Editorial: The repudiation of Trumpism

The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Nov 4, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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President Donald Trump is a loser.

That’s not a slur but the only cogent analysis of what happened in Tuesday’s midterm election. As Republicans were blown out of the water, America witnessed a clear repudiation of Trumpism, as manifest in egotism, extremism, retribution, and both personal and familial corruption.

Tuesday night had the feel of an exorcism. One race crystallized the shocking scale of what happened: the popular longtime governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, the man who bused migrants to Chicago but who had always cruised to victory in the Lone Star State, lost decisively to Gina Hinojosa, a result that would have been unthinkable just a few short months ago. Gov. JB Pritzker, victorious in his own race for another term as governor of Illinois, helped fund Hinojosa’s candidacy. Pritzker clearly has not forgotten what happened.

But Pritzker was not the one who burst the Trump fever dream on Tuesday night. It was voters who decided enough was more than enough.

In many ways, Democrats who had despised Trump from the beginning and never understood his populist appeal were not well positioned to understand the change that occurred over the last several months, especially when it came to rural voters who previously had turned a blind eye to Trump’s personal cruelty and repulsive rhetoric but never loved a truly unlovable man. It was the former Trump voters who saw most clearly that the President only had doubled down on his most toxic qualities. Many of them also deduced from his ramblings that he was pathologically incapable of doing the job they elected him to perform.

Simply put, Trump had gotten even worse: the betrayal of the people of Ukraine, the footsie played with the heinous Vladimir Putin, the familial schemes to make money from influence, the gilded theatrics in Washington, D.C. All of that grated, especially when you could not afford to fill your tractor with diesel.

The decision to wage war in Iran might have been a defensible national security decision, but the only currently visible result to most Americans is higher gas and diesel prices.

Nothing visible has been achieved. The dangerous regime is still in power and there is a growing sense that Iran’s still-robust Revolutionary Guard could and would cause such chaos across the Middle East in the event of a second Operation Epic Fury as to make such an operation non-viable in a world where oil reserves have already been depleted. In other words, voters decided that Trump’s signature combination of braggadocio and indecision had led to them paying the costs without seeing any of the benefits for global peace and security.

Not only were Democrats victorious, retaking both the U.S. Senate and, comfortably, the House, but Trump’s ill-chosen, hand-picked candidates from Darlene Graham (“national security is not my thing”) in South Carolina to Ken Paxton in Texas (“it’s all coming from D.C.”) were roadkill run over by a roaring Democratic truck. Calling into Fox News late on Tuesday night, Trump blamed the candidates and his own absence from the ballot. Even as he was talking, Fox called another Democratic race, adding to the majority in the Senate.

In race after race, Trump’s exorcising of Republican moderates and popular local figures turned solidly Republican states and districts into the sites of historic Democratic wins. If, on CNN, Jake Tapper seemed giddy, and he did, then Trump only has his own pointless battles with the cable network and other media outlets to blame.

Many progressives had a night to remember, but it is also worth noting that Hakeem Jeffries, likely the next Speaker of the House, also will have some new Democratic moderates in his caucus; they had to be moderate to take away so many Republican seats across the South.

In rural Texas, former Trump voters moved to the side of James Talarico, a man whose faith they clearly found to be genuine and who talked in unifying terms, avoiding divisive terminology and emphasizing health care, the need to fight back against corruption and the importance of lowering costs for working families.

Talarico was, Texas voters concluded, a thoroughly decent man and, it turned out, the perfect vaccine for the Trump virus.

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