Donald Trump and the GOP, see you in two years

Last night, a minority of voters, potentially aided by the deliberate weakening of the Voting Rights Act, disproportionately favored by our arcane and pointless electoral college system, and for the second time in five elections, handed the White House to a man the majority of voters rejected.

{mosads}A man for whom the list of applicable deleterious superlatives is so exhaustive as to beggar belief. And while America was at it, they handed him the keys to a unified House and Senate, as well as a Supreme Court with an immediate bench-tipping opening he’ll have filled by the end of January. I did not sleep last night. Not a wink. I spoke briefly to my father this morning. I told him that this wasn’t the country he and my mother had taught me about. “No, no it isn’t,” he agreed. 

I feel like Leia watching as her home of Alderaan is vaporized by the Death Star. Utterly helpless as the home I knew and fought for disappears. My daughter will turn five just a few days after the inauguration. I had hoped that her first political memory would be of the first female President being sworn into office. Instead, we’ve picked a man to lead us who considers her and all other women to be either ugly pigs worthy of nothing but scorn and public shaming, or objectified sex toys that exist purely for his own personal gratification.

Two years. 

That’s how long we have to survive this unmitigated disaster before we have another shot at fixing it. And a disaster it will be. For civil rights, healthcare, the economy, global stability and peace, and the future health and sustainability of the Earth herself.

Monday, I had made the bold claim that regardless of outcome, this year’s election would be the last one the GOP would participate in as a viable national party, and I stand by that claim.

In some ways, Trump’s victory may have only strengthened the argument. Once all the votes are tallied, Trump will have lost every demographic except older white Americans. This constituency will continue to die off at a natural rate, but Latinos, blacks, immigrants, Muslims, women, LGTBQI, and the young will only grow. And in the intervening years, everything that goes wrong, all of our compounding disasters, will rest squarely and exclusively on the shoulders of the GOP on Capitol Hill. They will have absolutely no one to blame but themselves, and the public will quickly grow tired of their excuses. Trump will not win a second term, if his attention span allows him to serve out his entire term in the first place.

Which brings us to the 2018 midterms. Once more, the entire House will be up for reelection, as well as a third of the Senate, although Democrats have more to defend. In the meantime, a very helpful Republican minority party starting in 2009 laid out the template for the sort of blockade the Democrats will have to employ in Congress for the next two years to blunt the worst of Trump’s domestic agenda.

Two years. We need a Gandalf to stand astride the Bridge of Khazad Dum. The Balrog is coming, and I fear it is beyond any of us.

Tomlinson is an author and regular contributor to the Hill on state, local and national politics. Follow him on Twitter @stealthygeek.

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