Darline Graham’s closing argument as to why she should continue representing South Carolina in the U.S. Senate was to call her opponent “batshit crazy.” By emulating the coarseness of her creator, Donald Trump, Graham became a vignette illustrating the deterioration of the nation’s civic life. Her opponent is now called “Senator-elect.”
When Graham’s brother, Lindsey, a senator, died in July, she was appointed to complete his expiring term, then she was chosen by Trump to (he assumed) serve a full term. He did this for the same reason he stocked his government with obedient misfits and intellectual ciphers (Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and on and on).
Trump elevated Graham for the same reason he has smashed the White House and splattered the nation’s capital with his bad taste. He has done all this because: He could.
He could, partly because the Republican-controlled Senate was invertebrate. Graham promised to be the president’s sock puppet (“I will have President Trump’s back 100 percent”). South Carolinians detected how he, and she, insulted them.
A fun fact: Come Jan. 3, the Senate will include a Kansas Democrat. The last time one was elected to the Senate, in 1932, the Democrat had been born in 1879, during the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Political scientists can perhaps tickle from the electoral data some facts about the following.
How much did the masked marauders of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contribute to making one of Trump’s two most salient issues in 2024, immigration, into a negative for him? How much did his tariffs nullify another winning issue of 2024, inflation?
The importance of money in politics is more asserted and deplored than measured. In Texas, Elon Musk, the most overrated dabbler in U.S. politics, perhaps did something useful with his estimated $224 million money geyser for Republicans. He unintentionally demonstrated that there is a point at which the utility of political dollars not only declines steeply, but actually becomes negative. Senator-elect James Talarico prospered politically while saying, “Texas is not for sale.”
Furthermore, all political spending funds, directly or indirectly, the dissemination of political speech. Those who have nothing intelligent, interesting, pertinent or plausible to say will injure themselves by lavish spending that makes this absence obvious. Vivek Ramaswamy will not be Ohio’s governor (or a Republican presidential candidate again), in part because of a campaign ad (featuring his opponent’s mother) that will live in political lore as a spectacular act of self-harm.
Tuesday was hardly an extinction event for the Republican Party. The last time the party’s survival was said to be doubtful was after the 1964 shellacking of Barry Goldwater, who lost 44 states. The party won four of the next five, and five of the next seven, presidential elections.
Our parties are primordial. So, the Republicans’ recovery is as predictable as what will cause it — excesses by Democrats. They will misread the largely negative nature of the voters’ mandate to them, which is: Stop the national embarrassments, the rampant egotism, corruption, recklessness and incompetence.
Congressional Democrats will rightly try to investigate, publicize and discourage all of this. Trump might inadvertently give Congress a spine transplant by spurning its subpoenas. By a political version of Newton’s third law of motion (for every force or action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction), his obduracy might prompt, on Capitol Hill and in the public, an overdue reaction against presidentialism — the overbearing primacy of the chief executive — that has poisoned politics for decades.
Meanwhile, stifle post-election giddiness. It is time for a sobering thought.
Lear raging on the heath is a figure of pathos. So, in a different way, was Trump when, the day before the elections, he chose, weirdly, the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool as the site for more of his maunderings about this and that.
Euphoria about the smashing to smithereens of his degraded party — a necessary act of civic hygiene — should be tempered by some facts: The president has learned how much latitude a president has if he acts fast and breaks things because he has no constitutional conscience — no allegiance to the spirit of the document. He has learned this from executive branch enablers masquerading as conservatives.
And the most important fact we have learned this autumn is never mind his ballroom and his gigantic arch-cum-sniper’s-nest. The president’s rhetorical streams of semiconsciousness have made something patent: He is not well. There might be dark, dangerous days ahead.
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