Dear Weekend Jolter,
In the end, the result was so much worse for the GOP than even our most dour predictions had it. Who saw Mississippi Turning? (The Polymarket page on that race is . . . amusing.)
One gets the feeling that President Trump sensed, perhaps weeks ago, that a rebuke of historic proportions was in the offing on Election Day and was resigned to it. From his insouciant revival of locker-room talk to his hyperfocus on D.C. beautification initiatives (pursued with the zest a pensioner typically reserves for gardening), his mind was deliberately elsewhere. He posted obligatory boasts touting his popularity as returns confirmed a walloping on Tuesday night. But the Great Blue Tsunami leaves much wreckage, and the movement Trump has spent the last decade building — at least the version whose agenda du moment is defined by him — may rest among the detritus.
What now?
The good news, per Jim Geraghty, is that “Republicans know that they have to change, and they have to change dramatically between now and Election Day 2028.” Modest losses might have let the party stumble around in “self-delusion” for two more years. That is not the case today.
Whether the GOP can learn from defeat is, as ever, an open question. As you might guess, our columnists have ideas. From Mark Antonio Wright:
The best-case scenario for conservatives over the coming years is a synthesis that takes the best of the populist impulse of the Trump years — secure borders, a harder line against Communist China, and a focus on creating a society friendly to family formation — while jettisoning the crudities, cruelties, and turnoffs of Trump himself (and those of his mini-me’s such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Ken Paxton). It should weld the pro-growth economics and the positive American internationalism of the Reagan years to the never-quite-achieved fiscal discipline of the Tea Party to a prudent skepticism of foreign intervention that has developed in the last decade. It should face down the left, take a stand against antisemitism, and remember that people generally prefer to vote for the friendly party.
As Kathryn Jean Lopez puts it to fellow Republicans: “You have been given an invitation/excuse/justification to insist on a post-Trump party.” Shedding its personality-based identity while that personality has two years left in his term will not be easy, Yuval Levin notes, but “the party’s next phase can’t come soon enough.”
On our Election Night liveblog (you can read and reminisce here), Jim called the president a “spent political force,” arguing that MAGA may continue in some form, but that the 2028 conversation now shifts beyond just the familiar names: “The Republican Party may well be best served by some figure who is completely disconnected from Washington and the Trump era. Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp, Glenn Youngkin . . .”
The causes of this week’s historic defeat are many — tariffs, the Iran war, their impact on prices, cyclical political headwinds for the incumbent’s party, corruption — but most of them share Trump as a common feature. Especially his — let’s be frank — increasingly unhinged and retributive style of governing, if one can call it that.
Republicans can no longer coast on Trump-adjacent vibes, the warm memories of the 2019 economy, or “it’s me or the left” messaging. Instead, they need to build a comprehensive policy platform that meets voter concerns. Arguably, doing that means not abandoning many of the key issues that have motivated the populist realignment but instead weaving them into a serious legislative program. Policies to streamline medical education and otherwise expand the supply of medical care could help tame health-care costs. A serious reindustrialization agenda cannot be confined to haphazard tariffs but instead demands investing in local infrastructure, vocational education, and technological innovation. . . .
Republicans will need a revivified policy platform. But they will also need an ethos that leads with governance rather than resentment. A politics of constant insults, self-enrichment, prosecutions of political opponents, and congressional abdication will not produce a governing majority, as Tuesday night’s results make crystal clear.
Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out on the liveblog that, on the semi-bright side, exit polls show voters still favor capitalism over socialism (these days, let’s call that a win); only a minority consider themselves either MAGA or democratic socialists. Noah Rothman writes that the socialists’ ranks in Congress are about to swell anew, but they are likely to collide with the reality that most Americans do not want their radical agenda; they want costs to go down. In time, “it will be up to conservatives to persuade voters that there is a better course — one unshackled to the state, in which your fate is yours to command.”
