florida and North Carolina to tilt the map in their favor, and the effort did little to blunt the Democratic wave. The party's remaining chances for House pickups are largely confined to two newly gerrymandered districts that were not supposed to be competitive.

The one seat Republicans may have a chance of flipping that was not redistricted before the election is Maine's 2nd District, Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, told CNBC by email.

Democrats took control of the Texas House for the first time in more than two decades and flipped both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature. They won the North Carolina House after 16 years in the minority and captured the Pennsylvania state Senate for the first time since before 1994. Unofficial results in Arizona pointed toward Democrats taking both legislative chambers for the first time in roughly 60 years.

Where Republican majorities survived, Democrats stripped veto-proof supermajorities in Florida, Indiana, Kansas and Missouri. Not since the aftermath of Watergate in 1974 had the GOP faced a statehouse reckoning of this size, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

What is not known

Nine House seats remained uncalled by the Associated Press late Wednesday, along with two Senate seats and two governors races, with Republicans still fighting to hold Senate seats in Alaska and Mississippi.

Kelly did not name a Republican she believes should lead the rebuilt party. She said she is over "the antics" and "the grift" of Trump's second term, and called the election a missed opportunity by a president who, in her words, had "so many of us believing in him."