Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2017
No. Trump passed the high-water mark on election day last year, and the tide will continue to go out. Americans see with increasing clarity the authoritarian proto-fascist beneath the smarmy television personality, they see the hypocrisy and malice of the Evangelical Right whose support was indispensable to Trump’s win last year, they see the whorish cowardliness of the Republican Party that turns a blind-eye to his plain corruption.
Though Northam’s victory in Virginia exceeded Clinton’s victory in Virginia last year, 9-points doesn’t constitute a landslide and I wouldn’t — solo scriptura, so to speak — call it a rebuke. But yesterday’s trend clearly favored Democrats, and that is a decisive rebuke of a president only 10-months into his term. The Deplorable One-third can still make noise — but they aren’t going to carry many more Republicans across the finish-line.
Republicans facing re-election are making their calculations, and it must be plain by now to even the most dimwitted that it’s foolish to hitch themselves to Trump; I expect a steadily-growing catalog of outright defections from, and refusals to indulge, that sick pastiche of disaffected nutjobs now known as the alt-right.