I told you so.
The backlash is here.
Several months ago, I said a backlash was coming. Tuesday night, it arrived. At least the down payment on it did.
To an even greater extent than Biden and Democrats, Trump and the MAGA Republicans have greatly overestimated their popularity and overreached badly. Trump’s unique blend of blatant, in-your-face corruption, abuses of power, and incompetence have proven to be unpopular with voters.
Who knew? Well, a lot of us did, as it turns out.
And now, with the cold, hard data of election results bursting the bubble of assumptions that a quiet majority was defying the polling of Trump’s plunging approval, all that Republican redistricting suddenly looks like a bad idea. If Republican gains in 2024 were an aberration rather than a new normal (and Trump has been working overtime to ensure that those new voters are scared off), then the result may be that safe Republican districts were watered down to a point where they will be competitive in a good Democratic year. A year like 2026.
In other words, Trump’s hubris and bad instincts may have sown the seeds of a Republican midterm apocalypse.
Republicans won larger shares of Hispanic and minority voters in 2024, but Trump’s use of ICE to violently root out immigrants and antagonize Americans has frittered away many of those voters already. Washington Post polling from just before the election showed that Trump faced broad disapproval, even on immigration and the economy, the issues that got him elected, even as Democrats remained unpopular as well. One of my maxims from recent years is that the more Americans see of Trump, the less they like him. That rule of thumb held true in 2025.
If there was any doubt that Trump would stay the course, he has already renewed his call to kill the filibuster in order to “pass legislation at levels you’ve never seen before” and blamed the shutdown for Tuesday’s losses. As a reminder, Republicans wanted a shutdown in order to unlock more authority to cut Democratic programs and continue to refuse to negotiate a compromise that would reopen the government.
Similarly, Bill O’Reilly was recently seen on News Nation, arguing that Trump can “see if, in the next eight months, the tariffs can kick in to bring prices down and to help people.”
Aside from being an admission that prices and the economy are problems, O’Reilly should know that tariffs increase rather than decrease prices (unless other factors like decreasing demand override the price increases). If Republicans are looking to tariffs to save the economy and the midterms, they are in deep trouble.
The fact that Trump and the smaller Republican majority are likely to double down and continue the policies that turned them from winners to losers within 12 months is even more good news for Democrats. The Democratic minority in Washington is still mostly just along for the ride while MAGA craziness is on full display.
Democrats did flip a previously-vacant House seat in Texas, meaning that two New Democrats will be seated when Mike Johnson finally reconvenes his chamber. Republicans will still hold a three-seat advantage in the House. The New Democrats, together with Republican rebels, may be enough to force release of the Epstein files.
Even Zohran Mamdami, the newly-elected Democratic Socialist who will be mayor of New York, seems unlikely to be much of a distraction from Trump’s antics. The mayor of New York is very constrained by state and federal laws and plays little role in Israeli-Palestinian policy. Mamdani’s job will be keeping garbage trucks on schedule and the NYPD staffed and empowered, which probably won’t give him much of an opportunity to be controversial. For what it’s worth, I think Mamdani
In addition to sweeping high profile races in New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats also won two seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission, a board that regulates utilities and sets rates. Democrats got the word out about these low-profile races at the No Kings rallies in October.
The PSC victories marked the first time that Democrats have won an election for a statewide office in Georgia since 2006. The results should sound an alarm for Georgia Republicans as the state gears up for gubernatorial and Senate elections next year.
As a conservative, it’s difficult to be too happy about Democratic wins, even though the party has become more centrist recently with the influx of moderate and conservative Trump opponents like Georgia’s Geoff Duncan. Nevertheless, I’m always happy when MAGA loses, and I’m feeling relieved and encouraged that America is rejecting trumpism.
On a final note, Tuesday night’s elections can reassure those who are concerned about free and fair elections. If anything, this week’s results prove that Donald Trump and MAGA do not control American electoral institutions. At least, not yet.
SCOTUS HEARS TARIFFS CASE On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging Trump’s authority to unilaterally levy tariffs under a statute that does not mention tariffs. Most sources indicate that the justices were not friendly to the Administration’s point of view.
Some Republicans hope that Trump will take the L and move on if SCOTUS rules age him. Personally, I doubt that he will be able to leave well enough alone because a) he is a “Tariff Man” and b) he can’t stand to lose. Bessent has already said that they have “lots of other authorities that can be used” if the Court rules against them on IEEPA. Sounds a lot like Biden on student loans.
UPS CRASH A UPS MD-11 freighter crashed on takeoff in Louisville, Kentucky on Tuesday, killing nine. Video of the crash is horrific and shows the left engine engulfed in flames on the takeoff roll. I’ll post a discussion after more details become available, but my first impression is that this accident may be similar to the Concorde crash in 2000, in which the plane lost an engine after it ingested pieces of a tire on the runway.
THE THREAT OF WAR WITH VENEZUELA seems to have passed. The USS Gerald Ford carrier group has reportedly departed the Caribbean for the Mediterranean. Trump has shifted his threats of war to Nigeria and Mexico.
290 DAYS since Donald Trump was inaugurated, and the Epstein files have still not been released.
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The backlash is coming
President Trump has completed his second first hundred days in office. MAGA is getting almost everything it wants (or at least Executive Orders that purport to do what they want), and the results are not good.