The bubble has burst, the spell is broken, the illusion is shattered. The worst president in American history was obliterated as a political force on Tuesday, as the party he rebuilt in his preening, bigoted, and dishonest image suffered humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat in elections across the country. Donald Trump is done. He’ll be president for two more years, and no doubt he’ll find ways to continue enriching himself while inflicting gratuitous damage on the nation. But as the vital center of American politics, he’s done. His hold on the Republican Party has always depended on the perception that his support could make or break a candidate. That perception held even as Trump’s own approval rating plummeted. In the midterms, though, his handpicked slate of MAGA sycophants, nepo siblings, zombie Islamophobes, and smirking grifters underperformed even the low expectations Republicans clung to as the races wound down. Democrats won the House and—incredibly, given this year’s map—the Senate. They won governorships. They won statehouses. They won too many races in normally deep-red territory to list. “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump repeatedly told voters before Election Day. The worst part for the president is that they listened.
That paragraph sounds pretty serious, so let me hasten to add: ahahahaha. The Republican strategy going into these midterms seemed to be that by recruiting the least appealing candidates imaginable and letting them run the most debased campaigns of all time, they might just pull this thing out. Somehow it didn’t work! The Anakin memes didn’t work. The ads attacking a survivor of sexual abuse didn’t work. Running the late Lindsey Graham’s sister for a Senate seat in South Carolina didn’t work. The rampant gerrymandering really, really didn’t work. Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of his own notionally real dollars to prop up a Republican Senate candidate in Texas who’d conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election; all that money managed to do was shift the balance of power in the state—including the governorship for the first time in 32 years—to the Democrats.
These were Trump’s candidates, running Trump-style campaigns, paid for through Trump’s funding channels. In a way, it was fitting that he closed out his series of weird, meandering election rallies with a weary, rasping speech about the Reflecting Pool. The midterms were a mirror of the past two years of his presidency. Only failure was visible in the glass.
We’re going to hear a lot about “candidate quality” over the coming weeks and months, which is appropriate. The staff of a randomly selected Long John Silver’s would have made a more formidable political slate than the middle-school bullies and hair-sprayed race-baiters Republicans assembled for these elections. There are prairie dog towns that would have run three points ahead of GOP candidates nationwide. I mean, this is the man Trump chose to lock down a crucial governorship in Ohio. Look at him!
They were really bad candidates, which would have been obvious from the start if Trump’s bizarro aura hadn’t made all of us think the crassest and most unhinged options were box-office magic. They weren’t, as it turns out, or at least not always. Our supply of the rarest commodity in American political life—sanity—hadn’t quite been exhausted after all.
But the takeaway from Tuesday is about more than the candidates. The malicious and incompetent political campaign the MAGA movement just concluded is both a symptom and a projection of the broader malice and incompetence with which the Trump administration has governed. Voters didn’t have to differentiate between the quality of the candidates and the quality of the president’s leadership, because the first flowed so clearly from the second: Voting against the chuds at the polls was a way of rejecting Trumpism as a style and a set of policies. Voting against Trumpism was a way of rejecting the chuds at the polls.
The lesson of this election, in other words, is the return of the obvious truth that the surreal distortion field of the past decade seemed to have superseded: In a democracy, you cannot govern like a ham-handed petty dictator and be allowed to keep governing indefinitely. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool most of the people most of the time, at least not when your strategy is to throw a match on some kerosene and then stand in the burning house and insist there’s no fire.
Trump has treated the presidency like an outsize crypto scam, to the point that corruption became one of the biggest issues in the race. Republicans then nominated, for a crucial Senate seat, a man who had literally been impeached for bribery by his own party. He lost by double digits. Trump has made scapegoating and punishing minority groups one of the pillars of his administration, to the point that much of the electorate is appalled by government cruelty. Republicans then made transphobia and Islamophobia central pillars of their campaign messaging. Missouri voters defeated an attempt to use a ban on gender-affirming surgery for minors to outlaw abortion, and the midterms’ highest-profile Islamophobe, Michigan’s Mike Rogers, lost to the highest-profile Muslim candidate, Abdul El-Sayed.
Trump’s ill-conceived tariffs and mismanaged war with Iran have wreaked havoc on global energy prices, making gas, food, and heat impossibly expensive for many Americans. Republicans then offered voters a slew of candidates who … didn’t have much to say about that, except to insist that prices were coming down (they weren’t), or that prices were Democrats’ fault (they weren’t), or that we’d really shown those Iranians (we hadn’t), or that you should worry about woke pronouns instead of anything else (you shouldn’t). Overwhelmingly, in staggering numbers, they lost. Even Susan Collins, who never loses, lost! As of this writing, Mississippi is still in play. MISSISSIPPI IS STILL IN PLAY. Imagine being so bad at your job that you made Mississippians vote for health care.
If you want the job of governing, you will eventually be judged by how you govern. And while MAGA has excelled as an outsider party, it’s been a screaming disaster whenever it gets real power. The made-for-YouTube combination of grievance, rage, blame, status worship, and thirst for superiority is cathartic for some voters when it’s a game of make-believe on a screen. But when it’s in the White House, those same voters—and also all the other voters—eventually notice whether their lives are better or worse. They notice whether they feel more or less free, more or less secure, more or less safe, more or less content. Trumpism has made life worse for nearly everyone on the planet, and apart from a few billionaires and Polymarket executives, very few Americans would say they feel happier, safer, freer, or better off than they did before the rise of MAGA a decade ago. A million pundits can analyze reasons for a million years; Republicans were crushed in this election because they’ve controlled all three branches of the government since 2024, and they’ve been unbelievably bad at it.
The numbers are probably too big for Trump to try his usual voter-fraud/my-controller-was-broken shtick. He’s already signaled that he’ll accept the results. But he’ll inevitably try to find some way to reframe the results that preserves his influence. Over the next few days, he’ll post a series of disparate and contradictory narratives to gauge which one people respond to—he’s already claiming Republicans would have won if his name had been on the ballot—then he’ll repeat the story 50 times a day to make people believe it. It won’t matter. He’s old, tired, and—to judge by his droopy demeanor at the Reflecting Pool rally, where he seemed to be physically melting—weak. Republicans whose futures depended on his support will have less and less reason to toe the line now that his name is politically toxic. Do you think JD Vance and Marco Rubio will stay loyal to him out of some innate respect? Most of the junior MAGA wing won’t publicly revolt, but they’ll be less focused on currying favor with Trump than on outmaneuvering one another for control of what remains of the Trumpist coalition. There’s a lot of technofascist money to chase, after all, and very little of it will flow through the president.
None of this says anything about how the Democrats will govern, of course, to the extent that a party that controls a single branch of government can govern at all. But that’s a question for tomorrow. For 10 years, our political life has revolved around one man, to the country’s enormous cost. Today, he’s a spent force. Whether and how we can rebuild is an open question, but at least we’re waking up in a country where it can be meaningfully asked. We’re waking up in a different country. He’s done.
