Dan Dinello Informed Comment
Over the past several days, I have allowed myself to enjoy, celebrate and gloat over the righteous and revengeful blue tidal wave unleashed in a red and blue America united in their hatred of Trump and Republicans. The unequivocal rebuke, historic repudiation, and electoral humiliation delivered to the addled President, spineless Republicans, and the dwindling cult of MAGA clowns sent chills of joy down my spine as my new pacemaker went into overdrive to control my racing heart.
The scale of Tuesday night’s reckoning defies even Trump‘s ability to lie, dissemble, and generally squirm his way out of this monumental beatdown. Voters from coast to coast and up and down the ballot rejected him. Revealed as a loser of epic proportions, Trump might eventually conjure reality-defying claims of electoral fraud. It won’t be easy. For now and forever, the midterm election of 2026 will be known as the most decisive rejection of an American President since the vindictive, thuggish President Richard Nixon was ridden out of town on a helicopter in 1974.
As of Friday, Republicans lost both the House, by at least forty-four seats, and the Senate, by as many as nine seats. This profound repudiation of Trumpism — hopefully its death knell — was a deafening scream of “NO!” to the hateful words, arrogant indifference, murderous actions, bizarre obsessions, and sheer idiocy of the corrupt demented liar in the White House. Simply put, the bad guys lost — a long overdue, deeply satisfying downfall.
Was Trump‘s devastating defeat the result of high gas and diesel prices caused by the stupid war in Iran? For sure. But the staggering magnitude of his renunciation was so widespread because the scale of Trump’s offenses has been so vast. The tariffs and trade wars, the Europe-bashing and anti-Canada hostility, the betrayal of Ukraine and embrace of Vladimir Putin, the grotesque self-enrichment of himself and his family, the invasion of our cities by an armed militia of ICE goons, his complicity with Israel’s war crimes and the extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean.
People voted for Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They voted against the viral spread of data centers and Elon Musk buying elections. They voted against the cost of everything being too damn high. They voted because so much of what is happening in Trump’s America is morally depraved, embarrassing, nauseating, and just plain stupid.
Trump’s own behavior in the last month of campaigning reinforced all the reasons why he is so abhorrent. A uniquely appalling combination of moronic ignorance and mean-spiritedness, Trump fawned over the size of Jon Husted’s ass muscle, marveled over the glories of his golden ballroom, proudly exulted in his heroic battle against the algae in the Reflecting Pool, and reveled in the billions made by oil companies, while dismissing and demeaning voters’ concerns about practically everything.
Nothing better illustrates the utter debasement of those around the President and his own cognitive deterioration than that he thought these were winning sentiments.
Trump maligned Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a “jihadist lunatic,” making El-Sayed’s victory particularly exhilarating. He became America’s first Muslim senator. Michigan voters delivered a resounding rebuke of Trump, his endorsed Islamophobic candidate Mike Rogers as well as Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens who, out of personal pique, endorsed Rodgers the day before the election. Stevens, in joining Rodgers in his campaign of hate, provoked the resignation of her staff and hopefully immolated her political career.
Like much of MAGA, Laura Loomer —”proud Islamophobe,” pro-white nationalist, and Trump acolyte — had a mental meltdown. “America is over,” she declared in a moment of existential despair. “If God is in charge, why did he let our country get taken over by Muslims and communists?” Avoiding serious introspection, she predicted that Americans will be under control of “Sharia law” and forced to learn the Arabic language of our new woke “Islamic communist” overlords. For her own safety, she needs a padded room.
In Ohio, voters delivered a thunderous knockout blow to another Trump-endorsed candidate — the insufferably arrogant Vivek Ramaswamy. An opponent of Medicare and Medicaid and a climate-change denying proponent of fossil fuels, the craven MAGA billionaire grovels at the feet of Donald Trump while campaigning with the smug swagger of an entitled tech bro. He climaxed his horrific campaign for governor with a cruel, disgusting ad that featured the estranged, assault-enabling mother of his opponent Amy Acton.
Calling her daughter a liar, the mother urged voters to reject Acton. As a 12-year old, Acton had been removed from her mother’s neglectful, abusive home and the two had not spoken since then. Her mother had sided with Acton’s stepfather, who was indicted for raping Acton as child. The cruel exploitative ad backfired in a storm of criticism, though it was supported by Trump, VP Vance, and Ramaswamy who doubled down on it. The heinous ad ultimately revealed Amy Acton as the heroic survivor of parental abuse. Acton’s victory was a cathartic rebuke of the smarmy Ramaswamy.
After winning, Acton said: “Ohio has chosen unity and decency over division and hate. The healing begins today.”
Shockingly, Texas also repudiated hate and demonstrated that it was not for sale. Bigoted fear-monger Elon Musk burned through $277 million supporting Texas Republicans and received nothing in return. As cringe-inducing senator Ted Cruz sadly put it, “Texas is blue. I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.”
The reason for Musk‘s focus on Texas is that he reincorporated his companies Tesla and SpaceX in the state. He also moved his personal home there. Musk successfully lobbied Texas Republicans to completely re-write the state’s corporate laws to benefit him personally, including a shield against shareholder lawsuits and changes to highway and airspace usage around his SpaceX facility. In other words, Musk bought the Texas government, and he wanted it to stay bought. Texas voters did not comply.
