Americans turned out in force on Nov. 3 to renounce Trumpism in all its ugliness.
By Bob Hennelly
The Democratic Party's dramatic blue wave has the GOP off-balance and struggling to find its footing even as its authoritarian ICE machine continued to terrorize. The post-election celebratory coverage masks the ongoing brutality of the moment.
Measles is still on the march and the ignorance that spreads is running the federal agency meant to stop it. Rep. Lamonica McIver (D-NJ) still faces 17 years in federal prison for trumped up charges that stem from doing her job overseeing a private immigration jail facility in Newark where three people have died in custody. Has Rep. Ilhan Omar got her passport back?
In ICE and private jail detention an untold number of human beings are being held without proper medical care so let's temper the backslapping self-congratulations. Expect the pillage of the US Treasury to pick up velocity and the shredding to commence, if paper records were ever kept.
Smash and grab is quick.
In the midst of President Trump's thrashing at the polls this week by a broad racial coalition of voters, the President gave an interview with the New York Times blaming the GOP loses on the fact he was NOT on the ballot and that he was now "absolutely willing" to accept the results of the midterms, and was prepared to work with the Democrats.
Shouldn't that mean dropping the charges against Rep. McIver?
As it turns out, more Americans actually love their neighbors, even ones of color than hate them. The Trump base was always terrified they would lose vestiges of white skin privilege in a sea of Beige, Black and Brown that's becoming the 21st century ruling majority.
So, Trump 's cruel incoherence and wild geo-gyrations still continue with his administration bombing Iran's Qeshm island on Monday and on Tuesday declaring the U.S. would cut off $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel.
The corporate news media, always looking to divide and prosper, press the intra-party quarrel line of which Democrats will lead. Now, that's the conventional second day story that will drive web traffic and clicks yet ignores the central role played by the ascendant labor movement they spend so much to keep out of their newsrooms.
Media and politics is all about who you let into the room for the 'after party.'
Keep in mind, how when Vice President Harris's bid came up short, the split between U.S. labor leaders and so much of their own rank and file that embraced Trump, was played high up. Across America, the foot soldiers of change were rank and file members of unions like the healthcare union 1199SEIU going door to door and helping to galvanize the millions Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Miller and Musk wanted to keep in their place. All while the junta literally took out from West Point storage the portrait of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a graduate, so they could put it back on display as Hegseth purged the Pentagon of top career military women and officers of color as he launched a misguided war with Iran.
In the corporate news media post Blue Wave analysis, we are not hearing about the Musk-Trump purge of the federal unionized civil service engineered by stripping one million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights and attempting to blow up the economic lives of many thousands of Black women in the process.
It was as if Trump and Musk wre executing the blueprint of a foreign power seeking to dismantle a rival from the inside.
Bishop William Barber talked about people power from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of the midterm elections.
So, it didn't matter that the Project 2025, Russell Vought-OMB plan to demoralize and put "in trauma" the federal civil service also would include an army of combat and peacetime veterans. Similarly, when ICE indiscriminately abducted hundreds of thousands of people suspected of immigration violations it was a direct assault on the healthcare workforce that had deep ties to places like Haiti.
And when American citizens stood in defense of their immigrant neighbors, Renee Good and VA Nurse and AFGE Member Alex Perretti were murdered in broad daylight by federal agents not on the back roads of Neshoba County, Mississippi where in June of 1964 the Klan took the lives of voting rights activists James Chaney, Micheal Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
Remember shame?
The very public pain was the point and hate was the fuel that backfired as labor got the blood-stained message. Gone were the divides of the blue collar trades and public union that Scott Walker and Trump had so skillfully mined.
As Steve Wishnia wrote in Work-Bites, quoting AFL-CIO leader Liz Shuler the "blue wave is union-made,” and “the largest midterm mobilization in the labor movement's history,” reaching more than 16 million union voters at their doors, on phones, and at worksites, and electing a record number of union members to Congress and state legislatures."
“Together, we rejected a government driven by greed rather than the needs of working families. This is just the beginning,” President of 1199SEIU President Yvonne Armstrong said in a statement, Work-Bites quoted.“We expect the leaders we elected to be ready to protect Medicaid, expand access to quality care, restore immigrant protections, and defend our right to organize.”
"American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley said he looked forward to 'the 120th Congress passing legislation to correct the injustices of the past few years and pulling DOGE corruption up by its roots'—specifically, 'overturning President Trump’s orders from last year that illegally eliminated collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal employees.'”
And now in Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and even up into Kansas the Third Reconstruction is underway.
To curry favor and cement access with the Beltway Democrats, the corporate news will credit the institutionalists with Trump's defeat willingly forgetting they almost lost the republic and are a long way from redeeming it.
There's a whimsy to the corporate news media's coverage's tone that gives us a false sense of forward motion.
It's simple. The Trump-Vance-Hegseth-Miller-Musk Junta tried to re-litigate the Civil War by bucking up white male skin privilege and the restoration of the ethos of the Confederacy whose battle flag made it into the US Capitol for the first time in our history on January 6th.
The junta hit the ground running with "chainsaw" Musk and his techno thugs seized the United States Institute of Peace.
What the white supremacists sparked was a third Reconstruction that Bishop William Barber said could manifest if and when the"sleeping giant" of tens and millions of America's low-wealth, low-wage Americans made it to the polls, something they opted not to do in 2024, clearing the way from Trump 2.0.
Weeks before the election, Bishop William Barber, convened a press conference in front of the US Supreme Court Building with the organizers of the Oct. 18th No Kings Early Voter Mobilization. His remarks to reporters bear repetition now as the professional pols grab the limelight in a victory that belongs to the long abused American people.
"There's not a state in this country, even in the south where if fifteen to twenty percent of poor and low wage voters that have not voted but are already registered but have been voting infrequently where to vote they could not overcome the margins of victory in the past," Barber told reporters. "The number of people hurt by bad policies out -distances the margin of victory sometimes by as much as ten or twelve times. There's a mobilization of pain that can become power because it's time for people to speak." Barber continued. "When you look at North Carolina--the last election the Presidential margin of victory was 180,000 votes, that's 1,830 votes per county--put the number of low wage and low wealth voters that stayed home was somewhere around 1.2 million--the number of African Americans over 500,000. Part of the problem is that authoritarianism will constantly tell you that you are weak and that you don't matter. We have to get that other narrative out there that the reality is that certain things have won, not because they are so powerful but because not everybody has been on the field. And that's not beating up on people, that's letting them know what their power is."
Millions of Americans have found that power and organized labor helped them find it.
Listen below for more discussion on the meaning of the midterms.