It’s a fact of life that the more brazenly a person traffics in illusion, the more likely you are to question what you’re actually seeing for yourself. So it’s been with Donald Trump, the most brazen illusionist our time. Pretty much from the moment Trump reentered
the White House last year, virtually every public survey showed him to be increasingly and historically unpopular. And yet Trump and his close coterie of extremists — Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, and so on — marched around as if they were fulfilling a revolutionary popular mandate, awash in some thunderous applause that only they could hear. It was natural for Democrats (and a lot of the media, too) to wonder if Trump knew something critical that they didn’t. Maybe the country really had turned a corner into some dark, authoritarian age. Maybe Trump understood the current history better than all the people who had actually studied it.
Yeah, not really. Because while Trump was issuing diktats, and while his party’s leaders were swearing they too could see his grand illusion, a furious electorate was just waiting to weigh in. When it did, the scale of the rejection was breathtaking. Trump managed to do something I did not think I would see again in my lifetime, which is to return the Democratic Party — at least for the moment — to its 20th century glory days of congressional and statehouse domination. (And please, I don’t ever want to hear another political data nerd tell me how precious few seats are actually up for grabs in any given election. That was always dumb.) On election night, Trump declared that he would accept the results of the election, which sounded a little like Louis XVI saying he would accept the guillotine. Having desperately tried and failed to steal the election through redistricting, Trump feebly allowed that he was willing to work with Democrats, as if he were now in a position to negotiate anything.
Inevitably, Republicans will argue that the vast repudiation was a reflection of rising prices, rather than a broader statement on Trump’s worldview. But this misses the point. As I wrote before the election, inflation and rising energy costs were not just things that happened to Trump, as they have to other presidents; in this case, they were the foreseeable result of an agenda driven by culture retribution and little else. Draconian tariffs, an impulsive war with Iran, the cruel hunting of immigrants, wild spending coupled with growing statism — all of these things were choices Trump made, all of them unpopular, and all guaranteed to wreak economic chaos. The voters weren’t punishing whoever happened to be in charge; they were rendering a verdict on Trump’s erratic mismanagement and his party’s embarrassing docility. If Republicans think all they need to do now is wait around for economic cycles to change, then they’re not seeing the twisted wreckage of their own party.
As for Democrats, I won’t waste a lot of words here warning about the perils of misreading their mandate, since they never listen anyway. The political story of the last few decades is of one party or the other surfing into power on a wave of voter anger and then immediately pursuing a divisive agenda that nobody knew they were voting for — it’s almost a cliché. But on one critical point, at least, there is a lesson the left should
take from these elections, and that has to do with their theory of social progress. Because these last few years should have taught us something about how the country moves forward on what Martin Luther King called the “the arc of moral justice” — and also how it doesn’t.
I’VE LONG MADE TEHE CASE, to the irritation of a lot of my colleagues, that the news media needed to own its own role in bringing about the rise of Trump in 2016. In the same way, Democrats need to reckon with what they did to make Trump’s resurrection possible in 2024. It wasn’t simply the onset of inflation after the pandemic, or even clownish set of calculations that led Democrats to rally around a clearly deteriorating president and then to embrace his underwhelming understudy. The truth is that Trump was pretty much buried as a politician until two things happened.
One was the combination of indictments against him that enabled Trump to credibly portray himself as a victim of elite persecution. (The federal cases over stolen documents and sedition were probably defensible; the cases in Georgia and New York, especially, were legally tenuous and politically moronic.) The second, and more consequential, was the crescendo of voices on the left talking about “white privilege” and “The 1619 Project” and whatever other forms of indictment could be levied against America’s founders. The stylish leftist refrain of the Biden years was that America was tumbling backward to the days of Jim Crow and the Klan. The message you got, if you turned on the radio or walked into any bookstore, was that whatever problems existed in America were because of white supremacy, and it enabled Trump to tell a large swath of voters that he was the only thing standing between them and a truth-and-reconciliation commission.
Democrats in 2026 wisely put some distance between themselves and this movement (“Woke 1 was kind of crazy,” is how Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez put it), and they recruited a slate of candidates who stayed far away from debates on identity. When Trump attacked Dr. Annie Andrews, soon-to-be the Democratic senator from South Carolina, as “Trannie Annie,” for no apparent reason, no Democrat took the bait and started lecturing about inclusivity. When JD Vance strongly implied that James Talarico, the soon to be senator from Texas, was gay, Talarico ignored him. When Trump and the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, Mike Rogers, vilely linked Abdul El-Sayed to radical Muslim terrorism, Sayed resisted monologuing about the history of white supremacy. (I did not think El-Sayed could win by more than a tiny margin after his meltdown with Haley Stevens in the closing days of the campaign. I was completely wrong.)
What was the result of the left not fixating on identity and America’s flawed history? The most astounding leap forward in political equality that the country has ever seen in single night — and that includes, I would argue, the first election of Barack Obama. Three black Democrats were elected governor (along with a Republican, Florida’s Byron Donald), including the nation’s first black woman to hold the job, Georgia’s Keisha Lance Bottoms. Texas will have a Latina woman governor and New Mexico a Native American woman — both firsts. The Senate will be seating its first openly gay man and its first Muslim. As I write this, it’s possible that Democrats will be sending a black man from Mississippi and two women with Native American heritage to the Senate, as well. And, of course, the House will have its first black speaker of the House in Hakeem Jeffries.
Democrats and their activist base should take away from this an obvious insight — the same one that Obama understood when he won the presidency and that Pete Buttigieg grasped as the first viable gay candidate in 2020. The worst way to chase social progress is to make aggreivement a central part of your argument. The best way, it seems now, is to recruit a diverse, qualified set of candidates who can speak to the issues people care about without putting them on the defensive — and to have a little faith that the country finds its way toward enlightenment, even if the path isn’t perfectly linear.
For the last two years, in fact, it’s been Trump — along with Vance and Hegseth and Elon Musk — who hasn’t been able to stop talking about identity and white nationalism and the contested American story. It’s Trump and his followers who have obsessed constantly about replacement theory and the primacy of white, Christian men, purging women from the military and prosecuting universities for not admitting enough white kids. Absent the perfect foil that Democratic activists once gave him, though, Trump’s conjuring of multicultural demons felt empty and tangential this time — a shtick every bit as performative as the left’s tiresome policing of rhetoric. Turns out Trump isn’t white America’s savior anymore. He’s just a grifter with an illusion, vanishing before our eyes.
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