David Cole • Sue Halpern • Mark O’Connell • Quinn Slobodian
The People’s Referendum
David Cole
Early in President Donald Trump’s second term, I spoke at a local Washington, D.C., bookstore on civil liberties and the rule of law. DOGE was taking a wrecking ball to federal agencies, Trump had pardoned everyone involved in the January 6 assault on the US Capitol and Capitol police, and the White House had issued a raft of unprecedented and unconstitutional executive orders. I stressed the gravity of the threats we faced, but also our collective power as citizens to push back, if we used our First Amendment rights to dissent, organize, assemble, and petition for redress of our grievances. And the midterms, I emphasized, would be upon us before we knew it, affording us an opportunity to use the formal political process to register our opposition. The first question I got from the packed house was “What if there are no midterms?” The worry was understandable; Trump had already engaged in many acts that would previously have been unthinkable. But it also reflected a fear that our institutions would fail in the face of Trump’s would-be authoritarianism.
Well, we certainly had midterms. Notwithstanding Trump’s efforts to deter people from voting, enlist the US Postal Service to undermine mail-in balloting, pressure red states to engage in blatant partisan gerrymandering, and use faulty federal data to disqualify eligible voters, the elections went off largely without a hitch. Civil society organizations and state attorney generals resisted Trump’s efforts to obstruct what he knew would be a referendum on his performance. Courts, including the Supreme Court, rebuffed most of his efforts to interfere. In short, the system worked.
And the results were enough to renew one’s faith in democracy. The people rendered judgment on a president who had done nothing to address their economic concerns but instead politicized the Justice Department to target his enemies, attacked core elements of our civil society, lined his family’s and friends’ pockets through rank corruption, imposed more than one hundred billion dollars in illegal tariffs, tried to end birthright citizenship, executed at least 240 people on the high seas on never-tested assertions that they were smuggling drugs, started an illegal and hugely costly war with Iran, and sent ICE agents onto city streets, where they have terrorized entire communities and killed several people, both citizens and immigrants.
At least sixty times in the leadup to the election, Trump urged people to act as if he were on the ballot—and they did. As the returns came in on Tuesday he pivoted and protested that they hadn’t been judging him after all, seeking in classic Trump style to deflect blame onto others: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” But let’s give credit where credit is due: this election was all about our current chief executive.
Still, we owe the blue wave not just to Trump’s own failures but to a pattern of sustained popular organizing and resistance since he retook office. Over the past two years the people marched in No Kings Day rallies, supported Democratic candidates who promised to check Trump, joined and donated to organizations that filed lawsuits challenging the legality of his ventures, raised their voices in outrage and derision at his misconduct, lampooned him on late-night television, exposed his incompetence and mendacity through investigative reporting, and knocked on doors to get out the vote. All of that contributed to the results we saw on election night. People often wonder what they can do in the face of assaults like those Trump repeatedly launched; the answer, in retrospect, is “a lot.”
What comes next? With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, they will decide what hearings and investigations to conduct, what subpoenas to issue, what legislation to pass, what Trump nominees to confirm or reject. That is a lot of power. Without the president’s signature, the Democrats cannot make law. But they can set the agenda for what they would do if a Democratic president were in the White House by sending Trump bills that meet people’s needs and forcing him to veto them. And he will have to sign some laws. He depends on Congressional appropriations, so will be compelled to accept terms he doesn’t like if he wants to keep his administration afloat.
Democrats can also use nationally televised hearings to bring much-needed attention to the administration’s corruption and abuses of power. If they do this right, they can, in effect, prosecute Trump before the court of public opinion. As long as the Republicans controlled both houses, Democrats were consigned to raising dissenting voices in hearings the Republican majority choreographed. Now that control belongs to the Democrats. It’s important that they not overstep by appearing more interested in taking partisan potshots than in working to address the people’s economic needs. But if they exercise their authority responsibly, they can let Trump and his administration hang themselves on their own words and actions, while simultaneously offering a positive vision of what government can do to actually help those who are so unhappy with the status quo.
