Our national horror movie found its third act on Tuesday, when the villains will be called to account
This is just the beginning, of course. Unfathomable destruction and damage to our people, to our ethos and to our national psyches did not disappear on Tuesday. The cleanup will be arduous and fraught.
The evening began with a hope that manifested as a tightness in the chest and throat. It was, in many respects, indistinguishable from the symptoms that accompany dread or PTSD. Lord knows that was in the mix.
So it’s understandable that the eruptions at an area watch party on Election Night began as the sounds of relief, then disbelief then, finally, delirium. They rolled through the evening like fusillades as the results poured in. That early on Democrats fell short in Florida might have conjured the false hopes of past elections but the margins had moved so absurdly leftward that the mood was barely dampened. Then came North Carolina and Georgia, and some astonishing overperformances in small bellwether state districts in Indiana and Kentucky. Then came Iowa, Kansas and, for the love of God, South Carolina! Then Ohio! Then Texas! Then Kansas! By the end of the night, Michigan and Minnesota too.
For Wisconsinites all that remained was the gubernatorial race and a possible trifecta. By 10 or so those were secured. After 10 years in the wilderness as a nation and 15 in our state, we could breathe again. We could believe that maybe we weren’t trapped in some endless horror movie that seemed to have no third act where the villains and the monsters are made to account.
This is just the beginning, of course. Unfathomable destruction and damage to our people, to our ethos and to our national psyches did not disappear on Tuesday. The cleanup will be arduous and fraught. And there will be plenty of time ahead for policy discussions, for the hashing out of the left-centrist divide in the party.
But the repudiation of Trump and the Republican Party was thorough, was, in the words of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, “an extinction event.”
As for an itemization of the depravity that brought about Tuesday's cataclysm, the list is nearly endless. It is a list of things so seemingly unthinkable before 2016 that it’s hard to fully grasp that so many Americans shrugged at it all for a decade. It includes wanton and gleeful cruelty toward immigrants and trans people; the use of ICE to terrorize citizens and non-citizens alike and to do so with impunity; the murder by ICE of at least two citizens followed by the administration’s refusal to investigate or share evidence; the tarnishing of those victims; disregard for court orders against deporting large groups of people often to random countries; the tearing apart of communities by removing people who had been part of their fabric for decades – all to meet a cruel, random deportation quota; the warehousing of immigrants in sub-human conditions; the mass and arbitrary dismantling of our civil service across all departments by unelected billionaires; the end to USAID and the estimated resulting starvation of hundreds of thousands of children; the open corruption; the unjustified demotion of Blacks and women with sparkling military records; the open weaponization of the Justice Department; the knowing false charges of vandalism of the Reflecting Pool against a citizen to cover up for the administration’s laughable incompetency; the laughable yet-anything-but-funny incompetency; the stupid war; the stupid tariffs; and the Republicans who never said no to any of it.
That list barely scrapes the surface of the depravity and grotesqueness (Epstein Files, anyone? Political ads that scapegoat 8-year-old rape victims?). For those of us who saw what Trump represented from the beginning – I mean, seriously, how could you not? – having to navigate these past 10 years of mass psychosis has been excruciating. Was MAGA delusional, nihilistic, amoral, afraid, entitled, racist, sexist or reacting to some primal wound? Beyond a certain point, trying to make it make sense stopped making sense. Ultimately what mattered was that we stare down the sheer indecency and audacity of it all, get to work and defeat it. On Tuesday, we won a very big, possibly decisive battle in that war.
What comes next, time will tell. For now we celebrate that we beat the bad guys (and, yes, they are bad guys). That it took so many people so long to come around to recognizing them for what they are, that it was only when their own self-interests were endangered that they voted against these monsters, is a matter for therapists and philosophers.
I recognize I am writing from a place of privilege. I am writing as someone who, because of good fortune in this world, has been largely immune to destructive Republican policy that threatens so many folks’ existence around the nation. I recognize that Democrats will have to help people hurting in their day to day lives.
But I am celebrating Tuesday’s reckoning. I am celebrating that on Tuesday night, the third act finally arrived.
Our national horror movie found its third act on Tuesday, when the villains will be called to account © 2026 by Kelly Fenton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
