The Revolt That Brought Trump Back Now Threatens to End Us All

Americans are angry, and they have every reason to be. The middle class is being squeezed out of the life it worked to build. Inflation, immigration, regulation and radical initiatives involving race, sexuality and gender have become an assault on our security and independence. People see their savings drained, necessities slipping beyond reach, decent jobs becoming harder to find and an education for their children carrying an impossible price. Pile on yet another nonsensical policy to disrupt what remains and it can be maddening. We all feel it.

Adding to that anger is a growing perception that the people operating the machinery of government are corrupt. That basic truths are being lied about. That money collected from the public is being siphoned away while the people who supplied it are told to accept less. COVID lockdowns. BLM riots. Epstein. Wars with no apparent purpose. Insider trading. No logical answers for any of it. Infuriating.

This precise anger is what put Donald Trump in office in 2016 and returned him in 2024. Those votes were a repudiation of the system, a raised middle finger to the people running it. Enough. We work, we pay, we try to raise our families, and you keep making it harder. Enough. Tear it down.

Viewed from outside that anger, voting for DSA and other fringe left-wing candidates whose own campaign promises are clearly going to do harm to the country and its' citizens seems to make no sense. Texas just chose a new governor who promises to stop enforcing the border and to regulate the industries that make Texas one of the richest states in the union. Huh? Why would Texans choose that outcome? Anger. Punishing the people responsible becomes more important than examining what their replacements intend to do. The attraction is the blow against the incumbent. The damage can come afterward.

In 2024 Trump looked like the last, best defense against runaway spending, inflation, endless war, an unenforced border and corruption. He had been shot. He and his family had been humiliated by the state. What better choice to tear that system apart?

His campaign promised to do just that. Return the country to the people supporting it. End the wars. Deport the millions of illegal immigrants welcomed into the country under Joe Biden. Expose the Epstein class and hold them accountable. Remove wasteful government spending to its' pre-COVID levels (at least). Lower prices. End the senseless Ukraine war "in the first ten minutes." These, and others, were the promises made to the people. The MAGA base voted for him, in large part, so that these promises would become reality.

Nearly two years later the report card is terrible. Government spending is higher than ever. Crushing inflation remains an impediment to an affordable life for most average Americans. Not only did we not end the Ukraine war, we have a new and more troublesome war in Iran. Epstein is a hoax? Deportations largely halted. No accountability for any of the open corruption we can all see.

Promises made. Promises broken.

That failure makes handing power to radicals attractive, even to people who might be harmed by their program. The righteous rage is real. So is the danger. There is little doubt that handing government control to a group of radicals would compound the damage, but a voter intent on delivering punishment may be willing to take that chance.

What next. Democrats will control the House and Senate. Investigations designed to embarrass Trump and the people who supported him will ensue immediately. Retribution is what they ran on, and that is precisely what they will do. The House will impeach the President and it isn't inconceivable, if not the base case, that Republicans hostile to Trump will join a larger Democratic bloc in the Senate, making conviction a possibility. JD Vance would then finish out the term if he isn't impeached as well (perhaps also the base case?).

What is more troubling for the longer term is what newly-elected Democratic state leadership in places like Texas, Ohio and Georgia will do, likely making the eventual repair harder. Texas is an immediate concern. A governor's influence over appointments and the administration of elections has consequences beyond a single term. In Texas, that includes appointing the secretary of state with Senate confirmation. Policy changes and institutional influence together could make a Republican recovery more difficult long after the first celebration ends.

What happens in 2028 will depend on what follows now. Does the conflict with Iran continue or escalate? What happens to immigration enforcement and deportations? Is there any action on affordability, to the extent such an option even exists? Does the public see government becoming cleaner and less corrupt, or continuing the trend of people benefiting from access? And whom do Republicans choose to lead their ticket? The remaining term will shape the answers. The party cannot treat 2028 as a substitute for them.

Existential damage in the next two years is difficult with a Republican in the White House.

The grave concern is a Democratic White House backed by Democratic control of Congress after 2028. We don't need to guess about what that would mean. The Democrats gleefully tell you what they will do. Court expansion would produce a judiciary hell-bent on enacting and enforcing policies associated with the most extreme leftists. D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood would add Senate seats and change the chamber's balance for generations. A government determined to relax border enforcement, permit mass immigration, regulate industry more aggressively and censor unwelcome speech would spell the end of the empire.

This is all a circular loop that comes right back to the aforementioned angry MAGA base. The promise of open borders, censorship, packed courts and new states isn't a new dynamic. The Biden White House achieved some of this and would have done far more had it not been for two holdout Democrat Senators who blocked them from ending the filibuster, which would have paved the path for all of these radical policies to move forward. Thankfully that didn't happen, and the country spoke by delivering Trump and the Republicans full control of the government. You would think they might do something to prevent these outcomes in the future, but no. They did nothing.

Now swap out Joe Manchin Kyrsten Sinema for Abdul El-Sayed and James Talarico, and the chamber is locked and loaded. We are two years from that outcome. There will be no holdouts next time. And that will be the end.

This is a lesson for all of us on the danger in voters seeking revenge for one set of failures, and how that authorizes changes far harder to undo. The powers being handed to the Democrats will be used to enact profound changes that might never be reversed. This will happen now in a small handful of newly-blue states, and if or when the White House flips in 2028, those changes will be made at the national level.

Regaining or undoing the damage of these political losses will be extraordinarily difficult. Aside from the eroded trust within the base for promises broken, there is a practical political matter of how we can avoid the calamity of a D-controlled government beyond 2028. Texas is central to the Republican route to the White House - there is no electoral path without Texas. A significant political effort within the Republican party must be made to understand and answer the reasons we just got wiped out in Texas. Without that we are lost.

A separate matter is the fact that Americans presently have only two choices. Chicken or fish. If you hate the fish, chicken it is. When you are fed up with the do-nothing Republicans, AOC it is. An angry electorate trapped between two choices will keep blaming whoever holds the levers. The opposition wins because it is the available instrument of punishment, and the size of the victory can tell us more about the intensity of the rage than enthusiasm for the replacement's program. That is what we saw last week. A credible third choice might offer a release valve for the downward spiral we presently find ourselves in. There are some rumblings on that subject in the winds.

We are all prone in modern American politics to engage in the tribal warfare of it all. My side. Their side. But underneath all of this is a country we love, our children's future, and a debt of gratitude to the people who came before us. The political decisions we make, collectively, have profound impacts on these things. Last week we handed enormous amounts of power to people who threaten to destroy us. That decision was made out of anger, and for good reason. It is incumbent on us, as a party, and as patriots, to address the source of that anger, and then work like hell to prevent the next shoe from dropping. That shoe, I fear, will be the last.