Is this the inflection point?
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has been voting Republican since 1889. That’s 136 straight years. Lancaster County elected Trump by 15 points just this last November. Last Tuesday Democrat James Malone, whose only political experience came when he twice ran unopposed for the mayor of East Petersburg, narrowly defeated well-known Republican County Commissioner Josh Parsons in a special election for state senate. Malone essentially ran on one thing: Parsons’ ties to Trump and Musk.
Despite Musk pouring millions of dollars into the race, polls indicate that Susan Crawford will handily beat MAGA Republican Brad Schimel to preserve her seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. We will learn the final results after the election Tuesday.
The “Hands Off!” movement will see millions of Americans on the street protesting Trump and Musk on April 5th. Exercise your first amendment rights (and help exorcise America of the Trump and Musk menace) by attending. Just Google “April 5th demonstration near me” to find out where to go. To coin a phrase, it will be wild.
All over the world people are responding with horror to Trump and Musk. Across Europe Tesla dealerships are shutting down. Travel advisories are warning people to exercise caution when going to the US, or to consider going somewhere else. Shops in Canada are displaying signs: “Sorry, we no longer accept US dollars.”
What’s going on? Just a bit more than two months into the toxic waste dump laughingly referred to as the “Trump administration,” people across America and across the world have had enough. Americans are horrified. America’s allies are horrified. Only the deeply stupid or steeply corrupt are happy.
In a desperate attempt to rescue the situation, pro-Trump and pro-Musk memes and articles are being posted by bots and idiots across fascist Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. It’s not working. People are getting sick of Trump and Musk. They want them gone.
The question is, have we reached an inflection point where Trump has taken on so much water that he’s heading, Titanic-like, to the bottom of the Atlantic? Possibly. We made perhaps too much (or at least I did) of the summary rejection of the Kansas abortion ban in 2022. But unlike that wholesale red state rejection, this new repudiation of Trump (and by extension, Musk) is across platforms and across demographics. It’s starting to look like the only people who are unanimously enthusiastic about Trump these days are America’s enemies.
The odd thing is Trump 2.0 seems indifferent to his toxically sinking popularity. By this time Trump 1.0 would be on the warpath firing people right and left. This time around it’s MAGA crickets. It’s as if captain Edward Smith had said, “Iceberg? Wake me when something important happens.”
Now, I’m not about to play the game of predicting the imminent demise of Trump. That game has been failing for decades, faster than “Putin has months to live.” These monsters seem to do nothing but prosper and survive. But there is something different about this trend away from Trump. It feels like a genuine article. Presidential honeymoons have come to an end before, but this one never started.
Trump might make it to the end of his four year term, but by then I doubt that anyone except the craziest MAGAs will want him to stay. But I can tell you this. If we get a supermajority in the Senate and a simple majority in the House in 2026, Trump and JD Vance will be impeached and out of office faster than a Tesla falls apart. The crimes Trump has committed in his second term already make his previous impeachments look like trifles.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.