Welcome to the post-Trump era, featuring 26 more months of Trump

Americans have spoken, and they’ve had enough. The age of Trump is coming to an end.

But will it end with a bang, or a whimper?

On Tuesday, voters in what had been some of America’s Trumpiest states wrote Donald Trump’s political obituary. They turned a slew of deeply red Republican states and districts Democratic blue. And the U.S. President … shrugged. He accepted the results.

The man who still refuses to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, who urged on (and then pardoned) Jan. 6 insurrectionists and who visibly schemed to undermine voting in the midterms immediately accepted the validity of Tuesday night’s results.

He of course blamed others and claimed that if he’d been on the ballot, his party would have done so much better. But everything else was, by the standards of the 47th President, abnormally normal.

Reflexively recognizing the legitimacy of election results? It was an action from the time before Trump.

Or the first sign of the post-Trump era.

Congress has been flipped from a servile Republican majority in both houses to whopping Democratic majorities in both chambers. That’s because voters in states that have swung solidly Republican since the dinosaurs walked the earth, and where enthusiasm was once high for Mr. Trump’s second coming, have started questioning the faith.

Analysis: Americans spoke loudly in the midterms, but time will tell whether they were a turning point

Back in 2004, Thomas Frank wrote a much-cited book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? He decried, and tried to explain, the fact that much of the country – led by blue-collar and farming Kansas – had become a Republican red sea. Mr. Trump made those states even more red.

But on Tuesday, that changed.

Mr. Trump won South Carolina in 2024 by a whopping 18 percentage points, but the state just elected its first Democratic senator in nearly three decades.

Iowa gave Mr. Trump a 13 percentage point margin of victory two years ago, moving it from swing state to solid red. But on Tuesday, a Democrat won its senate election.

Then there’s Texas. For Democrats, it’s been the white whale of red states: always pursued, never caught. But James Talarico just won the Senate race there by a whopping 12 points, while Gina Hinojosa was elected governor. Democrats last won those offices in the 1990s.

As in Hungary and Serbia, U.S. elections acted as a referendum on an out-of-touch leader

Mississippi, which gave Mr. Trump a massive 23 percentage point margin of victory in 2024, hasn’t had a Democratic senator since the 1980s. As of Wednesday night, the Democratic candidate was leading in a race that was still too close to call.

Kansas last had a Democratic senator in the 1930s. It’s now sending one to Washington.

The Democratic Party’s congressional delegation is about to become a lot bigger, which is a good thing. It’s also about to become a lot more ideologically heterodox – also a good thing.

The most left-leaning parts of the party, elected from impossibly safe districts in the northeast where the Democratic primary is the real election, get an outsized share of media attention.

But the core of the party are centrists, and the arrival of a crop of new members who know how to speak to Republican-leaning voters in Republican-leaning districts should add to the gravitational pull to the centre. Red-state Democrats understand that many of the voter concerns Mr. Trump claimed to want to address are real concerns, even if his solutions are not.

As for the Republican Party, it has spent the last decade turning itself into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mr. Trump’s desires, interests and whims. The President remade the party in his image. He’s still very popular with millions of MAGA true believers, but their numbers and their enthusiasm have clearly shrunk.

Republicans in districts and states that Mr. Trump won by double-digit margins saw complete fealty to him as their only option. He was America’s most popular Republican politician, by a long shot. But now, he’s a political millstone, at least in competitive states and districts.

And a lot of places just became a lot more politically competitive.

During the election campaign, several GOP members in tight races tried to dissociate themselves from policies such as tariffs on Canada. Others quietly begged him to not hold rallies in their areas with them.

Mr. Trump was the Republican future, until he wasn’t.

Republicans who want to hang on to competitive seats in 2028 have every incentive to open up some distance between themselves and the man of the past.

The funeral hall has been booked for the end of the Trump era. The plot has been picked out. The eulogy has been written.

There’s just one problem: The subject of eulogy will remain in the White House, vested with all the executive powers of the world’s most powerful head of state, for another 26 months.

He might go quietly into the political night. He might go peacefully. He might go with a whimper and a shrug.

Or the most intemperate and impetuous U.S. President, his power slipping and his sanity failing, may lash out in rage against reality and mortality.

The end of the Trump era could be a soft denouement, with a gentle fade to black.

Or it could be anything but.