Finally we can see a world without Donald Trump

It was a crushing defeat. The kind of defeat that shatters your project at its foundation. At long last, it is possible to imagine a world without Donald Trump. If you turn your head just right, you can see how it might all come to an end: the viciousness, the demagoguery, the lunacy, the petty, vindictive small-mindedness, the weirdness, the flights of dimwitted fancy, the sheer godforsaken stupidity of it all. He’ll stumble on for another couple of years. He’ll make threats. In all likelihood, he’ll probably try to rig the next election. But he has lost control of Congress. He has lost control of the country. This, finally, is the beginning of the end. The US midterm results constitute a biblical storm. Democrats now have control of the Senate and the House. They won in Texas. They won in South Carolina. They won in Kansas. They won in places that you associate so strongly with the right that it seems unthinkable to see them vote any other way. They won as comprehensively as it is possible to win. Many of the triumphant Democrat candidates would not have seen results this conclusive in their lifetime. In the weeks before these results, Trump’s Republican Party tried desperately to prevent this outcome. It did this in the only way it knew: through lies, hatred and big money donations. The President tried to place the blame for high petrol prices on Volodymyr Zelensky, and in doing so conspired to help Vladimir Putin.Republicans launched a last-minute anti-trans hate campaign, spending $183m (£135m) on around 217,000 TV spots nationwide. Speaking at a rally in Corinth, Mississippi, on Monday, Trump said that Democrats “promote the transgender mutilisation of your children”. In Florida the night before, he ranted about “men in women’s sports” four times and gender “mutilisation” – a malapropism for mutilation – another four times. They pumped money into influencing the election. Elon Musk spent $446m (£330m) on Republican candidates, particularly in Texas. They tried to gerrymander the election, reconfiguring boundaries in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas to favour the governing party. They pumped out Islamophobia. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was branded a “jihadist” and a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. He was told that he’d need to walk through a metal detector to get into the Senate. None of it worked. The anti-trans ads didn’t work. The anti Zelensky tactic did not work. The Musk money did not work. And the Islamophobia did not work. Overnight, El-Sayed won his Senate seat, becoming the first Muslim senator in US history. He walked out to adoring crowds. “My name,” he said, “is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.” He pronounced every syllable, carefully and pointedly, as if it were a testament to his victory, which it was. He spoke it with pride. And in that moment it was possible to believe, perhaps for just a moment, that there could be a better future in America. As Keith Ellison, who was re-elected as Minnesota attorney general, said last night: “Trump… demanded we turn on our Somali neighbours and we said: ‘No way, never.’ He demanded that we turn on our immigrant and refugee neighbours and we said: ‘No way, never.’ He demanded that we turn on our trans neighbours, and we said: ‘Absolutely not’… Tonight, we showed up for each other again.” These moments are not just important electorally in the US. They are important culturally for the world. Two years ago, when Trump won, it was taken as a signal that Western culture was going to march backwards. In country after country, industry after industry, a dark new consensus took hold: diversity had gone too far, progressive change needed to be reversed. In Britain, more than half of businesses changed their approach to ethical issues, like diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Keir Starmer effectively stated that trans women did not exist. Refugees were treated like a kind of social disease. Social media site X functioned as the central information hub for the far right, taking extremist content and presenting it to producers and journalists on a daily basis, dragging the political conversation further to the right and radicalising the mainstream. Each summer saw far-right riots, with Nazi thugs set loose on the streets of Britain. Mainstream parties adopted a policy of mass deportations. British political culture became so extreme that Labour ministers could not even bring themselves to fully condemn a Tommy Robinson march. Of course, the same thing will not happen in reverse. We will never see the film crews head out to urban centres asking liberal voters about their cultural views. We will never see people write in national newspapers about how they are once again free to put their pronouns in their emails. But the great cultural change of 2024 has now been halted. The age of far-right pomp is over. In fact, this cultural dominance is precisely what hurt the Republicans. Before Musk took it over, right-wingers used to love telling progressives that “Twitter is not the real world”. It is now time for them to learn that lesson for themselves. X is not the real world either. US Republicans spoke to their bubble, degenerating into ever greater levels of weirdness. They spent their time talking about trans “mutilisation”, or mandatory testosterone screening, or televised public executions, or fringe science about autism. But it didn’t get them anywhere. It just made them look utterly unhinged and disconnected from people’s real concerns. This was just a battle – not the war. There are still two more years of Trump to go. Even if the Democrats prove effective at restraining him in Congress, which is yet to be proven, they are limited in what they can do to restrict him internationally. It is perfectly possible – probable even – that he will lash out at Europe, or the UK, or Ukraine, as a result of his frustration with his impotence back home. But the key cultural moment has passed. The darkest period is over and it is possible to imagine the dawn. That age of far-right triumph, its imperial phase, has come to an end. It has no legacy but hatred, bitterness and ignorance. It did not help anyone but simply aimed to make them despise one another. It was shattered last night, across the US. And by God it richly deserved it.