Following the dismal midterm showing, there’s a lot of blame to go around.

While I can and will sum up the issue, I want to focus more narrowly on the way in which the entire Republican machine is turning from Trump, who is now anathema, to Ron DeSantis, who is the new god.

Considering that we still have a long time before the primaries and then the 2024 election, this kind of decision-making is premature and dangerous—and that’s why we’re being forced into it.

Here's a short list of leading blame topics:

After the midterms, the Republican Party and half of the conservative movement are now furious with Donald Trump. Their writs are many — even though the party establishment shares much of the blame.

Indeed, in near hysterical fashion, Trump became stigmatized and scapegoated as the culprit for nearly every Republican race lost. Yet many of his endorsed candidates won. And some who lost did so quite independently of anything Trump said or did.

An unspoken paradox arose among many that Trump’s vital MAGA agenda might be better continued and advanced by those others than its creator — even as Trump insisted that there can no more be a MAGA party without him than there could be sunshine without the sun.

One explanation of the Trump dilemma is that like all classical tragic heroes and western gunslingers, Trump solved problems through means unpalatable to those in need of solutions beyond their own refinement. It is the lot of such tragic figures to grate and wear out their welcome with their beneficiaries — but only after their service is increasingly deemed no longer needed.

In this moment of wishing the wounded Shane would ride off into the Tetons and leave the more civilized alone, we should remember Trump’s four historical accomplishments that will only grow in light of Biden’s subsequent disastrous four years.

Well, it is official. President Donald Trump is making another run at the White House in 2024. In front of a crowd at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Trump gave a speech in which he excoriated the ineptitude of the Biden administration while striking a hopeful message for the future.

There can be no doubt that Trump’s speech has already caused immense triggering on the left. Indeed, The Washington Post published an article titled “Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again” during the former president’s speech.

WaPo is sooooooooo mad right now. pic.twitter.com/ymsq7WjLtC

— The Redheaded libertarian (@TRHLofficial) November 16, 2022

Less than a week after Democrats "won" most of the midterm election, something pretty weird is going on in various Democrat power centers, in a curiously counterintuitive pattern of acts and weather balloons.

In three instances below, we see Democrats starting to act like Republicans, adopting the Republican line, which is strange stuff, given that they insist they "won" the election in what they claimed was a voter mandate for their current style of governance -- despite poll after poll confirming Joe Biden's unpopularity and voters convinced that America is on the wrong track.

Elsewhere Democrat after Democrat is suddenly moderating their stance, adapting the Republican agenda on enforcing the open border, doing something about crime, and firing up oil production. What’s going on?

What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country -- other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate albeit barely?

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the mess and the result is that once cherished Election Day balloting becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Election Night also no longer exists. Returns are not counted for days. It is intolerable for a modern democracy to wait and wait for all sorts of different ballots both cast and counted under radically different and sometimes dubious conditions.

The Democrats -- with overwhelming media and money advantages -- have mastered these arts of massive and unprecedented early, mail-in, and absentee voting. Old-fashioned Republicans count on riling up their voters to show up on Election Day. But it is far easier to finesse and control the mail-in ballots than to "get out the vote."

Well, that was disheartening, dispiriting, and demoralizing.

We went into the party with a president with some of the lowest approval ratings in history and Americans (at least according to the polls) focused like lasers on issues that could be chalked up to Democrat policy failures — namely, inflation and crime.

And yet Republicans are hanging on by a thread, and, as of this writing, it's still possible that Democrats will retain their majority in the House and gain a full majority in the Senate.  If that happens, the American experiment is over, and the Marxist experiment truly begins.

So how did we get here?