The blue wave also means that the federal judiciary will no longer stand alone as a check on executive power. The courts have performed admirably and courageously in holding the president accountable to the law, from district courts to, at least in some cases, the Supreme Court, which ruled against Trump on crucial matters—including tariffs, birthright citizenship, election interference, the National Guard, use of the Alien Enemies Act, and efforts to subvert the independence of the Federal Reserve Board—even as it has greenlit his actions in other respects. Often his own appointees have ruled against him, a phenomenon Trump seems to think is a personal betrayal but is in fact just judges doing their job. That job will remain necessary, as Trump will undoubtedly continue to launch illegal initiatives unilaterally. But now the courts will have backup.
The most important backup remains the people. Without our collective engagement, using the tools the Constitution gives us, these midterm results never would have happened. With our engagement, the institutions held, and are stronger now for having done so. The fight for our democracy is by no means over, but we know what to do.
The Question for the North Country
Sue Halpern
For the past decade, the most popular governor in the country has been Vermont’s Phil Scott. This is surprising on its face, since Scott is a Republican in a state whose beloved senior senator is Bernie Sanders. But Scott—who used to run a construction company and still races stock cars at Thunder Road, a track also known as the “nation’s site of excitement”—garnered tremendous goodwill throughout the state during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he led Vermont to the lowest death rate in the country. His criticisms of Trump and distance from MAGA Republicans have also endeared him to the largely Democratic electorate.
This year Scott was seeking his sixth two-year term, a win that initially seemed all but guaranteed. The Democrats, sensing the inevitable, didn’t run their strongest candidates, leaving the field wide open for two political novices—an unabashed, Bernie-ish progressive and a more conventional liberal—to duke it out in the primary. Much to the pundits’ surprise, the progressive, Amanda Janoo, won the contest, despite campaigning to levy a tax on the state’s highest earners.
Maybe Scott saw this as a gift, or maybe he was just confident that no one could unseat him, but he hardly mounted a campaign. Janoo, a Cambridge-educated economist who grew up on a farm in the eastern part of the state, had zero name recognition—even Bernie had never heard of her. Her quest was seen as something of a fool’s errand—until it wasn’t. Unlike her opponent, Janoo worked the state hard, showing up in supermarket parking lots, holding town halls, calling for universal health care, housing affordability, and shoring up public schools. She started to raise money, and by the end of the race had received more than twice as much from individual donors as Scott, even if Scott was always going to have more to spend, since he was the recipient of nearly a million dollars from the Republican Governors Association. He also had the support of an anti-Janoo super PAC—evidence, in its own way, that Janoo was gaining traction. By election day, there was a sense that she had a shot.
As the returns were beginning to be reported, that feeling intensified: in my small town in the middle of the state, for example, voters went two-to-one for Janoo. Most of the surrounding towns gave her resounding majorities, too, as did the largest city, Burlington, and the capital, Montpelier. In the end, she lost two parts of the state that proved decisive: the wealthy Burlington suburbs of Williston and Colchester, whose residents perhaps feared the wealth tax (or other taxes), and the poorest, most rural, and most reliably conservative region, known as the Northeast Kingdom. But she did give Scott a run for all his money. Two years ago Scott received a resounding 73 percent of the vote. This time he got less than 53 percent. “Tonight we may have not won the governor’s office,” Janoo said in her concession speech, “but we proved that another way of doing politics is possible.”
