There is a street corner in Minneapolis covered in flowers and other tokens of remembrance. A stethoscope dangles from a makeshift cross fastened to a lamppost. All this is for Alex Pretti, the intensive care unit nurse killed by immigration agents earlier this year. On Tuesday, after casting their ballots, Minnesotans stopped by to leave “I Voted” stickers at the memorial. They did the same thing for Renee Nicole Good, a writer and mother of three, also shot dead by a federal agent. “I just want this nightmare to end for our city and for our country,” one woman told the local press as she left a sticker for Pretti.
And end it did.
The scale of the Democratic Party’s midterm triumph was biblical. Kansas elected a Democratic senator for the first time in nearly a century, and Texas is now blue. “That is a hard sentence to utter,” wrote a distraught Ted Cruz on X. “But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas.” Democrats are projected to capture at least 258 House seats, according to NBC News, and have secured a Senate majority with at least 54 seats, likely 56 once the final two races are called. I could tell you how many state legislatures and governorships have been flipped. Or I could say Democrats picked up enough to potentially end the Electoral College. Democrats won races where they weren’t even running. For example, in September, Eric Armstrong dropped out of his bid for an Iowa Statehouse seat, citing health reasons. Voters had different plans and sent him back in. Armstrong grumbled to The New York Times that he would do his “best to represent” his district. “But I still have health issues,” he added. One might say he’s tired of winning.
I, a former Republican, voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, hoping for something like this to happen, then voted straight-ticket Democrat this year, glad that it did. The GOP deserved this belated outcome. Some Republicans fear Democrats will hold the Senate until 2032. I hope so, because the real fight has only just begun. Republicans suffered an extinction-level event, but it is doubtful that there will be a course correction from the psychopathy that triggered the belt-to-ass beating that is still dishing out licks. For the foreseeable future, a key feature of American politics is protecting the country from the dying Trump movement and its outgrowths. If you think that’s hyperbole or an expression of mere partisanship, then you should pay a visit to the Good and Pretti memorials.
The surest sign that the right will only become more deluded and dangerous is its response to the midterms. It boils down to two things: primarily blaming the Iran war while continuing to support a race war. Indeed, as I was writing this, Trump named Stephen Miller—the architect of the cruel policies Americans just rejected—as his new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. The decision was met with widespread approval from the worst corners of the right, which will not let something as small as a generational rebuke stay their agenda.
The Iran War
What’s happening now is somewhat difficult to unpack, and that’s in no small part due to the fact that the way the right reasons and reacts to its environment closely resembles the behavior of a schizophrenic. But I’m going to try, and I’ll start with Iran.
In a nutshell, the right, which doggedly defended or downplayed Trump’s war until now, is finally conceding that it has been an unmitigated disaster for Americans and has, along with tariffs, driven up costs. All of that is true. The war is unpopular, and it has made life worse. The problem is that this concession is really a scapegoat.
It’s a way for the new right that coalesced with Trump and took over the GOP to seem introspective and, more importantly, ward off the old guard that sees a potential opening to retake the castle. An exchange between National Review’s Dan McLaughlin (old) and The Federalist’s Sean Davis (new) is illustrative. I don’t mean to say that there isn’t overlap between these factions; National Review learned to live with Trump in a way that, say, The Bulwark—to its credit—never did. But National Review is not the same animal as The Federalist, which, like The Blaze, exists to bootlick Trump and his allies.
Davis responded to the losses by singling out Marc Thiessen, who I situate in the old guard camp:
Pretty self-explanatory. Sean Davis is like a homeless person assaulting the first shopper he sees walk out of the 7/11 he lives behind because he thinks their face is made of bees. I don’t like Thiessen, but it’s just deranged to put the midterms on a columnist for The Washington Post.
Then comes Dan McLaughlin, riding to Thiessen’s defense.
It’s remarkable how well you can see the contours of the division in this row.
Davis blames the pro-war crowd for leading Trump astray, for Trump can never fail, only be failed; McLaughlin responds with time-honored Republican free-market worship. It was the tariffs that did Trump in, he says, and the only problem with the war was how it was executed, not that it should never have happened at all. McLaughlin is closer to the truth than Davis in that he is correct that it wasn’t just the war. However, his foreign policy views, like those of most Republicans, are completely out of step with how most Americans feel.
The Davis position has emerged as one of the two cornerstones of the right’s consensus, and it has been interesting to see JD Vance plant his flag there as well.
In a long post that isn’t worth suffering through, Vance, who forgets that he is vice president from time to time, declared: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.”
The president? You mean your boss? The one who made you the primary salesman of the war to the public?
Vance has a habit of dissociating, slipping out of his suit and showing up next to you in the crowd to say, “don’t elect the people who caused these problems,” and “if you want to rebuild the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington.” So true.
