In this episode of Reality Check, David Cay Johnston exposes the Trump administration’s latest rollback of pollution protections and explains why Americans must demand enforcement of environmental laws.

Just before the 2026 midterm elections, the Trump administration made a major move to weaken environmental protections — and David Cay Johnston wants to make sure Americans know about it. In this episode of Reality Check, Johnston examines the Trump administration’s rollback of methane pollution regulations and what it could mean for public health, environmental protection, and the fossil fuel industry’s accountability. From increased risks of asthma and heart disease to the broader consequences of weakened environmental enforcement, Johnston argues that these decisions put corporate profits ahead of the health and safety of Americans. He also reminds viewers that landmark environmental protections, including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, have a long history of bipartisan support. The message? Americans have a voice. Johnston urges viewers to contact their representatives in Congress and demand that environmental and public health protections be enforced. Watch, share, and join the conversation.

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Tuesday was like a natural disaster in reverse. So much good shit happened all at once, it’s hard to focus on any one thing. We’re almost certainly going to have a 56-seat majority in the Senate. The ramifications of that are insane. We’re going to have the largest House majority in over thirty years. Whaaaat? 75% of the entire population will live under a Democratic governor and 53% under a full blue trifecta. Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?! The list goes on and on and on (and on).

But Texas? Texas is in a category all its own.

The Lone Star State has been our white whale for decades. We see Texas in a way Republicans do not see New York or California. The right knows that they will never convince the “coastal elites” 🙄 in NY and CA to vote for the party that openly despises them. We, on the other hand, always understood that Texas was not a red state.

It was, at worst, a purple state, but in reality, most likely a blue state. Texas was simply being smothered by decades of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and election rigging by a party of cheats and liars.

And we were right.

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Flipping the state house and every statewide executive office means the days of Republican power are over. Texas Democrats do not have to do anything dramatic to permanently alter the balance of power. They simply have to unrig their elections. For instance, Republicans closed almost 100 polling stations in minority communities just this year. Those will be restored and expanded. Easier access to voting means more voters. More voters means Republicans lose.

Other restrictions to voting will be eased or erased. Texans will not have to jump through hoops to prove they can vote. Their names will not be purged at random. They won’t have to fight tooth and nail to get registered. Voter participation will explode in Texas, and that will be nothing but bad news for Republicans.

It’s important to understand how crucial Texas is to the Republican Party. They can, in fact, win a presidential election without Texas, but only by running the tables and winning every swing state.

Republicans can win with the kind of results they had in 2024, but not 2016. In 2016, Nevada stayed blue, and that would have lost them the race. These days, Wisconsin is under a Democratic trifecta. All of their voter suppression will be gone soon. Think they’ll be voting red again? Same with Arizona and Pennsylvania. All of the bullshit Republicans slipped in over the years will be erased and, whoops, look at that: A sudden shift to the left. Almost like free and fair elections do not favor the party of fascism and billionaires. Which, of course, is why Republicans have spent decades and billions to strip so many Americans of their right to vote.

Texas is absolutely critical to the future of the Republican Party, and all of that is at risk now. If Texas remains blue, even just for a few years, the prospects of Republicans ever occupying the White House again are almost nonexistent.

It gets worse from here. For Republicans. For us? It gets soooo much better.

In 2028, this increase in voting will almost certainly see the state senate flip, handing Democrats a trifecta. That’s when the pain really starts (if you’re a piece of shit fascist). With a trifecta, Democrats can gerrymander the state. Republicans started this game. They’re going to really wish they had not. With 38 heavily gerrymandered House seats tilted toward the GOP, a sharp gerrymander to the left would push out almost a dozen Republicans (if not more). That’s before we even discuss the gerrymanders that will be coming in the five new states Democrats have total control in now: Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That’s maybe another, what?, dozen seats picked up between them? Then there’s New York and Maryland and Virginia. We’re looking at another 30 seats, minimum, gerrymandered in our favor.

Republicans did not think this through.

