I’ve been quiet for a few days, because I’ve needed some time to think about what I want to say.
Donald Trump has been the most important political figure of my lifetime. Without his first run for the presidency in 2015, I might never have become interested in politics or started blogging in the first place. His influence extends well beyond the borders of the United States; alongside Brexit and the various European reactions to the open-borders catastrophe of 2015, his voice became a major force in moving opposition to mass migration into mainstream discourse. History would be different without Trump. We would all be having different conversations, enduring different controversies and voting for different parties.
On Tuesday, the Trump era entered its final phase. Some losses are expected for the presidential party in midterm elections, but what happened this week was much more than an ordinary political setback. The Democrats achieved a midterm victory of historic proportions. When all of the counting is finished, they will probably have an 83-seat majority in the House of Representatives and a durable 10-seat majority in the Senate. For the next two years, Trump will be hemmed in on all sides. The Democrats will assert their control over nominations and appropriations and they will use their oversight, subpoena and impeachment powers to begin discrediting everyone around Trump and building a narrative for 2028. It is going to be ugly, it is going to go on and on, and the MAGA movement itself will probably not survive.
We must talk about why this happened, and I’ll need two posts to do that. Today you’ll get the very big picture, tomorrow the details.
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