The Next Generation

At the beginning of Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, the vultures have broken through the windows of the presidential palace, where the dictator has ruled forever, and “the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.” After the midterm elections, the would-be autocrat is far from dead, but the vultures are circling the Trump presidency, and the warm breeze of rotting grandeur is blowing through Washington. This is the autumn of the pungent patriarch.Trump’s imaginary triumphal arch has crumbled before it was built. The staggering victory of Democrats in the midterms resolves nothing, but it does expand the boundaries of what is possible in American politics. Trump was once the master of the improbable—now he is its victim. Thanks to him, the Democrats have won in places that seemed, even at the beginning of 2026, permanently beyond their reach. Trump has become the patron saint of lost blue causes.Of the many grievous mistakes he has made this year, perhaps the most fundamental was his invitation to his own voters to use their imaginations. On his frantic round of rallies, Trump repeatedly ask...