A friend of mine, a fundamentalist, told me this week that the country is going to hell in a handbasket because we went blue. I disagree. We did not lose because the nation lost its soul. We lost because we did not listen, did not read the room and forgot that people vote their wallets. Gas hit $4.15 a gallon on Election Day, up almost 40 percent from February’s $2.98, after the war with Iran began on February 28. [12] The Associated Press found that about nine in ten voters called the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote, and about two-thirds said Trump’s policies had fueled inflation. [5] Trump himself said the war “drove the gasoline up a little bit short-term” and that he would do it again. [5] When prices climb, the president’s party pays for it. Republicans lost 48 House seats in 1974 under Ford and Democrats lost 15 in 1978 under Carter, both in years when inflation hit voters hard. [12] The war at the pump sealed it, with the tariffs adding to the bill.

I agreed with bombing Iran. I just wish he could have bombed them into oblivion and moved on. Voters will forgive a quick win. They do not forgive what shows up at the pump.

If you spend thirty years alluding to everything that might go wrong, sooner or later something will. The test of a prophecy is what you could have told me before the event. What was supposed to happen? When? What would have made you say you got it wrong? If the answer changes with the headlines, you are telling me what worried you thirty years ago. I already know you were worried.

We have lived through wars, recessions, riots and scandals. We have had plenty of trials and tribulations, and every generation has had somebody ready to declare that its particular set of troubles was the end of the world. Now Muslim Americans win elections and you see another sign. I see Americans electing fellow citizens. If an officeholder does a lousy job, make the case against that person and I will hear you out. What am I supposed to learn about how someone will govern from knowing where they worship?

What Tuesday’s Voters Actually Said

The Associated Press found that about seven in ten voters under 30 backed the Democrat in their House race, and about six in ten of them said expressing opposition to Trump was one reason for their vote. [16] I am a Republican, and I can read those numbers. If my party wants those voters back, it might start by asking what it has done to make their lives any easier.

Try getting a job that pays enough to live on, then go look for an apartment. In Jersey City, a one-bedroom is listed at about $2,700 a month, according to Zumper. [22] Once you have paid rent and put gas in the car, a $100 pair of sneakers feels like something you put off until next payday. Then somebody on television asks why young people have such a sour view of the economy. I would like to see him live on their paycheck for a month.

For years, companies moved production overseas to cut costs. Research on competition from Chinese imports found that some American communities lost manufacturing jobs and felt the effects for years. [3] The worker overseas took a job that was available to him. The executives made the decision about where the work would go. I would put the question to them: your costs went down, so what did the town that lost its factory get out of the deal?

What Trump Delivered

Let me say the part that gets left out of most coverage of this election. Trump did a lot of what those of us who voted for him wanted done, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to look balanced.

We wanted the border closed. Border Patrol apprehensions on the southwest border ran at 21,815 for the first three months of fiscal year 2026, a 95 percent drop from the first-quarter average under Biden, and CBP reported zero parole releases for the eighth straight month in December. [8] We wanted illegal immigrants sent home. ICE had logged 356,389 removals by late July, putting it on pace to challenge the record Obama’s administration set in fiscal year 2013. [4] We wanted crime down. Murders fell about 21 percent in 2025, the largest one-year drop on record, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, though the researchers cautioned that homicides had been falling before the 2020 spike and that the causes are hard to pin down. [6]

We wanted boys kept out of girls’ sports, and the Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that states may reserve women’s and girls’ teams for biological females. [9] We wanted gender transition surgeries and drugs for minors stopped, and in 2025 the Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on them. [21] And a lot of us wanted the adults in schools and in medicine held to account when they cut parents out of decisions about their own children.

The people who sent Trump to Washington wanted a short list of things done, and on much of that list he delivered.

Too Much, Too Fast

Here is where I think Trump went wrong, and it is a mistake plenty of politicians have made before him. He tried to do too much, too quickly. The Caesars of Rome knew the pattern. Julius Caesar bypassed the Senate, put his own face on the coinage and was proclaimed dictator for life in early 44 B.C. He was dead by the Ides of March, stabbed by senators who feared one man was swallowing the republic. [10] Our history has its own version. After a landslide in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt sent Congress a plan to add as many as six justices to the Supreme Court, and the Senate buried it within months. [13]

Trump is an elected president, not an emperor, and the comparison has limits. But the lesson fits. A president can be right about the border, the sports ruling and the crime numbers and still pile so much on the table at once that voters tire of the pace. The Supreme Court struck down his emergency-powers tariffs in February. [18] Prices were already the voters’ complaint, and a fight over tariffs is not what a family looking at rent wanted to hear about. Plenty of people who liked his goals got tired of the barrage.

