Last night’s destruction of Donald Trump’s Republican Party raises some fundamental questions for both parties.
First for the Republicans: who are you guys? Are you going to continue to be the Party of Trump or will you return to being the Party of Reagan or will you reinvent yourself as something else entirely? Because you probably have to go back to 1980 to find a rejection of either party as thorough-going as this one. Democrats won in places where the laws of nature dictate this to be impossible. Water flowed uphill. Democrats travelled faster than the speed of light. If you had dropped a hammer last night it would have risen to the ceiling. It was like that.
This election can only be read one way: a resounding rejection of Donald Trump and his policies. To some extent, it restored my faith in the American people. I still can’t get over the fact that over 70 million Americans voted for this guy three times. Yeah, there was the hard core MAGA base, but most voted for him knowing — and disapproving — of who this man was. They didn’t find his character — his lying, his idiocy, his cruelty, his pathological self-absorption, his corruption — disqualifying. I don’t know what’s more disturbing: MAGA true believers or those who acknowledged his awfulness but looked past it because they liked some of his policies. For me, Trump was a means so absurd that he couldn’t possibly justify any ends.
Nonetheless, it took a lot of erstwhile Trump voters to make last night possible. His senseless shooting war with Iran and his equally insane trade wars with our friends and the resulting high prices appear to be what finally drove these voters away from him. And, again to those voters’ credit, it appears that Trump’s immigration policies went too far. Some Trump voters strongly supported securing the border and deporting violent criminals, but they didn’t sign up for mass deportations and ICE agents in masks terrifying neighborhoods of otherwise law abiding citizens. So, Trump overplayed that hand while he dealt other hands voters never wanted in the first place. After all, the man promised to end forever wars, not start them.
We’ll see now if spineless Republican pols will start to openly break with Trump. He is the anchor that has pulled them to the bottom of the river where they are now drowning. Will they cut him loose and save themselves? And, if they do, who are they without him?
Which leads us to the Democrats, because they too have defined themselves vis a vis Trump, albeit in opposition. They won this election, not so much by presenting an alternative vision, but by simply not being him. The whole Democratic campaign this time — and really for the last decade — has been about simply not being that man. In a way, even yesterday Trump remained in command. Only he had the power to deliver those massive victories to the other side.
But the Democrats have the same problem of self-definition. Who are they now? What is my party for when it no longer has Donald Trump to be against? Because if they reintroduce themselves as the same identity-obsessed party of big spenders and preachy liberals they’ll be ushered back through the door in two years.
And then America will really be lost. This moment of trauma for the GOP and elation for the Dems creates an opportunity for each party to redefine itself as something positive, as entities that actually deal honestly with the real issues that the great center of America cares about. And that’s not starting wars with Ayatollahs and it’s not who plays on girls’ basketball teams and it’s not picking fights with Canada and it’s not which pronouns to use and it’s not ballrooms and triumphant arches and reflecting pools and it’s not terrorizing otherwise peaceful people who are in the country illegally and it’s not employing discrimination now to make up for past discrimination and it’s not renaming bodies of water “America” just because you feel like it.
For years both parties have been wasting time and energy on issues that the vast middle doesn’t care about or actively opposes. The party that jettisons all that babble and focuses on those things that matter to middle America (metaphorically but also to some extent geographically) will win again in 2028. And by the way, it may also wind up restoring a little faith in American democracy.
