Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Trumpism is dead, long live populism!

Donald Trump is done for. Trumpism too. That’s the main takeaway of the Midterms. Many of the candidates Trump backed performed badly and Trump’s own incessant meddling in the Republican campaign seems to have turned voters off. That curious, manic, sometimes amusing little epoch in modern Western politics – the Trump era – is over.

But anyone who thinks this means populism is over is kidding themselves. Those folk of a more technocratic bent who are currently clinking their glasses of champagne at the prospect that populism is heading for the graveyard of bad ideas are in for a rude awakening. For there’s another takeaway from these Midterms – Trumpism might be dead, but populism lives.

Trump’s humiliation is undeniable. There will be many reasons the Republicans didn’t do as well as expected, with that noisily predicted Red Wave turning out to be more of a red dribble. But a key one is Trump. His boys took a beating.

TV’s Dr Mehmet Oz, loudly backed by Trump, lost the Republicans’ Senate seat to John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Trump-anointed candidates Don Bolduc and Blake Masters did badly in New Hampshire and Arizona respectively. Trump fave Herschel Walker appears to have underperformed in the race to be Senator in Georgia. It looks like there will be a run-off there. Strikingly, as NBC reports, the feeling in the GOP is that they’ve got to ‘keep Trump away from Georgia’. Trump love has become a kiss of death for aspiring politicians.

Trump’s humiliation is undeniable

ABC reckons that at least 14 of Trump’s picks have lost their election bids. Even a top Trump adviser now says, ‘This is a sinking ship’. Trump himself is reportedly ‘fuming’, stewing at his Mar-a-Lago estate over his failure to use the Midterms to reassert the politics of MAGA. What will become of his much-trailed ‘big announcement’ as to whether he’s going to run in 2024 remains to be seen.

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