Tell Us of the End

On the inevitability of Donald Trump, part three

(Quintin Soloviev)

“I will not break this oath
that I have made for the sun-disk my father, for ever and eternity.
It is now established on a stela of stone
[…]
It is not to be hacked out, it is not to be washed away, it is not to be defaced,
it is not to be plastered over, it is not to be made to vanish.
If it fades, if it crumbles,
if the stela bearing it falls down,
I will restore it back again
in this place where it is.”

—Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten, Late Egyptian (University College London translation)

“And on June fourteenth, nineteen forty-six,
God looked down on his planned paradise and said:
‘I need a caretaker.’
So God gave us Trump.
[…]
And then his oldest son turns and says,
‘Dad, let’s make America great again.
Dad, let’s build back a country
to be the envy of the world again.’
So God made Trump.”

—God Made Trump (Dilley Meme Team/generative AI)

I would like to seal the air of this November 2026 in a jar. When the score is settled, when the chickens come to roost, we will all look back¹ and many of us will point here.

For Republicans, the air of this November has become difficult to breathe.

Today, two days before Election Day, Nate Silver (still the king of this business and now Substacking as the Silver Bulletin) clocks the GOP at about one in twenty to retain the House. The Senate, that great graveyard of liberal hopes and dreams— ever the heartbreaker and ever the redeemer— now gives over three in four odds to the Democrats. That includes a slight edge in the State of Alaska, a slightly larger one in Iowa, a larger one still in Kansas, convincing odds to flip Texas and Ohio and Maine, whereas Georgia and North Carolina have wandered so far beyond 90% that GOP money men have shifted their capital to places that have never had a need for defense. South Carolina and Nebraska favor the Republicans, but hardly overwhelmingly.

President Trump’s approval hit 30% last month and in the same Pew Research poll, 73% of Americans said they were extremely or very concerned about higher fuel prices due to the ongoing Iran War. That undeclared war— free of even the United Nations Security Council pop-up gig Iraq was once subjected to— has made gasoline more expensive and groceries more expensive and fertilizer more expensive and diesel more expensive and just about everything that must be moved from point A to point B (which is everything) more expensive. Democrats in turn have looked at this robbery at the pump and the checkout counter and the 1-Click™ button and have snatched, drummed, focus-grouped, and in some cases nearly conjugated a word for all this: affordability.

In 2024, when I lacked a stable container for my P(dreading), I instead assigned it probabilities. I spent many of my evenings building a model, published the thing here, ran it daily, worried about Pennsylvania, asked an NYU roommate if they were truly going to vote for Jill Stein in Pennsylvania, did not externalize my anxieties onto flipping this one vote from Pennsylvania, and instead cast my lot with the many before me who keep the faith that, for a few hours at a time, a slight twinge of the unknown may be illuminated when expressed to the tenth of a percent. I will not build one again.

This is hardly because I have lost the disease. Far from it— I still lose evenings scrolling these .pdfs and have in the intervening two years become far more, rather than less, professionally entangled with the dark art of polling. Unfortunately, I draft the things now. The issue is that the question such a model would answer is, these days, largely answered. Modelling the thing myself would feel rather self-indulgent. FiveThirtyEight is dead, and what has sprouted from the corpse is, oddly enough, more cutthroat than what preceded it: Nate Silver and G. Elliott Morris, the scrappy underdogs at Split Ticket and Race to the WH, an ocean of models delighted to tell you just how badly things are going for Republicans— and arguments things may be even worse. Others have discovered that, if you want a feedback loop baked directly into your weights, you can feed the betting markets back into the model which helps inform the betting markets, for some reason.

Chuck Schumer, for his part, has been wishcasting a Democratic victory since at least February of last year, when he decided that his move to counter DOGE would be to stand outside the Treasury Department beside Maxine Waters and a cane-waving Al Green and attempt to lead a chant. “We will win! We will win!” The crowd countered by chanting How? The following month, Schumer helped advance the Republican spending bill, having concluded that a shutdown would give Trump and Musk ever more latitude to dismantle the federal government. Mark Fisher coined a term for this: reflexive impotence. He was writing about working-class British teenagers resigned to a world they felt powerless to change, mind you, not the leader of the Democratic Party in the United States Senate.

