This is what a post-Trump America looks like - National Post

Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Manage Account Sign Out Loading subscription options Subscribefor $0.50/week By Allen Abel November 5, 2026 at 6:55 a.m. Last Updated: November 6, 2026 at 12:41 p.m. Monroe, Mich. — The bigliest loser in American history — at least until the returns from the Congressional election started rolling in Tuesday night — surveyed the battleground state of Michigan from his perch on a downcast horse.

This was the doomed Major General George Armstrong Custer, whose brigade was routed and ritually mutilated by Sitting Bull’s Lakota Sioux at the battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana in 1876. “Custer’s Last Stand” has been immortalized in American infamy ever since, except in his hometown of Monroe, Mich., which is about an hour south of Detroit and just across the river from the tranche of the “51st State” still known to some as “Ontario.” In Monroe, Custer remains a bronze-headed hero, “presented at a young age,” according to a sign beside the equestrian statue on the bank of the River Raisin.

Now it was election day in Monroe, with an Egyptian-American on the Senatorial ballot in Michigan, Democrats predicted to be ascendant across the country, Republicans on the verge of losing their tenuous majorities in Washington, and Donald J. Trump, in his final pre-election speech on Monday, reduced to babbling about Corinthian columns, rusty water pipes, and the buttocks of men he admires.

“It’s NOT,” insisted a woman named Barb Hottenstein, who was at the desk for the local GOP.

“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump has been saying, and the danger was that a lot of people would.

“Republicans have been holding back,” said Hottenstein. “But now they’re here to attack.”

This was a rather woeful metaphor to put forward on a street named for George Custer, but Hottenstein was firm in her belief that all the noise about Trump’s wars and his deranged rants and the highest price for diesel fuel since Rudolph Diesel himself learned to drive in 1876 were just that — sitting bull.

“We’re going to pull through this,” she insisted. “They’re all going to wake up. They’re going to wake up all the Democrats.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that local idol Custer was a Democrat himself.

“You know, I don’t like everything Trump’s done,” Hottenstein went on. “But I give him about 80 per cent. He’s trying to change the world.”

“They could use a ballroom at the White House,” she maintained. “That way nobody will come in shooting him again when he’s trying to be out in the public. And, let’s face it, they needed that helicopter pad. I was just in Washington in July. He’s improving everything. I was really impressed.”

“Every poll says that Rogers and your GOP are going to get mutilated tonight,” I noted. Mike Rogers, a former member of Congress, was running for Senate against Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the socialist-leaning, Israel-spurning former University of Michigan valedictorian.

Trump said that blond, Caucasian billionaire Mike Rogers looks like he came “from central casting.” It was Rogers who posted a campaign video of himself holding a can of imported suds and asking, “Drinking a Labatt’s and rooting for the Red Wings — what could be more Michigan than that?” And there was Rogers decrying Trump’s tariffs and his taunting and Rogers saying that “Canada’s not our enemy,” and in the Republican Party in 2026 that was either a suicidal heresy, or the beginning of the palace coup.

(“All of a sudden, he’s reversed course, he’s doing an ad, drinking a Labatt’s and talking about the Red Wings…. Be serious,” El-Sayed snapped back in a Michigan Senate debate. “The ‘97 and ‘98 Stanley Cup championships are still highlights of my childhood. The teams the last few years have been a far cry from the Wings I came to love as a kid. I was at the game when Darren McCarty took on Claude Lemieux,” he later told Octopus Thrower, a Detroit Red Wings blog.)

“I’m hoping and saying a prayer,” said Hottenstein on election day, down in Monroe. “It’s going to take a combination of prayer and action.”

So here was your bill of goods for Trump on the day of his possible utter humiliation: hope and change.

“People are going to wake up about Abdul,” Hottenstein predicted. (The latest polls had the Democrat up by 11 percentage points, consistent with a national “blue wave.”)

I told her that I was going to go up to Dearborn, the most Muslim community in the entire country, for some tea and cake, and invited her to join me.

