Making Sense — Or Not — of an Electoral Smackdown

I waited all night for bad news. I was Charlie Brown, certain that Lucy would yank the football away at the last second.

Last Tuesday is still too big to grasp at this time, so I’m going to string together a few random thoughts, none of which would add up to a full essay. I’ll try to focus on things I’m not seeing much of in the media.

The pundits are arguing about whether this epic smackdown was about the Iran war, which it was. Or about gas prices, which it also was. Or about tariffs, healthcare, inflation, ICE, or massive corruption. And yes, the list is long.

But they’re all looking at the trees. The forest was Donald Trump. Or should I say the forest fire? He was the only thing on the ballot, a monster loose upon the land. Tuesday was a primal scream, ten years in the making, a scream rising from the monster’s victims, which all of us are. Tuesday was pure rage at the gall of this deranged narcissist for taking a flawed but functional country and deliberately wrecking it. We’ll be living with the damage for half a century.

I would like to think that last Tuesday put the country in a sort of remission, that we’re now in recovery from the Republican cancer that has metastasized over at least four decades, and of which Trump is merely a symptom. I’d like to think that the 70 million people who have enabled the monster have finally seen him for what he is, that they understand they’ve been scammed, that they found out the hard way that Republicans do not have their backs.

I like reading stories about the well-deserved death of the Republican Party, but I don’t believe it for a minute. Republicans are a rash that keeps coming back. What we need, more than anything, is to pummel them while they’re down. What that means exactly, I’m not sure, but if it doesn’t involve a lot of jail time for a lot of vile people, we will have failed.

I was almost convinced that impeaching Trump a third time was a bad idea. JD Vance and the tech oligarchs who own his soul are, in their own way, as big a danger as Trump. I was thinking that putting up with an enfeebled and politically neutered Trump might be the better choice for weathering the next two years, assuming Natalie Harp — or someone — can keep him from nuking Tehran, or Toronto, or Chicago.

But his appointment of Stephen Miller as chief of staff has changed my mind. Senile or not, Trump clearly has no intention of being neutered. If anything, he’s more pugnacious than ever. He has no interest in governing, never has, so he’ll turn that boring stuff over to Miller, if he didn’t long ago. This is scary enough. But when his pet construction projects get defunded — which could happen soon — he’ll have nothing to do all day but watch Fox and throw ketchup. Between Miller running the country and Trump vetoing anything that moves, we’re looking at yet another stress test for the American Experiment.

So I think we’ll need to impeach him again. But this time, his removal by the Senate is not as far-fetched as in the past. It will all come down to the behavior of the Republican senators who survived Tuesday’s bloodbath, especially those facing re-election in 2028.

The senatorial map these guys will face is as brutal for Republicans as this year’s map was for Democrats, who should not have done nearly this well. So while Democrats already have steamroller momentum going into 2028, Republicans have two more years of accumulated Trump-stink wafting off them. Their voters will need to wear masks.

Every GOP senator wishing to remain one will be hearing footsteps, and they will have every incentive to break with Trump. It takes a two-thirds vote — 67 senators — to convict and remove him from office. Assuming Democrats end up with 56 seats, then only eleven Republicans will need to conclude, for their own selfish reasons, that Trump needs to go.

We may get a sneak preview of this equation — a dry run of sorts — this week. The House could vote to impeach Pete Hegseth as early as tomorrow, and the votes might be there. Keep in mind this effort is being driven, not by Democrats, but by lame-duck Republicans, particularly outgoing Congressman Thomas Massie. House Democrats have been happy to participate — loathing of Hegseth is truly bipartisan — and Speaker Mike Johnson so feared this vote coming to the floor before midterms, that he sent the House home early in September.

If Hegseth is in fact impeached, the case will be referred to the Senate for trial. That could happen before the new year, but more likely it would wait until the new Senate is seated. If eleven or more Republican senators then vote to remove him, that would send a clear message that an impeachment of Trump is most definitely on the table.

Those same eleven GOP senators — or different ones, they’re interchangeble — could be of further use in overriding Trump’s vetoes. We’ve been assuming that any laws Democrats pass would automatically be vetoed, and that the only joy we’d get from passing, say, a restoration of the Obamacare subsidies, would be the ability to pin its failure on Senate Republicans.

But eleven Republican votes can change that dynamic. Every Republican senator will be under enormous pressure from their constituencies to end the war, bring down prices, restore Medicaid cuts, save rural hospitals, and rescue the healthcare system. Any of them who fail to join Democrats in doing that bare minimum will make themselves extremely vulnerable going into 2028. If one thing was made crystal clear last Tuesday, it’s that no Republican seat is safe.

For me, one of the most striking aspects of the blowout is all the things that didn’t work for the GOP. They threw their whole slimy playbook at the problem and barely made a dent.

Attack ads didn’t work, and here in Michigan we know that it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Name-calling didn’t work, though Republicans threw the words ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ around like it was the height of the Cold War.

Transgender bashing didn’t work, even though four states passed restrictive measures, shame on them.

Islamophobic slanders didn’t work, as Abdul El-Sayed could tell you, having been called a jihadist, a terrorist, and a sleeper agent for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Gerrymanders didn’t work. Suing states for their voter rolls didn’t work. ICE intimidation didn’t work. And I haven’t heard a peep about a stolen election all week.

But mostly what didn’t work was money. Especially Elon Musk’s money. The $400 million in pocket change he dropped on Texas may have backfired and actually helped Texas flip — that’s how pissed off the electorate was. But while Elon was the big loser, there are plenty of other donor-class oligarchs who surely regret the bet. Republicans brought to these midterms a war chest ten times the size of the Democrats’. That’s a lot of bucks for so little bang.

It has been, to be sure, a week to remember. I spent Tuesday night channeling my inner Charlie Brown. I spent Wednesday speechless, a rare condition for me. And now I’m waiting for the first “Democrats in Disarray” headline to appear in the New York Times. I might’ve already missed it.

But amazingly, the bad news never came. And Lucy is now lawyering up.