Unfortunately for him, though, James Donald Bowman—excuse me, James David Hamel—sorry, I mean JD Vance—is very much on the record explaining his flip-flop from anti-war to pro-war by claiming that the difference between the wars he previously condemned and this one is that “we have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated.” That’s pretty bad. But not as bad as Vance defending the war as necessary to prevent Iran from having suicide vests rigged with nuclear weapons. Yes, he really made that argument.
Vance seems to believe he can salvage his presidential aspirations by essentially throwing Trump under the bus on this issue. It’s very funny. I hope Trump does what he always does with sycophants and turns on him now that Vance has betrayed everything he ever claimed to believe. Perhaps he could change his name again, maybe write another memoir, or reconnect with his roots in a small town, like Hannah Montana.
But Vance, sadly, has no roots to speak of. Like the right that embraced him, he has nothing except the passing moment that started with Trump.
That brings me to the race war. Vance alluded to it in his post.
In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
According to Vance, the war he opposed before becoming vice president, passionately sold to the public as vice president, and now once again opposes—because it was the old vice president Vice President JD Vance who sold it—was the only reason Republicans lost. Most importantly, the right’s immigration agenda, which includes killing those who get in the way, still wins. If anything, enforcement should be more efficient. Anyone saying otherwise is gaslighting, declares Vance, gaslightingly.
The Race War
The position Vance is taking sketches how the right plans to stage a comeback, now that Trumpism is ending and something else is clawing out of its corpse. It reflects his bottomless cynicism as much as it does their fixations. Cynical, because Vance’s in-laws are Indian immigrants. His children are mixed. He recently said, in a red meat gesture to MAGA, that the Middle East is “a region of the world made up of countries and names that I cannot even pronounce.” His wife’s maiden name is Chilukuri, which is somewhat more difficult to say than “Jordan.” And that’s fine. I still get called Paco and Pablo instead of Pedro. But I hope you see why I doubt Vance has a functioning conscience; otherwise he would be ashamed to conduct himself this way. Vance might not be a white supremacist, but he knows he has to play their tune.
By denouncing the war, and therefore cementing his opposition to the old guard, while simultaneously upholding the hardline immigration enforcement as his utmost priority, Vance is signaling to the right that he is their movement’s most viable heir.
The right is obsessed with race because it understands it to be the thing that will tip the scales of power toward or away from them. There’s some back and forth within the movement over just how much “demographics is destiny.” But for the most part, it sees the world through the lens of an ongoing conflict between whites and everyone else. That is why immigration is its top issue, though it will often discuss it with euphemisms, like “demographics.” For example, The Blaze captioned a video of one of its hosts, John Doyle, as a discussion about “the impact that demographic changes and immigration have on the outcome of elections,” because “the impact that race and immigration have on the outcome of elections” sounds worse.
“We cannot forget the demographic component to all of this,” Doyle said in reference to the midterms. He elaborated in the video: “This is not the same country it was even six years ago. Everybody is looking at Texas starting to go Blue. This is something people have been warning about for decades. The demographic situation in Texas has changed.”
In other words, immigrants are to blame for the midterms. Brown people and their frustratingly delicious cuisine.
Blaze Media treats Doyle like its young golden boy, giving you an idea of how shallow the talent pool is over there.
But then again, Doyle’s job isn’t to be intelligent; it’s telling people what they want to hear. Doyle is genuinely delusional enough to believe these things, though. He truly trusts in his heart of hearts that Republicans suffered a blowout everywhere because of “demographic” changes and that immigration is still the right’s winning issue. Doyle is wrong about the latter, and right about the former, just not how he thinks: according to NBC’s exit polls, all white voters shifted about 15 points to the left. In Texas, every single county shifted to the left.
The really startling shift is found in the group Doyle is supposed to appeal to: Democrats won 59 percent of young white men. That is a 28-point swing to the left. The same survey shows that young white men voted about as Democratic as Latino men did overall, 59 percent versus 58 percent. Young white men, in fact, made a bigger swing to the left than Latinos overall. So when Doyle blames people like me for helping usher in the Blunami, he isn’t wrong. He’s just leaving out that the right managed to push the entire country to the left.
The message still isn’t getting through, though, and it is, from what I can tell, due to a single response to NBC’s exit polls. Republicans got a two-point lead on which party voters trust more with immigration. That’s it. That is their entire source of overconfidence now. When NBC asked who voters trusted on the issue more in 2024, Trump or Harris, voters gave Trump a nine-point lead. But they’re clinging to that two-point lead like the last lifeboat on the Titanic. It was always going to be this way. In a Nov. 1 X post, Blaze Media host Jonathan Keeperman wrote, “Whatever voting trends emerge from Tuesday, changes to the Hispanic vote or youth vote or whatever, will not vitiate this central priority. It is the issue.”
