After such an election thumping, another President might seek a deal to end the shutdown, which is, as of this week, the longest in history, breaking the thirty-five-day record set in Trump’s first term. Not Trump. Escalation not accommodation is his preferred move. On Wednesday, his Administration announced that, owing to air-traffic-controller shortages exacerbated by the shutdown, ten per cent of all flights at forty major airports around the country would be cancelled, causing travel mayhem in a high-stakes bid to force Democrats to end the impasse. I’m not quite sure about Trump’s theory of the case: If Americans didn’t blame the President already for the crisis, wouldn’t they be much more likely to now? (And the data suggest that the electorate already does hold Republicans responsible.) But whatever. The point is to change the subject, to show that he’s not rolling over just because the voters no longer love his party so much in Passaic County, New Jersey, or Lynchburg, Virginia.
More fights will no doubt soon follow. How long can it be until Trump has successfully picked one with New York’s incoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-four-year-old Democratic Socialist whose unlikely ascension this year has been greeted with almost as much enthusiasm by national Republican strategists as by young progressives in Brooklyn? Mamdani’s election-night victory speech suggested that he is more than willing to play the foil to Trump, even trolling the TV-obsessed President by telling him to “turn the volume up” so he could hear Mamdani’s come-and-get-us-if-you-can words of defiance. Mamdani knew his man—the White House later confirmed that Trump was, in fact, watching.
As Washington was still digesting the election results on Thursday, a fund-raising e-mail came across the transom from Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democratic congresswoman who has emerged as one of the Party’s louder TV warriors. Subject line: “His presidency is over y’all.”
Crockett might have been hyping Trump’s post-election obsolescence a bit, but she was on to something. The whiff of generational change now hangs over American politics. One sensed it in Mamdani’s victory, for sure, but also in those of New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, neither of whom, as my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted, were in politics when Trump first became President. Mamdani ended Andrew Cuomo’s attempt at a comeback, sending the former governor—whose father also held that office—once again into involuntary retirement. Cuomo, for now, is a name to be associated with the past, not the future, of New York politics.
Election Day itself began with the early-morning news that Dick Cheney, one of the dominant Republicans of his generation, had died at the age of eighty-four. When Cheney first made his mark in Washington, as Gerald Ford’s wunderkind White House chief of staff, he was the same age that Mamdani is now. In a career that had many acts, including as George W. Bush’s influential Vice-President and chief Iraq War promoter, Cheney’s final one—as a fierce opponent of Donald Trump—was perhaps his most surprising. Where other leading Republicans, including his former boss, were largely silent as Trump took over their party and defied constitutional norms and principles that they had once loudly defended, Cheney proudly supported his daughter Liz’s efforts to resist him. One of the more indelible images of how much our politics has changed in recent years was the sight of Cheney on the House floor for a ceremony Democrats held to mark the one-year anniversary of the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on January 6, 2021; he and Liz were the only Republicans to attend. Democrats, many of whom had once shunned Cheney as tantamount to a war criminal, lined up to shake his hand. The visual, like this week’s elections, underscored something essential: politics moves on. It is not static. Cheney’s resistance to Trump in the final years of his life was a rear-guard action, not a sign of things to come. His version of the G.O.P. no longer exists.
On Thursday morning, Nancy Pelosi, another giant of our recent politics, announced her decision to retire from Congress at the end of the current term. The two-time Speaker of the House, in which capacity she oversaw major legislative victories, including passage of the Affordable Care Act, during the Obama Administration, is arguably the most powerful woman in American history. During Trump’s first term, she became the President’s greatest scourge, rallying Democrats to come back from the shock of his 2016 victory and retake the House two years later. But this time, with Pelosi already eighty-five years old and no longer in a leadership role, it will be left to others to regroup.
Trump reacted to Pelosi’s announcement in a text to Fox News’s Peter Doocy. “The retirement of Nancy Pelosi is a great thing for America,” he wrote, calling her “evil,” “corrupt,” and “highly overrated.” He added, “I’m very honored that she impeached me twice and failed miserably twice.” She tried to get rid of me, he might as well have said, but I’m still here.
The clock, though, is ticking for Trump, too. The President himself knows it. He blamed Tuesday’s losses on the fact that he was not on the ballot to rally Republicans, but he did not mention a larger constitutional truth about his lame-duck status that neither he nor his Party seems to have begun reckoning with: he won’t be on the ballot heading the ticket ever again. ♦
