What Happens When Trump s Star Implodes

Here’s What Happens When Trump’s Star Implodes
We are watching a presidency collapse in real time. And it’s lovely and disorienting.
Andrew Egger, Martyn Wendell Jones, Jim Swift
11- 05-2026

We’re all still a little punch-drunk from Tuesday’s thunderclap of an election, which has left us in a magnanimous mood. So for the rest of the week, we’re having a little flash sale. Subscribe now to get 20% OFF the next year of Bulwark+. We want you with us for what comes next—and we think you’ll enjoy being along for the ride.

Two days later, we’re all still trying to find words big enough to describe the magnitude of the blue wave we just witnessed. Here’s a data point: One of the earliest bellwethers Tuesday night was Kentucky’s Sixth District, where even a razor-thin win for Democrat Zach Dembo was seen as a sign that a massive tsunami was on the horizon.

In the final count, Dembo won by more than nine points. Happy Thursday.


(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
Trump Retreats to His Happy Place
by Andrew Egger

It’s tough on the chattering class, living through a major political sea change. After Trump’s shocking win in 2016, pundits were suddenly deprived of the stores of political wisdom they’d spent years accumulating. Who could say how it had happened, or what would come next? Like everybody else, the analysts were groping blindly in the dark. (They compensated by visiting diners in rural Ohio to talk to voters.)

Right now feels a bit like that too. Up until Tuesday night, the Trump era had been defined by certain rules. You could count on Trump always to do the most self-serving thing, to drag his party along with him, to ruthlessly quash dissent. And from about 2018 on, you could typically count on the GOP to go along with this arrangement.

Are these still the rules after the midterm shellacking? Can Trump continue his generational run as Republican god-emperor? Here’s an even more astonishing question: Is he even going to try?

Yesterday, as the Republican blame game got going, Trump wasn’t the one laying out the case for how the GOP could regroup and recover. That job fell instead to Vice President JD Vance. And remarkably, the case Vance made was one more in keeping with his own views than with his own administration’s party line. In a long treatise on X, Trump’s veep laid out the ways his own administration had brought calamity upon itself.

“There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is,” Vance wrote. “But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. . . . The reason we lost is the war.”

To woo back the voters they lost, Vance argued, the administration would need to end the Iran war, refocus itself on cost-of-living issues, put America first, and “change our relationship to Israel.”

This would be extraordinary stuff from any vice president—let alone Trump’s, with his mobland obsession with personal loyalty. Vance has found plenty of ways this year to get the word out about his own reservations about the Iran war. But this is the first time he’s said fuck it and just started posting on main. And why not? What has he got to lose? Vance’s odds of winning the presidency in 2028 have never been lower, and even he must see that there’s certainly no path there anymore as Donald Trump’s Bestest Little Guy. Of course, it doesn’t seem very likely to work: There’s only so much you can do to distance yourself from a White House when you’re its second-in-command. And you can only bemoan so much about the need to end the war when you led the negotiations that failed to end it.

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Vance was hardly the only Republican trying to chart a path forward. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state Republicans weathered the blue hurricane better than most, spent yesterday repeatedly offering grim assessments of the dead-end trajectory of the current party and the opportunities it had squandered to get here. MAGA dissidents like Tucker Carlson were happy to twist the knife, too: “We can say, without hyperbole or gloating, this is the end of the Trump era last night,” Carlson said on his show. “We’re done.”

Even replacement-level GOP senators found their tongues for what felt like the first time in years. “Look, the president made it very clear that he was on the ballot,” South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, who was re-elected this week, told a local news station. “I think he did a lot of things right. But I think there were some challenges in the way some of those were executed. . . . We’re also going to have to take a second look at some of the executive branch decisions that have been made.”

The most incredible thing about all this wasn’t just that it seemed to happen independent of Trump himself. It was how little Trump even seemed to care.

All around him, his party was feverishly planning for a future that barely seemed to involve him. In some cases, a future that seemed organized against him. Meanwhile, he spent yesterday retreating further up his own ass. Hours after Vance posted his manifesto, Trump hurriedly assembled reporters to treat them—I swear I am not making this up—to fifteen minutes of aimless chitchat about his new East Wing ballroom.

“It’ll be the most beautiful ballroom, I think, anywhere in the world, and they’ve been trying to get it for 150 years,” Trump said. “You could put as many helicopters as you want on the roof.”

Eventually, Trump took some questions about the election, including whether he’s worried about being impeached—“what, for having a successful country?”—but he quickly tired of them. “Watch the beam go up,” he ordered the press. “Now envision chandeliers.”

