We are ready for tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/202Kac5Sae
— Mike Espy (@espyforsenate) November 26, 2018
One last 2018 Tuesday evening chewing our nails as the results come in…
It’s important that we note this and own this and celebrate this.
Organizing paid off. Donating paid off. Voting paid off.
It will pay off again in 2020. https://t.co/MqJ6WHNeKf
— laura olin (@lauraolin) November 26, 2018
… and some inspiration from Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate — “After Years of Taking Up Too Much Space, Trump Is Finally Small”:
The holidays can be tricky when one has begun to reflexively assume the posture of being pinned under the breakfront as the crazy racist grandpa shrieks year round. For many of us, the echo of Donald Trump’s voice, his tweets, his boasts and threats, are what wake us up at 4 a.m. and what makes us afraid to contemplate summer plans or even buy green bananas. But after two deeply destabilizing and in fact traumatic years of soaking in the president’s ugliness and invective, of absorbing the sound and sight of the sneering and the scowling and the fury, there is much to be thankful for this year. Because this year, by dint of miracle or magic or human endeavor, Donald Trump has been reduced to his actual size. He isn’t everything anymore. He is barely anything at all. He becomes smaller every single day, and for that, we have America to thank…
If the November midterms stood for anything, it was that in most jurisdictions that allow for meaningful voting and proportional representation, the whiz-bang showmanship of the past two years has become stale and dull. A clutch of exciting young candidates ran for office without even explicitly engaging with Trump or Trumpism. Powered by energy from below, they largely ignored the wallpaper of noise and sound that is the president. The narcissism and self-love of the ’90s TV hustler has finally just become tiresome.
As a final Thanksgiving miracle, Chief Justice John Roberts—who didn’t weigh in publicly when Donald Trump attacked a federal judge for being a biased Mexican, or a Seattle judge for being liberal, or three federal appeals court judges for halting his travel ban—spoke out Wednesday to rebuke Trump for berating an “Obama Judge” and the entire 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (which had enjoined his new asylum rules). Day after day, we can see that the entire legal apparatus of the United States is growing tired of being treated like Trump’s landscaping staff. More and more, the entire country is showing that it is tired and bored of being treated like gaffers and lighting technicians in the Trump show…
It’s going to be a long-ass haul to restore what’s been dismantled over the past two years. Fear and contempt are contagious and so, apparently, are ugliness and violence. But in so many ways resilience and dignity and pride are pushing through the noise. It’s hard to see it sometimes, but it’s surely rattling under the surface of things. Things will turn around the way you eat an elephant—bite by bite. But recognizing that the elephant was never all that enormous in the first instance makes it easier to do the work.