Turns out Trump is the one with Trump Derangement Syndrome. How embarrassing - The Independent

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Well, I guess no one’s getting their $5,000.

At the time of writing, the results of the midterms are still trickling in, but two major outcomes have been decided: Democrats have taken both the House and the Senate, flipping both expected seats and seats they barely even considered competitive.

Texas has gone blue; Kansas elected its first Democrat for almost 100 years; Susan Collins got booted out in Maine; Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline wasn’t fooling anyone in South Carolina. Republican aides had been talking about the possibility of narrowly losing the House for weeks, but this has to be so much worse than they imagined: both Houses gone in a landslide, an unrecoverable blue wave. It was an election MAGA hoped would be close enough to challenge with lawsuits and bluster about noncitizen voters. But it turned out that it was, in fact, their worst-case scenario, which is to say “too big to rig”.

Fully backed into a corner, even the president was forced to say on Fox News in the middle of the night that he would “work with” the Democrats and accept the results. He'd only just, a little before midnight, defiantly posted a big red hat emblazoned with the word “VETO” on Truth Social. And he'd reminded the New York Times at 10.30pm that the Democrats will “have” to work with him because he has the power of presidential veto. But in reality, it’s simply unlikely to work that way. That’s because the surviving Republican members of Congress will now be quietly planning how to save their own political careers beyond 2028. And they can join with Democrats in a veto-proof supermajority (two-thirds of Congress) to do that, thus effectively neutering their flailing, ego-damaged, lame-duck president.

MAGA-core Republicans will no doubt amplify what Trump is saying: that his loyal voters simply didn’t “turn out,” and that midterms always go badly for the sitting president. But early voter numbers suggested that turnout across the country was high for a midterm election: 54 million Americans cast their votes ahead of Tuesday, beating the numbers of the 2022 midterms by over 9 million. And although the Trump administration has become used to claiming that up is down and reality isn’t real, these voters just told them they’re not being gaslit any longer. If they insist on clinging to the idea that a huge, dedicated Trump base is still out there, making up the same numbers as it did in 2016 and 2024, they will lose 2028 too. And wouldn’t that be a terrible shame?

What makes this all the more delicious for Democrats is how deeply embarrassing the loss is for Republicans. Poor Elon Musk’s money — nearly half a billion dollars spent across the country trying to influence the races in favor of the GOP, and it turns out people still have their own minds. Poor redistricting (don’t say gerrymandering!) Republicans, who tried so hard to draw the lines in their own favor in deep-red states like Florida and Alabama and in purple states like North Carolina. None of it seems to have paid off.

Poor Haley Stevens, the Michigan Democrat who feuded so badly with her primary opponent Abdul El-Sayed that she suddenly changed parties at the eleventh hour, resulting in a huge surge of support for El-Sayed, who went on to win. And poor Donald J Trump, schlepping around the country and yelling at rallies full of empty seats, who by the end of the 29-date tour was openly stating that he was exhausted. None of it moved the needle, except possibly in the wrong direction, and all of it took a visible toll on the 80-year-old. His Monday afternoon speech was the bizarre nadir of the season: he rambled for 24 minutes about pipes, joints, algae and granite at the Reflecting Pool before he even got around to mentioning the election, all the while holding up printouts of construction work in front of an anxious-seeming Doug Burgum. His main message seemed to be that DC is a much nicer and fancier place than it used to be, thanks to him. He was, in that moment, the embodiment of the phrase “chronically out-of-touch”.

There are some candidates whose wins and losses are particularly instructive. Gina Hinojosa won the governorship in Texas, booting out the three-term Republican Greg Abbott who had been thought to be untouchable. Texas hasn’t had a Democrat governor in 35 years. Abbott’s attack ads on Hinojosa — tired, culture-wars stuff calling her “Gender Bender Gina” and accusing her of being “radical” and “woke” — failed to land. Hinojosa, who particularly connected with Latino voters who were sick of Trump’s economic and border policies, brushed off the attacks by pointing out that Texans care about being “broke” rather than “woke” and by adding: “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.” As one viral tweet put it, Trump failed at regime change in Iran, but he sure managed it in Texas.

In Maine, where Republican Susan Collins spent three decades pretending to be a moderate and an independent, voters finally called it. Democrat Troy Jackson was a last-minute pick and was barely even considered by his own party to be that strong a candidate. But it seems Collins had finally irritated enough people in the otherwise liberal-leaning east coast state. She voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court during Trump’s first term, told everyone she was sure Kavanaugh wouldn’t overturn Roe v Wade anyway and then, when he did, she said she had no regrets because she still thought confirming him was the right thing to do. She voted with Trump during his second term more often than she’d voted alongside any other president. And during a debate with Jackson a couple of weeks ago, she implied a protester who shouted something from the seats was “one of his guys”, which seemed to be flirting with the idea of “paid protesters” that Trump had been nonsensically shouting about at his own rallies. Troy responded in an offhanded, eye-rolling way that seemed to capture the mood of everybody. “Oh, shut up,” he said. “I don’t even know that guy.”

