Analysis by Todd Lassa
Tuesday’s midterm election Blue Wave – or call it a crush, tsunami, mushroom cloud, whatever – looks like it could be the beginning of the end of the MAGA movement and maybe remains of the Tea Party movement that preceded it. But it’s too early to declare it time to put a fork into Donald J. Trump himself.
After all, there’s the president’s new red hat. Act now; just $35.95.
The hat represents President Trump’s key weapon for resisting the new Democratic majorities’ efforts to claw back his foreign adventure in Iran, his tariffs, his questionable – corrupt – side deals, his administration’s Stasi-like deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, funded to $85 billion, his “Department of War,” his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool rehab, his Arc d’ Trump and his ballroom blitz.
By Wednesday morning, the Blue Wave could be felt soaking dry MAGA land in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina and maybe even Mississippi.
Will this Democratic dominance last beyond 2028? Probably not. But voters in those states and once-deep red districts within may never return to MAGA even as the last of Trump’s diehard faithful cough up another $40 for the latest hat update.
Trump, who told his midterm stump rally faithful – never saw rallies that big, except when he was running for president, he says – to think of him as on the ballot for Tuesday’s election.
Calling in to Fox News Democracy 26 after the strength of the Blue Wave had made itself clear, Trump said; “It’s been done before, as you know, numerous times. It’s the power of veto, it’s one of the stronger powers that a president has and they’ll send over things that are insane and I’ll veto them and after a couple of months of vetos, then they’ll call and they’ll say, ‘how do we get this stuff done? And we’ll work together. I have a lot of friends in the Democrats, believe it or not.”
It was not the Iran war, he said initially, Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that everybody outside the White House predicted, and the way it pushed oil prices up, nor ICE’s killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian refugees, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff making side deals while shuttling diplomacy mostly to Vladimir Putin, his Smoot-Hawley-like obsession with tariffs, nor his insulting voters who reject data centers as “backwards and poor” that cost the GOP the House, Senate, several gubernatorial and many local elections.
“They didn’t like the candidates,” he told Fox News. “And some of the candidates I endorsed, they fought me.
“I wasn’t on the ballot. If I was on the ballot, they would have got [unintelligible – maybe ‘done,’ but sounds like ‘down’].”
At the White House Wednesday, Trump reversed himself a bit, admitting that it was the war’s effect on the US economy that lost Republicans support Tuesday.
By now we can take it seriously when Trump says he will not run for an unconstitutional third term in 2028. He will take the money -- $2.2 billion last year, including $1.8 billion on cryptocurrency, the $TRUMP meme coin that lost 98% of its value for 740,000 mostly MAGA investors – and run.
The Democratic majorities in the House and Senate undoubtedly will try to impose the War Powers Act, again, introduce a bill imposing sanctions on Russia but without the escape clause allowed the president in the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 and of course attempt to claw back its own budgetary powers.
President Trump will rule to wield his Sharpie another day, maybe with his new red hat on head. This leaves us with the question of whether a sufficient number of surviving Republican senators, maybe five to seven, will be brave enough to vote with Democratic and independent senators, minus John Fetterman (D-PA), to override his vetos.
There will not be a hat for that.
Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings.