. . . and the madman in the White House is diving deeper into madness.
On Tuesday, Americans rejected the Trump administration. It turns out most people hated the idea of a strongman who ignored the Constitution, undermined democracy, and tried to rewrite America’s history in order to impose a white, Christian nationalist regime that enriched him and his cronies at the expense of everyone else.
Voters made their position very clear. A majority of more than 12 million demanded an end to corruption, an end to Trump’s war on Iran, an end to costly tariffs, and an end to the masked agents kidnapping Black and Brown people off the streets.
By a margin of more than 13%, they voted for a country based on the rule of law in which everyone is held accountable for their actions and no one can break the law with impunity. They voted for the system of checks and balances established by the Framers of the Constitution. They voted for policies that supported the American people, making it possible for them to afford food and housing and healthcare rather than continuing to funnel money to billionaires.
They voted for the multicultural country Trump and his loyalists mocked. They elected Democratic Black candidates Keisha Lance Bottoms to govern Georgia, David Crowley to govern Wisconsin, Aaron Ford to govern Nevada, and Stacey Plaskett to govern the U.S. Virgin Islands. They elected Byron Donalds, a Black Republican, to govern Florida.
Voters elected Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed to be the nation’s first Muslim senator, and they reelected Representative Ilhan Omar, whom Trump has made a key target of his attacks, with an astonishing 76.5% of her district’s vote.
As Valerie Gonzalez, Mike Catalini, and Jonathan J. Cooper of the Associated Press reported, Hispanic voters shifted hard away from the Republican Party and swung back toward the Democrats in 2026, with 7 out of 10 Hispanic voters in Texas backing Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. In a rejection of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, for the first time since 2008, Democrats won every House district that touches the U.S.-Mexico border, and voters have sent fourteen new Hispanic Democrats to Congress.
Black voters, especially in the American South, turned out in unusually high numbers, and they voted for Democrats at higher rates than they did in 2024. Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported that about 80% of Black votes in congressional races across the country were for Democratic candidates.
The message was unmistakable.
Since his 2024 reelection, Trump and his allies have repeatedly insisted that his victory of about 2.3 million voters over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, earning him less than 50% of the vote, was a “mandate.” Compared to the margin of more than 12 million voters delivered on Tuesday, it was a fizzle. The Economist noted that Tuesday’s Democratic victory was “the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years.” Recognizing the direction of the tide, since the election, panicked Republicans have called for regrouping, ending the war on Iran, and addressing affordability.
Trump initially appeared dazed by the rebuke, but today he woke up and threw their rejection of his agenda back in Americans’ teeth.
Ousting his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, Trump replaced her with the architect of some of his administration’s most extreme policies: Stephen Miller.
Miller is a fervent white nationalist who appears to believe in the racist “great replacement theory,” the idea that Black and Brown immigrants to Europe and the United States are destroying “Western culture.”
Miller’s elevation to chief of staff doesn’t necessarily change much; he already was a powerful force in the White House. Miller drove the “Muslim ban” in Trump’s first term and, in his second, the administration’s arrest, incarceration, and deportation plans for undocumented immigrants. His push for masked agents to arrest 3,000 people a day led to the murders of U.S. citizens Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, as well as the shooting deaths of immigrants and their mistreatment and deaths in concentration camps.
Miller has been a key proponent of Trump’s seizing power through emergency declarations that he uses to ignore the law. Frustrated by opposition to his plan to hurt Black and Brown people, Miller pushed for Trump to crush the opposition by invoking the Insurrection Act.
And Miller was central to the administration’s undermining of disability rights. Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported that after Trump complained about seeing homeless encampments in Washington, D.C., Miller argued for a plan to make it easier to round up mentally ill homeless people and institutionalize them. Making that happen required abandoning enforcement of the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C., which established that disabled Americans have a right to live in their communities rather than being forced into institutions.
The Department of Justice went along with Miller’s plan and issued a memo saying that it would no longer enforce Olmstead. While the initial targets were unhoused people, Hixenbaugh notes, the administration quickly backed away from at least five disability rights cases designed to keep physically or mentally disabled children and adults out of institutions. Hixenbaugh points out that the administration’s refusal to enforce Olmstead is sending a message to the states that, with the dramatic cuts to Medicaid in the Republicans’ so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they should “feel free to cut services that help disabled people remain at home,” forcing them into institutions.
As Phillips S. O’Brien wrote in Phillip’s Newsletter, Miller also supports Russia’s version of its war on Ukraine and has taken a strong and public stand against the embattled U.S. ally. O’Brien notes that Trump’s elevation of Miller now illustrates the president’s determination to get whatever he can for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin before the new Congress starts investigations and puts up roadblocks.
So, rather than moderating his behavior after voters’ dramatic rebuke, Trump is demonstrating by elevating Miller that he is hardening his position. He is surrounding himself with the most extreme of his advisors: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom he has supported in the face of calls for his impeachment; Natalie Harp, the smiling aide who appears glued to his side; and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025, who Trump boasted before the election would soon “be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion.” He noted: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ?”
Trump’s elevation of Miller was a deliberate declaration that he doesn’t care what the American people want. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has targeted because of her attempt to conduct oversight of a detention facility, was clear: “Stephen Miller is a white supremacist,” she said in a statement. “By promoting the person responsible for ICE detaining our neighbors and killing people in the streets, Donald Trump is doubling down on the cruelty and corruption that have defined his administration. The president is panicked after losing power in Congress and this is a signal about what he will prioritize in the final stretch of his presidency: grievance and cruelty.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) posted: “Donald Trump learned nothing from his historic defeat. Stephen Miller is the architect of the most barbaric, inhumane policies of this administration. Trump couldn’t have made a worse choice. Our Democratic majorities will fight him every step of the way.”
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries posted: “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”
But Trump’s embrace of Miller was not aimed at Democrats alone. It is a shot across the bow of Republicans who might want to jump ship. When Meredith Lee Hill of Politico told one House Republican that Trump had tapped Miller to be his chief of staff, the lawmaker replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”
Trump is making it clear to Republicans that he intends to force the party to stay behind an even more extreme weapon of MAGA than the one voters rejected Tuesday, incinerating their hopes for 2028. Alex Isenstadt of Axios reported today that Trump has told advisors that he intends to keep raising money so he can continue to wield power over Republican candidates in 2028.
And in a sign that MAGA leaders are determined to keep Republicans in line, Philip Wegmann of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the White House sent a memo to more than 3,000 Republican-oriented groups, warning them: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.”
It all feels very desperate.
Tonight Trump appeared in a campaign hat at a NASA event at which he rambled from topic to topic, slurring his words and sounding tired. He said he had declared all of space “open for American settlement, American civilization, and American freedom.” He said that “[w]ithin two years, NASA will launch the first ever nuclear powered spacecraft to Mars,” before veering off to talk about his uncle, who was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Trump promised that “before the end of my term, the United States will return American astronauts to the surface of the Moon. So exciting. And soon thereafter the United States will establish a permanent presence on lunar soil.” (NOTE: Trump’s uncle was a math professor at MIT. Trump frequently refers to this fact while claiming that he himself is a “genius” because his uncle was an MIT professor.)
To a silent audience, Trump said: “By the way, I was not on the ballot, just in case you had any questions. Because if we were on the ballot we would’ve won.”
