Voters Reject the Cruelty, Chaos, and Corruption of Trumpism

Donald Trump should have spent more time studying physics. In particular, he should have familiarized himself with Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Translated into language the MAGA man could understand, this amounts, in politics, to something like “promoting a far-right agenda that tramples the rights of millions of Americans and expecting a massive blowback at the polls from an enraged and energized population.” Question the dignity and legal status of people, and you should expect the emergence of political movements that seek not only to protect existing human and civil rights, but also to expand them. Demonize immigrants, and you should expect coalitions that bring immigrants into the corridors of power that MAGA is so terrified of losing control of.

This week’s election results, 17 days after at least 7 million Americans took to the streets in thousands of anti-Kings protests across the country, showed this blowback in all its multifaceted trappings. Almost everywhere there has been an election, Trump’s agenda has been put to the test and local candidates have triumphed by promising policies that are inclusive, economically ambitious, pro-immigrant, and based on the rule of law.

The headline of the day, of course, was that a socialist, Muslim, immigrant, millennial candidate had won the mayoralty of New York. But while Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary victory — and his equally extraordinary victory speech — were sure to send Trump into paroxysms of rage, the real story Tuesday night extended beyond the confines of New York City. Take your pick: Across the country, the results have been a rejection of the chaos, cruelty, incompetence, disregard for scientific knowledge, and corruption of Trumpism.

In Pennsylvania, three Democratic Supreme Court justices targeted by MAGA were re-elected handily, each with more than 60 percent of the vote. In Georgia, two Democrats were elected to the state’s utility regulator; it was the first time in nearly 20 years that Democrats won a statewide election for non-federal office. In Mississippi, Democrats picked up two seats in the state Senate and, in doing so, shattered the Republican Party’s supermajority in the Legislature.

The New Jersey gubernatorial race had, for months, been described as a toss-up. In the end, Democratic candidate Mikie Sherrill won by 13 points. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger triumphed in the gubernatorial race by an equally large margin, returning the state’s governorship to Democrats. In the state House of Delegates, Democrats increased their number by 51 seats to 64. It is a rout of epic proportions, fueled at least in part by the vast destruction of local jobs and community that Trump’s war on federal workers has wrought in Virginia.

And then there’s California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has thrown his political weight behind Proposition 50, a measure that would allow the state to suspend its independent district council and redistrict House seats in a way that neutralizes the Republican Party advantage Texas gained, at Trump’s urging, by implementing mid-decade redistricting. By the end of the evening, it was clear that Proposition 50 had passed by a margin of nearly two to one. What is worrying for Republicans is that this measure has not had great success only in liberal coastal cities. In conservative parts of the state with large Hispanic populations — inland areas such as San Bernardino, Riverside, Fresno and Imperial County, all of which voted for Trump in 2024 — majorities of voters also supported Proposition 50.

The Proposition 50 results suggest a widespread collapse in Hispanic support for the GOP in recent months, as ICE has repeatedly and violently targeted people for kidnapping and deportation based on their skin color, the language they speak, their accents, and even the tattoos they sport. Isaac Newton would not have been surprised.

Add up the results and Tuesday was a surprisingly bad day for MAGA. Yet instead of thinking about what voters were saying to the MAGAfied GOP, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that these were all victories in Democratic states – and I repeat, they were not – and that there were no lessons to be learned heading into the 2026 midterm elections. Republican congressional leaders lined up to smear Mamdani – to accuse him of being a communist and to condemn Democratic leaders for somehow sleeping with Mamdani. (In fact, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer didn’t even have the courage to say who he voted for in the mayoral election.) Trump flaunted, in all caps of course, that the Republican Party lost because of the government shutdown and because he wasn’t on the ballot.

This is, at best, disingenuous. Trump’s name may not have been on the ballot, but his policies, his actions, and his disregard for the rule of law most certainly were. It was Trump, after all, who spent much of the last week defying court orders to restore SNAP spending so that millions of food-insecure Americans could put food on the table this Thanksgiving. And it was Trump who doubled down on this threat even as his own spokespeople tried to push it back. It was Trump who was on CBS Sixty minutes a few days before the election, to say that ICE had not gone far enough in its terrorization of immigrants, “because we were held back by liberal judges.” And it was Trump who presided over the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House, giving the middle finger to the idea that the White House is “the people’s house.”

Make no mistake, Donald J. Trump, criminal, absolutely was on the ballot. And its evil presence has proven catastrophic for Republican candidates and the priorities of one state after another.

Republicans have sought to project an aura of invincibility and inevitability in the Trump era. Steve Bannon even went so far as to say that Trump would get a third presidential term – despite the constitutional ban – in 2028, and that the hundreds of millions of people in the United States “should just live with it.” Tuesday’s elections should put an end to this nonsense. They showed, in case anyone doubted it, that there is nothing inevitable about the ultimate victory of Trumpism or that the country will shift to the right in the years to come.

Trump is not an all-knowing, all-conquering political savant. Rather, he is a narcissistic thug with mediocre intellect, an elderly, insecure gangster who surrounds himself with courtiers and who has managed to maneuver his way into the spotlight for too long. On Tuesday, voters told him that the United States was not his personal property and that they would not put up with so much sadistic, senescent nonsense from the MAGA man.