How much does Harvard charge these day to learn how to report bullshit?
Full quotes:
"Our mission is to win the midterms. You know it's what's interesting is the party in power always gets crushed in the midterms. It's not a secret, there's no sugarcoating it. It's a pending… https://t.co/ru8aDOwar5 pic.twitter.com/E3UatOsh0d
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 12, 2025
On Friday the RNC tweeted the above “full context” to do some damage control after the Bulwark’s Andrew Egger printed the following collection of quotes from national party chair Joe Gruters during recent interviews on AM conservative talk radio shows: “It’s not a secret. There’s no sugarcoating it, it’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way,” “We are facing almost certain defeat,” “The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard,” and “You hit the nail on the head. This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms.”
In the RNC’s version in the above tweet, Gruters had said: “I LIKE OUR CHANCES IN THE MIDTERMS but let me put in perspective only three times in the last hundred years has the incumbent party been successful winning a midterm. We’re facing almost certain defeat. The only person who can bring the nose up and help us win is the President of the United States Donald J Trump.”
Which Egger had included in his article:
Gruters isn’t throwing Trump under the bus. Quite the opposite: As Democrats overperform in special election after special election and Republican confidence in the midterms craters, he’s trying to set expectations low – way low. After all, he says, the guys in power nearly always lose the midterms. And as once-unimaginable cracks have begun spiderwebbing across the MAGA coalition, he’s making a specific case to his party: “The only person that could bring the nose up and help us win is the president of the United States, Donald J Trump.”
And just a few minutes ago Egger noticed something else:
Interestingly, the RNC, after accusing me of telling "stupid, desperate lies" for transcribing remarks the RNC chair made in public and which the RNC uploaded to their own Soundcloud account, has now deleted each of those Soundcloud recordings (which I had linked to in the piece) https://t.co/rwWjVsOMs1 pic.twitter.com/tabbnPO2d7
— Andrew Egger (@EggerDC) December 12, 2025
Funny that. There’s also no pushback against him on the anonymous quotes he included from “swing state” Republican strategists and operatives, like the one who said Trump’s “message sucks. It’s absolute trash. ‘Affordability is a Democrat hoax’??? Give me a break. It’s the non-college-educated version of the Biden message, and we saw how well that worked… Nobody believes the economy and particularly affordability is getting better. This isn’t going to get better unless he either, one, shuts off the tariffs and starts a real economic turnaround, or two – well, I don’t know what two is.”
“I think the GOP is looking at a very rough midterm,” the strategist continued. Lol at the “non-college-educated version of the Biden message.” This thinks REAL highly of MAGA voters.
Another pouted over Trump’s refusal to allow candidates to have any daylight on policy whatsoever, saying “There have been past White Houses where it was okay to have some distance between yourself and the president. A candidate who says, ‘Yeah, maybe tariffs aren’t a great idea because of what they’re doing to prices,’ or whatever… That is clearly not the case with this administration.”
He means it was fun last year with Trump at the top of the ticket. Now it isn’t.