After Watergate—the wiretap/hush money scandal that finally forced a flawed, corrupt Republican president Richard Nixon from office on August 8, 1974—it was a truism to say the system worked.
Fifty-two years later—after a midterm blue tsunami drowned the Trump-transformed Republican party—the system worked again.
In the just completed national elections the system worked in the only way that could be effective: cobbling together an overwhelming repudiation up and down the ballot of Donald Trump and everything that this vainglorious traitor stands for.
The Blue Wave was the herd immunity I had hoped for, an electoral defeat so powerful and extensive that even Trump—in a listless, defeated, phone interview with the New York Times—conceded he could not challenge or oppose.
“I am absolutely willing to accept those results, yeah” Trump said.
Of course, Trump being Trump, he accepted no blame for anything. No way this ass-whipping was his fault.
“Because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote,” Trump insisted. “If I was on the ticket, we would have won in a landslide.”
In the chill dawn of a post-debacle Wednesday, many Republicans were quick to call bullshit on a man many of them once feared.
Nonsense, said retiring Republican rep. Don Bacon (Neb.). “This is all about him.”
Given the ravaged economy, punitive, price-rising tariffs, a war in Iran that Trump started (and has no clue how to end) and, of course sky-high gas and food prices, “Trump has almost dared Americans to vote against him,” noted GOP strategist Jason Roe of Michigan.
And, finally, surprise, surprise, they did.
My and others’ post-election elation would be much lower had the Democrats not also flipped the Senate, once considered a huge longshot, as well as flip the House, which by Tuesday night was viewed as inevitable.
But even in the Senate, the Democratic gains were impressive, prompting Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNOW anchor, to declare: “The Trump reign of error is over.”
O’Donnell, a longtime liberal thorn in Trump’s ample backside, opined that Trump not only is a lame duck now, but an incredibly weak one, with no GOP majority of spineless support to help him.
Remember Trump’s railroading Supreme Court picks through the Senate? Not bloody likely now, with Dems holding at least a four-seat margin in the chamber.
Recall, too, that one person’s “lawfare”—the common GOP whine when faced with official scrutiny—is another’s (read Democrats’) justified subpoena power as we enter the last two years of Trump’s godawful presidency.
Tempting though it may be for some congressional Democrats to think that the third time is the charm in re: impeachment, the last thing I think they should do is try to force Trump from office now. Better they should aim their impeachment ire at real incompetents and criminals like worm-brained Health Secretary Bobby Jr., who has given America the gift of measles and a hobbled medical research infrastructure, and Pete Hegseth, an ego in a tight suit who has no business even parking cars at the Pentagon.
Better to keep Donald Trump in office as a public symbol of what the GOP became under his watch, and let philosopher kings like JD Vance and Little Marco, Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles and Elon Musk fight over his bones.
See you in presidential 2028.
Frank Van Riper is the former White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor of the New York Daily News. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
