Liberation Day

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, November 05, 2026

 

Before we consider what yesterday was, we should consider what it wasn’t.

 

It wasn’t a repudiation of postliberalism, I’m sorry to say. You know and I know that if the economy were roaring, with inflation down and gas at $2.25 a gallon, this election would have been competitive despite the Trump administration’s orgiastic corruption and abuses of power. Americans are dead souls civically; if you doubt it, let me remind you again that the only Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in the past 20 years was a convicted felon with other criminal indictments pending against him who’d already attempted a coup.

 

The lesson of 2024 is that the people of this country will empower a movement of fascists led by a crook if they believe doing so will make groceries cheaper. It will take more than one encouraging election cycle to resurrect the fantasy of American exceptionalism.

 

In fact, not to be too Eeyore-ish on a happy day, but you could argue that last night was a victory for postliberals on both sides. It was a catastrophe for Trump cultists, of course, but dogmatic “America First-ers” can and will claim vindication. They warned the president not to launch another Bush-ian regime-change war, he didn’t listen, and now here we are. At some point recently, Tucker Carlson’s online shop began selling a sticker depicting Trump in a yarmulke with the caption, “Your gas Israeli expensive.” A Carlson 2028 campaign is more probable today than it was when we woke up yesterday morning.

 

Left-wing postliberals will be even more heartened by the results. Last month, in a meeting with donors, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez framed the stakes of an Abdul El-Sayed victory in Michigan’s Senate race for progressives this way: “What we do is that we break open the entire political calculus in America—period. Because if you can win, if Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere. Anywhere.” That isn’t true, but starry-eyed socialists desperately wish to believe it’s true, and so they will believe it. El-Sayed’s comfortable win will be taken as proof that conspiratorial left-wing populism is just as viable electorally as its right-wing counterpart.

 

And the supply of it will increase to meet the supposed demand.

 

Postliberalism’s greatest triumph on Tuesday, though, was the skyrocketing probability of a serious left-wing effort to pack the Supreme Court in a few years. A Senate with 54 Democrats (and potentially as many as 56, pending the results in Alaska and Mississippi) stands a real chance of mustering the votes needed to end the filibuster and expand the court—-and an outside chance of being able to do it without ending the filibuster if their party has another big night in 2028.

 

A tit-for-tat cycle in which Democrats and Republicans take turns adding partisan hacks to the bench each time they have a trifecta in Washington would destroy the independence of the federal judiciary more assuredly than anything Donald Trump has done in six years as president. It’s banana-republic stuff, the end of the rule of law in America, far more so than any of the Roberts court’s worst decisions. When Democrats and their allies assure you that court-packing is necessary to restore “balance” or some such nonsense, remember: There’s a word for people who believe that, to save civic norms, those norms must burn. And that word isn’t “liberal.”

 

That’s as much pessimism as I can manage this afternoon, though. After all, it’s Liberation Day.

 

Last night’s wipeout was so sweeping and so gratifying that even the rare bits of bad news felt like good news. It’s a bummer, for instance, that Trump acolyte Byron Donalds eked out a win in Florida, as it denied us the pleasure of Democrats getting to spike the football in the president’s home state. But it’s also fun that the only real success story of the night for a party whose activist class is teeming with ethnonationalist chuds was a young African American. I look forward to the groypers having to digest a Rubio-Donalds ticket in 2032.

 

As the results came in, I remembered the famous quote from an unnamed banker that made the rounds last year shortly before the president was inaugurated. “I feel liberated,” he told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.… It’s a new dawn.” Never has a political movement done so much damage, domestically and internationally, for reasons so insipid. In exchange for mass deportation, cultural permission to use slurs, and some magic beans, the modern American right eagerly bankrupted itself intellectually and morally.

 

It’s the most disgusting political faction our country has produced since segregation, a throng of bootlickers mesmerized by authoritarians, demagogues, grifters, and cowards united in the immoral conviction that ruthlessness is the right solution to any problem. In a better country it would have lost every race it contested on Tuesday. But you know what? It did, almost, lose every competitive race. Ten years too late, Donald Trump’s GOP got what it deserved—so emphatically that the president isn’t even bothering to pretend that the vote was rigged.

 

Democrats will control the House and Senate next year by wide margins. America’s experiment with autocracy is over. And so, perhaps, is the Republican Party’s.

 

The worst campaign ever.

 

The president’s mystique among his supporters is built on two beliefs. One is that the only unforgivable sin a Republican can commit is losing. The other is that Trump’s ability to win is singular and world-beating. Through some strange amalgam of “strength,” charisma, pugnacious viciousness, and sleaze, he alone can galvanize voters disaffected by politics and inspire mass defections from traditionally Democratic constituencies like Hispanics and young adults.

 

However repulsive his behavior might be, it must be overlooked or rationalized because the man wins—including in 2020, when the election was allegedly rigged against him. And not only does he win, he’s the only Republican who can. That’s what “pretend I’m on the ballot,” a phrase he uttered 47 times on the trail over the past month, is all about. Trump’s fans won’t turn out for the party, the theory goes. They’ll only turn out for him.

