“I think it’s safe to say we’re tired of being at odds with each other. We’re tired of being told to hate each other. It’s been a decade of this kind of politics. Politics as a blood sport. Politics as trolling and ownership. Politics like pro wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it makes us all feel terrible all the time.”
That’s what Sen.-elect James Talarico said in his election night victory speech after a Democrat won the Senate seat in Texas for the first time in nearly 40 years.
Although I don’t like Mr. Talarico or his policies, I agree with him on one thing. It’s that the American people are tired of being at odds with each other. We need more unity and less division in the Republican Party and in American politics in general.
This is the conclusion many American voters seem to have reached after a decade of Donald Trump’s dominance of the right.
Ten years ago, he forced his way into the political arena with a radically different approach and provocative rhetoric. He won the first American presidential election by attacking his opponents with clever and scathing nicknames. Perverse Hillary. Jeb low on energy. Pocahontas. little marco. Crazy Barney. Ted lying down.
It was all aimed at disparaging his rivals in a way that only die-hard MAGA fans could truly understand. His attacks worked well on social media, reflecting an American culture with far less respect for the political establishment, far coarser language, and far more interest in being entertained than informed.
Played live at the raucous rally, Trump’s attacks resembled a professional wrestling match. It was a bloodsport at the most basic level. And Trump’s supporters ate it up, liking his stance against elites who clearly despised them.
Hillary Clinton, her opponent in the 2016 presidential election, called half of her supporters “a bunch of deplorables.”
Seven years before Trump officially ran for the White House, President Barack Obama said in a speech in San Francisco that people like him “clung to guns and religion and antipathy to people who aren’t like us and anti-immigration sentiment and anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain our grievances.”
Trump rallied these angry voters, many of whom had protested during the Tea Party movement, and created Make America Great Again (MAGA). They liked President Trump’s intuitive way of communicating. They liked his promise to end illegal immigration and free trade policies that destroy manufacturing jobs.
Trump’s rhetoric, while crude, seemed honest and genuine, unscripted and completely real, not generated by polls or AI or written by expensive speechwriters. Trump was talking to them, not at them. He listened to their fears and promised to fight back with vengeance.
Even when Trump claimed that the political establishment had stolen his re-election, he refused to accept the results quietly. He consulted lawyers, devised a questionable legal strategy, and unleashed his supporters on the Capitol, hoping that their pressure would bend the sacred tradition of presidential succession to his will. It didn’t go well, but that didn’t disqualify me either.
During President Joe Biden’s four years in office, Trump weathered legal attacks, jail threats and assassination attempts to emerge as an unstoppable strongman who will return to power in 2024. His rise seemed like destiny.
But, as often happens, the fickle winds of the electorate changed direction. They once liked his unconventional approach to politics, but now they want him to follow through on his promises to lower inflation and gas prices. He once promised to keep us out of foreign wars, but that promise has also been broken. Perhaps he had legitimate reasons to attack Iran, but his failure to make a convincing case to the American public and his broken promises rapidly disillusioned voters. The vice president himself said the war was an electoral cost to the Republican Party. But it wasn’t just a war. Voters were disgusted by the whole act.
When President Trump asked voters to imagine themselves at the polls, it wasn’t just his supporters who turned this election into a referendum on him. So were angry Democrats, fed up independents, and more than a few former MAGA stooges.
They said this election was about affordability, but in reality it was about an undisciplined president who refuses to color code, who blunders into costly wars, who won’t stop an administration that detains and deports high school baseball coaches and Uber drivers and domestic workers, and who has too many white supremacists in his ranks.
He alienated women, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, and African Americans, and angered well-educated Midwesterners who could no longer tolerate his language and antics. The massive MAGA coalition he rallied for a historic victory in 2024 died one election night because they were fed up with the crap and wanted a change of direction.
Things are so bad for the Republican Party that they have lost all kinds of members, from House leaders like Richard Hudson to extremely flawed MAGA warriors like Ken Paxton to experienced and effective embezzlers like Susan Collins. Conservative Republicans lost. Traditional Republicans were defeated. Moderate Republicans lost. Republicans of all stripes lost. It is a complete repudiation of the Republican Party from top to bottom. Unmitigated disaster.
Two questions remain. What will happen to the MAGA movement in the future? And can we go back to the good old days before Trump made politics a blood sport more akin to Ultimate Fighting than the World Wrestling Federation?
Here’s the answer. Republicans will not be able to win the next election unless they fundamentally change how they communicate with voters and what they promise to do for them. MAGA will be lost forever. Governing is about building coalitions, not belittling potential allies with second-guessing attacks or needlessly partisan rhetoric.
Like Andrew Jackson, President Trump has changed American politics forever, but it is highly unlikely that we will ever fully return to the good old days of disagreement without opposition. But voters showed they were fed up with Trump’s obnoxious behavior by handing Democrats a major political victory.
This election did not support Democratic policies. It was a referendum on Trumpism and his vitriolic brand of politics. Let’s see if he got the message.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
