Trump did it again
In defiance of political gravity for the second time in a decade, he will return to the Oval Office with a hostile agenda and a MAGA-fied Congress. And Democrats will have little power to stop him.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome to a special edition of Once Upon a Hill. Donald Trump is on the verge of winning a second term in what his supporters describe as the greatest political comeback in US history.
After an unexpected victory in 2016 and a decisive defeat four years later, Trump improved his performance in every state that has counted most of its votes. He also flipped Georgia and Pennsylvania back into the win column after he secured those states in his first run but lost them to President Joe Biden in 2020.
At press time, Trump needs only one more state to win the election. And while the Associated Press has yet to call Wisconsin, it’s unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris—who replaced Biden at the top of the ticket 108 days ago and offered up an optimistic vision for the country without Trump at the center of the political universe—will receive enough absentee ballots in the Badger state to overcome Trump’s advantage.
The New York Times projects Trump will finish with 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 222 with all seven battleground states—those mentioned above plus North Carolina, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona either leaning or likely to fall into the Republican column. He performed better in every state and is expected to win the popular vote after losing it when he won the first time. In a remarkable data point, Harris underperformed Biden in every county in the country. And while Harris gained support from white men and women, it wasn’t enough to cancel out the inroads Republicans made with enough Black and Latino voters in a realignment that will be studied for years to come.
A second Trump administration has the potential to transform the nation dramatically. The US’s post-pandemic recovery could be threatened with Trump’s economic policy that features strict tariffs on exported goods that businesses will likely pass down to the consumer and an extension on the 2017 tax cuts that mostly benefitted wealthy folks and big corporations. The future of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza is uncertain, with Trump unlikely to continue the US’s robust military assistance to the eastern European country while green-lighting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued military operation in the Middle East more than a year after the Oct. 7 attacks by terrorist group Hamas despite the high Palestinian civilian casualties and the assassination of Hamas’s leader several weeks ago.
Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices in his first term. He’s likely to nominate at least two more and could cement a 7–2 conservative supermajority for a generation if one of the three Democratic-appointed justices steps down. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and has indicated a willingness to further erode abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and civil rights in future terms.
That’s not to mention what Trump plans to do regarding immigration, including a mass deportation plan that leaves immigrants legally in the US as collateral damage. Biden’s legislative legacy is at stake, too—from the Inflation Reduction Act to the expanded Child Tax Credit. The same goes for his predecessor, President Barack Obama’s landmark law, the Affordable Care Act, which Trump tried to repeal during his first term and could again the second time around.
American democracy is also at risk. Four years after inciting an insurrection on the US Capitol, Trump has said he would rule as a dictator on day one of his administration while empowering conspiracy theorists Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk to shape health care and economic policy, respectively. If that’s the case, his critics wonder if he plans to leave office after his second term.
Trump will backed by a Senate Republican majority who rode his coattails in states like Ohio and Wisconsin to flip seats from Democratic incumbents. Expectations were for the Senate GOP to emerge from the election with a 51–49 majority, but throw in competitive races in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania and Republicans could hold as many as 54 or 55 when it’s all said and done. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) predicted all cycle his caucus would not only defend their contested seats but pick up one or two as it did two years ago in a historic over performance. Ultimately, Democrats’ best pickup opportunities—Florida and Texas—weren’t the upsets Team Blue hoped for. And now it’s safe to wonder how much of a hit his standing as the top Senate Democrat will take after last night. Schumer is up for reelection in 2028.
The House is Democrats’ last line at some semblance of a defense against a Republican trifecta. And while they picked up two seats last night, they’ll need to virtually run the table in five California seats to offset their own upsets in Pennsylvania and the GOP incumbents who survived intense challenges. It took several weeks to know which party controlled the House in 2022. It could take as long to do so this cycle too.
I covered Election Night from the ballroom in the Hotel at the University of Maryland, where Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks delivered a victory speech to a crowd of jubilant supporters who helped her become the first Black person and woman elected to the US Senate. (Alsobrooks will join Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) in the Senate, making them the first two Black women in US history to serve in the institution at the same time.)
The night was filled with other historic firsts: Alabama will have two Black members of Congress for the first time after Shomari Figures flipped a seat redrawn as a Black opportunity district after a Supreme Court decision in 2023. Delaware state Rep. Sarah McBride (D) will succeed Blunt Rochester in the House as the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress.
But it was bonkers to watch Alsobrooks’ supporters dance to the Cupid Shuffle and vibe to a soundtrack of The Isley Brothers, Beyoncé and Soul 4 Real as I scrolled an X feed populated with followers grappling with Harris’s dwindling path to victory in real-time once Georgia and North Carolina were off the map. What had been a gleeful crowd at Howard University elated at the thought of celebrating an alum as the first HBCU graduate and Black and Asian woman to become the leader of the free world leave was reduced to a hopelessness that won’t soon subside. (Harris did not speak to supporters last night but is expected to do so today, per campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond.
In the weeks ahead, I’ll spill plenty of ink on where Democrats go from here. But it’s clear national Democrats have some rebranding to do. The party as it exists isn’t resonating with Black men and brown people anymore and highly educated white people and diversity groups seem to be no longer a formidable enough coalition to stem the country’s rightward shift that accelerated after the America got too close to the sun when it elected Obama in what well-meaning but oblivious pundits hilariously described as post-racial America.
I’m certain people will experience enormous suffering in the years ahead because of it.