Pozeram, The Wreck

Len D. Pozeram, “The Wreck,” Libertarian Alliance (UK) (5 November, 2026).

I am going to enjoy this, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I stayed up till nearly three watching the returns on the lobby TV, with a pot of coffee and a trucker who had come in off the interstate and couldn’t sleep either. When the networks called Kansas for a Methodist preacher, he laughed so hard he spilled his cup over the counter. I mopped it up without a word of complaint. It was the best night of television I have watched in years. For a decade Donald Trump told us we would get tired of winning. Last night the Republican Party found out what the other thing feels like, and it found out in places where it had forgotten that losing was possible.

Here is the tally for my British readers, who may have had the sense to go to bed. The Democrats needed four Senate seats. They took seven. Sherrod Brown beat Jon Husted in Ohio, a state Trump carried by eleven points two years ago, and I like to think the voters of Ohio took a look at Husted’s backside, as the President advised them, and decided they had seen enough. Adam Hamilton beat Roger Marshall in Kansas, and he will be the first Democrat that state has sent to the Senate since 1932. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas, the first Democratic Senate win there since 1988, and he did it after being outspent in the most expensive race of the year. Roy Cooper took North Carolina. Josh Turek took Iowa, which was the seat that gave the Democrats the Senate. Troy Jackson retired Susan Collins in Maine after nearly thirty years. In South Carolina, Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham, whom the governor had appointed in July to her late brother Lindsey’s seat and whom Trump had endorsed for a full term. The House went as well, and Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker in January. As I write, the Senate stands at fifty-four Democrats to forty-four Republicans, with the last races still being counted.

The administration spent election day sending letters to at least twenty Democrats to tell them they were targets of a criminal investigation into voter confusion in Alaska. The President spent the day before it complaining that the papers had taken him seriously when he said he would rename the Lincoln Memorial after himself. He says it was a joke. I believe him. Nobody who meant to win could have run a campaign like this one.

The commentators are already arguing about what did it. Mark Antonio Wright has written a sharp piece for National Review arguing that it was less the war than the man. He dates the rot from the Liberation Day tariffs of April 2025, which he compares to Biden’s flight from Kabul: the moment when Americans who don’t follow politics looked up and stopped believing the President could manage the basics. Then he lists the carnival that followed. Tariffs went on and off and on again. There was talk of taking Greenland, and then the ballroom, the President’s face on the coinage, the sulking over the Nobel Prize, and in the last weeks of the campaign the commentary on Republican rear ends. His verdict is that after eleven years the American people were “sick of Donald Trump.”

I agree with most of that. Where I part company with him is his argument that the war can’t have been decisive because nobody marched through the suburbs of Dallas. People don’t march when they are paying for a war. They sit at the kitchen table and do the sums. In the exit polls about sixty percent of voters said attacking Iran was the wrong decision, a third called the war a crucial factor in how they voted, and nine in ten said the cost of living mattered to them. The cost of living this year has a great deal of the war in it. You don’t need a protest when you have a gas pump. In any case the two explanations come to the same place. The tariffs and the ballroom and the war were the same fault three times over: a man who treats the government as a television show and his promises as lines in a script he can rewrite whenever the ratings dip.

That brings me to what I came to say. Trump’s legacy won’t be the triumphal arch he wants to put up in Washington, though I suppose Americans fifty years from now will still be able to stand and gaze at it. His legacy will be that he has made the American right unelectable for a generation, and he has done it by teaching the voters that it can’t be trusted.

Think about what he promised in 2024. None of it was vague. He promised no new wars. He promised to bring prices down. He promised to stop the government using its police powers against its political enemies, and to respect the Constitution that his opponents were supposed to be trampling. Those promises were as specific as a car loan agreement, with so much a month for so many months and your signature at the bottom. I have signed a few of those in my time, and I paid them off, because I knew the bank would come for the truck if I didn’t. When a man walks away from a loan, the bank doesn’t forget. It goes on his record, and every lender he walks into afterward can see it. That is where the American right stands this morning. It signed a contract with the voters for constitutional government at home and peace abroad, and it walked away inside eighteen months, for a war a foreign government wanted and a ballroom the President wanted. On the last day of the campaign his Justice Department was mailing target letters to the other party’s politicians. If the right would walk away from all that, the voters can fairly conclude it would walk away from anything. The next Republican who stands up and promises limited government and no foreign wars is going to be asked why anybody should believe him, and he will have no good answer.