But all that is the past now. I expect he will count Tuesday as vindication. There will be a great number of people who count Tuesday as vindication, many of whom have spent the intervening two years doing quite incompatible things. Democrats, by and large, will have at once held the line, kept their powder dry, met the moment, bent to the platonic ideal of the will of the voters, trusted the voters, and been rewarded for all the same executed skillfully in some indeterminate ratio. I have no particular wish to deny them a good evening. Yet one glaring thing about waiting for the electorate to punish something is that, in the meantime, it does in fact happen.

In some ways, you don’t even need an eye on the polls. Trump has been travelling state by state, pitching his usual curveballs to waning crowds. In Dallas, he offered every adult American $5,000 conditional on the GOP retaining both houses of Congress, a proposed $1.35 trillion line item with no clear accounting of where that money would come from, yet already a catchy slogan: the Trump dividend— not to be confused with the 2025 $2,000 tariff dividend no one got. He has faced hecklers from the pulpit in Ohio and Mississippi and South Carolina and Kansas. He cancelled his second Kansas visit and one to Iowa, pivoting to “telerallies,” only to reinstate them the day following. In Oklahoma, soon after a marquee stop in Texas, he told the crowd that he was worried about Texas and Michigan and several dozen other races across the nation, and asked the nation to turn out as if he was on the ballot, or to have the enthusiasm they would have if he were on the ballot, or to pretend the past two years did not happen and somehow get the nation to do exactly whatever it did in 2024 as if he was on the ballot. I suspect he will get his wish on all but the last count.

There was an odd period in the summer of last year, in the weeks after the primary, when I, as with many of my peers, found myself getting plain tea in FiDi, taking Zoom calls, and texting over Signal with national politics people I had, mere months earlier, no particular reason to imagine I would ever speak to. I suppose this is one of the privileges of actually winning. I followed some of their work closely, and I knew others mostly through the arguments others had about them, and now we were talking about an election— an ongoing one— I had a meager role in, as though I might spill some privileged information of how the hell it happened and continued to happen. That combination forced me to drag them into some strange theoretical domain I at first hated, and later came to appreciate. What I found myself repeatedly returning to were two propositions so elementary to politics that I had hardly given them much thought: political actors can actually change public opinion, and they can change who bothers to turn out and vote in the first place.

This is difficult, certainly, and even the people least inclined to make such an attempt would agree wholeheartedly, if asked directly, that it can indeed be done. Popularism is an overused word, and I think the people who have thought most seriously about it have earned taking some of the criticism as missing the point. They are quite right that Democratic politicians have found themselves dragged into affirmatively taking positions, often in rhetoric that is inscrutable to normal people. I have done some of the dragging myself. I continue to do so because there are damn good arguments for some of these positions, and because I am increasingly exasperated by how few people running for office and working in political comms have actually bothered learning how to make them outside this deferential just be nice, guys frame. That, may I make explicit, includes advocates of those positions. But given they have spent years neglecting these arguments, or making them rather badly, I do not expect repeating them twenty-four hours a day would make much of an improvement. There are other things to talk about. There is, however, quite a gap between deciding what to talk about in an election and deciding what the public can ever be persuaded to believe, and a rather great one in between either of those and, most self-defeatingly, going out of your way to tell the public why the other side was right all along.

I wonder, in looking back on the “vibe shift” of post-election 2024 and 2025 where everyone had a Universal Theory Of Everything, how many of those then announcing with such confidence what Americans do and do not care about had Jeffrey Epstein and data centers on their list of the great issues of the 2026 midterms. Or expected that Americans, given the opportunity of seeing that the administration meant what they campaigned on regarding immigration enforcement, might develop rather different opinions on ICE. The public changes its mind, and it changes what it is thinking about, and very often the base of the party leads the charge. And then there is the matter of who actually votes to begin with. In 2024, Trump won the least politically engaged quarter of voters by 13 points. Two years later, Democrats lead among them, and the change among those who did not vote at all in 2024 is even more remarkable: once inclined towards Trump by 4 points, they now prefer Democrats for Congress by about 20 points, or 32 taking into account their likelihood of voting. I would be reticent to declare this the dawn of some new and permanent Democratic electorate, having spent two years listening to declarations of a permanent Republican one.

Beyond the fifty states, the midterms have attracted considerable interest north of the border. Our ambassador in Ottawa, Pete Hoekstra, spent much of October warning Canadian pols to keep their noses out of American elections, and the embassy has compiled a grievance list of supposed instances of Canadian election interference, including officials discussing retaliatory tariffs against the country which imposed tariffs upon them to begin with. Meanwhile, Alberta separatists got at least three meetings with our own State Department last year, and Republican strategists turned up in Calgary offering to assist them. Albertans ended up voting three to one against even holding an independence referendum two weeks ago. Last week, Hoekstra was reported to have warned Canadian business leaders that Democratic victories in Maine and Michigan may in fact make matters worse for Canada, given Trump could decide to blame the Canadian government for how Americans vote.

