The End of the Trump Era
· The Atlantic
Well, that was weird. The Donald Trump era, I mean.
It’s over now. It ended yesterday when voters handed control of both houses of Congress to the Democratic Party, along with a clear set of instructions: Stop the madness. Be honest. Be competent. Be normal. Be nice.
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Trump will still be president for another two years, of course, and it is unimaginable that he will go gently into lame-duck irrelevance. But the Republican Party, or what is left of it, surely must realize that the late Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina was right—though a decade premature—when in 2016 he warned: “If we nominate Trump we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.”
Graham’s Senate seat will be occupied for the next six years by the pediatrician Annie Andrews, a Democrat. The last time a Democrat held that seat was in 1964, just before Strom Thurmond changed parties and became a Republican. Trump’s handpicked GOP candidate—Darline Graham, the late senator’s sister—lost by coming across to voters as utterly clueless.
Trump used his control of his party to defeat Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina in his Republican primary; his seat will now be filled by Democrat Roy Cooper. Trump did the same to Senator John Cornyn of Texas; his seat went to Democrat James Talarico, who beat Trump’s chosen candidate—the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton—by more than 1 million votes. Texas Governor Greg Abbott was collateral damage, losing to Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who will be the state’s first Latina governor. In fact, Democrats swept all of the statewide offices up for grabs in Texas, from governor and lieutenant governor down to railroad commissioner.
[Helen Lewis: A night of pure Trumpenfreude]
With Trump’s guidance, Republicans lost a Senate seat in reliably red Iowa. They lost a Senate seat in Kansas, which had elected its previous Democratic senator in 1930. As of this writing, Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi trails Democrat Scott Colom, a Black district attorney, by 65 votes. In Mississippi.
This goes far beyond the usual midterm setback for the party that holds the White House. It is as thorough a repudiation as we have seen since the post-Watergate 1974 midterms. Just as that election was a referendum on Richard Nixon, this one was a referendum on Trump. And the rebuke was about more than gas prices.
Voters said no to the corruption and self-dealing of the Trump era. In the exit poll conducted for a consortium of news organizations by the polling firm SSRS, 90 percent of respondents said that government corruption was either “crucial” or “a major factor” in how they voted in House races. Clearly that concern was expressed in other contests as well—notably, the resounding defeat of Paxton, whose past includes indictment on securities-fraud charges and impeachment by the GOP-controlled Texas House of Representatives.
Voters said no to the Trump era’s incompetence. Almost every Democratic candidate ran on a policy of quickly ending the Iran war, which Trump blundered into and has no idea how to exit. Asked about her views on foreign policy in a debate, Darline Graham said that she really didn’t have any. There are Republican members of Congress who do have informed, nuanced views about foreign policy. But they were afraid to say what they knew about the Iran debacle or the shattering of our nation’s most important alliances or this administration’s unthinkable coziness with Vladimir Putin, because they did not want to face Trump’s ire. Some of those who remained silent are soon-to-be-former members of Congress.
Voters said no to the Trump-era ethos of outrageousness for its own sake. Trump, the former star of The Apprentice, has always scripted his presidency as if it were a reality show: What matters isn’t doing what’s right; it’s attracting eyeballs, dominating the news cycle, drawing attention. That surely is what the GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thought he was doing when he aired that shocking ad—praised by Trump and Vice President Vance—in which Ohio Democrat Amy Acton’s mother accused her of being a liar. Ramaswamy apparently did not care that the mother had fled the state with her husband after he was indicted for allegedly sexually abusing Acton when she was 12. Voters in Ohio, another red state, cared a lot. Acton, and not Ramaswamy, will be the next governor.
[Jonathan Lemire: Repudiation]
Voters also said no to what might be the Trump era’s defining characteristic: gratuitous cruelty. Under the malign influence of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the administration has sent armed and masked federal agents into neighborhoods across the country, snatching immigrants from their homes and workplaces and sending them to detention centers for rapid deportation. U.S. citizens protesting this patently un-American spectacle have been killed. Two years ago, Trump was elected with unprecedentedly high levels of support from Latino voters. Today, look at the House results in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley of Texas: solid blue.
It’s over. Trump might spend his remaining time in office doubling down on all of his transgressive and ruinous policies. He might retreat and focus on his building projects—his precious ballroom, his longed-for triumphal arch; indeed, he delivered the closing argument for his party at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, whose renovation he botched. Predictably, he blames the losing GOP candidates (including those he picked) for yesterday’s wipeout.
But he no longer defines our time. A new era begins.