 

Those two assumptions created the “Republican hostage crisis” that I’ve written about for the last several years. Since 2016, the president and his populist horde have held a knife to the GOP’s throat while issuing an ultimatum to partisan conservatives: Do what Trump says or they’ll kill the hostage. Dare to undermine his leadership in any way and he, and they, will begin boycotting general elections and sabotaging Republican candidates. The GOP will lose every race. The left will run everything.

 

Those gutless partisans chose to pay the ransom. Given a choice between being governed by fascists or by Democrats, they chose the former for the sake of preserving the Republican coalition and keeping the hostage alive. The disgrace will never wash off.

 

On Tuesday night, the president rewarded them by turning around and slitting the hostage’s throat anyway. Democrats didn’t wield the knife. Trump did, by spearheading the worst campaign in American history.

 

That campaign began last year with his idiotic decision to tariff most of the planet less than six months after being elected with a mandate to reduce the cost of living. I once called “Liberation Day” the biggest mistake of his presidency, although I’d amend that post-Iran to say it was his second-biggest. It was, as Mark Antonio Wright said at National Review, the moment when Americans lost confidence in the president’s competence and never regained it, the equivalent of Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.

 

When Trump compounded the affordability problem by breaking his promise to avoid “forever wars” in the Middle East, triggering an inflationary oil crisis in the process, he and the GOP were ruined—as his own vice president acknowledged today. No president save possibly Richard Nixon was more plainly and directly to blame for his party’s midterm unpopularity and subsequent bloodletting.

 

In fact, setting aside Iran (unpopular), trade war unto death (unpopular), and siccing ICE on non-dangerous illegal immigrants (unpopular), the president hasn’t had anything resembling an actual program since taking office. “To this day, could a single elected Republican tell you what their agenda is for the next two years?” Politico’s Jonathan Martin wondered yesterday. “There was no plan, no platform, and no vision—a party left to one man’s hourly whims.” Even Trump’s electoral connivances proved ham-handed and counterproductive: The GOP’s mid-decade redistricting push backfired on Tuesday in states as diverse as Texas, Florida, and North Carolina.

 

Some of the electoral pain might have been mitigated had he and his advisers recruited candidates in key races more sensibly. Instead Trump managed to blow two eminently winnable Senate races with terrible endorsements, a talent he’s spent years perfecting. Backing Lindsey Graham’s overwhelmed neophyte sister for a six-year term in South Carolina over an established conservative turned one of the safest red seats in the country blue. And a good case can be made that, measured by sheer destructiveness, backing Ken Paxton in Texas was the worst presidential endorsement this country has ever seen.

 

Paxton’s shocking 12-point defeat dragged down the entire Republican ticket in Texas, setting off a political nuclear bomb that wiped away the incumbent governor and lieutenant governor and the party’s candidates for attorney general, land commissioner, railroad commissioner, four state supreme court justices, and possibly enough legislators to flip the state’s house of representatives. The most one can say in defense of Trump’s decision to support him is that the rotten GOP primary electorate might have nominated Paxton even if the president had endorsed Sen. John Cornyn.

 

To round things off, Trump spent the last month of the cycle wildly off-message at rallies, babbling inanely to no memorable end apart from occasional observations about the animal sex appeal of Sen. Jon Husted’s glutes. Historians will marvel that the president’s final event of the campaign was an appearance at the Lincoln Memorial to tout the renovations there, but as comically tone-deaf as it was, it was appropriate. It accurately reflected the fact that Trump cares more about remodeling public monuments than he does about his constituents’ problems, and it demonstrated that the leaders of his party are too dumb or too weak to talk him out of his worst ideas.

 

It was the capstone on 21 months of this ostensibly populist government’s “let them eat cake” contempt for the people it supposedly serves. Centuries ago in France, that attitude triggered a revolt against a monarchy. Last night in America, it did the same.

 

Partisan Republicans sold their souls to a con man to try to save their party—and he knifed it anyway.

 

The end of the crisis?

 

The dynamic of the hostage crisis has now changed, as it would in any real-world analogue where a captor stops negotiating and starts attacking his captive. Trying to resolve the crisis peacefully by obeying his wishes has failed; to save the hostage before he kills it, bystanders suddenly have no choice but to intervene.

 

The president is going to kill this hostage if Republican leaders don’t restrain him. Two more years of incompetence abroad and flagrant corruption at home risks a second backlash in 2028 that might plausibly deliver the White House and a filibuster-proof Senate majority to Democrats. Normally a president would consider that and restrain himself, avoiding unpopular actions that might sabotage his party at the polls in the next cycle. But Trump won’t. His second term, in theory and in practice, is an exercise in pure self-indulgence. He cares about the GOP only insofar as it serves him and not a jot about its prospects beyond that.

