TRUMP GAVE CARROTS TO ARGENTINA. MILEI WON. HE GAVE STICKS TO DEMOCRATIC STATES AND CITIES. DEMOCRATS WON.

Last month, just before an Argentinian election that MAGA-esque president Javier Milei's party was expected to lose, President Trump offered the country $20 billion in aid and an additional $20 billion currency swap, with a threat to withhold the money if Milei's party lost. Milei's party won.

So what carrots did Trump extend to the Democratic-leaning cities and states that held elections yesterday? There weren't any -- only sticks. Trump's message to New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, and California was what the young Michael Corleone said to Senator Geary:



New York got threats of a federal funding freeze and a military occupation. California has already seen a military occupation of its largest city. Virginia has seen massive layoffs of federal workers and paychecks withheld from those who are still employed. New Jersey saw the termination of a much-needed rail project that would connect the states' commuters to New York City.

And everyone got higher prices, as well as, in Jamelle Bouie's words,

soldiers on the streets, masked agents leading violent immigration raids, arbitrary tariffs, new conflicts abroad, dictatorial aspirations, endless chaos and a president more interested in taking a wrecking ball to the White House to build his garish ballroom than delivering anything of value to the public.

Some of this is incompetence -- Trump seems to have genuinely believed that he was capable of ushering in an economic Golden Age based on his cockamamie theories about tariffs. Some of it is his narcissistic grandiosity, which is encouraged by the right-wing media he eagerly consumes: He thought that, like his base, the rest of us would delight in his self-indulgent Gatsby party and destruction of the East Wing to build a ballroom reportedly funded by bribes disguised as construction contributions.

But to a large extent, Trump and his party behaved the way they did in the run-up to the election because they hate Democrats. They hate the left, they hate liberalism, they hate any group they identify with Democrats -- Blacks, Hispanics, people of non-European descent, immigrants, LGBTQ people, feminists, librarians, teachers, professors, anyone from Hollywood or the mainstream media -- and they've simply stopped trying to govern as if this is one country that includes groups they despise as full citizens. Not all of them make pronouncements in obscure journals about how evil we are and how necessary our destruction is, like this one from Charles Haywood, a wealthy right-wing donor and movement figure:

What is our end? That is easy — winning. What is the winning condition? It is the total, permanent defeat of the Left, of the ideology at the heart of the Enlightenment, with its two core principles of total emancipation from all bonds not continuously chosen, and of total forced equality of all people. When this defeat is accomplished, Right principles, those based in reality and recognizing the nature of man, his limitations, and his capabilities, can again become ascendant.

Winning does not mean electoral victory such that Right principles may be voted into law, and then nullified or voted out again. It means the total, permanent elimination of all Left power, and, even more importantly, the total discrediting, both on a moral and practical basis, of all Left ideology. What is Left should be seen for what it is, evil, and it should be seen as not only destructive in practice, but laughable, the ideology of losers and idiots, or at most something from the discredited past, viewed with vague curiosity, as the cult of Mithras is today.

On Fox News this past summer, Stephen Miller put it more simply:

“The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization."

This has been the message of the right-wing media for decades: that there are heroes and villains in our culture, and all the heroes are Republicans in good standing (or their allies overseas), while the villains are ... everyone else.

Now we have a Republican Party openly governing according to this worldview. Trump unabashedly attacks places and institutions identified as Democratic -- and then he's surprised when voters who aren't Republican go to the polls to reject more of the same.

Democrats had a message of affordability that came in both center-left and progressive-left varieties; they won elections both ways. Democrats won back groups who, according to hand-wringing pundits and consultants, were said to be permanently lost to the party after the 2024 elections -- including young voters and Hispanics. Punchbowl News notes:

Two heavily Latino counties in New Jersey that Trump won in 2024 swung back to the left. [New Jersey governor-elect Mikie] Sherrill flipped Passaic and Cumberland counties and improved [Kamala] Harris’ margin in Hudson County by a double-digit advantage. That’s an early sign for Democrats that Trump’s inroads with Latino voters may not last in the face of ICE’s national immigration raids. That has huge implications for the battle for the House.

And the issue that was supposed to mean instant death for Democrats -- the alleged trans menance -- utterly failed Republicans. We're told that "Republicans in the Virginia race have dedicated 57 percent of all their paid media campaigning toward transgender-related issues," but Winsome Earle-Sears lost the governor's race by double digits because that wasn't a key issue for voters.

Hard to overstate lack of salience of trans issue in new Washington Post/Schar poll of Virginia It actually went down in importance since their last poll It is top concern of 3% of voters This is after months of ads and posts about it Economy top concern at 18%

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— Sam Shirazi (@samshirazi.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 11:55 AM

The Democrats who won yesterday might struggle to deliver real change, but at least they want to make voters' lives better. It's clear now that Republicans hate a large portion of the electorate and don't want to make their lives better -- and are so focused on consolidating power that they're not even trying to make the lives of anyone else (except themselves and their friends) better.