I went anyway. At a café called Density Desserts, there were more than a dozen young women in hijabs, and a quartet of college guys pounding away at their laptops. Three of the men were of Yemeni extraction, the fourth was Bangladeshi, and all of them were full-on for El-Sayed, even though a couple of them told me that — believe it or not — they had voted for Trump for president in 2024.

This was another purported national trend: young dudes who carried Trump to redemption four years ago doing a 180 this time.

“We thought Trump was gonna have a pair of cojones,” said a fellow named Ahmed Sahouba, and by this he meant that he believed that Trump would stand up to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and not get involved in any Middle Eastern wars.

“Why are we sending billions to Israel when people are starving in this country because they can’t get food stamps?” asked the Bangladeshi.

“Abdul is promising free medical care for everyone,” noted Sami Alsami, one of the Yemeni-Americans. “People say, ‘Where is the money going to come from?’ but why do we send so much money overseas?”

“Barack Obama promised the same thing,” I said.

“Obama was a snake, 100 per cent,” Sahouba chimed in, which was not what I expected to hear in Dearborn, Mich. “You know how many people he killed in Iraq? A million people.

“The mainstream media is all propaganda,” he went on, even though he admitted that he never consumed any mainstream media at all. “People on the ground who are on social media are much better than the Washington Post.”

Sahouba said that a victory for El-Sayed would be a blow against rampant Islamophobia.

“It would prove that change is possible,” he insisted.

“That’s what Obama promised, and you just said Obama was a snake,” I mentioned.

“Is that a reason to give up?” Sahouba asked.

On March 12 of this year, a Lebanese-born man (and a Michigander since 2011) named Ayman Mohamed Ghazali, four of whose family members in Lebanon had been killed a week earlier in an Israeli air attack, stuffed a Ford F-150 pickup truck with explosives, loaded a rifle, and drove this four-wheel firebomb through the doors and down the hallway of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., one of the largest and handsomest synagogue campuses in the Western Hemisphere and — until that moment — unscarred by the epidemic of anti-Jewish murder, buckshot and hate-parading that has become a condoned and contemptible fixture on this continent in the past few years.

March 12 was a school day. There were a hundred pupils and fifty staff members of the parochial academy inside when the truck blew up. Temple Israel had rehearsed well for such a moment; children were lifted to safety; security guards went into action instead of running away.

Mohamed Ghazali shot himself and died. Everyone else at Temple Israel got home alive. “Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles,” as they sing in Fiddler on the Roof.

Eight months later, Temple Israel remains a reconstruction site, possibly to reopen fully before the end of the Christian year. Across the street is a shopping plaza with a vegan-friendly café called Soul that employs many young people with developmental disabilities.

So this is my lunch stop in West Bloomfield Township election day — the leaves turning red and gold at the site of the would-be hecatomb; falafel on pita at the Soul Café, and the Feyertags — Gwen and Fred — telling me that the elevation of El-Sayed to the United States Senate would encourage anti-Jewish pogroms and the establishment of Sharia law. (The couple occasionally attend worship services at Temple Israel but were not there on the day.)

“Hurt people hurt people,” El-Sayed said of Ghazali’s motive, before apologizing and walking it back.

“What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context,” the Senate candidate said. But it was the “hurt people” remark that people like the Feyertags remembered.

Why do these people hate America so much?

“Why do these people hate America so much?” Gwen wonders. And Fred, a professional engineer who also serves as a mashgiach — an inspector of adherence to Kosher food laws — was quick to lay blame: “It’s unrestricted immigration.”

“Anybody that listens to the news sees what’s going on in Spain, what’s going on in France — they’re burning those countries down.”

“Is that what you think the El-Sayeds want to do in this country?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Fred, who, like many of the men at the Soul Café, was wearing a yarmulke. “That’s what they said they want to do.”

“El-Sayed is very, very radical,” said his wife. “I just read that he’s a fan of open locker rooms.