They’ve been gerrymandering their states for decades. In 2010, they took it to an extreme level, and that worked for them. For a while. Democrats gerrymander, too, but not nearly to the same extent. That meant Republicans have very little room left to maneuver. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. But we had a lot of places we could cut Republicans out of. And with this many trifectas, that number became intolerably large. Add Texas to the picture, and I wonder if Democrats can do what Republicans were attempting: Permanently lock the other party out of power.

Want to see how quickly the Republicans on the Supreme Court change their minds about the constitutionality of the gerrymander? Want to see Republicans suddenly start screaming that gerrymandering is tyranny? All’s fair in love and war until they start losing. Let me soak up all those big, sobby MAGA tears with my teeny tiny sponge.

Of course, with all of that voter suppression out of the way, Ted Cruz is a dead man walking. He still has four years left, but it’s his last four years. No one likes him, and without rigged elections to protect him, he’s done. That means Democrats will have two more Senate seats than they usually do. Six more if they avail themselves of the opportunity in 2029 to pass statehood for Puerto Rico and DC. The decades-long structural advantage Republicans have had in the Senate will die a quiet death.1 Will the filibuster even matter at this point? Will Republicans dare to keep abusing it? Dunno. It’s the only leverage they’ll have. Maybe go back to using it in emergencies, or Democrats will take away their favorite toy…

These two last things are going to be very VERY bad for Republicans. The first is textbooks. Wait, what? What do textbooks have to do with anything? A lot.

Because Texas is so large, they are the second-largest purchaser of textbooks in the United States. Their previous hard-right Board of Education pushed a racist, Christofascist curriculum in their schools, which textbook companies had to adopt. That meant other Republican-controlled states used the same tainted textbooks. Teach them hate and ignorance when they’re young, and you can breed Republicans for a lifetime. It’s quite literally why Republicans have been trying to destroy public education longer than I’ve been alive.

California does something similar, but instead of slaves as “immigrant workers” and Creationism, its textbooks reflect reality and its well-known liberal bias. Unsurprisingly, Republican-controlled states do not use those textbooks.

But now, Democrats control the Texas board of education. No more state-sanctioned racism. No more theocratic garbage. No more enforced misogyny. The textbooks will change, and the textbook companies will comply because, well, Texas is their second-largest customer. Money talks.

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Red states will either have to buy the new textbooks or pay exorbitant amounts of money to have their own white trash textbooks written. Being as red states are controlled by Republicans who defund public education, that seems unlikely. Perhaps they’ll turn to Florida and beg them to take the lead in producing hate-filled textbooks to teach their children how to be good citizens of the 1800s.

Let us play a sad song for their travails on our itty bitty violins…

Finally, and this you’re going to enjoy the most, Elon Musk is completely fucked.

Musk took half a billion dollars, with a “b,” and flushed it down the toilet. That’s how much he spent in a last-minute bid to buy the midterms for the Republican Party. His main focus was Texas because that’s where he lives and most of his businesses are either located in Texas or have a significant presence there. Tesla, SpaceX, XAI, Neuralink, Twitter, etc., are all within the jurisdiction of the Texas Attorney General, who, as of January, will be a Democrat. As will the Governor, the Lt. Governor, and the Railroad Commissioner (who is in charge of enforcing environmental laws).

Guess who they’re going to want to talk to about all of the very illegal things his businesses do on a daily basis but that Republicans turned a blind eye to?

“Hey, let’s talk about how your cars are rolling death traps, Mr. Musk.”

“Hey, let’s talk about what kind of medical research you’re doing here. Seems kind of unethical and very illegal, Mr. Musk.”

“Mr. Musk, we have a warrant to seize all communications pertaining to Grok producing sexualized images of children. Can you come with us, please?”

Gonna be hard for Republicans to take Elon Musk’s money when he’s arrested for distributing child porn, like he should have been a year ago.

Will Texas go at him that hard? Maybe, maybe not, but Musk will be under fire from every angle both at the state level and federal, as Senate and House Democrats subpoena him for everything. He’ll be very, very busy trying to stay out of prison. Maybe too busy to play wannabe kingmaker in 2028.

