Marble Floors, Falling Ceilings

Trump admires his ballroom, Republicans hunt for a fall guy, and Moscow checks its calendar

Good morning! The morning after American voters handed his party a historic midterm defeat, Donald Trump went to look at his ballroom.

Cranes swung steel over what used to be the East Wing. Some of the ballroom’s steel had been donated by Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal, reportedly manufactured in Europe. A nice touch for a president who imposed tariffs to protect American steelmakers. Trump had signed the final I-beam himself, adding “Love!” above his name, and watched it rise with the contentment of a man whose day was going exactly as planned.

Elsewhere, the news was less structural. Kansas had elected its first Democratic senator in nearly a century. Texas sent James Talarico to Washington, the first Democrat to win statewide there in 32 years. Susan Collins was clearing out three decades of furrowed brows. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats and took the House with room to spare.

In his first public appearance after the rout, the President of the United States spent more than twenty minutes discussing his ballroom. The ceilings would soar more than fifty feet overhead. Naturally, it was “a structure the likes of which has never been seen anywhere.” He invited reporters to imagine the chandeliers.

But the marble was a particular triumph.

Not just any marble. “It’s a vein that people have been after for 50 years,” he explained. The quarry’s owner hadn’t wanted to sell it. “But he liked me.”

So that’s one.

The floor, he promised, will be the most beautiful marble you’ll ever see. It will need to be. Over in the Capitol, the roof had just caved in on his party, and by lunchtime his allies were already feeling their way toward the exits.

Before the cranes had finished for the day, the Republican lifeboats were already in the water.

JD Vance got there first. “The reason we lost is the war,” the vice president wrote in a long post on X. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.” He closed with a line that will follow him for a while: “everyone knows why we lost.”

Everyone, perhaps, except the JD Vance of November 2022. After that year’s disappointing midterms, he published an essay in The American Conservative titled “Don’t Blame Trump,” arguing that pinning the losses on Trump was a mistake. Four years later, he’s explaining another Republican defeat by pointing to a war launched by the Trump administration.

The war itself has given him some trouble. After the first U.S. strikes on Iran in June 2025, he assured Meet the Press that a clash with Iran would not be “some long, drawn-out thing.” Less than two days before this war began, he told The Washington Post there was “no chance” of a years-long Middle East war. In September, standing at the White House lectern, he declined to call it a war at all. Now it’s the reason his party lost the Senate.

Ron DeSantis, term-limited and suddenly free in 2027 and 2028, called the night “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans,” then spent much of his press conference explaining why Florida, under his leadership, had survived it. Few eulogies have doubled so neatly as presidential auditions.

Thom Tillis, who is retiring and therefore allowed to say things, was less interested in a single villain. Blame the war alone? “Give me a break.” He ran through Noem, Hegseth and Lutnick’s Liberation Day tariffs, and warned that if Republicans “double down on dumb,” 2028 will look like 2008.

Everyone had an explanation. Nobody seemed particularly eager to accept responsibility. And nobody was volunteering the man with the marble.

Trump’s own explanation came in installments.

Yes, the war played a part, he conceded, but he’d do it all again. And it wasn’t really the war, he clarified. “The price, not the war, the price.” Specifically, the gasoline prices the war had sent soaring, a distinction that will be lost on anyone who has filled a tank since February. When Vance’s post landed, Trump called it “largely true,” which is a generous review for a document that blames your signature policy for losing the Senate.

He had another explanation, one he was repeating behind closed doors, according to CNN’s Kristen Holmes: Republicans lost because he wasn’t on the ballot. He keeps pointing to the size of his rallies, although the crowds were often smaller than advertised. Holmes, who attended several and interviewed the people there, found that those she spoke with were already planning to vote Republican. Trump could exaggerate the crowds. He couldn’t conjure new voters.

As for impeachment, he isn’t worried “even a little bit.”

Which leaves a problem. If the war was right, the president blameless and the rallies enormous, someone else will have to explain why the Senate is gone.

Fortunately, Washington had a candidate in mind.

According to CBS News, Trump has been privately asking advisers whether he should fire his defense secretary, and Ron DeSantis has been floated as a replacement. A Republican close to the White House told CNN that if the president is serious about anyone taking responsibility, “it’s Pete Hegseth,” adding that Hegseth had been “either dishonest or incorrect” about the war’s timelines and goals from the start.

In public, Trump stood by his man. “I think he’s doing a very good job,” he said, and when asked about Hegseth filling the Senate seat Marsha Blackburn will vacate to become Tennessee’s governor, he added that Hegseth “would be very popular if he did that. But I haven’t heard that at all.” Nothing says job security like your boss musing about your next job.

The Pentagon, for its part, promised to press on “despite threats of sham witch hunts from Democrats,” and said Hegseth is “100% committed” to serving until the end of Trump’s term. It’s a bold forecast from a department that hasn’t been good at predicting how long things last.

The threat, though, isn’t only coming from Democrats. Thomas Massie plans to force an impeachment vote when the House returns next week, and several GOP sources told CNN they expect it to pass. That’s an expectation, not a vote count, but it’s a remarkable turnaround: in September, Speaker Johnson sent the House home early, conveniently postponing Massie’s first impeachment vote until after the election. Other Republicans have discovered the virtues of congressional oversight at precisely the moment it offers them a way to put distance between themselves and a Cabinet member.

A small historical footnote. On January 24, 2025, Hegseth’s nomination deadlocked at 50–50, with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell voting no. The vice president broke the tie. His name was JD Vance.

Everyone knows why we lost.

For a president who has long treated the stock market as his report card, Wednesday’s grades were awkward. The S&P 500 had its best day since early August, rallying on the news that his party had lost.