The Canadians are making preparations independent of our theoretical coming around. Back in January, Mark Carney went to Davos to discuss the “middle powers”— countries that do not dictate the terms of the world nor can risk whatever terms the great powers offer them. He proposed they build mutual arrangements and reduce exposure to great powers deciding they may conduct themselves as they please. “We know the old order is not coming back,” he said. “We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

This, mind you, is the Liberal Party’s Prime Minister of Canada. A man who was previously Governor of the Bank of England, before that Governor of the Bank of Canada, hardly someone thrilled with writing a postscript for the liberal international order. Canada has found itself among the many things that the President of the United States has decided we should own; Greenland too, and the Panama Canal, and most baffling yet the Gaza Strip. In August, our trade negotiators even found it necessary to quarrel over Canadian protections for French-language programming on streaming services, and the appearance of French on consumer products, before eventually abandoning those demands. I have a Canadian passport myself, and have tried to paint a picture in my mind of just how many entirely normal meetings between entirely normal American and Canadian officials would be needed for Canada to reasonably accept all this is something that happened once.

They are making other contingencies. On October 24th, Carney returned from Türkiye, where he had established a partnership covering trade, defense, and energy, with the first round of negotiations towards a free-trade agreement scheduled for the end of this month. On Thursday, his government published Canada’s first national security strategy in more than twenty years, treating the weaponization of trade and the vulnerabilities of economic dependence as matters of national sovereignty. The following day, in Montréal, he hosted leaders of the European Union, with whom he announced an Alliance for the Future, covering trade and critical minerals and defense and artificial intelligence and the Arctic and more. They are working towards what Carney hopes will become Canada’s status as the first associate member of the European Union, a category which does not exist and is therefore both fuzzy and controversial within the EU. They have given themselves a year to decide what such a thing would mean. Carney calls the whole thing a “Transatlantic Arch.” There are, apparently, several rather different arches being contemplated these days.

All this is part of Carney’s project to double Canadian exports to countries other than ours by 2035. A decade from now takes us through the remainder of this presidency, another president’s first term, and most of the one after that. It is easy to imagine the next president as someone who is so, very sorry, and perhaps quite eager to put all things right. Canada seems primed for the possibility that we come around, and then discover ourselves in need of coming around all over again.

We are already inclined to describe the war with Iran through the election it may cost the Republicans. The economic consequences on the world economy are indeed staggering and yet they also make a very convenient way of discussing a full-scale war without spending much time dwelling on the country being bombed. Here I have done much of that myself, for it is in some ways unavoidable. On the first morning of the war, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, killing more than a hundred children. The evidence points overwhelmingly towards the United States, though the Pentagon is months later yet to publish their findings. One of the teachers, Nasim Neyestani, had begun calling the parents of her twenty-two students, urging them to collect their children. Fourteen made it home. According to her mother, Neyestani took the remaining eight into the school’s prayer room, where she was killed with all eight of them. A United Nations investigation has since found reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed war crimes in this attack. The school is now preserved as a memorial.

Iran was hardly the beginning of this. In April of last year, American aircraft bombed a detention center in Yemen, killing sixty-eight African migrants imprisoned there by the Houthis, according to figures the Pentagon itself has since acknowledged. Another American strike at a Yemeni port killed eighty civilians. The military subsequently determined that neither incident warranted condolence payments. In the ongoing Gaza genocide, we backed and funded a new system of humanitarian aid distribution, in the vicinity of whose distribution points the United Nations recorded 859 Palestinians killed while trying to obtain food between May and July of last year, mostly by Israel. Since September of last year, we have taken to blowing up boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, killing at least 240 people alleged to be drug traffickers without anything resembling due process. Among them was a Colombian fisherman whose family says he went out fishing for tuna and marlin, and eight Mexican fishermen who made extra money in a squeezed economy carrying gasoline out to boats smuggling cocaine. In July, their neighbors held a memorial service out on the water, dozens of boats setting out together to commemorate eight men who had gone out together one early February morning to never return. The government calls these people terrorists, and has released shockingly little evidence concerning who they were, much less why it was in the national interest for them to be killed. In January, we invaded Venezuela to kidnap its president and bring him an hour on the F train from where I write.

