Post-election, Trump says “the country has had enough.” Yeah, of Trump!

Voters have just given Democrats one of the most massive midterm election victories ever, a Blue Tsunami.

Seven seats in the Senate have flipped and Democrats are leading in Mississippi and Alaska. Democrats have gained 38 seats in the House so far and could get as many as 45. This gives them firm control of both chambers of Congress. Democrats have flipped five Governor seats, giving them a total of 29 for the first time in many years.

This chart from The New York Times shows the raw voter margin for various demographic groups, along with the  shift in voter margin from 2024. Democrats are favored by every sex, race, and education group other than Whites, and there Republican support has declined by 12% since 2024. All  voters combined favored Democrats by 14 points in the 2026 midterm, a 15 point shift from 2024.

So one would think that President Trump would be doing some post-election soul-searching, especially since he barnstormed around the country for weeks prior, urging voters to pretend that he was on the ballot — wrongly believing that this would produce a good result for Republicans. Instead, Trump contributed to an election disaster for the GOP.

Well, the closest Trump came to admitting defeat today was this rather ambiguous statement: the country has had enough.

Trump also said he expects Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to come to the White House at some point, though he has not spoken with them yet.

Trump also said he has spoken with other Democrats but did not identify them.

“There are others — not them — but people, other Democrats, who have been calling. I have friends over there. I think we can get along. it’s good for the country if we do. The country has had enough,” he added.

I agree. The country has had enough… of Trump.

That’s why Democrats did so well in this midterm election. Voters were fed up with high prices, with Trump administration graft, with the Iran war, with cruelty toward hard-working honest migrants, with senseless slashing of government health care programs, with massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, with tariffs that serve no purpose other than Trump’s authoritarian impulses, with weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, with fossil fuel subsidies and renewable energy attacks, with destroying a large part of the White House for his beloved ballroom. And so much else.

There’s all kinds of theories floating around about why Democrats did so well in this election and Republicans did so poorly. Most of them have some merit, such as Democrats having considerably better candidate quality. But it seems to me that virtually every reason, and that virtually could well be eliminated, can be traced back to Trump.

Trump handpicked Senate candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina. That’s a big part of the GOP candidate quality problem. His Iran War was poorly conceived and incompetently executed. The war exacerbated inflation due to much higher gasoline and diesel prices. So did Trump’s tariffs.

Also, I think voters wanted some normalcy to return to our politics. Trump is a nonstop political drama queen. He is constantly insulting, threatening, blabbing on about whatever enters his twisted mind, never showing genuine caring or compassion for ordinary people.

Last week Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei appeared as a panel guest on Real Time with Bill Maher along with Kid Rock. I generally agree with what VanderHei said here, aside from his contention that voters are fed up with both parties. The midterm election showed that Americans “have had it” much more with Republicans than with Democrats.

VandeHei: Don’t look at your screen, right? Like, it’s the truth is, like, this is my belief about the country, why I’m, like, long-term very optimistic. It’s that if you look at your screen or you watch TV, you would think everybody’s batshit crazy. Why? Because the algorithms elevate the people who say the nuttiest, craziest, wackiest things. That’s not the country. The country is, like, eighty percent normal. They go to church, they go to Little League, they raise their kids, they’re normal people who do the right thing for the right reason, and they’re just, they don’t show up in politics, they don’t show up in your social media feed, but if you look at throughout the history of the country, those are the people who repair it when the smarty pants break it. And I do think that that will happen again. I think there’s something happening in politics right now where people just had it. They feel like they keep being told they’re gonna get one thing and they get something different, and they feel it about both parties. You see this rise in people who don’t wanna affiliate with either party. They’ve just had it, and they’ve had it because they just wanna live a normal life, and they want people who can critique the country but love the country.