A November to Remember: Hope that the American Experiment Will Survive

After a month of electoral losses and political missteps, Donald Trump is limping into the holiday season.

Illustration by Riley Levine

Last month gave us realistic hope that the American Experiment will survive the gravest threat it has faced since what is usually termed the Civil War — but would more accurately be named the Enslavers’ Rebellion.

In retrospect, the opening days of July 1863 are seen as the point at which the tide turned in that worst war in American history. The terrible, three-day Battle of Gettysburg ended on July 3 with the opponents of the vision of 1776 turning back to the south. The next day, American troops under U.S. Grant took Vicksburg and with it control over the Mississippi River.

Although this was a turning point, the war went on for nearly two more years.

So many things turned sharply against Donald Trump and his policies in the month of November this year that it may well come to be seen as a similar turning point in America’s latest struggle to preserve and expand the promise of 1776 against Americans who scoff at the ideal of pluralism, justice, and equal rights for all, aka “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” Trump and MAGA Republicans make it clearer by the day that they seek UIE: Uniformity, Inequality, and Exclusion.

America: The Forever Civil War

The history of the United States can be seen as a Forever Civil War between the Ideals of the Enlightenment given voice by Jefferson—especially the most radical idea imaginable, human equality—and the millennia-old construction of societies based on the belief in the innate inequality of categories of people.

As I wrote here two years ago, it would be appropriate to change the color scheme for American political parties from blue and red to blue and gray, because the MAGA “Republicans” today have turned against what Lincoln and his party stood for and in its place adopted the anti (and ante-) 1776 political and societal views of the enslavers who rebelled against the United States in 1860-61:

The Confederacy was explicitly based on opposition to the ideals put forth in the Declaration of Independence. John C. Calhoun, the leading theoretician of the beliefs that underpinned the rebellion of 1861, labelled slavery “a positive good” and demanded “minority [the minority, of course, being the wealthy, especially enslavers] veto power … to restrict what voters can achieve together in a democracy to what the wealthiest among them would agree to.”

In his 1861 “Cornerstone Speech,” Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens proclaimed that the Declaration’s belief in human equality is “fundamentally wrong.” The Confederacy directly rejected the 1776 definition of an America based on democracy and insisted that governments do not “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Confederacy was all about inequality, hierarchy, domination by some and subordination of others. In all these regards, today’s “Republican” Party has taken up the positions of the Democrats of the mid-nineteenth century.

A Disaster for Trumpian Authoritarianism

Adequately examining what happened in the thirty days that hath November to show the American tide is turning decisively against the Trump Delusion would require a book and I am busy writing a different one. Here, I’ll just quickly review some of what went wrong for Trump and his minions (and therefore went right for America) in the span of four weeks and two days.

The off-year elections held on November 3 constituted a massive repudiation of what has become the Anti-Republic Party. The three most-watched contests—gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and the mayoral race in New York City—all produced massive victories for Democrats—and Democrats of very different sorts. It wasn’t just the wins, but the margins of victory.

If you look at the AP map of the election in Virginia, every county in Virginia, including the very “red” ones, moved towards the Democrats. The same was the case in New Jersey.

And so it was across the nation. Democrats won judicial elections in Pennsylvania and Georgia. They won seats in the state legislature in … Mississippi! They won local elections—for school boards, town councils, and so forth—just about everywhere, and in the few cases where they didn’t win, they narrowed the margin substantially.

I don’t know whether dog catchers are elected anywhere anymore, but if they were, it’s a safe bet that it will be a Democrat catching dogs before Kristi Noem can shoot them.

In New York City, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won handily and stimulated the highest turnout in a mayoral election since 1969. He showed Democrats nationally how to campaign in ways that attract new and young voters. Nationwide, young voters, including young men, who had been gravitating toward Trump and his party, moved sharply to the Democrats.

In California, an election without candidates drew a huge turnout to vote for a plan to gerrymander California seats in the U.S. House for Democrats temporarily to the counter the Texas gerrymander intended to get five additional seats for Republicans.

In five special elections for vacant House seats this year, three in very red districts and two in blue districts, Democrats gained an average of 16 to 17 points over the presidential vote last year. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers estimated for Heather Cox Richardson that at this point, “the 2026 midterms can be expected to see a swing of 7 to 8 points toward the Democrats.”

Shutting Down the Shutdown

During the month’s first ten days, the longest government shutdown in history continued. Polls showed that a substantial majority of Americans blamed Trump and Republicans. Democrats were holding out for a restoration of government subsidies to help people pay for health insurance. Then Trump refused to allow the use of a fund for such emergencies to continue food assistance programs. The idea seemed to be something along the lines of:Democrats don’t like people to go hungry and without healthcare. I don’t give a shit about them, so they’ll cave.

If that was his strategy, it seemingly worked when a sufficient number of Senate Democrats agreed to reopen the government in exchange for a guarantee of a vote on health insurance in December. While there were good arguments on both sides for whether this was the way the Democrats should go, it appears that most voters got the message that Democrats care about people and Republicans don’t. For more on this, see my essay, “The Democratic Message Should Be Clear: We Care about people suffering; Republicans Couldn’t Care Less.”

Meanwhile, Trump was solidifying his identification with the popular image of Marie Antoinette by having lavish parties for the rich and having hideous gold-plated crap put up all over the White House, not to mention knocking down the East Wing to put up a Versailles-like ballroom.

