America Begins Clapping Back at Donald Trump
After such an election, another president could seek an agreement to end the shutdown, which is, as of this week, the longest in history, breaking the record of thirty-five days set during Trump’s first term. Not Trump. Escalation, not accommodation, is his preferred decision. On Wednesday, his administration announced that due to the shortage of air traffic controllers exacerbated by the shutdown, ten percent of all flights at forty major airports nationwide would be canceled, causing travel chaos in a high-stakes attempt to force Democrats to break the deadlock. I’m not entirely sure about Trump’s theory: If Americans weren’t already blaming the president for the crisis, wouldn’t they be much more likely to do so now? (And the data suggests the electorate has already do hold Republicans accountable.) But no matter. The point is to change the subject, to show that he’s not turning around just because voters don’t like his party as much in Passaic County, New Jersey, or Lynchburg, Virginia.
More fights will undoubtedly follow soon. How long will it be before Trump manages to pick one with New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist whose improbable rise this year has been greeted with almost as much enthusiasm by national Republican strategists as by Brooklyn’s young progressives? Mamdani’s election night victory speech suggested he was more than willing to play a role as a foil to Trump, even going so far as to troll the TV-obsessed president by telling him to “turn up the volume” so he could hear Mamdani’s defiant, come-get-us-if-you-can words. Mamdani knew his man – the White House later confirmed that Trump was indeed watching.
As Washington was still digesting the election results Thursday, a fundraising email landed on the mailbox from Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic congresswoman from Texas who has become one of the party’s loudest TV warriors. Subject line: “His presidency is over for all of you. »
Crockett may have exaggerated a bit about Trump’s post-election obsolescence, but she was right. The smell of generational change now hangs over American politics. It was felt in Mamdani’s victory, of course, but also in those of Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who, as my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted, were not in politics when Trump first became president. Mamdani ended Andrew Cuomo’s comeback attempt, sending the former governor — whose father also held that position — once again into involuntary retirement. Cuomo, for now, is a name to be associated with the past, not the future, of New York politics.
Election Day itself began with the early morning announcement that Dick Cheney, one of the dominant Republicans of his generation, had died at the age of eighty-four. When Cheney first made his mark in Washington, as Gerald Ford’s wunderkind White House chief of staff, he was the same age as Mamdani is today. In a career that has included many acts, including serving as influential vice president to George W. Bush and chief promoter of the Iraq War, Cheney’s latest — as a staunch opponent of Donald Trump — may have been the most surprising. While other prominent Republicans, including her former boss, remained largely silent as Trump took over their party and challenged the constitutional norms and principles they had once loudly defended, Cheney proudly supported her daughter Liz’s efforts to resist him. One of the most indelible images of the evolution of our politics in recent years was the sight of Cheney in the House of Representatives during a ceremony organized by Democrats to mark the one-year anniversary of the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on January 6, 2021; he and Liz were the only Republicans present. Democrats, many of whom had once dismissed Cheney as a war criminal, lined up to shake his hand. The visual, like this week’s elections, underlined something essential: politics is moving forward. It’s not static. Cheney’s resistance to Trump in the last years of her life was a rearguard action, not a sign of things to come. His version of the GOP no longer exists.
On Thursday morning, Nancy Pelosi, another giant of our recent politics, announced her decision to retire from Congress at the end of the current term. The two-time Speaker of the House of Representatives, in whose capacity she oversaw major legislative victories, including the passage of the Affordable Care Act, during the Obama administration, is arguably the most powerful woman in American history. During Trump’s first term, she became the president’s greatest scourge, rallying Democrats to recover from the shock of his 2016 victory and take back the House two years later. But this time, when Pelosi is already eighty-five years old and no longer in a leadership role, it will be up to others to regroup.
Trump responded to Pelosi’s announcement in a text to Fox News’ Peter Doocy. “Nancy Pelosi’s retirement is a great thing for America,” he wrote, calling her “nasty,” “corrupt” and “highly overrated.” He added: “I am very honored that she impeached me twice and failed miserably both times. » She tried to get rid of mehe might as well have said: but I’m still here.
But time is running out for Trump, too. The president himself knows it. He blamed Tuesday’s defeats on the fact that he wasn’t on the ballot to rally Republicans, but he didn’t mention a broader constitutional truth about his lame duck status that neither he nor his party seem to have begun to reckon with: He will never again be on the ballot at the top of the ticket. ♦
