Ourland

The Blue Wave that many people thought might break in the midterms turned out to be fully legitimate, not, as is often the case, a hallucination of the polls: the Democrats forged deep into GOP territory and regained control of both the House and the Senate, something that – as many pundits have pointed out – seemed like an utter fantasy just a few months ago. The Republicans saw this coming from several miles away, though I’m sure they crossed their sweaty fingers and prayed hard that the Trump-led GOP would once again exceed the expectations of oft-misleading polls. Yet the opposite happened, with the Dems overperforming in many races that already leaned pretty heavily in their favor. Now the Right has sunk to the same grim position that the Left was in a couple years ago: forced to undergo a clear-eyed postmortem about how it all went so cataclysmically wrong.

The current Republican autopsy seems a little more straightforward than the one undertaken by the Dems in the wake of ‘24: this was, almost inarguably, Trump’s fault. Of course he won’t admit it – he told the New York Times: “If I was on the ticket, we would’ve won in a landslide” – but anyone with a half-functioning frontal lobe will tell you that this was undeniably his fault. Sure, the Republican candidates were embarrassingly weak – was Ken Paxton even trying to win? – and the Dems, to their credit, trotted out a pretty solid cast of characters (re: James Talarico, Rob Sand, and so on), but even so, Trump has no one to blame but himself. He had a significant portion of the country eating from the palm of his hand after the last election, much as I hate to admit it, and all he had to do was at least feign giving a damn about the concerns of the voters who put him back in power: namely, the cost of living, and keeping our meddling American noses out of the Middle East. But what did he do instead? Drew up incomprehensible tariffs on a silly little chart, started a trade war with our friends to the north, gave ICE carte blanche to murder American citizens, plunged us into a complicated war in Iran, blabbered on about all manner of codswallop, focused his attention on indulgent pet projects like his arch and his ballroom and his Kennedy Center, all while driving up the cost of living, calling affordability a “democratic hoax,” and subsequently enraging many of the blue collar folks who’d stood by his side for years. It’s almost laughable how much he’s screwed up, and how far he’s fallen, in such a relatively short amount of time.

Hubris is a funny thing. Trump’s precipitous unraveling can be traced back to a word he used with impunity when he first returned to office: mandate. He thought he had free rein over this country, which he saw as his country. He truly believed he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and still retain his supporters, and honestly, who would’ve doubted him? He’s survived so many serious scandals that would’ve tanked less-shameful politicians that it began to feel like he might actually have an impenetrable force field protecting him. Then he was shot in Pennsylvania, and suddenly people (no one more than himself) started believing this to be a sign that he had some sort of divine directive to remake the country in his own bloated image. So much of Trump’s historic floundering in his second term can be traced back to that tragic day in Butler: that was the point when an insanely egotistical man who already thought he was above the law started to believe that he might be above God, too, or at least heaven-sent; and once someone with so much power has that delusional seed planted in their already-untethered mind, it’s only a matter of time before it sprouts into something grandiose and untenable.

So things feel pretty good for the Dems right now. Cool. But they’d be wise not to get too high on their collective donkey after such a thoroughgoing beatdown of the Right. It is, after all, much harder to be in charge than it is to point fingers at those in charge, and as we’ve recently seen, public opinion can swing hysterically between the two parties in no time at all. Remember how flaccid the Dems looked just a year ago? They were historically unpopular – more unpopular than Trump, even – and it seemed like they might remain in the political cellar for the foreseeable future. Yet here they are, rising from the dust to regain utter control of Congress. It’s somewhat disorienting, I have to admit, and I’m sure the Dems, puffed up on Total Victory as they are, feel like they can do whatever they want now that they have the “American people” on their side, as it were; but it’d behoove them to pump the breaks a bit: their handling of these next two years will play a crucial role in how the upcoming presidential election will pan out, and if they screw this thing up, as they’ve been great at doing in recent years, then the poles will invert yet again, and they’ll be the ones facing a referendum in the form of a Republican president in 2028. And the political pendulum will swing back-and-forth, back-and-forth, until we’re all green with nausea.

The results of the midterms are an undeniably seismic shift in American politics during an era when seismic shifts have become the norm, not the exception. The two most interesting things to watch over the next couple of years will be (1) whether Trump reacts by becoming a lame duck or an enraged/maimed gorilla and (2) whether GOP politicians finally begin to rebuke him en masse, saying all the things and doing all the things that they’ve been scared to say and do over the past 10 years because of Trump’s toxic grip on the party. Tucker Carlson looks like one of the smartest guys in the room right now: he knew the Iran War was going to be Trump’s downfall¹,and wisely jumped ship before it completely capsized, as it seems to have done now. Still, a nervous part of me is hesitant to proclaim that the midterm results are the Official Death Knell of Trump: he’s survived so many extinction-level events in the past, flabby oven-cooked cockroach that he is, that it seems foolish to ever fully count him out. Yet this moment feels fundamentally different, it really does, though only time – and the impending actions of the freshly-empowered Dems – will ultimately decide whether the fever that’s inflamed this country for the past decade has finally broken, or if it’s just momentarily subsiding, only to flare up again in the middle of another cold November night, two years hence.

1. I mean, it was pretty obvious, considering one of Trump’s main campaign promises was to keep us out of another forever war, but still: give Tucker credit where credit is due.