Democracy Wins

This Was the Night Donald Trump’s Spell Finally Broke

Our brilliant columnist Michael Daly has watched Trump since Day One—and never seen a moment like this. This is is unforgettable dispatch from a new America.

Opinion

The lobby of Trump Tower was nearly deserted the morning before the midterm elections, suggesting that the country really was beginning to recover its senses after years of mass delusion.

The U.S. House of Representatives was about to flip.

So was the U.S. Senate.

The polls would prove right after all.

Donald Trump would not manage to hold onto power despite his bullying and lies and unprecedented grifting.

America was correcting its course towards true greatness after a prolonged detour.

No Kings indeed.

In the eponymous tower that Trump continues to say is 68 stories when it is only 58, nary a tourist took the 24-second descent on the escalator—trimmed with motel-grade brass but called golden. A security guard confirmed that this is the one that carried Trump and his wife Melania down to the lower level of the public atrium on the day in 2015 when he announced his candidacy for president.

“That’s the stage right there,” the guard told me.

He pointed to an expanse of pink marble where Trump delivered his first official campaign speech, concluding with a phrase he had trademarked in 2012, nine days after Mitt Romney was defeated and Barack Obama elected to a second term. Trump now actually used it for the first time in his own bid for the highest office.

“Make America Great Again.”

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Trump himself did not expect how many Americans would blindly embrace the supposed Master of Money as concocted by the producers of the reality TV show The Apprentice. It was filmed in a boardroom set built on the tower’s fifth floor. His actual office had chipped furniture and musky-smelling carpet and was deemed altogether unsuitable.

Trump’s actual genius as a showman proved to be perfectly attuned to the TV age, and he increased the effect exponentially by telling followers what they wanted to hear: He would not only build a border wall; he would also get Mexico to pay for it.

At a July 23, 2016, rally in Sioux City, Iowa, he seemed to marvel at his own growing power as he made what should have been an outlandish boast

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

But even Trump was surprised by the outcome of the 2016 election.

“Can you believe it?” he asked a friend who called him the morning after.

As he went from the pink stage in his tower to the Oval Office, Trump’s repeated call to Make America Great Again had spawned a MAGA movement of people who would stick with him no matter what he did.

At the same time, real realities such as the pandemic caused a majority of the electorate to see the actual Trump. He really did wonder aloud during an April 23, 2020, coronavirus task force meeting whether COVID-19 could be treated with ultraviolet light or injections of bleach.

But soon Trump had gone from being unable to believe he had actually been elected president to being unable to believe he had actually been defeated. One result was the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by followers bent on preventing the certification of the 2020 election.

Newly elected President Joe Biden was 78 by the time of his inauguration and had suggested that he only intended to serve one term. But he proved unable to give up a position he had long wanted, and insisted on running again even though he was one person who definitely knew his capacities were significantly dwindling with age. He dropped out after a disastrous debate performance, and his running mate Kamala Harris assumed the top of the ticket.

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Then, on July 13, 2024, eight years to the month after his Fifth Avenue boast, Trump was the one who was shot. The would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his right, and his Secret Service detail moved to pile on top of him and rush him away.

But the part of Trump that is a TV person caused him to stand with blood running down his cheek, his fist upraised. The image, as captured by a news photographer, was made perfect by a HUGE American flag suspended behind him.

“I was saved by God to make America great again,” Trump declared afterward.

He may have even believed it.

The iconic photo likely got Trump elected despite his conviction in New York for concealing hush money payments to a porn star and indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, for election interference. Trump won with 77,305,580 votes, as opposed to 75,017,613 for Harris. The 2,287,967 difference out of a total of 152,323,193 was hardly a landslide, but the margin was spread across so many congressional districts that it imparted the power of one. And Trump was quick to wield it as he returned to office, bent on vengeance and still insisting the 2020 election was rigged.

At the same time, he set to Trumpfying the White House, from which he had been evicted after his first term. He knocked down the East Wing and proceeded to build a HUGE ballroom, demonstrating, as he had in 1980 while knocking down a department store to make room for Trump Tower, that demolition is not something that can just be undone.

Back in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was running for president, an admiring teenage Trump told his military school bunkmate, “He doesn’t even need to boast.” Trump now had his name affixed to what Congress had designated the capital’s one memorial to the assassinated president. A federal judge ordered Trump to remove it, and he has threatened to demolish the whole building.

As part of an elaborate plan to simultaneously celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday and his own 80th, Trump also set out to redo the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He gave a no-bid contract to a “pool guy” to recoat the bottom with an “American flag blue” coating. The stuff was no sooner applied than it began to detach in big patches. Trump falsely claimed that the botched job was the work of vandals armed with box cutters.

He was still perpetuating this lie on Monday, when he chose the refurbished reflecting pool at the place to make his concluding argument prior to the midterm elections that tipped the balance of power in Congress back to the Democrats. But that was just another falsehood he had told among so many, many others. He had also simultaneously demonstrated remarkable ignorance, as he had on Sunday at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa. A four-time draft dodger during the Vietnam War, Trump said, “I would’ve won that war in one week” by “going after Ho Chi Minh City.” He was apparently unaware that what the North Vietnamese had renamed Saigon after the war had been our ally’s capital.

He likely could have still kept his grip on power if he had stuck to a pledge to be “the peace president” after years of ”forever wars.” He instead followed an easy win in Venezuela by launching a war of choice against Iran. The conflict has remained unresolved eight months later as gas prices climbed and the prices of seemingly everything else rose.

The president who continued to complain that the 2020 election had been rigged sought to buy this one by pledging to present every adult American with $5,000 if the Republicans won. Any actual patriot would have been insulted by the offer. Some people who do know money pointed out that Trump had once said that the national debt hitting $25 trillion was “a point of no return.” It now stands at more than $40 trillion.

Where Republicans in Congress had been fearful of challenging Trump, they had begun to wonder if his appearance at their side helped or hurt their chances. He ended up making his last appearance solo in a place that is in nobody’s congressional district.

If he had been elected by the “Fight! Fight! Fight!!: photo of him rising bloody-faced and defiant in Butler, he was now made ridiculous by the image of him standing at the reflecting pool with pictures of algae and old water pipes.

Up in New York, Fifth Avenue has been packed, but barely a soul has been turning into the lobby of the tower where the delusion began and was now dispelled.

At the top of the vacant escalator beside the huge flag covering the waterfall in the tower that is supposedly 68 stories, but is really 58, was a sign depicting a future 80-story project.

“TRUMP INTERNATIONAL HOTEL & TOWER

DUBAI

CHALLENGE EVERYTHING

STOP AT NOTHING"

Behind the image of the tower that may or may not ever be is a patch of blue that represents the Persian Gulf, where there is a war that Trump insists is not a war, but is enough of a war that even some of MAGA cannot abide it.

And an election day with no kings.

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Michael DalySpecial Correspondent

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