Two years ago, it looked like Donald Trump had a mandate. He had returned to power after attempting a coup in 2021 and then, just five months before the 2024 election, being convicted of dozens of felonies related to the Stormy Daniels hush-money scheme. And somehow, despite this flagrant lawlessness, he had won more convincingly than ever before, winning not only the Electoral College but also, for the first time, the popular vote, thanks in part to unprecedented gains with Black, Latino, and young voters, particularly men. It wasn’t just a political victory, either: Star athletes began celebrating scores with the “Trump Dance.” He wasn’t just normalized. He was American culture.
Or so it seemed at the time. That conclusion had already aged poorly before this week, but Tuesday’s election results make it look ridiculous. What we are seeing almost defies description. South Carolina and Texas will soon have Democratic senators. So, it seems, will Kansas. Georgia just elected the country’s first-ever Black woman governor. There are many explanations for this blue tsunami—Iran, tariffs, horrific GOP candidate selection—but the simplest is also the most persuasive: This is a historic rebuke of Donald Trump and his party.
Far from being the dawn of a new political epoch, Trump’s return to power was something closer to a flash in the pan. By last summer, he had squandered what little political capital he had entered office with. And now, he will have to deal with a Democratic House and almost certainly a Democratic Senate. There will be investigations. There will be accountability. And there will likely be a furious, perhaps unprecedented response from the president and the MAGA loyalists who surround him. But make no mistake: Trump’s downfall has begun. The only question is what happens to the political movement he has led for the last eleven years.
Trump, it turns out, had not really won hearts and minds in 2024. He won because Joe Biden had overseen a period of rampant inflation, which was not his fault, and had held onto a doomed reelection campaign despite widespread concerns about his age, which was. Trump’s victory two years ago, in retrospect, was a massive, foolish risk by voters that he would govern more or less like he did during the pre-Covid period of his first term, which is to say erratically but not destructively.
Those of us who saw Trump’s victory in sweeping cultural terms were wrong. But that is also how those surrounding him saw his victory—and they promptly overplayed their hand. They should have understood their mandate as largely limited to bringing down soaring costs. Instead, they eviscerated the federal government. They invaded U.S. cities with masked goons. They deported law-abiding immigrants and murdered U.S. citizens seeking to protect them. They started two wars—one economic, the other literal—that caused prices, which the Biden administration had just started to bring under control, to soar again.
This administration has been lawless, authoritarian, imperial, fascistic, and plutocratic. There is no question that is the most corrupt in American history. The president and his cronies have lined their pockets while the cost of basic commodities has skyrocketed. They have attempted to cover up the president’s ties to the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, while defying court orders and launching bogus, retaliatory, politically motivated prosecutions. They will say that the Democrats “stole” this election. But they only have themselves to blame.
What is undoubtedly true is that we have seen the MAGA agenda in its clearest realization these last two years. No future Republican can say, as some said of Reaganism after Ronald Reagan left office, that real Trumpism has never been tried. We have seen MAGA in all its glory—or rather, horror.
It is tempting, given how completely Trump has sabotaged his second term, to discount the Democrats’ achievement this week. It is certainly true that most of the responsibility lies at Trump’s feet. It is also true that this has been an unusually chaotic primary cycle, one that didn’t exactly suggest that the Democrats have learned hard truths from their stint in the political wilderness. The blue wave arrived after quite a bit of teeth-grinding anxiety, particularly in Maine, Michigan, and Alaska. As of publication, none of those races have been called. But the larger picture is clear no matter what happens in those races. Voters have showed up everywhere, in extraordinary numbers, to vote against the revolution that Trump and his backers thought they were leading. That revolution is dead now.
The optimistic take is that some of that chaos is the result of what amounts to political growing pains. Democrats have embraced new candidates and new positions. They are figuring out how to move with an electorate that is rapidly evolving on a host of issues, from the support of Israel to trans rights. But the larger takeaway from the midterms is that voters were willing to back practically anyone with a (D) next to their name. If the party is still figuring out precisely where it stands on thorny issues, there is time to figure that out. Right now, the Democratic tent is as large as it has been in a generation.
Democrats will soon have a national stage to debate where the party should stand on key issues—not only because they will take control of the House and almost certainly the Senate, but because the jockeying for the party’s presidential nomination will begin very shortly. For the first time since 2008, there is not a clear establishment-backed candidate waiting in the wings—unless you count Kamala Harris, who lost badly to Trump and may not run again (she shouldn’t).
Meanwhile, the Republicans will be doing something even harder: figuring out who they are without Trump. And they will have to do that while Trump is still around. On the one hand, he’s a lame-duck president who may spend the rest of his time in office raving about men’s asses and his interior decorating projects. On the other hand, Trump is a megalomaniac with a deep fear of irrelevance, so he will do whatever he can to strengthen his grip on the Republican Party and try to influence where it goes after he’s whisked away from his brand-new helipad for the final time.
In the history of American politics, there has never been a problem quite like the one Republicans are facing now. For the last decade, they have allowed their party to transform into a cult of personality. Trump has had almost total control over the GOP at almost every level, and has remade the party in his own image. Now, voters have delivered a historic rebuke to that party. Ordinarily, you would expect members of that party to reject the massively incompetent and destructive person who has led it for three consecutive presidential cycles. You would expect them to learn lessons from their defeat and to start to rebuild. But that is simply not possible with Trump, who will not allow Republicans to reject him.
Over the next two years, the Democrats can continue to build on the message that helped return them to power on Tuesday—one that centers Trump’s corruption and incompetence. They will do so as evidence of that corruption and incompetence continues to mount, and they now have power they can wield to investigate it. But even though Republicans have lost power in Congress, and Trump is historically unpopular, he is still in charge. He is also venal, thin-skinned, and increasingly erratic. The next two years will be turbulent. They may even be scary. But for now, let us take comfort in this much: Two years ago, Trump thought he was invincible. This week, the Democrats shoved his political mortality in his face.