In order to make that case, the GOP has some hard — but entirely obvious — choices to make.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the shellacking: Armageddon
Let’s start here: Repeal the Tariffs
A few bright spots: Ballot Initiatives Produced Many Silver Linings
Breaking down the case: The Murky Ilhan Omar Affair
On ranked-choice voting: Keep American Voting Simple
ARTICLES
Dan McLaughlin: Trump Lost the Congressional GOP by Treating Them with Contempt
Charles Hilu: El-Sayed Strikes Defiant Tone, Mocks Republicans After Capping Off Blue Wave in Michigan
Noah Rothman: Here Come the Socialists
Yuval Levin: Another Repudiation Election
Eva Terry: Fentanyl Test Strips and Free Condoms: Inside the Socialists’ Big Election Night Celebration
Abigail Anthony: Time to Be Woke Again
Christian Schneider: The Return of Shame
Will Swaim: Two Legacies of Dolores Huerta
Inez Feltscher Stepman: Taking Stock of the Trump Administration’s Victories
Michael J. Ard: Now Is the Time for the U.S. to Pursue Venezuelan Elections
Becket Adams: Election Trutherism Is Not a One-Sided Problem
Andrew McCarthy: Abdul El-Sayed: The Gerry Adams of the Muslim Brotherhood
Kamden Mulder: How Republicans Used the Courtroom to Narrow Democrats’ Historic Fundraising Advantage
Rich Lowry: Britain Owes No One an Apology
John Gustavsson: The Fundamental Flaw in European Unity
CAPITAL MATTERS
Luke Wake & Mitchell Scacchi, on unwarranted red flags: Buying a House with Cash Shouldn’t Make You a Suspect
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Welcome to this review. It’s been waiting for you: Zero Charisma for Swifties
Will America’s artwork get stranded in Italy? Brian Allen investigates: Final Thoughts on the Biennale: Yarn, Salt, Pepper, Sludge, and a Shark
EXCERPTS NOT POSTMARKED BY ELECTION DAY STILL COUNT
Dan McLaughlin offers further thoughts on how Trump doomed his party in Congress:
There are a great many lessons to be drawn from the steep descent of Republicans from the heights of 2024 to the collapse of 2026. But surely a big one is this: The party in Congress paid the price for Donald Trump’s contempt for the party in Congress.
It wasn’t always this way. Look at Trump’s first term. Sure, he didn’t always take the advice he was given from the Hill. His effort to repeal Obamacare was a halfway compromise between what he wanted and what Republicans wanted, and it failed. But he was much more open then to treating Republicans in the House and Senate as partners. The 2017 tax bill had Trump input and features, but it was largely conventional Republican tax policy, mostly written by Paul Ryan from prior Republican proposals. On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell and committee chairs such as Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham had a lot of input on judicial nominations. Trump sent executive branch nominees to the Hill with an eye to who would get confirmed. He grumbled but accepted reality when McConnell and his caucus wouldn’t budge on abolishing the filibuster. For all of Trump’s instincts to demand personal loyalty, Republican senators kept a sufficiently distinct brand from his that a number of them survived tough races in 2020 when Trump was going down to defeat.
This time, things were different from the outset. Even with a Senate inclined to give Trump just about anything he wanted, he set the tone up front by threatening to demand that the Senate put itself in recess so he could appoint a cabinet without confirmation hearings. Even Trump couldn’t get Matt Gaetz confirmed, but Senate Republicans were browbeaten into accepting his other terrible nominees, including not only the execrable Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but also people such as Kristi Noem and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who have since departed in predictable disgrace. Along the way, Trump forces drove Joni Ernst of Iowa into retirement in good part by hounding her over her skepticism of Pete Hegseth and made Bill Cassidy’s position untenable as well. Ernst’s Senate seat will now be held by a Democrat.
Few things are more traditionally the prerogatives of Congress than the setting of tax rates. That includes tariffs, which were once the main source of federal revenue and enacted in highly detailed schedules by Congress that reflected the conflicting interests of different constituencies and regions. But breaking with the targeted tariffs of his first term, Trump early on unveiled sweeping, global tariffs that proved immensely unpopular and sabotaged his entire brand as a champion of a lower cost of living. Crucially, Trump did not go to Congress with this plan, the centerpiece of his second-term economic agenda.
Republicans certainly earned the rebuke: This second time around for Donald Trump has just been an awful presidency so far, significantly worse than his first, which is saying something. And the broader Republican Party has mostly enabled it all, or at least has behaved as though it has all been fine, and so has earned the rebuke it got, too.
That’s not to say this presidency has entirely lacked for achievements. The Trump administration really seems to have gained control of the southern border, for instance, and has effectively pushed back on some of the excesses of Covid-era wokeism, both of which were (rightly) high priorities for many 2024 Trump voters. Some lower-profile but still important measures have advanced in some agencies, too.
