It’s a perversely Nietzschean triumph of the will.
It’s a perversely Nietzschean triumph of the will.
I t is Election Day — it’s all over but the voting and counting tonight. I can hardly believe we made it through yet another campaign season of craziness, all the way to the finish line, and I am glad to be with you, dear readers — here at the end of all things. There are no eagles coming to save us from onrushing doom this time, however, no deus ex machina to extract the Republican Party from an electoral judgment fully two years in the making.
And in all matters, great and small, this outcome has been crafted by Donald Trump. Truly, Donald Trump is the master of his own fate, the author of his own bad fortune, down to nearly every detail and grace note. Seen one way, it’s a perversely Nietzschean triumph of the will: No other president could singlehandedly put their party so deep down in a hole that half the operatives I’m talking to consider the Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina Senate races to range from “severely threatened” to “gone.”
First, there were Trump’s overarching policy blunders that set the scene for all that voters are angry about: The tariff regime crippling America’s heartland is inexcusable, dubiously constitutional, and hideously destructive to the GOP’s chances in once-solid red states like Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. (And Trump will never let it go.) The trade war (and bilious, senseless rhetoric) has made Trump toxic with all those who share a border with our otherwise innocuous northern neighbor, Canada. The Iran war has precipitously raised the price of gas — and has no end in sight, especially given the administration’s warnings about resumed strikes. Inflation continues to bite on top of all of that. The Ukraine war has devolved into a double-dealing farce.
And through it all, there Trump and his friends and family have sat — shamelessly corrupt, gorging themselves like ravenous hogs from the public trough, and flaunting it all with such open trashiness. It’s clear that nearly everybody in or around this White House treats the Trump presidency primarily as a financial opportunity rather than a public responsibility.
It’s enough to put the American people off their lunch, and then we must turn to all the specific moves Donald Trump made to ensure that the GOP would field the weakest possible slate of candidates for Senate in nearly every race. Trump’s primary criterion for judging politicians has always been personal loyalty: Only the most docile, loudly croaking toady in the room gets his endorsement. This means he has thrown his support behind mook after mook: He cleared the field in the Ohio governor’s race for Vivek Ramaswamy back in January 2025, and look at how that has turned out! He chased Thom Tillis from office in North Carolina over a minor budget dispute — and his handpicked replacement candidate is going to get destroyed by former Governor Roy Cooper.
In South Carolina, so desperate was he to replace Lindsey Graham with a loyal puppet that he forced his wildly unqualified sister Darline to run as his anointed choice for a six-year term — and now that seat is seriously threatened by both Democrats and disgusted Republicans alike. In Georgia, Brian Kemp was not-so-subtly discouraged by the Trump administration from even bothering to run for Jon Ossoff’s Senate seat — a thankless task in any event, and one even harder given Trump’s history of interference in the state. Instead, Trump got the candidate he wanted, and MAGA moron Mike Collins is going to be flattened by Ossoff in a campaign that just might carry the Democratic candidate to victory in the governor’s race as well.
Jim Geraghty made much the same point a few days ago: This is the team Trump wanted, nay demanded. The unthinkable now seems likely to happen in Texas, as human-bullfrog hybrid Ken Paxton is about to be defeated by progressive James Talarico — because Trump chose to back the one man too corrupt for Texas politics. (For those who might argue that Paxton was a guaranteed primary winner, Trump’s early intervention might have made a difference; in any event Paxton’s political career is only conceivable in a world where Trump’s own legendary ethical problems made Paxton’s even worse ones survivable.)
Realize that in November 2024, in the wake of Trump’s remarkable return to the presidency, it was simply mooted that the Senate would be out of reach for Democrats in 2024. The map was so forbidding for Democrats! (“What, they are going to gain seats in Kansas or South Carolina?”) Now even my prediction of a 50–50 tie, offered in September, looks impossibly rosy compared to some other people’s.
Trump’s closing argument, the New York Times bemusedly reported yesterday afternoon, was given at the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial. In his speech, he was entirely resigned about the outcome of the midterms: “For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms. But we gave this a very strong shot.” Qué será, será, I suppose. But Trump mostly spoke about the one thing that, in his ruin, gives him comfort: the permanent upgrades he has spent government money on, particularly the Reflecting Pool itself — now finally reopen after its disastrous failed renovation earlier this year.
After he finished with the pictures, the president turned to other matters of national interest. Matters including: the nature of Corinthian columns (“the most beautiful in the world”); the soul of grass generally, and Bermuda grass specifically (“like the human being, grass has a life also”); the endurance of granite (“it literally has thousands of years of life”); the renovation of a public golf course on the Potomac that he’s planning; statues; the White House ballroom; graffiti; and the new White House helipad.
That, readers, is the sound of a man audibly retreating to his psychological “happy place” — entertaining youthful fantasias of “Trump the Builder” rather than confronting the wreckage of his own administration and his party. Because what cares Donald Trump for the fortunes of the Republican Party? They have always been a mere means to an end for him, a prize to be mastered and used for personal advantage and self-glorification. Despite Trump’s egotistical pleas to voters to “pretend he’s on the ballot,” he is not — Republicans are, and they are about to get swept away by the judgment of the people.
Donald Trump will still be there, though, for two more years, beyond the reach of the law and the voters alike. He has already accumulated massive — perhaps generational — debts on the Republican Party’s credit card, and has every reason to rack up more. Why should he care? He’s not the one who ultimately pays the bill; the GOP is. He has always considered himself unencumbered by even the barest obligation to the party whose brand he has usurped. We can only guess what happens next.