The people who believed hardest are the ones least likely to come back. The union men, the young men who had given up on both parties, the Hispanic families in the Rio Grande valley, the old antiwar right that sat out every election from the second Bush to Romney and came out for Trump: these were the new money in the Republican fund, and they were spent first. The exit polls say about a fifth of Trump’s own 2024 voters now disapprove of him. Those are the clients who checked the books.

So he has let the Democrats back in, and my readers should be clear about whom he has let in. This is not the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton. Its new senators include Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and a crop of progressives who regard the market as a problem to be managed and property as a privilege to be licensed. They don’t have the White House yet. Trump has two years left and a veto pen, and he will use it, if only out of spite. But the voters who sent the Democrats to Congress last night are not going to forgive the Republicans by 2028, and once the Democrats hold the presidency as well, they won’t waste it. I know what they will do because they have told us.

They will abolish the filibuster, which they tried to do in January 2022 and were stopped only by two senators of their own, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, neither of whom sits in the Senate now. They will pass something like the For the People Act, which the House passed in 2021 and which would have laid federal rules over the way every state runs its elections. They will make the District of Columbia a state, which the House has voted for twice, and collect two safe Democratic senators for it. They have bills ready to enlarge the Supreme Court from nine justices to thirteen. None of this needs a constitutional amendment. It needs a majority in each house and a President, and the Republicans have just handed them the first and done most of the work toward the second.

The First Amendment comes next. In 2014 every Democrat in the Senate voted for a constitutional amendment that would have let Congress and the states limit what is spent on political speech. It needed sixty-seven votes and got fifty-four. In 2022 the Biden administration set up a Disinformation Governance Board inside the Department of Homeland Security, and dropped it only when the laughter got too loud. A party that believes the government should decide how much a citizen may spend arguing against it, and which arguments count as disinformation, doesn’t need to repeal the First Amendment. It only needs to reinterpret it, and a Supreme Court of thirteen will be happy to oblige. The end in view is rules so arranged that nobody much to the right of Joe Biden can be elected to anything again. Trump spent ten years telling his people the Democrats were coming for the Constitution. He has just opened the door and held it for them.

What does this mean for Britain? More than my friends over there may like. When this war began, every party of any size on the British right lined up behind it except one. The Conservatives backed it. Reform backed it, and Nigel Farage told the cameras this was the right war and the gloves needed to come off, which is an easy thing to say in a television studio. The only party that said no from the first day was Restore Britain, and it took a good deal of abuse from Reform for saying so. It said no for the plain reason that the first duty of a British government is to Britain, and that a war with Iran would land on British families as more expensive petrol, heating and groceries. That is exactly what happened, over there and over here. The diesel that moves the food costs more, the farmer’s machinery costs more to run, the small firm’s electricity bill goes up, and none of the men who made speeches about international leadership paid a cent of it.

Now watch what follows. The British right has spent ten years copying the American Republicans, their slogans and their grievances and their talk-show manner. It is about to watch its model drive into a wall. If Reform wants to know what becomes of a party of the right that promises ordinary people a better deal and then spends their money on somebody else’s war, it can look at Kansas. And if the British public wants to know what it has bought with seventy years of following Washington into the Middle East, it can remember the B-1s leaving Fairford in a hurry last month, run off a British airfield by the threat of a few drones.

I voted for Donald Trump three times, and I will carry that the way a man carries a loan he co-signed for a no-good brother-in-law. He was supposed to save us from socialism. Instead he has given the American left its easiest road to power since 1932, and he did it not by fighting for free markets and constitutional government but by showing the voters, over and over, that he had no use for either. He has no principles. He has appetites. The country has found that out, and last night it said so in states it hadn’t said anything like it in for generations.

When his time comes, I won’t be at the funeral and I won’t be sending flowers. If there is a Hell, and I have never been sure there is, I hope he spends eternity in it with the bill for this war in his hand.

The trucker who spilled his coffee checked out at six this morning. He told me he had voted Republican all his life and hadn’t voted at all yesterday, and he asked me who I thought the party would run next time. I said it didn’t much matter. Whoever it is will have to explain why anybody should sign with him again, and nobody is going to take his word for it.