The End?

Will Leitch, on his Substack newsletter, writes about tomorrow’s midterm election. I think I’m sympatico with everything here. So, instead of rehashing it, I’m blockquoting a bunch of it. I know it’s long, but I would implore you to read it in its entirety.

The last two years have been worse than I thought they’d be—and I thought they would be bad—but not as bad as they could have been. The president and his cronies (and those are the only people left) were more aggressive than even those the most terrified they would be, but they’ve also been as incompetent and stupid as we thought they’d be too, and it’s possible that ends up being our saving grace. There is a world where someone with the total awesome power of the United States government—as Trump has had for the last two years—is cunning and efficient and smart, and slowly, but surely, everything we thought America was would drain and dribble away. Some of this has happened of course. We have lost any standing we had left in the international community in a way that is destructive to the world but arguably worse for ourselves; it has been two year of shooting ourselves in every appendage. We have lost good, valuable people, families have been torn apart, there are people who should be alive right now and are not—it has been awful.

But, if this ends someday, and I’m definitely still saying if, 2026 will be the year that it turned. This is the year it fell apart. It did so from the very beginning, starting with the shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti (whose parents are still trying to get answers out of the government), which led to the truly heroic resistance that the city of Minneapolis showed in response. This was the first real, sustained and unquestionably successful pushback the administration had received in his second term—they certainly didn’t get much from worlds of technology, finance and media—and it was a signal to the rest of the country that the country, at its core, had not fundamentally changed, that good people would fight back against injustice and oppression, that you were not crazy, what was happening was immoral and horrific and you had a foundational right, even obligation, to stand up against it. What Minneapolis did was show, in broad daylight, documented by every day citizens just trying to live their lives, what was happening, what they were doing … and Americans were appalled, because how could they not be? (Here is your reminder that the Vice President refused to apologize to the Pretti family for calling their son a “terrorist” and, in fact, when asked if he should apologize, snapped “for what?”) As usual, the administration’s response was incoherent, backing down in some places and doubling down in others, which had a dual effect: Their weakness was exposed while they still, because of the absurd, delusional media echo chamber in which they reside and the erratic, sundowning leader they all follow, kept making idiotic decisions that made them look even more incompetent and insane while consistently, and steadily, making life worse for more and more American citizens.

This lead to the insane tariffs and the profoundly misguided Iran war, both the sort of slam-head-on-desk decisions that could only come from the addled and the deranged. This worked to turn nearly everyone against them: Those who did so for moral reasons and those who did so for political reasons were joined by those who did so for household or financial reasons. It exposed them for what they were: Vacant, nihilist dipshits. It is now impossible not to see unless you are purposely trying not to look. (Which a third of the country has proven amazingly apt at doing.)

Which leads, again, to Tuesday.

This is a midterm election, which means it will be not be enough by itself to reverse the insane decision this country made to re-elect this madman in 2024. But if this is going to end someday, if, that has to start by curbing him now, right now, before he can cause more unfettered damage. There will be more bad things in the next two years even if this election goes against the president; as many have noted, if you corner a rabid raccoon in your garage, that you have have cornered a rabid raccoon in your garage is both the good news and the bad news. But putting control of the Senate and the House back in the hands of the opposition party does two massively important things:

It puts up an institutional blockade that will not stop him but will absolutely slow him down.

It is a massive public rebuke, a clear, obvious and overwhelming sign—to the nation, to the world, to him, to Republicans who have supported him out of self-interest, to every American citizen, to history—that this is not what we want, this is not who we are, that we want this over with. That we want it to end.

This is why the “blue wave” that seems to be forming is so important. You can be skeptical of some of the Democratic candidates, for whatever reason you may be skeptical of them. You can focus just on your own state, whether it has a Senate race or not. You can argue what the direction of the Democratic party should or should not be. (Which will, in itself, affect the direction of the Republican party, which is an important factor in whether this is going to end for all of us, whether you are a Republican or not.) But right now, a huge wound has been gushing blood for the last two years, and if we don’t at least put some sort of tourniquet on it, we’re gonna bleed out. Control of Congress will slow him down for the next two years, and that’s important. But just as important, if not more so, is drawing the line in the sand right now: This has to end. We have to be something different.

It’s time.