And there are also the people we have killed by desisting in what we were already doing. Last year, the administration dismantled most of the foreign aid system, including programmes which were treating people for diseases they would otherwise die from. In South Sudan, a clinic funded by USAID closed in the middle of a cholera epidemic. Two weeks later, a woman named Nyarietna became ill. Her son, Tor Top, rented a canoe and began taking her to the nearest hospital, some eight hours away. She died before they had even made it halfway there. He turned around, brought her home, and buried her in their backyard. The clinic has since reopened, seven months after it first closed. I suppose we can take some solace in that. There are certainly people alive today because it did. But the intervening seven months happened, too.

And there are the people we have cast out. In March and April of last year, the United States sent 252 Venezuelan men to CECOT in El Salvador, paying the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to imprison them. Many had no criminal convictions in this country, and dozens had been seeking asylum here. Four months later, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner exchange. In the meantime, they had been held incommunicado, beaten repeatedly, and in some cases sexually abused, according to an investigation by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal. We have developed an increasingly elaborate practice of sending people to countries where they have never lived, in some cases where they have no conceivable connection whatsoever, paying foreign governments to receive and often imprison them. Among them was Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a woman who had lived in Maryland for nearly thirty years, who an American immigration judge had protected against deportation to her native Sierra Leone. The system having done its job, we sent her to Ghana instead. After six days in detention, the Ghanaians dragged her out of a hotel and sent her to Sierra Leone in shackles. At least twenty-one other people sent through Ghana have been sent in turn to countries where American judges have determined they face imminent danger.

Here at home, we have at least occasionally discovered such things can be resisted. The President has deployed the National Guard in American cities, sent Marines to Los Angeles, and attempted deployments elsewhere against the will of state and local governments. In Minnesota, where thousands of federal immigration officers descended upon the Twin Cities, the resistance was rather more remarkable. People organized to follow the agents, warn neighbors of their presence, record arrests, and help those being targeted. Unions, churches, and businesses organized a day of economic resistance on January 23rd, where tens of thousands marched through the streets in temperatures as low as negative twenty and hundreds of businesses shut their doors. The following morning, federal officers killed Alex Pretti, seventeen days after an ICE officer had killed Renée Good. All of this led politicians who had spent much of the previous year explaining why little could be done to discover that there was in fact suddenly a lot to demand. The administration sent Tom Homan to take over the operation, removed Greg Bovino, and eventually announced the end of the surge altogether.

I do not want to understate the extraordinary thing that the people of Minnesota accomplished. There is, however, an enormous difference between what people in Minneapolis can do versus what the people in Minab or Sa’ada or South Sudan can do about the decisions made in Washington. In some cases, as in Canada, their governments have some points of leverage. In far more, there is no such thing. The American government is not responsible to them in anything approaching the sense in which it must eventually answer to the people of our country. There is an International Criminal Court, but the United States is not a party to it, rejects its attempts to assert jurisdiction over Americans, and this October imposed sanctions upon the court itself. Forty-five House Democrats voted for legislation towards much the same end in January of last year. There is a United Nations Security Council, on which we possess a permanent veto power. There are plenty of laws against these things, but the people with the practical authority to enforce those laws against us are, so very often, only ourselves.

And I am struck by how quickly we move past all of it. We have not been living through Trump II for even two years, and already I have trouble placing more events than not in their proper month, or remembering if they happened this year or last. I don’t know if I have ever needed Google more in writing an article. There are quite a few things the United States has done in these two years that would have occupied the political zeitgeist for months, maybe years, had we not been so preoccupied with what is to come next. In January we were discussing the killings in Minneapolis; five weeks after Pretti was killed, we began to bomb Iran. Now the war is principally a story about the price of diesel and how badly this hurts Republicans in the Heartland. Say this changes after Tuesday, in rhetoric if not in substance. When the war ends, when each of these things ends, how quickly will they become things that happened rather than things we did?

In Tehran, conservators have been sorting and cataloguing the shattered fragments of the Qajar-era Golestan Palace’s āyeneh-kāri— intricate mosaic mirrorwork— damaged during the joint American–Israeli bombing in the war our two countries decided to start. UNESCO approved emergency assistance for its restoration just last month. Elsewhere, people are trying to reconstruct the circumstances of over a hundred children being killed by our tax dollars over the course of a few terrifying hours, pry from the government information about how their wife was killed in Minneapolis, sue the governments that imprisoned them and the one that aided enthusiastically in their imprisonment, and wonder for the rest of their lives who would still be alive had a clinic not closed for seven long months. We have not stopped caring about these things, let alone stopped trying to do something about them. But soon we will discuss what the numbers at the ballot box mean practically for their continuance, while innumerable people are still trying to piece together what exactly happened to them in the first place. And come Tuesday, we will spend the rest of our lives living in the country that did those things, whether they were done a year ago, or five, ten, fifty, eighty.

