Trump is responsible for the Republican midterm disaster. But he is far from over

Well, Main Street USA has spoken, and it’s now pretty safe to say that the Democrats pulled out a victory in the midterms and the Republicans screwed it totally.

Over the past few days, one result after another came in, all of them terrible for the GOP. They had to surrender the hope of a red wave on election night and in the days after, as it became clear that only a score or so of House seats were going to change hands, and the last of these would take days and weeks to count and then recount. Then they lose the Pennsylvania Senate seat to John Fetterman, who had alarmingly blorked and gasped his way through the one debate — bravely, yes, but also alarmingly, the victim of a stroke months earlier. Elsewhere, Democratic Senate seats polled as close didn’t come near to falling. 

With their narrative shot, the Republican media celebrated the never-in-doubt Florida victories of Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco “Little Hands” Rubio, and glommed onto the Nevada and Arizona Senate races, and the latter state’s hardcore election-denier governor and state secretary candidates. Adam Laxalt from Nevada and Blake Masters from Arizona became cable news fixtures, as the right desperately tried to keep some sort of momentum going.

But it was not to be. In the last 48 hours both have fallen after some hard counting, to incumbents Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada and Mark Kelly in Arizona. And then, in the last 24, mirabile dictu, the shiny, sharp-tongued, take-no-priso… oh look, arsehole, she’s just an arsehole, Kari Lake, Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate, narrowly lost to Katie Hobbs, the current state secretary. 

Et tu Arizona? Then die red wave. Lake had been their star girl, Trump with poise, the politician they had hoped Sarah Palin would be. Her putdowns of the media, her sinister allusions to what would follow her election and her unashamed election denial had made her Joan of Arizona. They warmed their hands by her glow, and then she went up in flames, a little smoke signal in the desert  She, and her election-denier state secretary running mate Mark Finchem, appear to be refusing to accept the result, and they have plenty to work with, as the count took days, and had a late blue surge. 

The Republicans are even suffering the ignominy of being raced to the limit on the House. At time of writing, they’re on 217, one short of a majority of 218. There aren’t many places left to get them: the Republicans are fighting for four seats in California, and the rest are scattered, such as gun-totin’ mama Lauren Boebert in Colorado, fighting for her political life.

It’s getting very very tight for them, and it will almost be more trouble than it’s worth. The Republican leadership’s desire to roll out a comprehensive anti-Biden program will be somewhat stymied by the dozen or so Republicans who have won seats in Democrat-leaning districts, and will suddenly be interested in the idea of consensus, coming together, a new respect, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the right of the party has been making noise about blocking Kevin McCarthy as the new speaker — though they couldn’t stop him getting voted up as House GOP leader today, which is the precursor.

How could it possibly get any worse? Well, Donald Trump is about to announce his candidacy for 2024, and may well have done so by the time you read this. With many of the candidates he sponsored having crashed and burned, the deep hatred of the Republican establishment directed towards him, and being a direct competitor for the base with heir apparent DeSantis, he is the Republicans’ nightmare.

News Corp has not so quietly instr-, er, urged Trump not to run, and a bunch of MAGA House reps who were going to attend the announcement at Mar-a-Lago have suddenly melted away. For Trump, this all should be a disaster. The one thing he hates is to be called is a loser, and, as Chris Christie pointed out, he has lost the party, the House in 2018, the presidency in 2020, and the Senate in 2022. 

But the trouble for the Republicans is: there’s no one like The Donald. He is utterly singular. For his supporters — and he still has enough to surge through the primaries — he exists at a position somewhere between reality and fantasy. They love him not because he gives a story about free enterprise and that anyone can make it, but precisely because he doesn’t.

Trump is, in the cultural memory and on TV, “the boss”, and for many he’s redolent of a time, the post-war Keynesian period, when a “class realism” was more frequently applied than homilies about striving. Trump promised not that everyone could get rich, but that the “good jobs” would come back. By this, he meant high-paying factory jobs of old, jobs that the non- or basic-skilled could walk into.

This is the opposite of the purported American dream because it accepts class not only as legitimate but as a preferred mode of life. With free-market Republicans praising driven entrepreneurs and Democrats in love with exceptional heroes of gender, race, identity, etc, Trump provided a politics for the rest. “Because he’s a businessman,” hundreds of people said, “he knows how to run things.”

They said it like “businessman” was a caste, not a profession, and they liked that because it offered stability and certainty. In a world where billions were made from computer magic by kids, Trump reunited the idea of the leader, the elder and the father. He offered the promise of stability, not disruption, and this supported the magical notion that he had unique qualities that restored a lost America.

That, in turn, allowed such beliefs to be transferred to the Trump family as a whole — or his progeny and son-in-law at least. Such a belief in Trump thus made all the opulence part of his gift to his people. Coming down a gold elevator to accept a nomination? Does not the most famous myth of modern America have four broken characters on a journey to wholeness by “following the yellow brick road”? 

Professional politicians of the right such as DeSantis can’t provide anything like that. The right are desperately talking themselves into the idea that the Trump magic can be transferred across, without acknowledging what a singular place Florida has become, and how Americans look for something different in a president than they look for in a governor. Mind you, Trump couldn’t provide these things either, and there are a lot of people who won’t be fooled again. But they certainly wouldn’t accept it from “a politician”, not beyond the base in any case. 

Of course, if Trump doesn’t run, this was all moot. But even so, his presence will hang in the air, above the Republican primaries, over everything. Bizarrely, the Republican losses caused by his endorsement have strengthened his power, as the party is in a state of vacuum. Trump can stroll in and dictate, and there will be no unified front against him. Trump’s a conman, the type who can bilk his marks repeatedly because he keeps the relationship with them. With that situation in place, he could stroll through the primaries and pick up the nomination like a feather in Main Street USA.