Has America just rejected Trumpism? | Simon Marks

The pendulum has swung even further away from Donald Trump than the most optimistic polling had predicted. Yeah, that's absolutely correct, James. This is the comeuppance's comeuppance. He is a busted flush, as of this morning here in Washington, D.C. You can call it a rebuke. You can call it a rout. You can call it, as I see one news organization is here today, a blue nami. But this is a total, utter blowout for Donald Trump, for his inner circle. Still trying to circle the wagons at the White House as this new dawn, quite literally, has just broken here in the United States with, I think, as yet. unrealised and undetermined consequences because the scale of this Democratic Party victory is beyond anything that Democrats, even themselves, had dared to dream, beyond anything that the opinion polls were suggesting. They have flipped enough seats in the Senate already to be looking at a situation where they've got 54 seats in the Senate. Remember, you need 50 for a majority there, 51 for the majority, casting tie. Of course, if it's 50-50, depending on who the vice president of the United States is, it's perfectly possible they're going to end up with 56 seats by the time this is all wrapped up. In the House of Representatives, they've currently got 228. They only needed 218 to form a majority. There are some estimates here suggesting that by the time all the remaining races are declared, they could end up with as many as 240 members of the House of Representatives. And for Donald Trump and the White House I mean, the arguments that they are making overnight and into the morning simply aren't going to wash. I see that the Washington Sun is quoting a senior White House official as saying President Trump did a better job. promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves. So this is all part and parcel of the president now insisting that if his name had been on the ballot, it would have been a landslide for him. It's the problem that the candidates that the Republicans ran were no good. So let's just look into that in just one small bit of additional detail. Let's look at what happened in Texas. Texas, Texas, the bluest. The reddest of red states now suddenly giving Democrats a reason to believe that they've turned it blue and that it may now be a real election battleground moving forward in 2028 and beyond. In Texas, if Donald Trump had not turned against the incumbent Republican senator, John Cornyn. Much beloved by Texas Republicans, if he hadn't ordered the Texas Republican Party to defenestrate Senator John Cornyn so that... Ken Paxton, his mini-me, the scandal-soaked Attorney General of Texas, could end up being the pathetic candidate trying to take on James Tallarico, the 37-year-old upstart within the Democratic Party, beloved by left-wingers and centrists alike, the man that the Republicans went on to dub. Tallarico. Oh, six gender Jimmy. He's a vegan. Donald Trump kept falsely telling everybody you can't possibly win in Texas if you're a vegan. Well, guess what? Tell a tell a Rico walked it last night. And the candidate that the Republicans had in Texas for that Senate seat was terrible. Yeah, but it was Donald Trump So the notion that, you know, you can just go around and blame these terrible candidates and issue blame for all of this is laughable. I think it's also important to underscore that last night actually was a demonstration of the fact that up until now, the American constitution over the last two years has essentially failed. It has been found to be lacking. And it is only... The corrective of an election and this mass movement of voters weighing in, in many cases, moving away from Republicans for the first time in their voting history to express their fury at what Donald Trump has done to this country since he returned to power, that is halting him. In his tracks, doesn't of course completely limit what he can do in power, but certainly halting him legislatively for the next two years and turning him into a lame duck. And Republicans have got major questions to answer that the public essentially is asking them as a result of that vote last night. Where were you for the last two years? What was Congress, the Republican majority in Congress? ...doing in failing to demonstrate any spine to stand up to a man who was chipping away at the country's democracy, at the country's standing on the world stage, and they were all, along with the captains of industry here and tech, for the tech industry last night... Abject disaster, given that they've all been on their knees before Donald Trump over the last two years. This wasn't just a rebuke of the President of the United States, of J.D. Vance, of Marco Rubio, of Pete Hegseth, all men, by the way, who up until yesterday thought that they were, you know, potential runners and riders for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2028. This is a rebuke. Of all those people in the private sector who bent the knee to Trump, whether they are the Elon Musks, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Jeff Bezoses, or the media organisations here, CBS News and the like, that have absolutely prostrated themselves before this president, the American public sent a message last night that they have had enough. It's like a spell-breaking. Isn't it? I mean, I love your exuberance in covering this because you... You convey perfectly the sheer scale of both the surprise but also the significance. And the power of that spell is best illustrated by the power of the men that fell under it, who you have just listed. So if a spell has broken or a dam perhaps has broken, what now gets washed away? What gets washed away? Because these people will still own the massive companies. J.D. Vance will still be the vice president. The cronies and the sycophants will still surround The president. So so what changes? Well, let's talk about the tech sector, first of all, because my colleague here, our LBC colleague, Matt Fry, was making this point in our special coverage late last night. You know, this is not just a rebuke. For Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, which, of course, was not really ever a real government department, even though he was suddenly empowered, waving his chainsaw around to fire hundreds of thousands of federal government workers by President Donald Trump. This is a major element of pushback by the American electorate towards AI, towards data centers. It was fury towards data centers in Texas that fueled not only... Ken Paxton's defeat at the hands of James Tallarico but staggeringly Governor Greg Abbott seeking a fourth term in office in the Lone Star State who only 10 or 11 months ago Made a speech when Google flung money into Texas, saying that he wanted