Trump squandered his mandate to be normal, to bring back prosperity, to be more than simply not Joe Biden’s Woke Democrats.
Two years ago, on November 6, 2024, as the world awoke to the most breathtaking and remarkable political comeback in American history — Donald Trump’s return to the White House — I wrote that “Donald Trump is the most consequential American political figure of the 21st century so far.”
He arrived on the partisan political scene not more than 15 years ago. But in that short time, Trump has decisively closed the Obama era in American politics, which began with what many on the left thought was a permanent realignment in 2008. With his reelection in 2024, Trump has defeated Barack Obama’s successor’s successor and his ideological heir, Kamala Harris. I think it’s fair to say that Trump has also, in a second try, defeated Joe Biden by forcing him out of the race last summer. Trump has now — twice! — climbed the Blue Wall and dismantled the Obama coalition in the crucible of a general election.
Two years later, that remarkable comeback has ended in a crushing electoral defeat on a scale not seen since the post-Watergate election of 1974. The Republican Party’s majority in the House of Representatives was washed away, which was not unexpected. But its Senate majority also went down to stunning defeat — swept away in the Blue Tsunami in heretofore red states. Kansas’s Roger Marshall lost. South Carolina’s Darline Graham lost. Democrats won in Senate races in North Carolina and in Iowa and, in an almost unimaginable turn of events a year ago, the Republican Party lost a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. Republicans also lost the Texas governor’s mansion. Republicans lost the Texas lieutenant governor’s race. The Texas legislature is likely to tip to the left. Republicans’ majority on the Texas Supreme Court may go from 9–0 to 5–4.
My friend Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in these pages that the explanation for all this is that it’s “The War, Stupid.” “Anyone,” MBD argues, “who privileges other explanations than the Iran war [for the GOP defeat] is selling you a just-so story.”
Exit polls showed 74 percent of voters deemed the Iran war a “major” or “crucial” factor in their vote. Sixty-two percent of voters think the war was “wrong.”
The fact is, the administration ran on slogans about putting “America First.” When Trump announced the resumption of war in February this year, he did so in the middle of the night heading into Saturday, and the vast majority of his address seemed to be aimed at Iranians, rather than Americans. He did not bother to make a case for the war. Congress was given a letter about it the following Monday.
Yes, of course. But of course it’s more than all that. It’s more than the war: It’s Trump. The American people rejected Trump.
They rejected Trump on the grounds of his handling of the war, yes — but moreover they rejected him (and by extension his party) for his constant distractions, distractions that everyone understood detracted from the fundamental reason that Trump got himself reelected. In 2024, Trump promised — no, he guaranteed — a return to low inflation and prosperity; he promised real wage growth; he promised cultural normality.
Instead, the last two years have brought an air of shambolic chaos in Washington. Trump careened from 30 percent tariffs to a trade war with China to 10 percent across-the-board tariffs to a trade war on Canada to 100 percent tariffs on China to a potential invasion of Greenland to a real shooting war in the Persian Gulf. On top of all that, he called the “affordability crisis” a hoax; he put his face on the coinage; he caterwauled about the Nobel Peace Prize; he spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on his White House ballroom and the grass on the National Mall and the trees surrounding public golf courses in D.C.; he spent the closing weeks of the campaign performatively describing the rear ends of Republican political candidates; he put internet-obsessed 14-year-olds in charge of the White House Twitter account.
I’ve long thought that the true origins of the blue wave that crashed ashore this week were the Liberation Day tariffs of April 2025. But the issue, in my view, wasn’t tariffs per se — though the tariffs did put upward pressure on prices and that certainly didn’t help.
I see the Liberation Day the same way that I see Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal debacle in the summer of 2021.
Why? Afghanistan and Liberation Day were the precise moments when normie, not particularly partisan, not particularly tuned-in Americans looked up in horror and lost confidence that Biden and then Trump were capable of basic competence. Neither presidency ever recovered.
If the economy were roaring throughout 2025, inflation was under control, and real wages were up, voters may have given Trump a little more leash on Iran and high gas prices in 2026. After all, while gas and diesel prices were painfully high, American combat troops weren’t dying in large numbers. But after the chaotic deployment of the tariffs in April 2025 and the economic shocks that resulted, voters simply weren’t going to do that.
To be clear, the Iran war, especially the way it has been handled, especially the way that Trump constantly promised that victory was just around the corner (or was already in the bag), is not popular. But unpopular foreign wars don’t typically turn Texas into a blue state. Texas, after all, with its important oil and gas sector, has a lot to gain from consistently elevated energy prices. If the Iran war was so extremely unpopular as to come close to destroying the Republican Party as a viable electoral enterprise going forward, where were the massive street protests in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston?
More convincingly, after eleven years as the dominant, completely unavoidable figure in the nation’s political life, the American people were sick of Donald Trump. On Tuesday, they showed him just how sick of him they were.
Two years ago, still in awe of Trump’s political comeback, I cautiously warned that “there is nothing permanent about any of the so-called ‘permanent’ realignments in our politics.” Indeed. There was nothing permanent about Trump’s 2024 victory. The great rightward vibe shift could be squandered. The congressional majorities could be frittered away. The mandate could be wasted, even thrown in the gutter.
And yes, make no mistake: Trump squandered his mandate to be normal, to bring back prosperity, to be more than simply not Joe Biden’s Woke Democrats. He blew it all up in a short two years. Tuesday night was the end of the Trump era — all that remains is watching the rubble bounce and trying to pick up the pieces.
It wasn’t the war. It was Trump, stupid.