The Democrats’ sweeping midterm victory reflects a decade of resistance to Trump’s MAGA movement and its assault on American democracy, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
THE DEMOCRATS’ stunning “blue tsunami” in the U.S. midterm elections is not a normal election result.
It is not normal because the last decade of U.S. politics has not been normal. Despite powerful efforts to normalise the Trump era, the majority of American voters have refused to accept this offensive absurdity as normal.
Although the election result feels like the bursting of a boil, like an instantaneous and seismic shift, in reality, it is the outcome of a slow and steady resistance by ordinary American people who have said every day for ten years: “This is not who we are.”
Where mainstream media would like to simplify the election result down to the single issue of fuel prices, this idea totally misses what has really occurred. Indeed, it is not surprising that mainstream journalists did not see this result coming, considering they have missed for ten years the implications of the Trump era – the abnormality of it – for everyday people in America. They have missed the biggest story of our age.
Over the past decade, Trump and his powerful allies have worked relentlessly to normalise his abuses of power, his corruption, his lies, his idiocy, his cruelty, his total incompetence, his abject unfitness for the job.
They have created and contributed to media echo chambers – both social media and mainstream media – resplendent with disinformation and hate, echo chambers that have fed and grown the MAGA movement through division, hatred, polarisation and lies.
In this toxic environment, major media outlets like Fox News became mouthpieces for MAGA propaganda, and most other major outlets, unfortunately, capitulated to Trump’s power and diligently worked for the Trump movement by also contributing to normalising his behaviour.
No matter how low Trump went, no matter his crimes and corruption, no matter his racism, his misogyny, his hatefulness, and all the destruction he caused to the lives of Americans and across the globe, no matter how he decimated American democracy, he was framed as just any other politician.
This powerful legitimisation of illegitimacy continued up until the day of the midterm elections. In their usual horserace and false-balance frame, you would have thought the biggest news in the days before the U.S. elections was that some Democrats were not endorsing each other after preselection fights.
I also note journalists were constantly at pains to point out that not only were the Republicans unpopular, but so were the Democrats. The both-siding templating, this false-reality cooked up by mainstream media, continued to distort what was really happening in America right up until the bubble burst and the tsunami rolled in.
This election result demonstrates that no matter how hard the Trump movement and mainstream media across the world have tried to cast U.S. politics into a normal frame for the past decade, ordinary Americans refused to accept this was normal.
These ordinary people and their quiet and consistent resistance are the force that has defeated Trump. They are the ones who have convinced their friends and neighbours – even their MAGA community members who have directed hate at them – to do the right thing. And finally, the majority have done it.
When I think about this resistance, I have a picture of Ronan Donohoe in mind. Ronan is described in a New York Times piece titled ‘Americans on why they rejected Trump’s Republican Party’ as an 85-year-old retired high school history teacher from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Asked to share his reasoning for voting Democrat, Ronan said:
“I would crawl on my belly over broken glass to vote against that awful man.”
Eventually, finally and not a second too soon, U.S. voters emphatically joined with Ronan and said enough is enough. Sure, there might be some voters who were finally tipped over the edge by fuel prices, who finally came around to what Democrat supporters had been saying for ten years as they urged MAGA voters to recognise it was never in their interests – economically, culturally, nationalistically – to support Trump.
But even if fuel prices start dropping, it is not going to save Trump, or MAGA, or the Republicans, come 2028. This is because Americans have recognised – permanently – that a hateful, lying government is not good for them. They have recognised that Trump wants power for one purpose: to serve himself and his billionaire mates. Once you see this, it is impossible to unsee.
Watching the results come in, I felt like I could finally exhale after holding my breath in anxious pain for ten years while I waited for Trump’s MAGA movement to finally be exposed, to be vanquished, to be decimated. I have been writing about the terror inflicted by this movement for a decade. It feels like a new dawn. And not a moment too soon.
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads @drvicfielding or Bluesky @drvicfielding.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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