The Trump administration was roundly defeated last Tuesday. You could say Republicans were defeated, but it was Trump and company who invited the thrashing and who are getting blamed for it.
A sufficient number of Americans prefer lower prices and fewer wars rather than the inverse. Enough of them were insufficiently seduced by the siren song of the MAGA cult. A majority rejected authoritarianism and fascism. It’s not exactly morning in America, but it could be much worse.
Before the midterms, there was concern — which I shared — of an outside chance that the executive branch might have come to see elections as frivolous barriers to kingly governance and would try to do away with them. When the votes went ahead, I was relieved. When Donald Trump accepted the election results right away, I was surprised. The best he could manage was to bleat that had he been on the ballot, Republicans would have won. Never mind that he’d spent weeks saying that he was, de facto, on the ballot. Who can remember what happened so far back.
Now the rats are preparing to flee the ship, scurrying over one another on the way out. The 2028 elections, including the presidential race, have begun. In America, you’re always running for election or re-election. Enjoy the victory night party or sulk for a week after the loss. Then get back to it. America is so democratic that self-government is non-existent and election season is permanent.
Trump is threatening to be “Mr. Veto” and grind the gears of Congress to a halt, which has been the congressional state of nature since the advent of cable news. Maybe he will. But you get the sense that his heart isn’t in it anymore. For an all-time hater, it looks as if Trump is looking to spend more time running his mouth and cementing his legacy — in some cases quite literally — than playing the game. Call him the Cristiano Ronaldo of politics. Curtains, folks. But first, we shore up the legacy.
Soon after Republicans ate it in the midterms, Trump turned his focus to building the White House ballroom and futzing with the Reflecting Pool. He also managed to free up a few minutes to sign an executive order to prevent future administrations from altering the Oval Office or Cabinet in an attempt to freeze his tacky, gilded, ahh, upgrades. It won’t work. The next president will do with the rooms what they wish, and that’s unlikely to entail cursive script on the walls and enshrining an aesthetic late-stage Saddam Hussein chic.
The flurry of brick-and-mortar concerns from Trump suggests a project of legacy-making in the only way the real estate crook knows how: big, bold letters projecting a confidence behind which nothing exists but the self-justification of brashness. The effort reads as the modus operandi of a spent force who is looking to latch onto something that, like a tombstone, will say “I was here.”
As much as Trump is a petty, vindictive, and dangerous authoritarian, he’s also a lazy old bastard whose clock is ticking. It could be that the last years of the Trump administration, while certainly not benign, are increasingly prone to greater and greater neglect as the president prepares to fly off to Mar-a-Lago to spend his days playing golf and making angry phone calls to Fox News, live on air. You’d be forgiven for wondering how that’s any different from his current day-to-day life, but he’d no longer have his finger on the button, nor would he have the authority to launch wars of convenience.
Anything is possible with Trump, for whom the word “mercurial” is equal parts elegant understatement and meeting him more than halfway. But the days following the midterm rout indicate a politics of defeat and resignation buttressed by the pillars of the triumphal arch — which Trump is also trying and failing to literally build.
Two years from now, the long, international nightmare of the Trump regime may well end with a whimper and a mess that won’t be cleaned up soon, if ever, rather than a bang. Should the end come to pass this way, Trump’s epitaph won’t be inscribed on monuments. It will be lamented in speeches given by those who will reject the man and his movement, complicit as they were in the madness. The post-Trump project won’t be veneration. It will be an attempt to send his eight years in power down the memory hole in a process of demented de-Stalinization. You can carve that into the plinths right now.
Over the next two years… Donald J could easily become the most transformative (in a positive way this time…) President since LBJ.
Via a combination of ego-stroke and non-prosecution agreements, universal healthcare could become a reality BEFORE Trump either croaks or leaves office. This would likely take the form of an initial “TrumpCare” Public Option, which rapidly and magically becomes a subsidized Public Option, which then evolves… due to math and economics and, dare I say, “ the invisible hand of the Market”, into a two tier Public/Private Euro-style system which subsequently becomes primarily a Single Payer system.
Accountability is good, but a functional universal healthcare option for the public is better. Release all the negotiations and trade offs after he’s dead. Until then, sing the praises of Dear Leader as though it were his idea and his alone. Lead him to instruct all his self interested Flying Monkeys to support the shift to TrumpCare… or else. He has the dirt on them, regardless how much they may loathe him, they’ll play along.
Obviously, neither Schumer, Shrugmaster Hakeem, or Ironbladder Booker will facilitate this shift, so new leadership will be required.
The rapid focus and delivery of healthcare will allow the Dems to redirect from their problematic history with Israel, their role in wealth and income inequities, and countless other failures. Somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the US population supports universal healthcare. It’s a self licking ice cream cone if someone is smart enough to load it.
There are currently meetings with Reps who are discussing this option. It’s neither radical nor impossible.
Generational change always comes out of calamitous periods. This will likely (hopefully) be one of those envelopes in which genuine and substantial change is possible.
If they wait for a Dem admin in 2028… big change will likely be promptly rationalized away. Just like every other time in the modern era.
"Call him the Cristiano Ronaldo of politics." This seems unfair on many levels. Firstly, Ronaldo is objectively in the pantheon of greatest of the game. Whether you like him or not, you can't deny his talent. Trump is a petty malignant narcissist, a failed businessman, whose only skill has been fooling the stupid and willing for decades. His legacy will be disaster and disgust. Over 150 historians already rank him as the worst president ever. He's scrambling for a legacy because he knows he's done, he's spent. That is why we can correctly use the word 'obliterated' to describe the referendum held on his presidency on Tuesday. He said, 'vote like I'm on the ballot', and America did. The Trump decade is already a cautionary tale for other nations flirting with raising the most ignorant, most corrupt in your society to legislative levels. Canada benefitted from having a front row seat. And note that previous supporters, some high up in his circle, are already claiming they 'weren't involved'. Rats meet ship. That said, what the Democrats now do will be the defining epitaph to the lost decade and the future of American pluralistic democracy.