Aside from his being singularly deranged, Musk’s hilarious face-plant stemmed from his association with the worst excesses of the most despised industry in America: AI data centers. He was also backing an awful, Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Ken Paxton.
A scandal-plagued attorney general and prominent 2020 election denier, the repellent Paxton was dogged by felony securities-fraud charges that resulted in a plea bargain as well as bribery and corruption allegations. Impeached by his Republican colleagues, he managed to survive a Senate trial, emerging with his Trump-like persecution narrative intact and seemingly impervious to the accumulating wreckage of his own making.
In a seismic shift, James Talarico won the Senate seat and finally terminated Paxton’s infuriatingly preposterous 23-year run of electoral invulnerability despite hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the race by Musk, whose ads failed to convince Texans that Presbyterian seminarian Talarico was an unhinged extremist.
Talarico made Musk the centerpiece of his campaign in the final weeks. One of Talarico’s closing ads made the point with brutal effectiveness: Musk is “almost singlehandedly bankrolling the effort to install Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate,” it said. “Elon wants to buy up our land. He wants to buy up our water. And now he wants to buy his own personal US senator. He knows that if his millions drag the most corrupt politician in Texas across the finish line, Ken Paxton will owe him everything.”
“Against big money and big odds we took our power back,” Talarico said in his victory speech. He called the negative campaign waged by Musk and Paxton the “final howls of a dying establishment, the death rattle of a status quo that knows its days are numbered.”
For Ken Paxton advisor Michelle Smith, Tuesday’s results were not only an electoral catastrophe, but they spelled the end of Christianity. For her, Democratic rule meant that “We’re going to have a state income tax. Our churches, Christianity — it’s all gone.”
In a delicious double take-down, civil rights lawyer and former Austin school board president Gina Hinojosa ousted the heartless three-term governor Greg Abbott, the tyrannical titan of Texas politics. Another contemptible MAGA hero bit the Texas dust in a stunning upset that caused puerile Ted Cruz to whine in protest: “Hear me now: we will bring Texas back. Texas will be red again. We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas.”
Cruz loved that Abbott had signed the nation’s harshest abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The law empowered private citizens to sue abortion providers or helpers.
Virulently xenophobic, Abbott also facilitated ICE raids that incarcerated immigrants in private prisons owned by Abbott’s donors. The brutal mass deportation campaign pushed droves of Hispanic voters, who had backed Trump in 2024, to vote for Hinojosa.
She succeeded despite Abbott’s Trumpian attacks that portrayed her as too “woke” for Texas and labeled her as “gender-bender Hinojosa.” She countered the tired culture-war tactics with an ad declaring her pronouns: “Mom, Texan and soon-to-be governor.” She succeeded despite being trounced in campaign spending by Abbott and Musk.
Like Talarico, Hinojosa focused much of her campaign on Musk. She promised to investigate his corrupt Abbott-engineered deals, such as his receiving preferential treatment in the awarding of state funds for the build-out of his broadband company Starlink. She declared that Abbott was “doing the bidding of the world’s only trillionaire.”
Fiercely criticizing Abbott’s tax breaks for AI data centers including those planned by Musk for Space X, she asserted, “Data centers are coming in and doing as they please — They are guzzling up all our water, guzzling up all our electricity – and the people have no say. We are at a time in history where the crony capitalism and the corruption are in our face, it is blatant. Wealth is built on the backs of our government with our taxpayer dollars. It is out of hand. It is so imbalanced.”
At the top of safe Republican strongholds was Texas, the state that has come to epitomize the suffocating grip of modern MAGA rule. The anchor state in the Republicans’ Electoral College coalition, its defeat punctuated a nation-wide condemnation of Trumpism that also helped break the GOP’s Southern stranglehold. In the iconic words of OutKast rapper André 3000, “The south got something to say!”
Along with Texas, Democratic victories in Georgia, North and South Carolina, and probably Mississippi cracked the iron curtain that divided the Confederacy from the rest of the country. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms won her gubernatorial race to become the first Black woman governor in the US and Jon Ossoff — the charismatic Democratic presidential contender and sharp Trump critic — easily won re-election to his Senate seat. Among the most astonishing results was the victory, in deep red South Carolina, of pediatrician Annie Andrews over Darline Graham, the notably weak sister of deceased Senator Lindsey Graham.
But the prize for sheer eye-bulging amazement would go to African-American Democrat Scott Colom’s triumph over Mississippi’s decidedly dim-witted incumbent senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith. He currently leads in the still-undecided race.
Election night victories felt like democracy had been reinvigorated. Republican attempts to steal the election failed. At the urging of a terrified Trump, Republican state legislators spent a year trying to fortify their House majority against an expected midterm onslaught from Democrats. They surgically redrew congressional districts in their favor helped by the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. On election night, however, the red wall that Republicans had gerrymandered collapsed under a blue flood. They lost nearly all of the remapped seats.
After a few days, my election euphoria waned as I angrily remembered all of the horrific economic and human damage caused by Trump’s brutal impulses and encouraged by a silent supine Republican congress. Further, I will not assume that a single victorious election night translates into a permanent realignment of the US electorate toward my political preferences. Trump’s promotion of fascist Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller to chief of staff is a declaration of war on Democrats and the electorate.
The election did restore hope for meaningful change. But time is limited by an impatient electorate. After celebrating, Democrats must work fast to show they can rebuild the country in all the ways that it has been broken and corrupted.
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