In other words, even if Republicans had not squeaked out the smallest lead on that question, the right would have stayed the course anyway. That is also why the same people touting that little lead as the silver lining are overlooking the other immigration-related responses, and the most important one: 58 percent of voters believe enforcement has gone too far, and only 20 percent say it has not gone far enough. On ICE’s job approval, 60 percent of voters disapprove, and 50 percent strongly disapprove, according to NBC’s figures.
Hardline immigration policies, the kind Doyle and Keeperman favor, are popular almost exclusively with Trump-supporting, Vance-liking Republicans. There is no silver lining. The straws these people are grasping at are imaginary. The right isn’t doing any introspection. It is experiencing mass psychogenic illness. See Blake Neff, a producer on The Charlie Kirk Show, who wrote on X that “Democrats aggressively avoided talking about ICE and immigration during the general election.”
“Immigration wasn’t talked about this cycle, and among voters who said it was critical to their vote, Republicans won easily,” Neff added. This was repeated on a post-midterm podcast hosted by Keeperman, as if it is such a genius observation.
Democrats didn’t need to talk about immigration. Americans witnessed federal agents kill two American citizens and then watched the right, including Neff and his co-host, Andrew Kolvet, rationalize their deaths. Kolvet, in fact, described a union that called for accountability for Good’s killer as one of the “communist front groups,” and amplified a baseless claim that Pretti wanted to “massacre” law enforcement.
We listened to Kristi Noem slander the victims as “domestic terrorists,” saw Vance smirk while refusing to apologize to Pretti’s family for smearing him. We saw federal agents viciously attack immigrants and racially profile U.S. citizens. Neff is under the delusion that we did not know Democrats are softer on immigration than Republicans—not perfect, certainly, but softer—when in fact that is why we voted for them. It actually becomes a dumber point the more you think about it, especially given the nonstop cruelty theater coming from official White House social media accounts. It’s also ironic, as Doyle and Keeperman have both suggested that one way forward for the right is to talk as little about what it is doing as possible to avoid another wave of public backlash.
“The ends are what’s important, not the means,” Keeperman said.
You should not care what gets this done. It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not it gets done, and if we’re looking at an environment in which one way of doing it is going to create political headwinds that doesn’t allow you to achieve those ends, you ought to immediately drop that way of doing it and pivot to some other way of doing it. You ought to talk about it in a way that is appealing to the average voter. And that might mean, by the way, not talking about it at all. And if that’s the case, don’t talk about it. Keep it out of sight.
However, there is no going back. The right misread the 2024 election as its opportunity to take the mask off. Voters saw its ugly face and recoiled in horror. This was evident leading up to the midterms.
A February Quinnipiac poll found that 59 percent of voters said that “they would prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, while 34 percent say they would prefer deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.” A March YouGov survey found that 50 percent of Americans “somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE,” while only 39 percent oppose abolishing the agency. A NORC survey from that same month found that a majority of Americans support a path to legal status for immigrants in the U.S. without authorization. Gallup reported in July that 73 percent of adults say immigration in general is a good thing; majorities said that legal immigration, which much of the right is now also against, has a “very or somewhat positive” effect on “filling gaps in the workforce left by a growing retired population (64 percent), supplying workers for low-wage jobs (60 percent), generating tax revenue for public programs (56 percent), and contributing to the availability of science and technology workers (52 percent).”
An August Economist/YouGov poll found that just 24 percent of Americans want all undocumented immigrants deported. The following month, a POLITICO poll showed that “most Americans—including majorities of both MAGA and non-MAGA Trump voters” support prioritizing people convicted of “serious violent or sexual offenses” for deportation. Support falls steeply among both of these groups for removing people “who have lived in the U.S. for several years without legal status or people with dependent children in the U.S.” Even many MAGA Republicans don’t have the stomach for the right’s agenda.
All of that came after NBC’s 2024 exit poll, which showed 56 percent of voters supported giving most immigrants without legal status a chance to apply for it and stay in America. In other words, Trump never had the mandate Doyle, Keeperman, and all the rest understand as vital to their project. There is no “silent majority” waiting to show support, and there is something deeply pathetic about the psychology of the right in this regard. These people love to style themselves as preaching common, if tough, sense. In reality, their views are repugnant to the average person, who is much, much more open to amnesty than the alleged hard-nosed realists.
The average American now hates ICE, wants criminals deported, and favors a pathway to legal status for most everyone else. It wants nothing to do with talk like “The Indian Question,” as Keeperman refers to the discussion about Indian Americans triggered by the racist musings of Bo French aimed at University of Texas at Austin students.
“Successful assimilation is precisely that you wouldn’t notice it,” Keeperman told his podcast co-host, Chris Rufo. “The mere fact of us being able to notice—that no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game—is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.”