Texas to be at the epicenter of the AI industry. Ten months later, guess what? Republican voters in urban areas said, I don't want those things in my backyard. And in rural areas, the hunters, the fishermen, the gun fans, actually turn out also to be lovers of the environment in the great Texas countryside. The Texas Hill Country and other parts of the state, and they turned around and said, you can take these data centers and stuff it. There's a risk in that now, economically, because as Matt Fry was observing here on LBC last night, we were already seeing some indications of a possible AI bubble bursting. And the AI industry is all about massive growth and construction all over the United States. And now suddenly obstacles are going to be placed in the way of that. Because of what the electorate did last night, there's a message in all of that to our own government back in the UK, which I think even, you know, a matter of months ago, was still sort of struggling to understand that actually members of the public have questions about AI and want the opportunity to weigh in on this issue of construction of data centres. So for the tech industry, this is a real disaster. But I think also, for all of those People across the country, in some universities, at many law firms, within our industry, the media industry, which has largely collapsed here, absolutely failed in its duty to serve as the fourth estate, the people that hold power to account since Donald Trump returned to power In January of 2025, they are all facing. Monumental questions, and particularly in our industry, there's no coming back. There's no coming back for CBS News from what has taken place there under the Ellisons over the course of the last months since Paramount bought CBS News. What on earth is going to happen at CNN now that CNN is about to fall into the Ellison's hands? Christiane Amanpour, the host of the global podcast, The X-Files, but also, of course, up until now, CNN's chief international correspondent, she's voting with her feet. She's getting out before the Ellisons take. over these industries that have been absolutely dominated by the sudden race into Donald Trump's embrace, whatever it means for core principles, I think are facing massive questions today. And Donald Trump is going to find himself over the next two years now because of the size of this victory. Facing not just a barrage of investigations of his own activities and the activities of key figures within his inner circle, the Hegseths, the people like Todd Blanche, the Attorney General, the former Attorney General, Pam Bondi. Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security since left her post, she's going to be called up before investigative committees. Elon Musk, I mean, there's a great line from The Sopranos, which I can't entirely use on a family radio program. But at one point, Tony Soprano says that he's got federal investigators so burrowed within his insides that they can taste the brill cream. I mean, that is the situation that is going to exist here for men like Elon Musk. Elon Musk, who flung hundreds of millions of dollars at one Senate race in Texas, never mind all the other money that he spent on this race, is going to find himself in the crosshairs of federal investigation by the committees of Congress. And so for all of these people, the party is absolutely over. Crikey. It might have been a slightly different show if I talked to you at 10 o'clock instead of at half past 12. I mean that in the best possible way because you're unequivocal in your analysis. And final question, and we'll have to be brief. The scale also diminishes the threat. The scale of the victory diminishes the threat of the corrupt response, but it doesn't eradicate it entirely. Oh, well, I agree with that. I mean, he's got no way of pushing back at this because he can't claim it was rigged because, as he said of his own win in 2024, that was too big to rig. He said it was too big for the Democrats to rig. Well, this is absolutely too big. for him to claim it was rigged, which is why he folded his tent on that last night. Look, I don't think it's completely over for President Donald Trump. I don't want to leave anybody with that impression. In foreign policy terms, he can continue to do pretty much whatever he wants, because even though the Democrats are going to pass all sorts of resolutions insisting that he's got to wrap up the war in Iran, he's got no authority to prosecute it, he can completely ignore all of that. And any legislation they pass that crosses his desk, as he indicated last night, on social media, he can veto, and they're not going to have the two-thirds majority needed on Capitol Hill to override the veto. So he's still able to use the powers of the presidency to his best ability. It is the investigations that are going to tie these people, including the president, not necessarily impeachment investigations, up in two knots. Does anybody genuinely think he's just going to be able to carry on building his Quote-unquote ballroom, his Arc de Trump, I think the Kennedy Center is safe from the bulldozers now that he has threatened to move in there to bring it crashing down. The BBC is probably off the hook as well. Sorry, say that again? The BBC is probably off the hook as well, albeit that... Well, I mean, that lawsuit is going to crumble under its own weight, the weight of its own pomposity. I mean, there's no possibility that the BBC needs to worry about that. They're just going to have to come up with the money to pay their legal bills. But, you know, in all of these areas, he is going to be constrained now. And I do wonder, James, you know, we talked about this a few weeks Those emails that he was sending out, those fundraising emails where he was saying, I may only have one month left in the presidency. In a week, I may not be president any longer. There was an image of him boarding a train and riding out of town that he used in one of his fundraising emails only last week. I do wonder if he's really going to stick around for the next two years or at some point say. I'll throw in the towel. I'll give it to JD Vance and give him a chance to try and build up some head of steam before 2028. I, you know, He's never looked like a quitter to me, but I do wonder whether we might be heading down that kind of an avenue. Well, there'll be plenty more for us to talk about moving forward. Simon Marks, you need to get yourself to bed. Have you hallucinated at all? Well, maybe the whole thing was a hallucination. Maybe the whole thing was a hallucination. We'll be back tomorrow to restore reality. Simon Marks, who led some extraordinary coverage of these extraordinary midterms overnight on LBC, ably assisted by a veritable roster of A-team global talent.