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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Democrats swept Tuesday’s midterm elections, taking the House and Senate by significant margins. Seats that went heavily Trump in 2022 went blue; Democrats not only won in most of the closely-watched Senate races (Texas, Michigan, Maine) but in states that seemed likely to stay red and were largely ignored in the press — South Carolina elected Annie Andrews over Lindsay Graham’s sister, and as of 4am Eastern time on Wednesday, deep-red Mississippi remains up for grabs. Mississippi! Cindy Hyde-Smith may well pull ahead, but wow — even if she wins, this sends a pretty strong message that voters, including Republicans, are awfully fed up with Trump, Trumpism, and the Republican Party. And if she loses? All I can say is lololol and congrats to the Democratic senator from Mississippi.

Kansas. Iowa. Ohio. North Carolinas. Both Carolinas! What a night.

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The man to credit with / blame for all of it is Donald Trump. These results are a rebuke of decisions he has made almost unilaterally: The tariffs that raised consumer prices. The utterly pointless Iran war that compromised American security and sent gas prices skyrocketing. The masked ICE agents who abused immigrants and citizens alike and were afforded anonymity and total protection. The corruption that enriched the president and his family to the tune of billions upon billions while Americans were wondering if they could afford the cheapest ground beef on the shelf. A president more concerned about his ballroom, his arch, and the algae in the reflecting pool than how Americans were actually faring.

Americans have given that president a giant middle finger, rejecting even Trump’s attempts to bribe voters into supporting him with $5,000 checks. And any normal president would be chastened, slinking quietly into his lame duck era and allowing his party to distance themselves from him so they might have a shot at regaining some power in two years.

This president, though, has never done anything quietly, and has certainly never done anything for the good of anyone but himself. And I suspect that he will spend the next two years doing everything in his power to exact revenge upon his enemies and push whatever radical agenda is sold to him by a small group of his most loyal and least judicious advisors — the ones who know their careers are tied to Trump, and that their own days in power are waning along with his. This is not going to be Trump’s lame duck era. It’s going to be his revenge era — even as he mentally crumbles before our eyes.

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MSNOW has called the sixth Senate seat flip, giving Democrats control of the Senate and the House. I just heard one of the panelists say that Susan Collins called Troy her opponent, Troy Jackson, in Maine and conceded. Three Republican House seats in Iowa just flipped to the Democrats. Things are moving fast, and they are moving toward even more wins by Democrats in the House.

The opposition party has won back both houses of Congress in a midterm election only three times since World War II. The results for Michigan and Alaska aren’t even in, and it’s already a political earthquake in Washington D.C. The White House will not get a single law passed during the next two years. Not one. They won’t get another person confirmed by the Senate. For anything. No more judges. No more cabinet secretaries. No one. It is likely Democrats won’t even schedule confirmation hearings.

But the big realignment in this election was between money and people. Republicans spent billions to elect their candidates in the midterms. Elon Musk alone spent nearly $500 million to elect Republicans, with $250 million of the total going down the Ken Paxton sewer hole in Texas. Silicon Valley billionaires threw tens of millions at Republicans. AI companies put in their millions. So did crypto companies. All of their millions went to Republicans. Here in Pennsylvania, local television was drenched in ads for Day-trader Bresnahan, who had to have raised tens of millions to waste on them. Did. Not. Matter. Paige Cognetti whipped him by nearly 10 points.

None of the billions spent on Republicans in battleground races worked. People ignored the ads those billions bought and went out and voted the way they were going to vote, and they voted for Democrats. I don’t know what’s going to happen between now and 2028, but money is going to play a different role in that election. The vote today was a people’s vote. It was a vote against billionaires as much as it was a vote against Republicans. And it was a vote against the corruption and excess represented by Donald Trump and everything he and his family stand for.

Today, the people spoke in a mandate to reset the balance of power in Washington D.C. Republicans and their oligarch friends tried to buy this election, but the votes of the people were not for sale.

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We’ve already taken the House, and we’ve won the races we knew we’d win in North Carolina and Georgia, but I’ve got to write this sentence. Georgia will have a governor who is a Black woman, Keisha Lance Bottoms. We’re ahead in Texas. We’re ahead in Kansas. We’re ahead in Michigan. We’re ahead in Ohio. They’re calling House races in North Carolina for Democrats that weren’t on anyone’s radar.

This is an election that’s being won on organization, enthusiasm, and turn out. New voters went to the polls in every state in the country. MAGA stayed home, or coughed hard and looked sideways as they filled out a ballot voting Democrat. This may not be a realignment, but the message tonight, the message tomorrow, the message for the next two years is this: Nobody is afraid of Trump anymore, not even Republicans who will have to defend House and Senate seats they managed to hang onto this year.

There will be hearings, dozens and dozens of hearings. There will be subpoenas, hundreds of subpoenas sent by messenger all over Washington D.C. If you’re a lawyer, and you want to make a quick million dollars, put out a shingle that says “I represent Republicans in trouble on the Hill.” You’ll be lounging on your own yacht in the Chesapeake by next August.

Trump will sputter and whine and lie, but you know what? Donald Trump doesn’t matter tonight, and he won’t matter tomorrow. He’s not just a lame duck. He’s over.

Wow. They just called South Carolina for Democrat Annie Andrews. That was the Lindsey Graham seat. Hell, it was the Strom Thurmond seat! For the next six years, it will belong to a Democratic woman.

We’re going to have some fun writing our Substack columns here at the Truscott-Harris household, and it starts right now.

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