What do we mean here by “being able to notice”? He said that they’re “visibly conspicuous, in the way that darker-skinned people are.” I get that way sometimes in the summer as a relatively light-skinned Latino. But I don’t see how it makes me less American. Apparently most people agree, given that French went on to lose his race for Texas railroad commissioner.
And that is why the refrain has become, “It was just the war.” An honest, sober reckoning of the midterms would point to the ineluctable conclusion that the right-wing project has been rejected across the board. The state of democracy was also a top issue for voters, and Democrats won 79 percent of those. Is there a clearer signal? Probably not. But here’s more.
A full 56 percent of voters said “artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers” were crucial or major to their vote, and Democrats won 65 percent of them. That’s significant because politicians like Vance and pundits like Keeperman are allied with the tech world, specifically the Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen networks. It’s another issue the right doesn’t want to talk about. How could it? Its main vehicle for navigating the post-Trump world is firmly in the techno-accelerationist camp.
The right embraced such shocking corruption by one man and his allies that, for the first time I can recall, government corruption actually became a top issue at the ballot box: 55 percent of voters said corruption was a crucial issue to them, and 63 percent of those voters went Democrat. In his pre-election post, Keeperman stressed that “Republicans should make the fight against public fraud a central part of their agenda,” which is what Vance has been doing. I wish I could have been a fly on that wall (or group chat) to hear Vance and his team try to workshop a way of distracting from Trump’s unprecedented corruption, thinking that nobody would understand the ruse. It’s a joke, obviously. When Americans think of self-dealing and graft, immigrants scamming people isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. They think of Trump making more stock trades than every member of Congress combined. They think of Trump raking in at least $2 billion since his return to Washington. They think of the Trump family’s crypto dealings. And they think of the ballroom for billionaires Trump wouldn’t shut up about the day after midterms or the months leading up to them.
The Long Fight
So what’s next? Trumpism is dying. The midterms were its death knell. But the next fight is starting, and there is much possibility and peril on the horizon.
After Trump won in 2024, an anonymous but influential figure on the right reminded his movement in an essay titled “Project 2035: Building a Trump Movement to Last” that the goal is enduring power, not merely winning an election here or there:
I do believe that a violent leftwing revolution with a serious chance of overthrowing America’s Constitutional order and replacing it with a new system will arrive within the next 10 years. This presents an enormous challenge for the incoming Trump administration and whatever is to follow. The conservative movement of today is in a bad place to meet this challenge. . . . President Trump will eventually grow old and die. His replacement as frontrunner, likely J.D. Vance, will not have the same superhuman charisma that once seduced a nation out of seemingly endless decline. As the United States enters its next existential crisis, which I believe will begin within the next 10 years (before 2035, hence the title of this essay), the challenge facing conservatives today is to transform the Trump movement into a professional force capable of working in concert towards realistic objectives over the course of years and decades to come.
It feels strange telling you about the ravings of some seemingly random lunatic. But these people have remarkable sway over the right-wing psychosphere, something that is unique to the movement. This particular person is quoted in the introduction to Jack Posobiec’s Unhumans: Socialist Revolution – Tactics for Patriots to Survive a Communist Uprising, and a catalogue of reprinted books he put together is distributed by Keeperman’s publishing company. Ravings such as these are the psychic wallpaper of the movement. And more importantly, his views are a good distillation of how the right looks at politics today, and why it must be thwarted in the years to come.
Revisit all the gerrymandering efforts ahead of midterms by Republicans, revisit Louisiana v. Callais, and you will see that the right openly embraced attempting to rig the system in such a way as to prevent Americans from being able to vote their way out from their rule. It failed, thankfully. The backlash was too strong, too widespread. In the South, the right hoped its attacks on the Voting Rights Act would deprive black and minority voters of representation. Instead, outrage at these efforts fueled the Democratic Party’s bull run through the region. “It was essentially too big to rig,” as one Trump adviser conceded to CNN.
The bottom line is that Democrats have to win in 2028. Then again in 2030, and in 2032. Doing that will require finding their footing on issues like immigration. I think that the data already shows a few popular items out of which to build a new consensus: path to legal status, deport criminals, dismantle ICE. I do not care about “wokeness,” nor do most Americans. What I do care about is a right-wing movement that sees itself in an existential race against the clock to bring the horrors we saw in Minnesota to every city and town in America. And if not that, then something else, just as sinister and more efficient.
Democrats have to build something now. The party must turn this momentum into a durable, long-term project. It must offer people a constructive vision of the future that addresses real concerns while also neutralizing the vectors by which the right might recover its full power. Everything we have seen from the right since the wipeout this week suggests that it will continue on the path that enraged the country, assured that, at least for the moment, it remains untouchable.