Where Congress Fell Down

What he could not deliver on his own was law. Executive orders can be reversed by the next president. The way to lock in an agenda is to pass it, and that was the job of Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, and John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader.

Take the SAVE America Act, the voter ID and proof-of-citizenship bill that Trump made his top legislative priority. The House passed it. The Senate never did, because it needs 60 votes, Democrats were united against it, and Thune said he could not find 50 Republicans to end the filibuster. [11] Trump told Republicans to kill the filibuster. Thune answered that he did not have the votes. [14] Maybe he is right about the count. A leader’s job is to change the count, or to look his voters in the eye and tell them why he did not. This summer Trump tried to attach the bill to the defense bill, a House revolt led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna argued it was doomed in the Senate, and on June 30 Johnson canceled votes and sent members home for the holiday. [2]

I give both men credit for one thing. They worked with Trump, and they did not spend two years fighting their own president. I like that. The problem is that cooperating with a president is not the same as delivering for him. They had the House, the Senate and the White House, and when the clock ran out, the most important election bill was still sitting in the Senate.

I judge these two men by what they got done for the people who sent them there. The voters who handed Trump the border, the sports ruling and the crime numbers wanted Congress to make them stick. They did not get that, and a party that treats a good first two years as a license to coast should not expect the voters to wait.

One Set of Rules Would Do

I am tired of seeing congressional leaders sit on their thumbs while Rome burns. Both parties have this problem, and the stock trades Nancy Pelosi disclosed for her husband are one example the public can see. [7] The question applies across party lines. Why should members of Congress and their spouses be able to trade individual stocks while those members help write the laws that affect those companies?

Congress has finally moved, partway. In July the House passed a bill that bars members and their families from buying new stocks and requires public notice before they sell existing holdings. It lets them keep what they own, and Hakeem Jeffries objected that it does not ban trading outright and excludes the president, vice president and cabinet. The Senate version is still being drafted, and its future is uncertain. [1] That is a start, not an answer. A rule that applies to everybody would not be hard to write.

Then there is Epstein. Girls were sexually abused. Ghislaine Maxwell got twenty years. [19] Epstein died in federal custody before he could stand trial on the 2019 federal charges, and the Justice Department’s own Inspector General found serious failures at the jail where he was held. [20] I still want to know who helped him, who looked the other way and what the institutions that failed those girls have done to answer for it. The public is entitled to answers grounded in evidence, and the survivors are owed more than another cycle of television coverage.

The Kennedy assassinations left a different kind of scar on public trust. Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald could stand trial for JFK’s murder, and the Warren Commission’s report did not settle the argument for a great many Americans. [15] Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of murdering Robert Kennedy and went to prison, and he has been denied parole repeatedly, most recently by a board in 2023. [17] I bring them up because the distrust you see today has been building for longer than either of us has been arguing about Tuesday.

The Anger Looks Familiar

You and I part ways on religion. I do not believe there is a God who will hold a priest, a preacher or a politician to account. That job falls to us. For centuries, rulers have called on churches to bless their authority, and rulers have used patronage and secrecy to protect it. A preacher can abuse the trust of his congregation every bit as readily as a politician can abuse the trust of his voters. That is precisely why I want church and state separate. In a country where we have to live with one another, public officials owe us reasons we can all examine.

Today a leaked document or a video can bring something into daylight that powerful people once could have kept quiet. And the twenty-four-hour news business can spend the next week squeezing outrage out of it without getting us any closer to an answer. I am as tired of the spectacle as I am of the people who give the networks so much material.

What I recognize from the Vietnam era is the moment when young people quit taking their elders’ assurances at face value. Back then the anger spilled into marches and sometimes violence. On Tuesday it showed up in ballots. The grievances are different, but I recognize the look on the faces of young people who have been told for years that the people in charge know what they are doing.

So if you want to know where I think the country is headed, look at the people who were promised that hard work would get them a decent shot at a life of their own. They are doing the math. They are voting against the people in charge. And if the next crowd keeps the same arrangements and changes the names on the doors, I think those voters will come for them at the ballot box, too.

The world we grew up in is coming apart in places. People are already fighting over what will replace it. I would give the young people who have to live in it a little more credit than your prophecy does.