I’ve been following politics in some form or other since the Clinton administration (imagine my parents’ discomfort on being asked what “the Lewinsky scandal” was after some poorly supervised family viewing of PBS News Hour), and it’s safe to say that midterm elections don’t tend to leave much of an impression. Even the big ones—the 2006 GOP massacre, the 2010 Tea Party rebellion—fade pretty quickly from mind, not to mention their characters. (When’s the last time you thought about Kevin Yoder?)
Today’s elections are different. I have said on the tee vee and elsewhere that these midterms don’t matter. As regards actual governance and policy, I still believe that. The Republicans have no legislative agenda to speak of; the SAVE Act is still vaguely floating around as a kind of fetish object, but, strange to say, nobody really seems to be talking about it anymore. The administration’s signature policies are all executive-branch shows: the war, monkeying with trade policy, annihilating the Kennedy Center. Even if the Democrats take both chambers of Congress, they will fall well short of veto-proof, impeach-and-remove majorities. They will doubtless make nuisances of themselves with oversight and impeachments, but we’ve seen that movie a time or three before.
But these elections are different, and will be memorable—not because anything will happen, but because they constitute the last contest of the Trump era. Donald Trump will never lead the GOP to the polls again. Whatever happens today—and it’s probably not going to be very pretty for the Republicans—will set the stage for a year and a half of vicious infighting over what the post-Trump party is going to be. Analysis, spin, and recrimination will be the order of the day.
Of course Trump will still have two more years to inflict war and/or peace on the rest of the world. And of course Trump is going to keep his hand in GOP politics as long as he’s alive and able to get a television crew out to wherever he’s living and golfing. But this is the day from which his power will wane. In 2024, efforts to break with him were comically doomed; nobody with an ounce of political brains thought the nomination and party leadership would go to anyone else. He had the effective power of life and death over everyone below him on the ticket. Now, the terms of rupture or continuity are themselves going to be the subject of contention.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is the man to watch. He has adapted his public persona to the downmarket aesthetics of the Trump-era party, but has not indulged in the policy heterodoxy of industrial policy, trade protectionism, and less war. As Trump plumbs new polling depths, Cruz will be well positioned to be the unity candidate, bringing together populist style and Chamber of Commerce content. For those who prefer their nihilism neat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will make the case that what the country really needs is a top policymaker who is even more thuggish and less restrained. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office is constantly putting out the word that he is not going to run in 2028—and who could blame him?—but, of course, there will be Vice President J.D. Vance, making the case that, maybe, we could actually do all the things that the administration in which he has served said it was actually going to do.
It barely requires comment that the fundamental variable for the post-Trump combination is going to be how the war is resolved. There is a linear relation between the war and the economy: Kinking the hose on Middle Eastern energy exports makes everything more expensive, including, indirectly, the cost of credit. The American people are pretty tolerant of foreign-policy antics so long as the money-machine keeps purring along, but this war so far has not been such a low-cost adventure. As I wrote last week, Vance in particular needs a decent resolution to the war to be viable in 2028.
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And Vance remains the best option on the table for something like America First conservatism. As the Trump administration has fallen into boring Republicanism, and reminded everyone how unpopular and unsuccessful elements of that policy suite are, America First conservatism has become both more obviously theoretically justified and more difficult to pursue. The America First candidate must make the case for paths not taken and promises unfulfilled. This is a far more difficult trick, especially for someone who has been part of this circus.
Michael Anton’s 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” remains the seminal text for the American right in its current situation. The underlying argument is that voting for Donald Trump may not guarantee a good outcome, but it at least challenges the basic dysfunctions at the heart of the American order: deindustrialization, the collapse of national identity, imperial adventurism abroad. This is what sets it apart from the team-sports philosophy of voting red no matter who: The “Flight 93” framing applies only if the red team is in fact rushing the cockpit, is in fact challenging these dysfunctions. If it’s business as usual but with some tax cuts, who cares?
That was true in 2024, and it’s true now. The difference now is that America First will not have this past decade’s unique and often faithless champion. The new world begins today. Will it look like something old—à la the smirking, inescapable Cruz—or will a real rain come and wash all this scum off the streets?