Investors liked the idea of gridlock, and one Pictet strategist told the Financial Times the result was “a clear repudiation of tariffs and foreign policy.” Brent crude fell almost 9 percent on bets that Trump would now be under more pressure to end the Iran war. Man Group’s Kristina Hooper said the margin was a relief in itself: big enough, she believed, to prevent a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the results. Wall Street had considered a contested American election a financial risk. Read that sentence twice.

Defense contractors didn’t join the party. Lockheed Martin and L3Harris fell more than 6 percent and Northrop Grumman 4.5 percent, as the FT noted that Hegseth’s relations with Congress had soured over the war. Even the companies selling the Pentagon its missiles were having second thoughts about the future of Trump’s military spending bonanza.

In Texas, Greg Abbott lost to Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned for a moratorium on data centers. Back in August, Trump had called Abbott’s own pause on approvals “a mistake.” Abbott doubled down in September, tightening the restrictions. Meanwhile, the Texas Tribune found that data-center-related donors had given him another $2.8 million after he announced the pause. The permits stopped. The checks kept coming. The voters elected somebody else anyway.

Markets weren’t the only ones running the numbers. Moscow was doing some arithmetic of its own. The harshest review of Trump’s night may have come from an unexpected place: the Russian government’s own newspaper.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta, as the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg noted, tore into the president on Thursday morning. His campaigning, it said, had hurt Republican candidates rather than helped them. It predicted corruption investigations into Trump and his family, scrutiny of the ballroom, the arch and the Reflecting Pool, and renewed examination of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

And who knows? We might finally see the rest of the Epstein files before Trump gets his chandeliers.

Another Russian commentary acknowledged that Trump’s October diesel deal with Putin hadn’t helped him either. After a phone call with Putin, Trump announced the arrangement, and Treasury waived sanctions on Russian diesel through April 7, 2027, just weeks after he signed sweeping sanctions legislation against Russia. The idea was to lower fuel prices before the midterms. Prices stayed high, the voters delivered their verdict, and Moscow kept its waiver. Now even the tankers are reportedly having second thoughts: two shipments originally headed for the United States have changed course amid concerns about sanctions risks.

Then the Russian papers stopped gloating and started watching the clock.

Kommersant observed that in November and December, the administration would try to rely on the outgoing Congress, which it described as “more loyal.” It urged Russia to make maximum use of that opportunity. RBK warned that Democratic control could bring closer scrutiny of Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and new obstacles to any Ukraine settlement.

None of this constitutes an official Kremlin statement. But it offers a revealing glimpse into how influential Russian commentators assess Washington. They didn’t call the outgoing Republican Congress pro-Russian. They called it convenient.

January 3 is a constitutional date. Under the 20th Amendment, the new Congress takes office at noon. Trump will still be president, with substantial authority over foreign policy. But Russian commentators see January 3 as a deadline, when the administration may face a Congress more willing to scrutinize its dealings with Moscow.

They want Russia to make its moves before that happens. They’re saying so openly.

Worth watching between now and January 3: trips by Witkoff or Kushner, new sanctions waivers, any slowdown in weapons or intelligence assistance to Kyiv, and renewed pressure from Trump on Zelensky to accept a settlement.

Abroad, the headline writers had the time of their lives.

The Guardian went with “Trumped.” The Daily Mirror reached for Springsteen: “Reborn in the US.” Metro declared him a “lame Donald Duck,” and the Daily Star rewrote “My Way” as a farewell for MAGA. In France, Libération simply called him a loser, while the Catholic daily La Croix saw a “democratic jolt” and blamed petrol prices driven by the Iran war. When a Catholic paper and a communist one, L’Humanité, reach the same verdict, you can call it consensus.

Not everyone celebrated. Israel’s pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom warned that the new Congress could be the most hostile to Israel in history, and Haaretz cautioned that Israelis used to decades of American protection weren’t ready for what comes next.

Foreign Affairs offered a sobering note: a boxed-in president might lash out abroad, threatening Canada, undermining alliances or pursuing new arrangements with Russia or China. Losing Congress doesn’t mean losing command of American foreign policy. Moscow, as we’ve seen, is hoping to take advantage of the time remaining.

In London, The Times was already contemplating the demise of Mar-a-Lago Face. It seemed only proper to prepare an obituary.

RIP, Mar-a-Lago Face (2016–2026)

Mar-a-Lago Face passed away Tuesday night in Texas, Kansas, Ohio and several other unlikely places, after a long struggle with gas prices. It was ten.

Born in Palm Beach, it rose from country-club obscurity to become the unofficial uniform of an administration. At its peak it was less a look than a loyalty oath: the lacquered hair, the filler, the bronzer applied with the confidence of someone who had never once checked a mirror in natural light. Cabinet secretaries adopted it, cable hosts perfected it, and its founder wore it in a shade not found in nature. The tan, more than the face, was always the true signature.

It is survived by an unfinished ballroom awaiting the most magnificent marble floor anyone has ever seen, a triumphal arch nobody asked for, and a defense secretary whose own days appear to be numbered.

Mourners are invited to make donations in its memory to the congressional oversight committees, which come under new management in January.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you stop asking what it cost.

On the home front, I’ve suffered a rather more personal defeat. My right knee found itself between Marz, my 150-pound mastiff, and a cheeky gray squirrel. The squirrel escaped unharmed, Marz remains entirely unrepentant, and I’m now hobbling around on crutches with an MRI scheduled.

The squirrel, I regret to report, has learned absolutely nothing from the experience.

Have a wonderful day, everyone. I’m off to put my feet up, one of them rather more carefully than the other.