 

If you’re the sort of right-wing partisan whose priority is defeating Democrats, not glorifying the president, you now stand more to lose by letting the Republican hostage crisis continue than by intervening to weaken Trump’s grip on the party. The myth that he’s the only thing standing between the GOP and obliteration at the polls has been shattered as thoroughly as it could be. Republicans now risk being obliterated again if he goes on wielding autocratic power, heedless of his party’s interests and the American public’s wishes. And another obliteration in 2028 will usher in a de facto one-party state in Washington for two years at least and possibly longer.

 

Simply put, Trump’s political legacy on the right is no longer one of invincibility, the man of the people whom only a vast election-rigging conspiracy in 2020 could defeat. His legacy is a photo of the newly elected Democratic governor and senator of America’s largest red state enjoying a Coke at Whataburger after routing the GOP.

 

Because they’re cowards, Republican leaders will initially approach the challenge of restraining Trump the way they’ve always approached the idea of confronting him: They’ll bite their lips and hope that someone else will do their dirty work for them. Maybe the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will save them from the president, using their new leverage to prevent him from extending the Iran war, expanding tariffs, and doing various and sundry other things that everyone except him hates.

 

But probably not. As impressive as yesterday’s wins were, Democrats will end up a few dozen House seats and a dozen or so Senate seats shy of being able to override Trump’s inevitable vetoes of legislation aimed at reining him in. That’s where this becomes interesting: If the House moves a bill in January that would repeal the president’s tariffs, might there be 35 or so Republicans willing to join Democrats in overriding that veto for the sake of freeing their party from his grasp?

 

He’d be furious. He’d surely threaten to primary them in 2028. They’d be taking a risk. But as of this morning, they’re also taking a risk in the next general election by letting his tariffs stand. Should they let Trump go on stabbing his Republican hostage, waging a trade war that will bolster Democrats’ affordability case against the GOP in the next cycle? Or should they intervene and hope not to be sliced by the president themselves?

 

A similar calculus applies to impeachment. Remember that the House will soon vote on Rep. Thomas Massie’s resolution accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of various high crimes and misdemeanors. Do we think some of the 35 or so Republicans who were ousted yesterday might join Democrats during the lame-duck session in voting to impeach an architect of the Iran war, the single biggest factor in voters’ decision to end their careers? I think they might.

 

What if one of the Democrats’ many investigations into the president next year produces evidence of bribery, one of two impeachable offenses named explicitly in the Constitution? The majority party could have as many as 56 votes in the Senate to convict, putting it just 11 shy of the two-thirds needed to remove Trump. If the president is sitting at 30 percent approval at the time and consumed with some horribly unpopular new gambit (withdrawing from NATO, maybe?), could 11 Senate Republicans decide that they’re better off pushing him out and running in 2028 with J.D. Vance as the incumbent president?

 

I wouldn’t say it’s likely. But I’d no longer bet big money against it, either.

 

Some prominent Republicans will be encouraged by ambition to test Trump’s ability to control his hostage. On Monday Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis accused certain unnamed GOP officials of “gaslighting” voters by pretending that high gas prices are Joe Biden’s fault rather than a consequence of the Iran war. DeSantis ran for president in 2024 as “Trump, but competent” and is plainly preparing to dust off that playbook again, hoping next time that the Republican primary electorate will be more receptive to the point after paying dearly at the polls for Trump’s idiocy.

 

I’m sure we’ll also hear soon from Ted Cruz, another former presidential candidate who’s keen to run again and whose future in the Senate looks cloudy in a newly purplish Texas. Cruz wants to position his brand of conservative populism against J.D. Vance’s more nationalist version. Yesterday’s results will give him an opening to argue that the Trump-Vance vision of right-wing socialism is alienating voters and that the GOP needs to get back to basics.

 

And I expect it won’t be long before Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has something to say. Until Tuesday, Kemp enjoyed the distinction of having dealt Trump the most embarrassing defeat of his political career. He’s the closest thing the GOP has to an avatar of traditional conservatism, a man who defended democratic norms during the 2020 maelstrom and did so again this morning. Having twice defeated progressive heartthrob Stacey Abrams, Kemp can argue more compellingly than most that Reaganism coupled with good government is the key to winning the center.

 

I don’t agree with the sentiment widespread on social media today that “the Trump era is over.” The president still isn’t halfway through his term yet, I regret to inform you; he can and will do terrible damage to America before he’s gone, and many members of his party will abet him in it. But the age of autocracy is over, thank God, and if the Republican hostage crisis isn’t entirely over, it’s ending. At the very least, the belief that Trump cracked the code of how to build a durable working-class majority in 2024 such that the GOP need only blindly follow his lead to cement its hold on power is well and truly dead.

 

“If you join a cult, at some point the cult leader takes you to Jonestown and tries to get you to drink the Kool-Aid,” Van Jones said on CNN last night as the scale of the Democratic wipeout became clear. “This is Jonestown for the Republican Party.” It is, and they deserved it. Those who inflicted, and continue to inflict, the postliberal civic nightmare that this country has endured for 10 years will never be forgiven.