[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]
Yes, we are still living in a brave new world, and I want to make it really clear. On Tuesday, the Democrats won. It isn’t just that the Republicans lost, but for right now, I want to focus on some of the reasons I think the Republican Party did lose so massively on Tuesday. The results, or the reasons for the results, are multifactorial. The meaning of the results is multibillion.
However, there are many reasons beyond the two most cited. Voters claim that the two biggest reasons for voting Democrat were the economy, also known as affordability, Donald. It’s really a thing. The other is the gobsmacking, in your face, out in the open corruption of Donald, his family, and others in his inner circle.
But again, much, much, much more has been going on. As we learned on Tuesday, the American people have been paying attention. It turns out that they don’t like, for example, that the rule of law in this country is being eroded before our eyes. They don’t like the fact that the Attorney General of the United States is, to all intents and purposes, Donald’s personal defense lawyer, who sees it as his job not to represent the American people but to go after Donald’s perceived political enemies, people like James Comey and Letitia James. As for the economy, yes, it is about the price of gas and essential goods going up. It is about the fact that inflation is rising even though Donald promised the opposite would happen. It’s also about the economics, the glaring inequality of wealth that continues to grow before our eyes because Donald is allowing it to.
People don’t like it when one man is allowed to become so obscenely wealthy that he can set $500 million on fire trying to buy an election. How do we know people don’t like this? Well, because Elon Musk tried to buy several elections, and he succeeded in less than 10 percent of them.
Then there is quite simply the fascism. Americans may not be able to define democracy, but they know they want to live in a democratic country, or at least most of us do. The Republican Party has just been so thoroughly repudiated for enabling and being complicit in all of Donald’s darkest authoritarian and fascistic instincts, and it turns out that doesn’t go over very well.
Then, of course, there is the toxic masculinity, this idea that men, white men in particular, should be able to do to women and speak to women any way they want.I have kind of lost track of how many men in Donald’s inner circle, and with whom he has associated over the decades, have turned out to be sexual predators of one kind or another. There’s a line that can be crossed, even in this deeply misogynistic country of ours. That was most obviously the refusal by Donald and the DOJ to release the Epstein Files, because it became increasingly clear that the refusal was linked not to protecting anybody who was a victim but to protecting the potential predators. Those who might well have been co-conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, two of the worst rapists and sex traffickers of girls and young women this country has ever seen, were the ones being shielded.
Also, perhaps people got really tired of the fact that Donald is constantly attacking women, particularly Black women in power, for being stupid, low IQ individuals. He attacks female reporters much more viciously than he attacks male reporters, often using ad hominem attacks against them. Donald’s taunt to a female reporter was this:
“quiet piggy”
Maybe it was a bridge too far when a woman at one of his rallies, exercising her First Amendment right to protest, called for the release of the Epstein Files while wearing a shirt that said “release the Epstein Files.” Donald essentially gave a pass to the white men in the audience who tried to beat her up.
It also turns out that Americans care deeply about the right to due process, the constitutional right to due process, which extends to everybody in this country, not just its citizens. They take offense at the US military illegally blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea without any evidence of wrongdoing, as if that would be justification. We do not take kindly to anybody, American citizen or not, being taken off our streets and disappeared. And we certainly will not stand for it when an out of control, rogue governmental agency under the leadership of Stephen Miller and with the support of Donald starts murdering people.
We don’t like it. It turns out that when Republicans engage in unconstitutional behavior that limits our choices in an election, we notice. I’m speaking, of course, of the midterm census that was not supposed to happen in response to redrawing district lines and getting rid of some congressional districts to create new ones that favored Republicans, making them almost impossible for Democrats to win. Well, guess what? Democrats won almost every single one of them.
We are not okay with the assaults on our social services. This is related to the economics of it all, because as the rich get richer, it is getting increasingly difficult for people to pay for gas, food, rent, their mortgages, childcare and their healthcare. And this Republican Party, after passing the big abominable bill, has taken an ax to the programs so many millions of Americans rely on, such as SNAP and Medicaid.
Turns out that maybe toxic masculinity is not appealing to most of us. That thuggish, cruel streak that so many Republicans exhibit is not the way to go, and we rejected it wholesale. We have had it, it would seem, with the Trump regime’s dismantling of our institutions, the destruction of institutional memory, and the decimation of our civil service, all done with the weak kneed and feckless complicity of the Republican Party, which ceded its constitutional responsibilities to prevent those things from happening. We are done, it would appear, with the cruelty and the bigotry. Voters decided they no longer want to be complicit in those things and refuse to elect those who traffic in nothing else.
Threatening our allies, losing our standing in the world, and weakening our alliances is not what we are going to stand for anymore. Many Americans are horrified by Donald’s cozying up to brutal totalitarian dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and others. And it turns out we don’t like it when a president threatens our allies, weakens our alliances, and shows contempt for NATO and the Western liberal alliance created after World War II in the wake of our victory over fascism.
Speaking of democracy and alliances, it has been horrifying to watch the Trump regime abandon Ukraine and the Ukrainian people while the Republican Party failed utterly to do anything about it. It also turns out that we don’t like illegal wars of choice against countries that did not threaten us.
Finally, for now, because I think there’s a lot more we could talk about, it offends us that Donald and the Republicans are so diligently trying to change what it means to be an American, going after birthright citizenship, ending temporary protected status for Haitians and others, and trying to convince us that we are not a country of immigrants, that this is a country only for the white, the privileged, and the Christian.
That is not at all what this country is supposed to be. On Tuesday, we showed up and made that emphatically clear. We elected the most diverse group of people in American history, and come January 3, the people representing us are going to look like the people who voted them into office.
That is an amazing turn of events and that needs to be honored and celebrated.
And now he selected the most extreme most hateful evil person on his staff to be CHIEF OF STAFF!!!
Thank you for saying all this. We are ready to start again, in all seriousness, as we need to bring about changes.