The Dispatch
Wednesday, November 4, 2026
It ended with a whimper, and then a bang.
Less than 24 hours before polls opened in Tuesday’s
midterm elections, President Donald Trump released a slick video with a last-minute pitch to voters
that was at once banal and novel. Vote for my party, he urged, just as any
sitting president might. But Trump offered an additional incentive: an open
bribe to keep the GOP in power, repeating his September promise of a “Trump dividend” of $5,000 for every American—but only if
Republicans win the midterms.
It was an idiotic and dishonest wheedle, of course—the
president couldn’t do it, and Congress wouldn’t fund it. But even if the gambit
was possible, explicitly bribing Americans with their own money is—call us
old-fashioned!—banana-republic stuff that would have been shocking before
Trump’s relentless disfigurement of American politics. Earlier this year, Trump
told the New York Times that the only constraint on
him was, in his words, “my own morality,” which, it ought to be plain, amounts
to basically nothing.
But there is one other constraint, it turns out: voters.
The electorate has rendered
its judgment of Donald Trump and his MAGA-fied Republican Party: No
more. Democrats have taken control of both the Senate and the House of
Representatives. In doing so, they flipped Senate seats in states Trump won by
double digits in 2024, including Iowa, Kansas, and crimson red South Carolina.
In Ohio, which Trump won by more than 11 points, Republicans lost both a Senate
seat and the governorship. And Texas, of all places, practically turned blue
all the way down the ballot—including in the very House districts Republicans
redrew mid-decade to gain every advantage they could. We will learn more in the
coming days about the extent of this historic Republican collapse, but it’s
worth noting that this Trumpified GOP is ceding power to a Democratic Party
whose own popularity is at near all-time lows.
Voters did not reject vague “elites” or some ill-defined
synecdoche for the status quo called “Washington.” Americans rejected Donald
Trump, his Republican Party, and its works. Trump campaigned
this fall telling Americans that they should vote as if he were on the
ballot. Americans took him at his word and did just that. It was a complete and
total repudiation of the president and his Make America Great Again movement.
The results of an Associated Press/NORC poll taken shortly before the
election make this clear. Voters were asked: “Do you think higher than usual
prices are because of President Trump’s policies or more because of factors
outside Trump’s control?” Sixty-five percent blamed Trump.
Asked about specific issues, their responses were the
same. “Do you think President Trump’s handling of each of the following during
his second term has gone better than you expected, worse than you expected, or
has it been about what you expected?” Cost of living? Sixty-nine percent said
worse. Trade? Fifty-eight percent, worse. Foreign policy? Fifty-five percent,
worse. Even on immigration, thought to be Trump’s signature issue, 48 percent
of those surveyed said he and his administration have been worse than they’d
expected.
This is what a failed presidency looks like. And a failed
president with two more years in office can do lots of damage. In recent weeks,
perhaps with the dawning realization that his time in office will soon be
ending, we’ve seen a lot of YOLO Trump—defying court orders on monuments to himself, delivering
campaign speeches on John Husted’s ass, unapologetically siccing his Justice Department on his political enemies,
and taking
concrete policy steps seemingly designed to help his friend Vladimir Putin
win his war of aggression in Ukraine. The remaining two years of this
presidency will be trying.
And while Democratic control of Congress will bring a
much-needed check on Trump’s power, the growing influence of the progressive
left is hardly reassuring. Among the members of Congress sworn in early next
year will be at least a half dozen socialists, along with an unsettling
collection of other unsavory radicals. We hope the centrist Democrats who won in Trumpy
congressional districts and in red states will arrive in Washington ready to
challenge the extremists in their own party just as they took on Republicans in
their campaigns.
Still, the internecine fighting among Democrats, if it
comes to pass, will seem like mere skirmishes compared to the coming battles on
the right. On that, at least, Steve Bannon is correct. We don’t often agree
with Donald Trump’s longtime consigliere and the champion of the right-wing
populist movement responsible for the moral and electoral wreckage that is the
modern Republican Party. But when Bannon told the Financial Times last week that a new
ideological “civil war” on the right would begin immediately after the
midterms, we nodded our heads in hopeful agreement.
The fight for the post-Trump right is long overdue.
Last spring, the New York Times asked Republicans if they’d like their next presidential
candidate to follow Trump’s lead or move the party in a new direction. More
than a third—37 percent—said they’d prefer the latter. We suspect that number
is much higher today as Republicans sift through the ashes of their majorities
in Congress and state legislatures across the country.
There are scores of current Republican lawmakers who have
long believed the party needed new direction, even if they’ve often been afraid
to say so in public. We know this because they tell us in hushed,
off-the-record conversations—conversations that have been taking place since
Trump first arrived on the political scene more than a decade ago. We hope the
results of these midterms will embolden them to say in public what they’ve told
us in private over the years.
The beginning of the end of the Trump era is now here. As
we
wrote in an editorial earlier this year, what America needs is a return to
the principles the Founders enshrined in the constitutional order Trump and his
allies have sought to undermine—the principles the conservative movement used
to champion.
We’ve pointed out many times before that America no
longer has a limited government party. It needs one.
The leaders of the MAGA right often sneer at these ideas
as hopelessly anachronistic and dismiss the principles of limited-government
conservatism as “Zombie Reaganism.” We confess: That never felt like a
pejorative to us. And with the ugly—if entirely predictable—electoral collapse
of a populist right unmoored from any principles at all, conservatives would be
wise to revisit the ideas that animated the nation’s 40th president.
Yes, times have changed. And, yes, the policy
implications of limiting government will be different, in no small measure
because there’s a lot more government to limit these days. But the thing about
principles—the thing that the president and the motley band of grifters and
opportunists around him, unsurprisingly, do not understand—is that they’re
timeless. And, at the very least, elected officials devoted to relimiting
government might have been compelled to speak up when the president promised to
spend more than $1 trillion on a fanciful bribe to keep his party in power.
Speaking out in those moments requires character. As the
debate over the future of the right unfolds in the coming months, we hope that
character somehow matters again in a way that it hasn’t to the party of Roy
Moore and Ken Paxton and Donald Trump. A country facing the kinds of challenges
the United States is facing—many of them, it must be said, of our own
making—will need not only wise leaders, but good ones, too.
So, bring on the fight. Good change is coming.
Republicans can wake up and be part of that revival, or they can continue to
suffer more humiliating defeats of the kind they experienced last night.
No comments:
Post a Comment