Megyn Kelly told Republicans they need to learn how to win without Donald Trump after the party’s heavy losses in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Speaking on Wednesday’s episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, the podcast host said the GOP must now “learn how to win without Daddy on the ballot,” according to TheWrap.
The midterms delivered a Democratic wave that returned control of both the House and the Senate to the party. Megyn Kelly opened her reaction bluntly. “This morning the Republican Party is in ruins, and maybe it needed to be,” she said, adding that the party now has to “reflect, rebuild, and reinvent in the image of no man.”
Kelly argued that Republicans will have to do that work on their own, as Trump will never appear on a ballot again. She also said Republican lawmakers should stop acting like “puppets of Trump” whose entire political world revolves around him. Her comments came as the White House was offering its own explanation for why so many candidates lost.
Megyn Kelly says voters wanted Congress to start acting like its own branch of government
Kelly pointed to exit polling that she said showed voters did not believe Congress was doing an adequate job of checking presidential power. She framed the message from voters as a demand that lawmakers stop deferring to the president. Congress should act as one of the separate powers the founders envisioned, she said, reminding lawmakers that “you happen to be the first branch.”
The host also told the party to start from scratch. “You got to rebuild, my friends,” Megyn Kelly said, urging Republicans to figure out what worked in the past. She said the party needs to build something ethical with a moral center that “understands the mood of the country,” and she stressed that she meant it.
Her comments stood in sharp contrast with the mood at the White House. On the show, Kelly read out a statement from a White House official who said the president did a better job promoting many of the candidates than the candidates did themselves. However, the same official also argued that Trump voters turn out when Trump is on the ballot, and he was not on it this time.
Kelly also said Trump’s power to primary and threaten Republican lawmakers had been eliminated, and that it was time for them to “get really honest.” She described what remains of core MAGA as a shadow of its former self. She said core MAGA’s position, echoed by Trump on Wednesday, is that elections are irrelevant unless he is on the ballot, a problem as he never will be again.
Megyn Kelly’s break with the president has been building for months, ever since Trump said Kelly was never really MAGA over her criticism of the war with Iran. She broke publicly with the administration over the conflict in March. However, she has since kept up her criticism on other fronts, including gas prices and the Trump family’s finances.
The new message marks a shift from earlier in the campaign, when Kelly told her listeners they had to vote Republican no matter how angry they were at the party. At the time, she argued that the alternative was worse, even as she criticized the GOP’s poor approval ratings on her show.
With Democrats set to control both chambers, Republicans in Congress are expected to face early tests of whether they will break with Trump on key votes in the coming months.
Published: Nov 5, 2026 10:00 am