The polls close in Vermont two hours before they do in New York—but the Vermont governor’s race was so close that Scott’s victory was far from certain when results began trickling in for the other race I was watching, in New York’s twenty-first congressional district. I live in Vermont but spend a lot of time in NY-21, which is just on the other side of Lake Champlain. The largest congressional district in New York by area, it covers more than 16,000 square miles, with its nearly 800,000 residents spread out from the far end of the Catskill Mountains in the south all the way up to the Canadian border. It’s a mix of rural outposts, mountain towns, farming villages, forgotten industrial cities, and a few well-heeled areas, as well as the six-million-acre Adirondack Park. For the past twelve years it has been Elise Stefanik’s fiefdom, a reliably red district that happened to go for Obama in 2008 and 2012. In her first term Stefanik was a bona fide moderate, but after Trump won in 2016 her politics moved decisively to the right; in 2022 she described herself as “ultra-MAGA.”
Not long after Trump won in 2024, he tapped Stefanik to be ambassador to the United Nations, which she called “a corrupt, defunct, and paralyzed institution.” He withdrew the nomination when he realized that her departure from the House would trigger a special election and further narrow the Republican majority—but not before the Democrats put forward a candidate to replace her, a political newcomer named Blake Gendebien who ran a dairy farm in the far reaches of the district. A few months after Trump sent Stefanik back to the House, she announced she was running for governor, and weeks later she dropped out of that race and also said she wouldn’t seek reelection to Congress. Gendebien kept campaigning, even after the special election was canceled, garnering enough support to win the Democratic primary last June.
His opponent, Anthony Constantino, whom Trump endorsed over a more conventional Republican member of the state legislature, is an aspiring rapper who last year released an album called Thank You, President Trump, and the owner of a company that makes stickers and other printed material. Republican voters got a sense of Constantino’s character when it was discovered that he had left a threatening voicemail for an eighty-two-year-old Republican county committee member who was supporting his primary opponent. They chose him anyway. Constantino continued his dirty tricks by, among other things, releasing a deepfake video that put words in Gendebien’s mouth about rape, human trafficking, and pedophilia; making questionable allegations that having a Ukrainian woman on his campaign staff broke election laws; and paying $28,000 to one of Gendebien’s neighbors linked to a spurious complaint that the farmer was illegally dumping dead cattle.
Gendebien, meanwhile, was running an earnest, grassroots campaign, pitching himself as “a conservative, old-school, free-market capitalist Democrat.” He urged New Yorkers to restore decency and civility in politics and talked about the affordability issues that were animating campaigns all over the country. “What we all want is to make sure that we can afford to live here, make sure…that inflation doesn’t outpace our ability to afford food, gasoline, diesel, fuel, and fertilizer,” he told North Country Public Radio. “We want to make sure that health care does not bankrupt our families…[and] that everyone can afford to live comfortably in a home or an apartment with dignity in the North Country and have a great job with a living wage.”
NY-21 borders Vermont, but for the most part their political cultures could not be more different. This has to do, in part, with demographics: Vermont is more educated, with less poverty and a higher per capita income. But it also can be attributed to Vermonters’ relationship to government. Every March each of the state’s 247 towns and cities gathers for a town meeting, an exercise in participatory democracy and local control that has made us less distrustful of our politicians, all of whom are our neighbors—even the stock-car-racing governor. It’s why, I suspect, we can send a democratic socialist to Washington and a moderate Republican to Montpelier. NY-21, in contrast, is vast and spread out, with little cohesiveness between regions; many people there, especially in the most remote areas, have an ingrained skepticism about the fairness and utility of government, perhaps in part because the seat of power is so far removed. NY-21 has been a Republican stronghold for 150 years, and while that may be changing, being a Republican remains a potent political identity.
On Tuesday the question for the North Country was: Would it repudiate Trump by rejecting one of his most zealous followers, or would it continue down the path of right-wing extremity forged by Stefanik? By evening, hours after Phil Scott won his sixth term in Vermont, Anthony Constantino beat Blake Gendebien by six thousand votes. It was as close to a blue wave as the district has seen in a long time, and maybe it portends a different future, but for the time being NY-21 remains a Republican redoubt.
In his profanity-laced victory speech, Constantino called members of the press “scumbags” and “fucking assholes.” So much for returning decency and civility to Washington.