Personally, I want him so miserable and depressed he spends all day snorting Ketamine. What a terrible shame it will be to wake up one morning to read that the world’s richest Nazi overdosed and is now in a persistent vegetative state. And nothing of value would be lost…

Put all of this together, and Blue Texas is not just a massive psychological and logistical blow to the Republican Party; it’s an existential threat. More than any other state, Texas is the very core of the GOP. Now it belongs to us, and they’re going to fight tooth and nail to flip it back. Pay attention to Texas. It’s a pivot point for the future of the entire country, and if we can cement our hold on it, the entire fascist Republican project fails.

Now you know just how much of a Big fucking Deal this is.2

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All that’s missing is the five-foot thick reinforced concrete walls. Everything else from the Berlin bunker is there – the plush carpets and overstuffed gilded furniture and oil paintings of favorite past leaders hanging on the wall, all the luxo-accruements of a wounded, monomaniacal fruitcake looking down the long tunnel of his last days. Headlines this afternoon say that Trump has been “furious” at the Tuesday election results, stalking through the West Wing, growling at underlings, practicing his golf swing, looking for someone, anyone to blame.

Trump’s ire at completely blowing the midterms is wildly misplaced. Last night he accepted the resignation of his loyal chief of staff, Suzi Wiles, and this morning he appointed his Reichsminister of Hate, Stephen Miller, to replace her. The bunker’s final population is complete.

Miller is the Trumpazoid chiefly responsible for the flight of the Latino vote from Republicans in every state. Miller spent every waking minute working for Trump in both his terms obsessing about running “illegal” immigrants out of the country, whose “legal” relatives and friends ended up swinging to Democrats by as much as 40 percent from their 2024 voting numbers in key races in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania and other battleground states. According to exit polling by the New York Times, Latinos shifted to Democrats by 28 percent overall nationwide. The Latino vote helped Democrats flip six governorships and 12 statehouse chambers from Republican to Democrat. Republican supermajorities in the state legislatures of eight states went down as well. Fourteen Hispanic Democrats were newly elected to Congress on Tuesday. The Congressional Latino Caucus projects that it will have 55 members come January, a record since it was formed 50 years ago.

Stephen Miller was identified early on in 2025 as the White House official who called the Department of Homeland Security every day screaming his displeasure that ICE was not rounding up enough immigrants. He demanded that ICE meet quotas of 3,000 immigrant arrests every day. Miller and his ally Russel Vought were behind the push that put some $200 billion for immigration enforcement in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed last year. It was Miller’s pressure on ICE that led to the “surge” in Minnesota early this year, a policy that ended in the deaths of two American citizens and the arrests of countless undocumented immigrants who had been living and working and paying taxes in the state, many of them for decades. Miller was also behind the shift in enforcement policy from going after undocumented immigrants with arrests and convictions to picking up immigrants who didn’t have law enforcement records of any kind.

Miller already enjoyed so-called “open door” access to Trump, able to walk through one of the curved doors into the Oval Office and whisper in Trump’s ear at will. As chief of staff, his whispers will carry extra weight, ensuring that his racist immigration policies will continue apace into 2027 and the 2028 election year.

Voters overwhelmingly expressed their displeasure with Trump’s racist, xenophobic, sexist bullshit this week, but he can’t admit that. Of course he doubled down by promoting Stephen Miller. How could he resist seeing his face and the hate behind it coming through his door even more often than before.

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Can you hear the slosh of the flood of crocodile tears around my ankles as I sit here writing this? I feel so, so sorry for Petey “I’ll stand my ground at the Pentagon as I beg Marsha Blackburn to appoint me to her Senate seat” Hegseth. In the words of multiple headlines today, “the knives are out” in both the Pentagon and the White House for the beleaguered Secretary of (cough, cough) War.

Why is Hegseth so worried? The Republican firing squad has gathered with Petey at its center ready to blame him for the lost war in Iran and the lost midterm elections.

Wait a minute! I get the war blame, but what the fuck did Petey have to do with Paxton going down in flames in Texas, or Susan Collins whining her way to defeat in Maine, or the projected loss of what looks to be 50 or more House seats in practically every state in the nation? I mean, Petey was so busy doing pushups and lining up male members of the military to take the jab and get their testosterone checked, he hardly had time to lose the midterms!

