President Trump has long sought to create a political realignment in America. He succeeded on Tuesday night. In declaring that he voters should behave as though he were on the midterms ballot, Trump singlehandedly resurrected the Democratic party which is poised to win both the House and Senate as well as numerous statewide races.
The midterms don’t represent a setback for Trump but a crushing rebuke. For all his huffing and puffing about a stolen election in the run-up to the midterms, Trump told the New York Times on Tuesday evening that he accepts the results. “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he said. “We’ll probably work something out.” Much like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who faced a similar revolt over corruption and an infirm economy, Trump appears to be a spent force.
The GOP will emerge from this election dazed but not confused
The Democrats are on track to win over 240 House seats. In Senate races, Texas Democrat James Talarico rolled over Attorney General Ken Paxton. Darline Graham, Trump’s hapless handpicked candidate, has lost in South Carolina to the physician Annie Andrews. Adam Hamilton won the Kansas seat, the first time a Democrat has captured the seat since 1932, when Herbert Hoover lost the presidency to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the new governor of Georgia. Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for Governor of Ohio, is toast. And so on.
The GOP will emerge from this election dazed but not confused. The culprit is clear enough. Yes, indeedy. Before the results had even begun to stream in Trump was engaging in his favorite activity – targeting the news media. This time the object of his wrath was Fox News. “The FoxNews Poll, always the worst, is so insulting with the questions they ask,” Trump wrote. “Every question is a hit job, and every answer is “BULLSHIT!” This has been going on for years.”
Trump has long relied on his deep well of objurgatory language to intimidate his rivals and associates but the shtick has run thin. As he watched the returns with his cabinet members in the White House East Room, they will have been making their own calculations. What lifeboats will they seek to man? The sweeping scale of the electoral defeat casts a serious pall on either Vice President J.D. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s presidential prospects in 2028. Say hasta la vista to the MAGA movement.
Just as they did after the Nixon presidency – which culminated in the disastrous midterm defeat in 1974 – conservatives will eventually regroup but it may take a decade or longer to efface the stain of Trumpism. Now that Texas has turned blue, it will be an almost insuperable task for the GOP to amass enough electoral votes to win the presidency in the future. Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico looms. Watch for the Democrats to learn to love the electoral college that they have been dissing in recent years.
By the time he leaves the White House, if not sooner, Trump will likely be the most reviled president in American history. His ruinous tariffs have stimulated inflation. His lavish spending and tax cuts account for a fourth of the $40 trillion federal deficit. His administration has become a byword for malversation. His fealty to Russian President Vladimir Putin has not only jeopardized Ukraine but also NATO. And his war in the Middle East, a direct violation of his own America First edict, has enmeshed America in a fresh foreign policy imbroglio.
Suddenly, the Democratic nomination for the presidency appears even more tempting. A variety of candidates will vie for the nomination but Senator Jon Ossoff, who won reelection, fired the opening shot on Tuesday evening with a speech decrying the “depravity” of the Trump administration as well as its foreign policy.
Comments