Supremely insufferable fucking chode NRCC chair Richard Hudson this week sat down for a Puck News interview and had not the easiest time reconciling his party’s propaganda with the reality of their increasingly grim situation going into the new year, being first confronted with the godawful results of last month’s off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and California, forcing him to admit that convicted felon President Trump is a millstone on the necks of GOP candidates everywhere.
“Turnout on the Democrat side was record levels for an off-year election, and Republican turnout was about what it usually is. Democrats are out of power. They’re motivated. They don’t like Donald Trump, so they’re going to turn out. Our side is happy because our guy won the White House, and they like the policies that are coming,” Hudson said, before sharing his little secret sauce for 2026.
“So they aren’t motivated by fear or anger to show up. I think that’s a lesson for us going into the midterms. Turnout is everything. And if we don’t do more than we would normally do, if we don’t turn out our voters, that’s a real threat for us,” the campaign guru said, pretty plainly hinting at the next caravan, rainbow fentanyl in Halloween candy, violent murder(s) that can be somehow blamed on Joe Biden, or some similar panic will need to be focus grouped to appeal to fear and anger voters.
Unmentioned was the fear that Trump will be impeached for a third time. That’ll be fun campaign messaging to watch, telling a 27 year-old gamer in Pennsylvania – who voted red in 2024 on the implied promise that he’d have his own apartment by now – to get up off the futon in his mom’s basement and turn out for Republicans or else Trump, Pam Bondi, and Todd Blanche will be impeached for failure to comply with their statutory duty to release the Epstein files in their entirety.
The reporter then said “Trump held a rally last week where he called the affordability issue a hoax. Is that helpful? How do you get the president to be on the same page of what you need to deliver to voters on this issue?” to which Hudson responded with “What he said was that the Democrats blaming Republicans for affordability is a hoax” and lol that’s a fucking lie because that was Jaydee Vance’s smarmy spin when he was asked to address it on Meet the Press a few weeks ago.
Problem for Hudson was that the reporter was too smart to get tripped up on those weeds as well as cutting to exactly why that line doesn’t matter outside of insular DC shitposting, coming back with “That’s such a nuance that voters don’t care about. They are feeling what they feel now.”
“Could he have done a better job of starting his remarks by saying, ‘I understand what you’re going through, I ran for president again because I want to make your lives better, the Democrats are now trying to blame me for their policies, I’m on a rescue mission to save you’? Yeah, he could have communicated it more artfully, but he’s being taken out of context on purpose to try and make it look like he doesn’t care about what people are going through. The hoax he’s describing is the Democrats trying to blame him for their affordability crisis that we’re trying to fix,” said Hudson.
That’s actually 98 more words than the party’s message on affordability from last year, pictured above. Kind of hard to fit the new one on a sign that can be read and absorbed as quickly. Might’ve been easier if they had just actually governed in a way consistent with upholding that pledge instead of letting Trump do whatever the fuck he wanted with his stupid trade war that made things worse.
On that note, the reporter then said “Polling is starting to suggest that people are associating tariffs with high prices, and that’s a Trump policy specifically. Is that a challenge for you? Do you want the Supreme Court to overturn the tariffs?” to which Hudson said “No… I do know we’re going to land the plane at some point, and we are going to get trade deals with Europe and China and our major trading partners. And this reset is going to be a windfall for America because we’re going to finally have fair trade rules around the world. Once the rules get more clear, I think you’re going to see a flood of capital in the market, and this economy is going to take off like no one’s going to believe.”
“I just hope it’s soon so we can get the impact before the election,” Hudson added.
Right here is where it might be smart to hedge on what would be just as likely to happen, make it clear that it’s a laugh line to say that what Hudson hopes for is as likely as Joe Biden, the Clintons, the Obamas, Kamala Harris, John Podesta, and so on to be put on trial for treason, convicted, and hanged live on camera at GTIMO for a worldwide audience. The problem with that joke is that it’s arguably more likely than the Supreme Court upholding tariffs, Trump negotiating trade deals to the benefit of the US economy, and the positive effects to be felt before next November.
QAnon is literally more realistic than Hudson’s little fanfic there.