Or did he? Turns out that Petey did make a few stops during the fall campaign. He appeared in Kentucky during the primary to support Ed Gallrein who was running against Trump-target Thomas Massie of Kentucky who earned Trump’s ire for several reasons, most prominent among them his partnership with Democrat Ro Khanna to force a House vote that compelled the DOJ to release the Epstein files. Hegseth also flew out to Iowa late in the campaign to give a speech for Republican Zach Nunn supporting his campaign to save his House seat…which didn’t work, since Nunn lost his race to Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott in one of the party’s several House pick-ups in Iowa. Petey also made a campaign stop in Wisconsin to support Republican Derrick Van Orden in his House campaign. Didn’t work, either. Van Orden lost to Democrat Rebecca Cooke in a 52 to 46 blow-out.

If Hegseth can be blamed for contributing to the loss of only two House seats in the disastrous performance of Republicans on Tuesday, what’s going on? Why are the knives out for poor Petey?

Well, to answer that question we need look only as far as his face. Hegseth is one of the most hated people in his party. He’s arrogant, inflexible, stupid, self-obsessed -- but hell, that describes the man he works for to a “T” just as it describes practically every Republican who lost on Tuesday as well as all of those who fucking won.

Leaks out of the White House even before the Republican Party collapsed on Tuesday had Hegseth in the crosshairs of Suzi Wiles, never a good sign when you’re contemplating your future under Trump. What could possibly have pissed her off? Every time Hegseth got up in the morning, he fired another general or admiral or messed around with Pentagon promotion boards, creating a headache for the Wiles and the White House which was increasingly hard-pressed to answer questions about Hegseth’s Pentagon rein of terror.

And then, of course, there was the war.

Who was responsible for the war? The answer to that question is plainly Donald Trump. But when the war went south, who was responsible? Couldn’t be the Commander in Chief. He’s a military genius of the first order. Look at the man. He’s even got photographs of himself standing tall in the uniform he wore when he went to a Hudson Valley military school for boys that was at least close to West Point! And he loves SCIFs and top-secret briefings from generals and admirals, just as long as they don’t happen too often and get in the way of his many, many building projects. What is important when you’re president, anyway? Risking the lives of Americans fighting in a war, or scheduling the tear-down of the East Wing and forcing the re-construction of a helipad on the South Lawn of the White House because the first one was not level enough?

You may have noticed that it’s now two days since the midterm elections and there are no bombs falling on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain or on the infrastructure targets that Trump threatened in the days leading up to the elections. What could possibly be going on with that?

Oh, I almost forgot that we’re pretty much out of bombs and missiles. Petey has already been pointing fingers to blame others for that little misstep. Last week he fired the Pentagon’s top war planner, Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, in preparation for more blame casting and finger pointing.

And there have recently been those pesky leaks, complete with photographs, showing the extensive damage done to U.S. military bases all over the Persian Gulf region…and who is responsible for that? Well, today there were stories that Hegseth is thinking of firing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, and the commander of Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, who all of a sudden is being identified in every story about the abortive war in Iran as the war’s “architect” and strongest defender.

How much did we hear about Brad when the bombs were dropping and the missiles were flying back in March and April and the other months when the war was going hot and heavy? Not a peep. Who was front and center in bragging about how peachy things were going back in those days?

Petey, that’s who.

But hey, folks! Somebody’s got to pay for the biggest military disaster since our last two or three military disasters! Who’s available for that sorry task?

Petey, that’s who.

Hegseth is about to learn a hard lesson about working for a narcissistic fuckwad like Donald Trump. Rule number one: don’t make the man who got us into the war that Republicans have now decided lost the midterms look bad.

There are no good solutions to where the Republican Party finds itself right now. They can blame their losses on the war, but that means they have to blame someone for the war, and they can’t blame Trump, so that means they need to find someone else to blame.

