Matt Walsh Calls Donald Trump 'Most Despised Politician of Our Lifetime'

Matt Walsh, the conservative Daily Wire host who backed Donald Trump, said Tuesday's Republican midterm defeat came down mainly to voters' dislike of the president, whom he described as "the most despised politician of our lifetime."

The remarks, made on The Matt Walsh Show, put one of the right's most prominent commentators among the Republicans blaming Trump himself for an election in which Democrats won control of Congress. Walsh cited the Iran war and tariffs as broken promises, called for ending the war and lifting tariffs affecting Texas, and told conservatives not to defend the Trump family's crypto profits.

Matt Walsh Blames Donald Trump for the Midterm Losses

"This election was mainly about the fact that a lot of people now hate Donald Trump," Walsh said. "He's always been despised by a huge number of Americans, but he used to also have a huge, extremely enthusiastic fan base to counteract it."

With much of that enthusiasm gone, he said, "he's now left being the most despised politician of our lifetime. I mean, he is."

Walsh called it "a pretty demoralizing realization" for people who had high hopes for the second term. "A lot of people, myself included, supported Trump," he said. He played Trump's 2025 inaugural pledge to measure success by "the wars we never get into," then turned to the record.

"What we got instead was an extreme degree of unpredictability along with a new war. We got new tariffs every other week, sending the stock market crashing," Walsh said. "By my count, I think we won the war about 500 times since it started."

"He's now left being the most despised politician of our lifetime. I mean, he is." — Matt Walsh

What the Exit Polls and Approval Data Show

The "most despised" verdict is Walsh's own, but the numbers point the same way. The NBC News Exit Poll found 38 percent of voters approved of Trump's performance, down from 45 percent at the 2018 midterms and lower than any sitting president's Election Day rating in nearly two decades. In the same poll, 43 percent said they had voted partly to express opposition to Trump, and 63 percent said the U.S. made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran.

Trump's approval stands at 38.2 percent, with 58.7 percent disapproving, in PolitiKool's polling average. On the economy he is at 29.7 percent in PolitiKool's polling average. In the CNBC Voter Poll, 64 percent said Trump's tariffs had hurt the economy in their area.

Walsh Says Conservatives Should Not Defend Trump's Crypto

Walsh went further on the family business. "It is weird, for example, that the Trump family has made hundreds of millions of dollars on a crypto scheme while Trump is in office," he said. "It's not my job to defend the president's crypto scheme, and I won't, and neither should you."

The real sum is larger. A Reuters investigation published June 9 found the family made about $2.3 billion in profit from crypto ventures, led by World Liberty Financial, while investors lost about the same amount, Gizmodo reported. World Liberty Financial said in the same report that its token "is not an investment product" and that it "does not validate third-party methodologies for valuing governance tokens or estimating aggregate investor positions."

"Even if it's legal, it might be an issue for Trump. It's not our issue."

Walsh Still Calls Democrats an Extreme Threat

Walsh's break with Trump did not soften his view of the other side. "Should a socialist Democrat win, there will be nothing stopping Democrats from packing the courts, adding new states, nationalizing critical industries, opening the borders," he said of 2028, adding that "people will go to jail because when they have power, they wield it."

He called state ballot measures "the only bright spot." Voters "made some good conservative decisions, even in places where you wouldn't expect it," Walsh said. He argued that "exit polls and referendum outcomes show that this wasn't ideological confirmation of Democrats, so much as it was just a total rejection of Trump."

Trump has framed the result differently, telling Politico "I wasn't on the ballot" and that voters "didn't like the candidates."

What Happens Next

Walsh said the party has to look past the president. "The public is moving on from the Trump brand," he said. "The Trump name has dominated the political discussion... It's not going to steer it for the next decade, and it shouldn't."

He called Vice President JD Vance and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis real contenders, and ruled out Donald Trump Jr. Vance leads the field at 38.9 percent in PolitiKool's polling average, with Trump Jr. third at 8.5 percent.

Walsh had already said, on the Daily Wire panel show Friendly Fire, that the GOP has "no future" if Trump is still leading the party into 2028. Whether other Trump supporters follow him is the question for the next two years.