Bruce Arthur: Donald Trump was destroyed in the midterms. It could take a decade to sort through the wreckage - Toronto Star
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media on Wednesday, the day after the midterm elections, at the site of the White House ballroom under construction.
Bruce Arthur is a columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur.
The day after America rejected almost everything he touched, U.S. President Donald Trump held an event about the ballroom he’s building on the ruins of the East Wing of the White House. He was vaguely subdued, saying things almost by rote in his rasp, as if he was speaking to himself. Given the context, Trump almost seemed to be wandering around in his own afterlife.
Maybe he was. Trump was destroyed on Tuesday night. Not as a person, or as a malignant force in American life, of course; he could still order a nuke, invade Canada, steal state secrets and sell them off the back of a truck. He will get more desperate, as the walls close in. The nightmare isn’t done.
But on Tuesday night the American electorate rebelled. Midterms often punish the ruling party, but this was a meteor. Democrats won the House and the Senate by commanding margins; they now control a majority of the governors’ chairs, which encompass three quarters of the population; they won Senate seats in Kansas and South Carolina and maybe Alaska and Mississippi. Elon Musk spent nearly a quarter of a billion in Texas and Texas elected Democrats to statewide offices — to almost every available statewide office — after not doing so in any race since 1994.
As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, “This is as close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country probably as we have seen in the last 100 years.” It was, speaking personally, my favourite night of television of the year.
And picking one issue as The Reason only really works if The Reason is Trump, his decisions, and the people who have been drawn into his abhorrent orbit.
In a slightly different world, you could argue Trump wanted to lose, because every single piece of his administration and comportment was toxic, corrupt, stupid or evil. The list is encyclopedic: rapprochement with Russia or economic war with Canada and Europe; war with Iran or blood and soil nationalism run by goons and thugs on the streets of America and defined by cruelty, and even an evil sort of delight.
Trump’s tariffs further drove up inflation and prices, and he did not live up to promises to release the Epstein files. He embodied corruption, and embraced the zombie plague of AI and data centres. (There were 44 proposed moratoriums on data centre construction on the ballot Tuesday: 43 of them won, and the other was a 430-person vote in Harwood, N.D.)
The pool of Trump-approved Republican candidates was a sewer, and official government Twitter accounts spat out white nationalist memes involving a gender-bending Harry Potter character and lauding Anakin Skywalker, or Darth Vader, as a heroic figure, and Trump’s closing argument involved describing the asses of certain men.
Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair. It could take a decade to sort through the wreckage, much less attempt a reconstruction.
The fever won’t break completely, of course. Republicans had already rotted for years, and a more competent authoritarian could easily appeal to the same base instincts and turn the GOP back into a global menace.
But what happened Tuesday was a blow to Trump and, as important, against his malign influence throughout politics. America called itself the shining city on a hill, and a lot of it was myth, but the United States really did send a signal to the world about democracy and possibility in a nation that welcomed Albert Einstein and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and produced Dolly Parton and “Sesame Street.”
Under Trump, America became a vector of corrosion: an anti-science, anti-expertise, anti-media bouillabaisse of gutter racism, brutish misogyny, funhouse mirror conspiracies, Potemkin influencers, isolationism, election denial, corruption, and a sea of lies so vast that it was as if Trump and MAGA were trying to reorder reality itself into a mirror of their own distorted, unhappy, hateful selves. You can see various echoes in conservative parties around the world.
And Tuesday America chose something more .... human. This was the biggest electoral wipeout since 1974, after Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation. Republicans lost every income level in this election. They lost men in this election.
It’s enough to restore your faith, at least a little: the far right is a cancer of the human soul and a magnet for incompetence, and it has been rejected in Hungary, in Serbia, and in Brazil. And now in America, where the future is not a white nationalist dystopia because Trump has been turned into an 80-year-old has-been who might one day go to prison, if everything breaks right. He isn’t dead but he’s dying as a politician, and the real hope is some of his ideas die with him. It doesn’t repair the wreckage, of course; there’s too much of that. But it’s a start.
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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Bruce Arthur is a columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur.