This is why you are able to see two streaks in the sky over Washington D.C. tonight, the contrails left by JD Vance and Marco Rubio flying the fuck out of town to avoid the blame game. JD wrote a novel on X after the election explaining that he had been against the war all along. Marco has his leakers ringing up every reporter they’ve got a number for pointing out the lack of Rubio fingerprints on the Gun that Killed the Republicans, the war in Iran.

And what do we find at the top of our newsfeeds this morning? Leaks that Mrs. Petey was paid a small fortune to consult for Lockheed Martin, the massive defense contractor that – oh, by the way – has taken in a cool $66 billion since Mr. Petey has been running the Pentagon that signs all the checks to defense firms such as…Lockheed Martin.

I guess that little gem of news coming out two days after Republicans lost the midterms and are in full-cry blaming the war on Iran for their losses is just a coincidence, right?

The blame for the collapse of the Republican Party in the midterms couldn’t fall on the man who flew all over the country for 29 days bragging to the MAGAs half-filling high school gyms that he won the war on Iran! That would be, uh, unacceptable.

Bye, bye Petey. Make sure you tuck your testosterone test results in your pants on your way out the door.

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This is rather awkward for me. I usually have SOME idea of what’s going to happen. I’m not always 100% right, but I’m more often than not in the general ballpark when I’m not annoyingly right on target.1

Right now, though? I have no idea what Republicans are going to do. I know what they WANTED to do because they told us. They’ve been planning it for the last two years: Steal the midterms. Everything they’ve done, from lying about mail-in voting to seizing the 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, to inventing a “federal voter roll,” which is not a thing and will NEVER be a thing. The threats to have ICE or the FBI or the National Guard or just white nationalist militias terrorize voters at polling places were part of it. The DOJ’s threats to arrest election workers. The attempt to seize control of mail-in voting. The threats of martial law and the Insurrection Act.

All of this was laying the rhetorical and “legal”2 groundwork to throw out the results of the midterms and declare Trump and his party the sole and uncontested rulers of America forever and ever. There was just one catch: The elections had to be close.

They were not.

We, as in every single one of us yapping heads on the left, have been saying for the entirety of 2026: Vote in such overwhelming numbers that it will be impossible for the fascist fucks to even dare attempt their plots and schemes and bullshit. “Too big to rig” became the rallying cry and, fuuuuuuck me, that’s what we saw on Tuesday.

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The fact that Trump and his regime of pedophiles and Nazis did not immediately run to Fox News to scream about foreign interference or secret transgender Antifa ballot stuffing means we overwhelmed them. Shock and motherfucking awe, baby!

Remember, the right lives in a bubble of pure propaganda. They have cut themselves off from reality so thoroughly that just a few months ago, they were still convinced that the elections would be close enough to pull the trigger on Operation Let’s Stop Pretending We’re Not Nazis. Just a few weeks ago, they were still talking about “foreign interference,” and Trump’s allies were whispering “martial law” into his magically healing ear.

Now? Whole lot of silence on the “We actually won!” front. Instead, all the sewer rats are blaming each other and scrambling to avoid the wrath of the Mad King.

So, what happens now? This is the part I can’t see. Normally, Republicans would come crawling back to grovel before their God Emperor. Trump controls the party. He controls the money. He controls the base. He controls everything.

But that was on Monday.

On Wednesday, Trump is a lame duck who cost his party control of the Senate, the House, five governorships, well over three hundred state legislature seats, handed Democrats four trifectas in swing states, and, unbelievably, flipped Texas blue. Donald Trump failed so goddamn hard, he flipped fucking Texas blue.

Every single bad thing that happened to Republicans on Tuesday, and there was a lot of it, can be laid directly at the feet of Donald Trump. There’s plenty of blame to spread around his regime, of course, but they all obeyed his orders willingly. They were all complicit in following a treasonous, dying pedophile who proceeded to drag his party into oblivion.

So, do Republicans come crawling back? I don’t actually know. What’s their incentive? Yes, Trump controls the party and the money and the media machine. But for how much longer? Trump is a loser now. He’s THE loser. Democrats are going to investigate everyone and everything that Trump has ever touched. Trump’s billionaire buddies are going to lose his number. Trump? Trump who? Never met him.