“I don’t know much about Islam,” she went on, “but how can he take the radical socialist agenda on some of these issues and say he’s a religious Muslim?”

“Because he wants to deconstruct the United States,” Fred responded. “That’s what he’s after. That’s what the Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt.”

“We’re shocked that he was even considered a viable candidate,” Gwen said.

“He’s not just viable,” I told her. “He’s probably your next Senator.”

A couple of hours later, I was at the Rogers For Senate watch party and (probable) funeral at the century-old Westin Book Cadillac hotel in downtown Detroit because, hey, free chicken and waffles.

There were about three hundred GOPers in the ballroom. They were decked in red and white and blue and there was bonhomie and laughter because the polls had not yet closed in Michigan, which is the largest state east of the Mississippi and which has become famous as the swingiest of all the “swing states.”

Trump had won here in 2016, and lost in 2020, and won in 2024, which is as swingy as you can get.

Now a preacher-man asked us all to pray “to bring Jesus back into society because society is lost right now and we need some common sense” and we recited the Pledge of Allegiance and conspicuously sang that ancient anthem of bombs and rockets, which may well be the weapons that would bring Trump’s Republican Party to the gates of oblivion on this gentle November Motown night.

One man in the throng was an insurance attorney named Mark Koroi and he said that his grandfather was from Saskatoon and his uncle had been the city clerk of Windsor, Ont., which is just across the river from the Book Cadillac hotel. Koroi was wearing a hat that said TRUMP WAS RIGHT but he admitted that it long may be remembered from this day forward that Trump turned out to be very, finally, fatally wrong.

“The problem in Michigan is he started the Iran war and he didn’t finish up in Gaza and there are thousands of Arabs and other Muslims here and that’s a problem,” Koroi said. And then there were the gas prices that were nearly double what they were a year ago, even for a vehicle as venerable and efficient as Koroi’s Buick Verano, which had travelled 333,000 miles without so much as a burnt spark plug.

“People wanted Donald Trump,” he analyzed. “They wanted the man in office. Millions of people looked at him and looked at Hillary Clinton and looked at Kamala Harris and said ‘well, he’s better than the Democrat.’”

“Will you be glad to see the last of him?” I asked. “Will you miss him?”

“I will miss him like I miss Jimmy Carter,” Koroi replied. “Carter did a lot of good things, but he did the same as Trump — he had trouble with Iran. The Iranians are not afraid to die, and there are seventy million of them, and that’s a problem. The people who went to war are nuts — didn’t they learn anything from Iraq?”

“But on the other hand, he’s a communist!”

Now the early returns were coming in on FOX News and Koroi said, “He’s going to lose the House and maybe lose the Senate,” and this was coming from a man who supported Trump and who had come to cheer on the cream of the Midwestern GOP, those avatars of the Feyertags and the Hottensteins and even, for a brief moment two years ago, of some of the manifold Alsalmis and the Sahoubas of the Great Lakes State.

By 10 p.m., the polls had closed across the mitten-shaped bedrock of Michigan and the farthest reaches of the Upper Peninsula and El-Sayed was ahead of Mike Rogers by 54 per cent to 44 per cent and The New York Times gave the Democrat an 82 per cent likelihood of going to Washington, but there was some small consolation: Rogers was winning General Custer’s Monroe County by a landslide.

As of Wednesday, El-Sayed had won with 52 per cent of the vote and Americans had delivered a stern rebuke of Trump, with the Democrats winning control of both the House and Senate.

“Is this the end of the Republican Party?” I asked Mark Koroi when the results were still rolling in Tuesday night.

“We’re never destroyed,” he answered on the night of Trump’s Last Stand. “They said we were destroyed after Watergate, and six years after that we got Ronald Reagan.

“We’re very good patriots. We’re here to save our country. We may be losers tonight, but we’re good patriots anyway.”

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Even unsuccessful legislative moves could pressure Trump to strike a deal.