‘Now Envision Chandeliers’
Mark O’Connell
Among the most remarkable aspects of this week’s midterms is how little the president seems bothered by the electorate’s unequivocal rejection of himself and the MAGA movement he founded. The man has long been recognized for his ability to airily dismiss reality, but his insistence that had he personally been on the ballot he would have won by a landslide was impressive even by his own standards. The one political reality to which he does seem to have resigned himself is that he won’t be running for office again, and so all this is of limited relevance to him, personally. He has, at least for now, reverted to his comfort zone: interior design. On Wednesday, having tired of questions about the election, he gave reporters a tour of the new White House ballroom. “Now envision chandeliers,” he said. “Envision marble floor. Oh, it’s going to be beautiful.”
JD Vance is nowhere near as insulated from reality as his boss. As vice president, he has always viewed himself as the heir apparent of the MAGA movement and of the White House itself. And so although he hopes to inherit these chandeliers and marble floors, he cannot content himself with merely envisioning them. It has been apparent for some time now that Vance’s intention, as paradoxical as it might be, is to distance himself as much as possible from a hugely unpopular president while at the same time courting his approval.
In his memoir Communion, which was published earlier this year and which I wrote about in the current issue of the magazine, he dealt with this predicament mostly by ignoring it. The book is, at least nominally, an account of his conversion to Catholicism; it’s also, less nominally, an account of his conversion to MAGA, having established himself as a public figure largely on the strength of his criticisms of Trump. To read the book is to experience a jarring cognitive dissonance: Vance attempts to portray himself as a spiritual seeker who found his way, via Christ’s teachings, to becoming a central figure in perhaps the most morally bankrupt and politically corrupt administration in American history.
Given typical publishing schedules, we can assume that the book, which appeared last June, was largely complete by late February, when Trump started a war of aggression against Iran. (It features, at any rate, not a single mention of that country.) It was certainly written long before a full view emerged of American voters’ discontent with the Trump administration and the economic effects of the war. Since its publication, and in particular since the midterms, Vance’s situation has become even more difficult.
The vice president, though, has always been a preternaturally supple political contortionist. He also has what seems a bottomless contempt for the intelligence of voters. Witness, for instance, the lengthy statement he posted on X the day following the midterms. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote. “The president himself said so last night. If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost.”
Though he doesn’t come out and say it, Vance’s implication seems to be that he himself, privately and internally, was always against the war. Publicly, however, he fell in line. Asked in March about the decision to go to war with Iran, he told reporters that “we have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.”
But the war, unpopular (and unlawful) though it remains, is by no means the only reason voters rejected Trump and MAGA, nor even the main reason. According to exit polls, 90 percent of voters named government corruption as crucial to their vote—a higher percentage than for the Iran war. Vance, unsurprisingly, makes no mention of this in his statement. His willingness to distance himself from the president goes only so far.
In this sense, maybe the strangest and most galling part of his statement is his insistence that, in the postmortem of the Republicans’ defeat, “there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting,” and voters should not listen to people advancing alternative explanations. Perhaps his use of a phrase so associated with the High Woke era is an indication that Vance is plotting some new and unprecedentedly audacious ideological defection. That seems improbable, though. It is more likely a sign that the gaslighting has already begun.
Rubio With Blue Hair
Quinn Slobodian
There is a meme circulating of Secretary of State Marco Rubio sitting on the couch despondently in blue hair, torn black jeans, and a lavender cardigan embellished with BLM, Pride, and pro-choice pins. Above it the line: “Marco Rubio realizing he has to update his pronouns to survive the next 2 years.” It joins an online museum of “Rubio realizing” he is the new governor of Greenland, the new food pyramid, or the new Supreme Leader of Iran. This is the first one, though, where Rubio’s mandate is not MAGA but Woke.