Corporations that were so eager to bend the knee are going to discover a newfound appreciation for diversity and speaking truth to power. Sure, the regime will have two years to inflict financial damage on them, but Democrats are going to be in power for much longer after that. Continuing to side with fascism when fascism has lost is a really bad business decision.

Republicans may look around and find that Trump is no longer the scary monster who can end their career with a tweet. They’ll still have support from Big Oil and their voters because, really, who gives a fuck what that loser Trump says? He led the GOP to not just a loss, but a historic loss they’ll be writing about for the next 100 years. And if Trump can’t end the careers of Republicans, they don’t have to listen to a fucking word he has to say.

But Republicans are absolutely spineless cowards. They have no principles. They believe in nothing. Today’s free-market capitalist is tomorrow’s isolationist in favor of a government-controlled economy. Today’s anti-Big Government libertarian is tomorrow’s Big Brother authoritarian. The only consistent throughline is whatever gives a Republican more power while filling their pockets with stolen money. Also, preferably hurting all of the people they hate, including their own voters. Especially their own voters.

Have I mentioned lately that Republicans are evil, diseased monsters? No? It’s probably implied in literally every sentence I write about them, I guess.

Trump will also, when the shock has worn off, go back to throwing daily temper tantrums. He’ll threaten his own party if they don’t sufficiently debase themselves for his amusement. Any hint of disloyalty will be met with promises of ruin. Maybe the IRS will pay a visit. Maybe the FBI. Republicans are, to a one, criminals. I doubt even a single elected GOP official hasn’t committed fraud or embezzled money or has child porn on their computer. Will Trump go that far to keep his party in line? Will Republicans put up with that kind of abuse? I do not know, but we’re going to find out.

Anyway! We have two months until Democrats are sworn in and take control of Congress. Today, the GOP is paralysed by the force of our collective scream of rage, all of it directed at them. But next week? They may remember that losing power means losing everything. With 54, possibly up to 56 Senate seats, Republicans will not be able to take back the Senate for almost a decade. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas will never survive eight years of President Democrat 2029 with a Democratic Senate. That means Republicans lose the Supreme Court, assuming Democrats don’t just expand it immediately in 2029 anyway.

By Christmas, they may get angry and afraid enough to try to implement some of their schemes to steal the elections. But then again, they may not. Risking it all to keep Donald Trump in power when Trump is the biggest loser in the last 100 years has to seem like a really stupid idea for Republicans who want to keep their job and stay out of prison. And not for nothing; most Republicans absolutely fucking hate Trump. If they can throw him under the bus and spend two years trying to rehabilitate their image? That would be a much better use of their time than continuing to suck up to a dying pedophile.

It’s a coin flip which way Republicans will go, and I really do not know. I suspect we’re going to see increasingly large numbers of Republicans tell Trump to fuck off. That idea he had of running for a third term? I also suspect we’re going to increasingly hear Republicans say, “No, that’s not going to happen.” The LAST thing the GOP wants is to have that fucking loser hanging around in 2028. It’s already going to be impossible to wash the stench of Trump dirty diapers failure off. Ain’t NOBODY going to want his dumb ass on the campaign trail with them.

We should have a pretty good idea which way the party is moving by Thanksgiving. If the fascists are going to actually try to steal power, they’ll have to lay the groundwork. Just showing up on January 3rd and refusing to seat fifty House Democrats and half a dozen Democratic Senators isn’t going to fly. Even MAGAland won’t accept that out of the blue.

If the regime hasn’t started to make noise about foreign interference and rigged elections by then, what we’ll almost certainly see is the party turn on Trump and destroy him. They’ll offer him and his corrupt family up as a sacrifice in hopes of being spared the consequences of a decade of fascism and corruption.

Good luck with that?

We’re still going to demand Nuremberg trials and the arrest of every last motherfucker who got rich on pain and torture or wallowed in violence and cruelty. Since that covers most Republicans and their billionaire donors, sad days ahead for them. Womp-womp.

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The experts are already crunching the numbers that show young people, Latinos, and women coming out in huge numbers and voting for Democrats all across the country. When you’ve won in South Carolina and Kansas and Iowa, and Mississippi is still in play, something is up.