Trump has meanwhile been attending to what will remain his own. Trump banners on the Labor Department, Trump on Agriculture, Trump on Justice, Trump on the parks pass and in the US passport, TrumpRx, TRUMP Accounts, the Trump Gold Card, the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, the Trump-Kennedy Center, Trump on the dollar coin, Trump’s signatures on banknotes, Trump-class battleships (I have a strange fixation on naval history and once slept overnight on the USS Massachusetts; let it be known these are not battleships), and his birthday, that providential June fourteenth, on the Interior Department’s calendar of free admission to the national parks as “Flag Day/President Trump’s birthday.” He wants his name and sometimes his face very badly on your medicine, your money, your baby’s money, your travel documents, your afternoon gazing at a mountain, the federal office you have business with, the performing arts, peace, naval warfare, and all else where there remains a reasonably legible surface where “Trump” could conceivably be pencilled in.

I am struck by how little confidence in being remembered positively— or even at all— this suggests. I am struck more by the sheer number of instances of this man which will be scrubbed or maybe not in the coming years.

The Kennedy Center renaming ran headfirst into a judge. The triumphal arch has a planning meeting come November 5th, with political appointees replacing career officials ahead of it. His ballroom fundraising has Apple and NVIDIA at $25 million each, Microsoft, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin at $10 million apiece, and Google supplying $22 million through the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit over YouTube suspending his account after January 6th. I would have had difficulty explaining all that in January 2021, when we were still discussing his permanent disqualification from public life.

I have been thinking, lately, about what it means to have won something.

My maternal grandfather Buckley is a short moustachioed Catskill native who went from young fatherhood to operating a tollbooth on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to a Navy tender ship to IBM, and somehow wound up by the time of my birth shoeing horses in northern Colorado, fifteen minutes’ drive from the Wyoming border. He kept horses and mules of his own, hunted, and owned what seemed to me as a child a ridiculous number of guns. Less ridiculous once I was old enough for him to teach me to shoot. I am now a transgender socialist political operative in New York City, a long way from the milieu of his world— but his world will always be mine, too. Once, returning from a fishing trip, driving up his red-brown dirt mountain road, we came across an elk standing in the road. He pulled up alongside it, on the side of the road nearest the drop, hand-cranked down the window of his pickup, and greeted it in his booming baritone: “Hello, ol’ feller!”

Around ten years ago, or maybe nearer to fifteen, he won a lottery for the right to hunt a bighorn sheep. He had entered the drawing year after year for decades, despite the slim odds, and winning only gave him the chance to try. And so, well into his sixties, he needed to assemble a hunting party, hike up into the mountains, find one, track it for days, line up a clean shot, and kill it. He did. I remember months later standing in his house, looking up at the spiralled horns of this creature, its head mounted on wood, and being struck that this must have been one of the great accomplishments of his life. I wondered if I would ever have something like that to look back on with my grandchildren. Now I do. Then I ate hamburgers made from it.

I expect that, when Democrats win Tuesday night, I shall watch every press conference I can catch.

I will watch the victory speeches and I will watch the leadership elections. I will watch those who spent two years asking for power again explain what they will do with it now that they have some. I will watch Donald Trump explain why none of it matters, why we remain the land of one great man, why you and I and everyone had it all wrong once more. I will watch to see whether the ninth life has finally been spent. I will probably keep a television on or at least a C-SPAN tab on listening to these voices, listening to these men and women of power, until one of them just might say something that makes the shape of these next two years clear.

When does winning become power?

When does power become using it?

When does using it become stopping something?

When does stopping it mean it has stopped?

When will it have stopped?

When will stopped mean finished?
When will finished mean it cannot simply begin again?
When will again stop being the word?
When will another election stop being another chance to destroy the last one?
When will another chance become more than another turn?
When will another turn be enough?
When will enough be enough?
When will it be over?

I would like to know.
Tell me.
Tell us.

Will you please, please, just tell us of the end already?

1

Again and again, “Auld Lang Syne”— literally, “old long since.” The song we sing at the end of every year, every year.

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?”