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Epstein, Epstein, Epstein

The constant drumbeat accompanying the Trumpian slide in November was the demand to release the Epstein Files—and his desperate quest to stop them from coming out. After the Shutdown ended and Mike Johnson had to reopen the House and finally llet Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva be sworn in on November 12, it was clear that the discharge petition to get a vote on releasing the files would pass.

At first, Trump put even more pressure on the Republicans who had signed it to reverse course, but they refused. He was finally left with no choice but having most Republicans go on record in opposition to exposing powerful pedophiles or let them all vote for it and try to keep secret whatever it is that he so fears is in the files from getting out. another way. He order his yes-woman Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to open an investigation of Democrats in the files, but not of Trump.

The whole shabby performance has weakened the support for Trump in the MAGA/QAnon base.

Rather than get into this matter more here, I’ll direct readers to my two-part essay on it, “Could THIS Be What Trump is Terrified There’s Proof of in the Epstein Files?”, available here: and here.

I also highly recommend the outstanding essay Anand Giridharadas wrote in the New York Times after reading all the Epstein emails that have been released to this point, “How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails.”

Trump Falls Under Mamdani’s Spell

On November 21, Trump met at the White House with Mamdani, whom he had denounced as a “communist” among numerous other condemnations. When they emerged from the meeting for an Oval Office press conference, Trump seemed like a teenage girl who had fallen in love. Apparently totally smitten by the young, charismatic Muslim Democratic Socialist, Trump was agreeing with him on everything, joking with him, holding his hand, saying “I’ll be cheering for him,” said he was unconcerned that the mayor-elect refers to him as a fascist, that he thinks Mamdani will do a “great job” as mayor and he would “feel very comfortable” living there with Mamdani as mayor.

It was jaw-dropping even for those of us whose jaws have dropped to the floor many times before from Trump’s statements and actions . People in the MAGAverse were stunned. There were reports of discussions of invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Trump.

Trump Is Still Putin’s Lapdog

The next day was Saturday, November 22. Trump, dressed in a turtleneck and dark jacket similar to the preferred style of his new crush, pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept a 28-point “peace plan” that had been given to American “negotiators” in Moscow by Vladimir Putin’s representative and, as George F. Will neatly characterized it, “reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus.” Trump said Zelenskyy had to sign this surrender by Thanksgiving or he could “continue to fight his little heart out.”

It was quickly noticed that the plan showed signs of having been written in Russian and clumsily translated into English. The syntax was Russian. Trump had, of course fallen in love with Putin long before he did with Mamdani and even long before he did with North Korean totalitarian Kim Jong Un.

The plan would not only give Putin everything he had hoped his naked aggression would in Ukraine, but severely weaken NATO and have Putin’s Russia welcomed back into the world community.

Trump Pardons Drug Kingpin—while Sinking Small Boats in the Caribbean

On November 28, Trump announced that he would issue a “full and complete pardon” to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez. Hernandez had been convicted last year of being part of a running a drug trafficking operation that sent more than 400 tons of cocaine to the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison. This comes while Trump and his “War” department are sinking small boats they allege—without providing any evidence—are carrying drugs from Venezuela toward the United States, killing the people on board without charges being filed, indictments obtained, or evidence presented in a trial, let alone a conviction. And at a time when Trump is demanding and the “Justice” Department is pursuing indictments of Americans Trump doesn’t like on ridiculous charges.

The 28th of November was a busy day in Trump’s decline. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth had order the American military tasked with carrying out the likely illegal attacks on Venezuelan boats to “kill everybody” when it was found that there were two survivors clinging to wreckage after an American attack on September 2. Such an order is a war crime or, since there is no war, murder.

Two days earlier, on November 20, Trump had called a video six Democrats in Congress, all of them veterans of the American military or Intelligence services, had made informing people serving in the military that they are required not to follow illegal orders “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

The 28th also saw a federal appeals court in El Paso strike down as blatantly racist the Republican gerrymander in Texas. On Thursday of this week, however, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court allowed Texas to go ahead with the racially gerrymandered districts because … well, you know, what’s wrong with racism?

So many other things were going on simultaneously. Trump falling asleep in public, Marjorie Taylor Greene flipping on him, other Republicans in Congress showing faint signs of becoming a vertebrate species, the Supreme Court indicating it may strike down Trump’s tariffs, growing outrage at the actions of ICE agents …

The Worst Poll Numbers

The bottom line, though, is that Trump is collapsing in the polls.

A Gallup Poll conducted throughout most of the month found his approval at a new low: 36 percent, with 60 percent disapproving, a 24 point gap. Only 26 percent of independents approve of the way he is handling his job.

Other November polls found Trump underwater by similar huge numbers: Reuters/Ipsos (-22) and AP/NORC (-26)

Below is a graph of Trump’s approval since he returned to office in January, averaging many polls, by the New York Times. Notice how much the gap is widening since the beginning of November.

In the face of all this, Trump is retreating further into his land of make-believe, saying he has his highest poll numbers ever, gathering together his “Clowns to the left of me /
Jokers to the right” cabinet to tell him he’s the greatest ever, at everything.

The prospects of the survival of the American Experiment are improving. But remember how long and horrible the time after early July 1863 was before the United States achieved final victory in April 1865.

If the Trump authoritarians see that they could not possibly win a fair election, they will do everything they can think of to prevent a real election from happening. We may be facing troops in the streets before and on Election Day. But whatever they do, we clearly have the numbers on our side—the side of freedom and democracy. We will prevail if we keep up the struggle.

Author and historian Robert S. McElvaine writes the Musings & Amusings Substack. Read the original column here.