But these have been overwhelmed by the broader tenor of this administration, which has utterly lacked any public-spirited vision or direction and has allowed itself to be defined by Trump’s own vapid impulsivity and thuggish narcissism, and to descend into shameless personal corruption. The president’s uses of power have tended to involve starting risky and complicated ventures that he has had neither the patience nor the strategy to finish and then moving on from them, as if it hardly matters how they might end up, and any bad news that results can just be overwhelmed by the next big thing. This has often been his path through life, of course, but the stakes of failure are awfully high when what’s at issue is a war or trade policy rather than an ill-conceived casino project. And at this point, the president just seems to have grown tired of his job, seeking escape from its burdens in ridiculous vanity projects while real problems (often of his own creation) fester.
In fact, sheer exhaustion now defines the public’s responses to Trump, too. Many Americans who had a lot of tolerance for him and once found his antics entertaining are tired of it all. His silly nicknames and his petty whining haven’t gotten any dumber — they were always this dumb. But many people who thought they were funny have grown sick of them, and Trump’s sheer unseriousness now strikes some of his former supporters as inadequate to the office and the moment.
That this exhaustion is what drove the midterm wave is crucial to understand if we want to learn some lessons from an election that harbors a lot of them.
These lessons aren’t new, despite the scale of the outcome. There is always a tendency in the immediate wake of an election to see its results as a stark change of direction launching something wholly unprecedented. But it seems to me that the message of this election is pretty much the same as the message of all of our national elections for at least a decade now. The message is: “No, thank you.”
But enough about America. What about Europe’s problems? John Gustavsson explains the overlooked issues with the notion of continental “unity”:
The flaws of the European Union are many: Its overregulation of AI, growth-killing climate goals, and foreign-policy virtue signaling are but a few of its vices. Much less discussed, however, is the fundamental flaw in the idea that sits at the heart of the EU’s political union: the notion that European unity is, in and of itself, desirable. Europe’s history suggests otherwise.
When picturing a disunited Europe, most observers picture the horrible scenes of the First and Second World Wars, waged between competing European powers vying for dominance of the continent. This is also the picture of “disunity” that the EU likes to sell: We must stay united, or else we will soon be back in the trenches killing one another. Pro-EU campaigners during Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum even hinted at the prospect of a World War III in their attempts to convince Brits to remain.
In reality, disunity among nations looks much like disunity among firms — in other words, it looks like competition. Competition between European nations was crucial in spreading the industrial revolution. After Britain began the process of industrialization, other European countries faced a stark choice: Reform your economic systems and institutions in such a manner that you can follow Britain and industrialize — or be left in the dust.
The latter option would not just mean accepting an ever-widening gap in living standards between themselves and Britain, but also facing the threat of future conquest from a British military funded by the ever-growing wealth produced by industrialization. It is not a coincidence that France, Britain’s historical archrival, was among the very first countries to follow its lead, with Napoleon removing internal trade barriers and formalizing the ban on guilds introduced during the French Revolution. Belgium, though allied with Britain, also realized what was about to happen and went as far as to smuggle British machinery into its country to copy it. After being defeated by the aforementioned Napoleon, Prussia liberalized land markets and abolished serfdom.
The 19th century also saw freer trade than before, meaning businesses faced international competition — many of them for the first time. Lower trade barriers created even more pressure on governments to keep up with economic reforms that helped their own country’s foreign competitors succeed.
At this, supporters of the EU may clap back that this is exactly what the EU is enabling: creating a free market not just for goods, but for services, capital and labor. The single market is, indeed, the EU’s greatest success, something even harsh Euroskeptics readily concede.
Yet, while businesses in Europe do compete with one another, countries are increasingly unable to do so. Harmonization of regulatory standards has been the EU’s big project for decades. This effectively removes the ability of a country to carry out most regulatory reforms to be more competitive, since its regulations must, in more and more areas, abide by whatever the EU says.
CODA
After a stressful election cycle, it is appropriate to bring tensions down a notch. Relax to the sounds of a jammy West Coast group called Particle. I’m not the Bonnaroo-going type so can’t say I’m very familiar with them, but I do like this song of theirs: “Below Radar.”
Thanks for reading.