The misreading of the room by the Republicans has been truly revealing. Trump said on Wednesday that he still considers himself to have delivered “the most successful two-year period in any presidency in history,” but quite clearly the rest of America disagrees. People don’t want data centers in their back yards. They don’t care if China also develops AI at a rapid clip: they still want to see some guardrails. They don’t want to see public executions livestreamed across the country (an announcement of Pete Hegseth’s that was so revolting and radical that even Trump ended up nixing it.)

Trump knew what people wanted when he stood in 2016, 2020 and 2024: no more wars, cheaper groceries and gas, an end to the general sense that government was corrupt and cosy with billionaires. Rarely does one person read the national mood so well and then fail to deliver on it — or indeed actively go against it — so catastrophically. As tech billionaires cycled in and out of Mar-a-Lago and the White House; as the world’s richest man got handed the ick-inducing title of First Buddy and was put in charge of DOGE, a ridiculous government entity that promised efficiency and ended up costing the taxpayer; as the “no more forever wars” president started a war that it turned out he didn’t know how to end, it all became increasingly clear that Trump had no idea what he was doing. Fragile and egotistical, he was quite clearly influenced by anyone around him who flattered him enough. And so he dropped missiles on Iran and aligned himself on the world stage with the spectacularly unpopular Bibi Netanyahu. He held a vast military parade on his own birthday. He shrugged his shoulders when Elon Musk throttled Starlink over Ukraine.

Instead of draining the swamp, in other words, he added a few particularly unattractive alligators.

Democrats need to take advantage of this victory, and hopefully they have learned some hard lessons from the past few years. Don’t waste time impeaching Trump for the billionth (OK, third) time; such posturing is an active turnoff to voters, doesn’t affect their lives in any material way, and looks vengeful at a time when people are tiring of vengeance rhetoric. Focus on real legislation and on robust opposition. Bring in those AI guardrails. Bring back the health and social care that has recently been stripped away. Restrict the powers of ICE to arrest people violently on the streets and separate children from their parents, and stop the building of further ICE detention facilities. Restore funding for medical trials and universities.

And, yes, let’s see Elon Musk brought into Congress to explain what the hell he’s been doing in the background to deconstruct the country with his billions. Let’s make a meal of the odious, Soylent-chugging poser Pete Hegseth. That counts as robust opposition. Playing politics with impeachment articles doesn’t.

This is also an opportunity for those Republicans who want to survive beyond the MAGA era. Trump is already talking about using his own presidential powers to effectively subvert democracy. But there are a lot of Democrats in Congress now — enough that the atmosphere in both the House and the Senate will be changed right up to 2030 — and they can join with Republicans to put together that two-thirds supermajority if the president insists on pursuing his ultra-radical agenda without oversight. These Republicans can either be seen as weak obstructionists kowtowing to a wannabe king or people of conscience. They can remake themselves in the image of something that isn’t Donald Trump. Now he’s definitely not running for another term, they might actually do it.

The worry for Democrats, of course, is that this election was a repudiation of Trump rather than a show of support for them. There was a lot of talk of ending corruption and giving the country back to the people on the campaign trail — but the last election proved that just preaching a return to normalcy isn’t enough. They need both exciting policies and an exciting candidate for the presidential run in 2028 (as well as elections beyond.)

There are some rising presidential-caliber stars here, notably including Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, who won reelection for the US Senate and whose energetic and positive, unity-focused speeches are an antidote to entrenched division and feel, at times, even Obama-esque. Democrats need to find these people, amplify them and elevate them now. They can’t afford to fumble this.

Meanwhile, inside the administration, the mood is no doubt somber. JD Vance, who is expected to run for the Republicans in 2028, is going to have to somehow separate himself publicly from a Trump who has nothing to lose. We know (from that leaked Signal chat a year ago) that Vance disagreed with the decision to strike Iran in the first place, and had concerns that the war would carry on indefinitely if they did. He did say he’d support them in public if the president went ahead, though (and he did so, although he’s previously tried to sell us on the idea that it’s “not really a war”.) Late Wednesday morning, we saw the first signs of this: “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance tweeted, in a long and surprisingly contrite-seeming analysis after it had become clear how terrible the midterms really had been for his party, adding that despite what Trump had claimed, “the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.” The reason I describe this as contrite-seeming is, of course, that it’s mainly save-his-own-assery.

The echo chamber that Trump surrounded himself with has certainly shown its limits: shouty radicals who flirt with fascism (see: Stephen Miller, Hegseth, Burgum, Kristi Noem) allowed the president to believe he was untouchable. They also, according to rumors, have reassured him this week that he can govern without Congress anyway. But if we know anything about Trump, we know that he needs heads to roll when the emotions all get too much. And imagine how mad he’s going to get when he finds out his consolation prize — the supposedly magical presidential veto — isn’t as shiny as he thinks it will be.

Yes, it’s going to be a tough day around the White House today, even if the Reflecting Pool is looking beautifully blue and the granite has been re-caulked with maximum efficiency. Because it looks like the only person actually suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome was the president himself.

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