You have to imagine Trump will not stay quite this dissociated forever. He has plenty of reasons to lock back in: A world where he doesn’t rule his party with an iron fist is a far less pleasant one for him going forward, one with far fewer opportunities to rake in the benjamins and far more legal storm clouds on the horizon.

But for now, at least, we are seeing something that would have seemed unimaginable just a few days ago. For a decade, the GOP has been a solar system that revolves around one supermassive star. Yesterday, we got a glimpse of what it will look like when that star suddenly goes out.

Blue, eh?
by Martyn Wendell Jones

Toronto, Ontario
Considering the threats, tariffs, and mockery President Donald Trump has directed at Canada over the last two years, one might expect Canadians to be positively thrilled with the drubbing the Republicans took in the midterm elections. But so far, north of the border, reactions have been a bit more circumspect.

“Yes, the Republicans took a pounding—by recent American standards,” wrote Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne, one of the paper’s more conservative voices. But the 41 or 42 percent of the popular vote he expected Republicans to pick up in the final count “would exceed the winning party’s vote share in most recent Canadian elections,” and therefore he found it difficult to view the result as the thoroughgoing repudiation of Trump’s deranged politics that many Americans have taken it to be.

The fact that “tens of millions of Americans continue to support him,” Coyne wrote, is “as much the lesson of this election as the Republican losses.”

In a similar vein, Toronto Star columnist Justin Ling characterized the blue wave that put Congress firmly in the hands of the Democrats as a “productive cough for democracy in the United States.” But like Coyne, he bemoaned the lack of a supermajority in either chamber that could otherwise enable Democrats to override Trump’s veto power, which the president has threatened to deploy in various interviews and taunted his opponents with in a Truth Social post.

Ling expects Trump to befuddle Congress through the sort of thin-slicing “salami tactics” the Communist Party used to consolidate its rule in post-war Hungary. As for what Canadian leadership should do about it, he thought it would be “mad” to accept a new trade deal with the U.S. under Trump—arguing that Prime Minister Mark Carney should stay the course and continue to watch Canada’s non-U.S.-bound exports grow.

Journalist Matt Gurney said he hopes Americans have a shot at stabilizing their political situation, but expects that “most damage won’t be reversed.” And not only that.

“U.S. voters would inflict more of the last two years on the Western allies in a heartbeat for cheaper gas and ground beef,” he lamented.

Such dour assessments underscore a harsh reality about Trump’s second term: It’s going to be years before erstwhile international allies, Canadians among them, become open to re-establishing the friendly, easygoing relationship they once enjoyed with the United States. One former U.S. ambassador to Canada called for Congress to begin “a formal reconciliation process with Canada . . . almost the first day they come into office in January.” That could offer a good first step—but the collective foot of Democratic lawmakers will hang in the air without finding a place to put down if Trump continues making noise about Canadian annexation, as he did at rally appearances in the lead-up to the midterms. Members of his cabinet cheered on the cause of Albertan secession. And just days before Americans went to the polls, the current U.S. ambassador to Canada suggested the country could be blamed for unfavorable midterm results for Republicans owing to the role he expected trade pressures to play in key border states.

Even prominent Democrats have acted in ways that have alienated the Canadian public. On October 14, five days before Alberta’s independence referendum, Sen. Adam Schiff visited the province and met with Premier Danielle Smith—a right-wing figure many Canadians criticize for her role in the separatism crisis—to discuss trade issues. During an interview back in August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was reluctant to commit to reversing Trump’s tariffs against Canada. (He has since come around.) Many Canadians took these acts for evidence that Canada won’t necessarily be better off under a Democratic administration than a Republican one. Something fundamental has changed.

Many Americans profess to love and respect Canada and see Trump’s actions, such as “renaming” Lake Ontario, as ridiculous and demeaning. Canadians have interpreted Trump’s belligerence differently: as a threat to their sovereignty. They are correct to do so. Canada’s economy was struggling even before Trump’s latest round of tariffs went into effect; one CBC reporter estimated that the 50 percent duties Trump imposed on $28 billion of Canadian exports in late August put tens of thousands of jobs and half a point of the country’s GDP freshly at risk.

To many on both sides of the border, the midterms betoken a light at the end of the authoritarian tunnel in the United States. But we Americans need to find our way out ourselves before we can expect to approach our former friends with tidings of normality. For now, we continue to travel in the dark.