Rubio with blue hair arrived in a flood of memes on the site formerly known as Twitter after the GOP’s historic loss in the midterm elections this week. “Woke is Back” is the joke: corporate and political leaders will bend the knee to a despotic reassertion of a sensibility that supposedly reigned circa 2020. One image shows the Silicon Valley CEOs who lined up behind Trump at his inauguration kneeling in kente cloth, as Democratic congresspeople did amid the George Floyd protests. Another détournes an Elon Musk post of himself in a cowboy hat with drag makeup, sequins, and a sash reading “Vote Democrat 2026.” Another shows Marc Andreessen in colossal spacers, a septum piercing, and a rainbow cable-knit sweater. Another shows Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan with a green smoothie and floral tote, subtitled as if he were saying, “Tech really needs some more feminine energy right now.”
This meme wave showed how generative AI image creation could be used to humiliate the right and their allies as easily as it could the left. Since the era of political memes dawned with Pepe the Frog a decade ago, this was assumed to be a uniquely right-wing arsenal. The first two years of the Trump administration were a golden age of slopaganda; from a Studio Ghibli-style image of a woman in ICE handcuffs to pictures of Trump dropping feces from a fighter jet over a No Kings protest, the semiotic sludge has seemed to flow in one direction—from the right to the left. One of the iconic memes of the Trump era was an unidentified person at the Women’s March, raising their face to the heavens and screaming. Rubio received a framed portrait of the “Rubio realizing” memes for his fifty-fifth birthday; Vance went as a meme of himself for Halloween. In the axiom that was itself a meme, “the Left can’t meme.”
Have we been witnessing a genuine reversal? A skeptic might say the new memes achieve virality by reproducing insulting stereotypes. “They’re doing top surgery on the Statue of Liberty,” reads one. “Elon Musk is now Elon Mosque,” “Five Guys is now Five Folx.” Another shows Christoph Waltz’s character from Inglourious Basterds in Warby Parker hornrims and trans flag epaulettes saying, “You are sheltering straight cisgendered white men beneath your floorboards, are you not?” Yet one thing that makes this phenomenon interesting is that it is rarely clear whether the person who created or posted the meme was politically affiliated with the right or the left.
This might simply be the poster’s aesthetic; the troll is ambidextrous. But a more optimistic reading is that it shows how the high tide of “wokeness” has lost its confrontational edge and started fueling a kind of shared generational nostalgia. “Woke 1 was crazy” has become a meme of its own, quoted laughingly by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to downplay the earlier policy positions of fellow progressives. For today’s meme creators—many of whom were children at the time of the first pink pussyhat a decade ago—Woke 1 is encountered only through its broad signifiers: the flags, the lawn signs, the Manic Panic hair dye. It suggests harmless, radical chic.
If the barista with gender-ambiguous presentation, tattoos, and facial piercings is a new stock figure in advertisements for coffee machines and credit cards, they are also an artifact from an imagined lost moment of relative ease—refugee icons from the era of quantitative easing and zero interest rates. None of this needs to have any relationship to actual reality or history. Indeed, most of it doesn’t. But it does give a feeling—from the notoriously slippery flux of online communication—of how previously incendiary markers can become objects of play and subversion as Woke 1 diffuses into candy-colored tropes.
As far as “Woke 2” exists, it is usually dated to Zohran Mamdani’s election, and seems to mean less a focus on symbolic victories or a false binary between material interests and one’s gender or racial status—things that were never separable in the first place—but rather a willingness to brazenly combine them. When Mamdani began his victory speech by shouting out his fellow immigrants, or when a victorious Abdul El-Sayed introduced himself with his full name with proper Arabic pronunciation, they were also provoking in the same way the blue-hair memes do, proudly flaunting the identity markers that moderates and DNC strategists had warned were electoral suicide. There was a willingness to own difference unapologetically when you are secure in your moral high ground and your rival is momentarily brought low. It’s a chance to mark a new era from the one which we’re departing. As the writer Alex Bronzini-Vender posted: “Chud 1 was crazyyyy.”