The Tribune

By CHARLIE HARPER

WITH the likely exceptions of Vladimir Putin in Moscow and House speaker Mike Johnson in Washington, most of the world must have breathed a huge sigh of relief on Tuesday as US president Donald Trump and his subservient Republican Party crashed to a tumultuous defeat, losing control of the US Senate and House of Representatives, a majority of US state governorships, and probably their own viability as true contenders to maintain or recapture executive and legislative power in the upcoming 2028 presidential elections.

The giddiest punditry was doubtless found at the commentary desk at MSNOW, where there was awe at the parade of shocking results that revealed the depth and breadth of American disgust at the second term performance of Trump and the coterie of cynical, often bigoted and unrepresentative aides and advisers who have apparently shielded him from the depth of public discontent.

Ironically, Trump has slipped into a situation not dissimilar to that of the man whose public disintegration at a televised campaign debate in June 2024 presaged Trump’s return to the White House. Trump correctly had labelled Joe Biden ‘sleepy’ long before Biden froze and fumbled his lone debate with Trump at the turning point of the last presidential election campaign.

Now, it’s Trump himself whose look and actions often betray his 80 years and who, like all of his recent predecessors, is showing the strain that inevitably shadows American presidents in office.

Still, Trump is Trump. He reacted in a way we have come to see as characteristic to Tuesday’s calamitous election results, writing on his social media account and later muttering to Fox News at one point that "I wasn't on the ballot and if I was, we would have won in a lanslide!" However, while he did concede that “the Democrats did a good job,” he soon turned to criticisms of many of the losing GOP candidates, especially those outside the circle of candidates whom he had either personally recruited or whose success in primary elections was mostly due to his endorsement.

While Trump had carried all seven so-called ‘swing states’ in the 2024 presidential election, his GOP basically whiffed in each of the states that forecasters had predicted would be decisive in the 2026 mid-terms. The Dems prevailed in every one of them. 

Generally speaking, the successful Republican efforts last year to gerrymander House seats in several red-leaning states failed to deliver wins for the GOP candidates contesting them on Tuesday. And pursuing legal machinations to further dilute the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 didn’t seem to lead to much of a Republican advantage either.

Trump’s own insistence on staging a rare mid-term ‘convention’ in August in Texas and his dogged campaigning in deeper red states in October seemed to mostly focus voter attention on his outsized influence on the recent course of American political – and economic – events. That turned out to be a big negative for Republican candidates this week, as voters appear to overwhelmingly blame Trump for their economic dissatisfaction.

Yesterday morning, the punditry world was brightest on ‘Morning Joe,’ another MSNOW daily political show whose host Joe Scarborough once represented the same northwest Florida district that more recently sent disgraced Matt Gaetz to Congress. ‘Morning Joe’ managed to assemble all of its regular superstar talkers. And, while their message was predictably ebullient, most warned against prioritizing political retribution.

The temptation must be great for Democratic politicians to launch into full-time impeachment efforts as soon as they retake the gavels of power in January. There’s plenty of evidence in the public record that would justify a third impeachment against Trump, and there has been recent chatter that the newly Democratic House would take aim also at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

As many of ‘Morning Joe’s’ experts pointed out, however, that course would prove ruinous for the Democrats – even as it did after their sweeping electoral gains after Trump’s first mid-term elections in 2018. The collective advice from these sympathetic experts was that the Dems should develop and pass legislation on immigration, health care affordability, the economy and the US role in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that would appeal to and address the voter concerns that swept them back into power. 

There would likely be a reasonable public tolerance for investigating the grift, outright greed, and corruption that has characterized Trump’s second term. But making this the centerpiece of Democratic policymaking would be catastrophic for the Dems, and could even open the door for a Republican presidential nominee two years hence.

We should see soon enough if the Dems are listening.

Meantime, it’s fair to say that Donald Trump has completely squandered a significant advantage that he and his party won just two years ago. While there are inflationary pressures in many economies around the world for which he is not responsible, Trump seems to have made two fundamental unforced errors as he launched his second term.

First, he clearly decided to surround himself with loyalists who wouldn’t publicly challenge him – and maybe not disagree privately either. Many of them are craven and incompetent. Secondly, he has been unable to check his own impulsiveness and impetuosity in policymaking and implementation. He’s acted against established norms both domestically and internationally, and virtually universal disapprobation has not seemed to sway him from his fixation with tariffs or ‘slam-dunk’ foreign military adventures.

The president certainly seems to have made himself into a prime candidate for figurative neuropathy, having shot himself in the foot so often. Post-election commentary was full of references to ‘what might have been’ if Trump had not insisted on pushing away viable GOP candidates in several high-profile elections in favor of sycophants. Deeply flawed Republican Senate candidates in Texas, North and South Carolina are only a few of the cited examples.

While the headlines this week will doubtless and understandably focus on election results in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Michigan, Maine, Mississippi, Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio, there’s a case to be made that the most significant ballots were cast in a southern state with ties to many in The Bahamas and which has been at the center of some really significant, transformative political developments in American affairs for more than the past 30 years.

What happened in Georgia on Tuesday may have as profound an effect on American politics going forward as did a political revolution there in 1994.

As pundits, polls and politicians gravitated inexorably toward a forecast of a big Democratic Party win in the American elections two days ago, it was widely acknowledged that 40-year-old Georgia senator Jon Ossoff was going to clobber his Donald Trump-selected opponent and win reelection this month.

Ossoff, the youngest current member of the US Senate, has become well-known in his first senate term as someone who can articulate the truth without being offensive. He is also clearly able to attract significantly large sums of money in campaign contributions without appearing to mortgage his moral future to cynical donors. Observers have compared his campaigns to the successful efforts to oust the autocratic Russophile Viktor Orban from his presidency in Hungary earlier this year.

In June, Michele Goldberg of the New York Times wrote: “Look, if you were going to cook someone up in a lab to run in 2028, he would be someone who looked a lot like Jon Ossoff. Even if he doesn’t run, the formula that he has perfected, this combination of a relentless focus on the Trump regime’s corruption and the need for reform, coupled with this very earnest and serious sort of patriotism is, I think, the formula not just for defeating Trump, who we assume is going to be gone in two years, but for defeating the whole reactionary, autocratic movement around him.”

Ossoff, whose success in the Senate was due partly to Trump’s selection of a crony to oppose him in 2020, may lead the way to a real change in American politics. If so, he might emulate Newt Gingrich, an obscure Atlanta-area history professor who led the overthrow of generations of Democratic domination of the House in 1994 and helped to create the Tea Party movement in 2009 in response to federal corporate bailouts and other financial interventions, and one of whose successors and beneficiaries has been Trump.