We had excellent candidates -- Talarico and Hinojosa in Texas, El Sayed in Michigan, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Colom in Mississippi – I could name many more – all gave voters somebody they wanted to vote for.

We had good issues to run on – data centers, abortion rights, affordability, the war on Iran, gas and diesel prices that hit farmers hard in places like Iowa and Kansas and North and South Carolina and Mississippi.

But I think this election turned on something bigger, and if I can say so, warmer, that bent some otherwise unreachable voters away from MAGA and Trumpism. To put it plainly, many, many Americans are fed up with the cruelty and corruption and criminality of Donald Trump and his party. When people in this country think of immigration, they don’t think of masked men carrying automatic weapons dressed up like they’re going to war grabbing families with children out of their cars and throwing them on the ground and handcuffing them and spiriting them away to cages and off to foreign countries shackled to the floors of airplanes. People don’t think of immigration as an issue that leads to American citizens being killed in the streets by masked men.

The outrageous cruelty of Trump’s ICE tactics have had a ripple effect through the public at large. More Americans than Republicans counted on have been wondering why there can’t be a system that comes up with documents for undocumented immigrants so they can stay in their jobs, pay their taxes, keep their kids in schools, and work toward citizenship. In the blizzard of election coverage, it was easy to miss the stories about school closures because a lack of students and a disappearing tax base makes them too expensive to maintain in small towns. There were the same sort of stories about small colleges that cannot recruit enough students to stay open, so they’re closing, too. When schools and colleges close, small and medium-size towns lose the teaching and administrative jobs that keep people on payrolls and businesses open.

After two years of watching Trump cover the walls of the Oval Office with goldleaf gimcrackery and dig holes in the ground to erect monuments to himself and close down beloved institutions such as the Kennedy Center out of pique that he can’t put his name on its building, people have seen the rank corruption and ugly ego behind his moves. Two years of stories about Don Junior and Eric and Jared Kushner jetting around the world enriching themselves had enough of an effect on people that some of them decided to change their votes or stay home.

Story after story has been published about January 6 criminals pardoned by Trump who have committed new crimes, all the way from murder to domestic and child sexual abuse, to burglary and grand theft. Just this week, a man pardoned by Trump was accused of threatening the lives of federal judges. Other stories have exposed the dozens of pardons Trump has handed out to wealthy people who essentially bought their pardons. People see it as the pattern it is. Most Americans believe in the rule of law. They don’t believe that there should be one set of laws for them, and another set of laws for rich people who have political connections.

It took almost two years, but this stuff broke through. Even with issues like Trump’s attacks on NATO, his denigration of our neighbors and long-time allies such as Canada, and his overt cozying up to dictators who have included Vladimir Putin, people didn’t recognize the United States they grew up in, that many of them served in the military, for which many of their ancestors fought in World War I and World War II.

I have hated the phrase “this is not who we are” for years. It is usually uttered by a politician attempting to deny something that proves he is exactly who he is.

But yesterday at voting booths across this country, people took their ballots and cast votes that said it out loud. This is not who we are. We are better than this. We are going to vote for people who will stand up and act like we are better than this in Washington D.C. and in state houses across the country.

We have thought for too long that Trumpism is entrenched so deeply, it cannot be beaten; that MAGA voters are unreachable. It’s not. They’re not.

It’s been almost 100 years since Kansas elected a Democrat as their Senator. Kansans, confronted with the cruelty of Republican Senator Roger Marshall, an OBGYN doctor who sued his own patients and drove many of them into bankruptcy and jail, voted a Democrat, Adam Hamilton, to represent them in the Senate. This wasn’t just a political change. It was an earthquake, and it happened over and over across the country in states that Democrats have thought were lost to them.

They’re not. Americans live in those states. They said loud and clear that the corruption and cruelty of Republicans is not who they are. They went into the voting booth and said, we’re better than that.

They are. We are. It’s a new day in the United States of America we’ve been all along. We aren’t “great.” We need some work to get better than we are. But after yesterday, we’re getting there.

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