Well, that sucked — nay, it super sucked. It sucked like the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy. There’s no silver lining to this cloud; the best you’re going to get is some aluminum. But we’ve been here before. Not to this extent for a long time, but we have been here before. We’ve had bad nights. And Tuesday was a very, very bad night.
OK, so we’re going to sit and cry about it? Are we going to give up? Not unless we want to give up our country. And I don’t want to give up our country. The only good thing that happened on Election Day was that my new novel “American Warlord” finally came out, and if you want to see the worst-case scenario, read it. If you want to avoid the worst-case scenario, let’s figure out what happened and how to fix it.
I did not see this coming. I knew it was a possibility, and there were people out there saying it could happen. My assessment was that we might lose one or two Senate seats overall and probably the House by a few. See, that’s why you shouldn’t assess — you can make an assessment of yourself.
Three different groups reacted in three different ways. I saw one of them coming. Democrats were motivated to get out there and vote, to scramble over broken glass in an effort to send their message of perversion and communism. I did not see Republicans not showing up in numbers. I thought the Trump rally swings and the massive ad spending would have alerted them to the danger and gotten them off their duffs, even if they were mad about four-dollar gas and us defeating a generational enemy that had murdered and maimed thousands of Americans. I suspect we may find that it was independents who did it, breaking hard for something new and different. After all, it’s been almost 11 and a half years since Donald Trump came down that escalator. It’s been fun, and he’s done great things, but as Saul Alinsky observed, after a while, everything becomes a drag. Maybe they’re exhausted of Donald Trump. Maybe they forgot all the great things he did, like seal the border and rebuild the military and get rid of DEI. Maybe they were asking, “What have you done for me lately?”
They knew they couldn’t afford things, and they didn’t think Trump, or any Republican, cared. I went out to breakfast on the morning of Election Day at a cute little breakfast place in my liberal enclave in now-blue Texas. I got three scrambled eggs, bacon, some sourdough toast, hash browns, a coffee, and two orange juices. Irina got a little less. With tip, I paid $60. This was practically a diner. How can normal people pay $60 for a breakfast every day? How can they pay $30 for breakfast every day, or $15? They can’t. Something’s got to give. And what gave was the Republicans’ grip on power.
Well, who else are they going to blame? We’re the ones in charge. Yes, I know why all this stuff happened. I know what Biden did to the economy. There are logical reasons why the Republicans aren’t to blame, but if you think persuasion is about logic, you’ve never stood up in front of a jury of 12 people who couldn’t get out of jury duty. We were in charge, things were perceived to suck — please don’t quote me all the statistics about how the economy’s doing great because they don’t matter — and so we got the blame and the boot.
One thing it is not is proof that somehow people hate MAGA candidates and don’t want them anymore. No, this was an equal-opportunity bloodbath. MAGA guys like Vivek Ramaswamy got destroyed — his likely departure from the public eye is one of those aluminum linings — but so did normie Republicans like Ashley Hinson, John Husted, and Mike Rogers. Who is more normal than Susan Collins? Not the guy who fills his family’s Thanksgiving dinner with erotic tension — you know, Senator Cousintapper? It wasn’t about who they were, but about that R after their names. In Texas, they wiped out Republicans from senator and governor down through a whole lot of the ticket. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t rational. This was emotional.
Now, there’s already some gloating by the people affiliated with the old-school Busherriffic Republicans, who are now going to argue that we should announce the end of the America First movement and allow them back into power. They are positively giddy that this happened because they imagine we’re going to come crawling to them, admit we were wrong, and beg them to take us back. Not happening. Another of those aluminum linings is the fact that a lot of jerks are now gone. We’re not going to have to deal with the likes of John Cornyn or Thom Tillis anymore. Don’t fall for the baloney line that if we had not turned on them (after they turned on us), they would’ve won their current seats. It’s pretty clear they would’ve been slaughtered, too. The Republican Party that’s left is tighter and more conservative. Thomas Massie is gone, and so are Don Bacon, Dan Crenshaw, and other pains in the rear. It’s not much, but we should take what we can get.
Again, something was going on here that was bigger than we could’ve imagined. That we were so out of touch is on us, though I’m not sure what we could’ve done about it in the run-up. With Congress, and to some extent the president, the last year has felt like we’ve been treading water. The important question is what do we do about it now?
Well, first we don’t give up. These things happen. We’ve been through bad nights before. Not usually this bad, but we’ve had some pretty bad ones, and so have the Democrats. But you can come back from them. It’s never over. In 2010, we crushed the Democrats. In 2012, the Democrats came back, and Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney — incidentally, another of those normal guy Republicans we were told we need to nominate. The 2028 election is a century away and is also tomorrow, and it begins today.
If you would ask me two days ago who was gonna be the GOP nominee in 2028, I would’ve told you it’s whoever Donald Trump anoints, and that the anointee du jour is JD Vance. Well, I don’t know about that anymore. Vance has wrapped himself up with Donald Trump, and that might not be helpful in 2028. But then it may be helpful in 2028 — Donald Trump thrives with a nemesis, and he has the opportunity to place himself in opposition to a Democrat Congress and take credit for keeping it from doing the insane things its insane members are insanely set upon doing. It is not out of the realm of possibility that Trump goes from zero to hero in two years, just like he went from hero to zero in two years. We will be talking about the 2028 race, which is now underway, more in the future…
Back to the present. The immediate policy prescriptions kind of write themselves. The Iran War is going to end soon, whether with a bang or a whimper. On the plus side, the whole world owes Donald Trump its gratitude for courageously neutering the pagan, psychopathic regime, at least for a while. The obvious move for the president is to focus on the economy, but that was also the obvious move for the last year. He needs to stop being distracted by things like ballrooms and Bill Maher beefs. People are just done with that. You can argue whether this stuff is right or wrong objectively, but it’s not about being objective. It’s about vibes. And the vibes are bad. We need to hope that they’re not so bad that Donald Trump gets suckered into a deal for the sake of a deal on something like immigration. It’s not clear we have enough senators to filibuster a bad deal.
As for the festival of impeachment and investigations, there’s a substantial chance that Democrats will overreach. It would be nice for the Republicans to be able to run in 2028 against a Congress that has done nothing about the things that it was sent to Washington to do and, instead, single-mindedly pursued its vendetta against its political opposition. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is still president. He still holds the veto power, and, as somebody else once said in the wake of a similar electoral disaster, he can do a lot of governing with a phone and a pen. But he’s not going to do much nominating — make sure you keep Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in your prayers.
So, yes, this sucks. Yes, there are going to be consequences — the people who gave the Democrats a chance may end up getting those consequences as good and hard. And while there is the potential for the Democrats to destroy our country as we know it down the road if they build on this foundation of failure, America the day after the debacle is still the greatest country on earth.
