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Trump Sits Alone in the Dark as the Cheesecake Factory Trays Go Cold
Here’s how Trump’s grip on Congress ended last night. Not with a rally. With cold sliders and egg rolls going stale in the East Room. According to the Daily Mail, the White House ordered trays of Cheesecake Factory appetizers for its election night watch party, a jab back at Barack Obama’s crack that Trump’s renovations made the place look like Saddam Hussein had opened a Cheesecake Factory. Cabinet officials, advisers and MAGA allies filed in, and then the returns came in. Senior staff headed for the exits first. Then Cabinet members, including Marco Rubio by one account. Staffers didn’t just leave the party. They left the building for a bar down the street. By 10 p.m. the room was mostly empty and the food was untouched. Melania wasn’t there. Trump was upstairs in the residence with Susie Wiles and aide Natalie Harp, watching Fox News. One senior official said, “It’s very, very dark in the residence. It’s a dark scene.” Another said he was barely speaking. Then he went on Truth Social to blame Fox News for the losses. This is the man who told us he alone could fix it. When the voters finally answered, he couldn’t even face his own party.
Did Voters Just Pull the Plug on Big Tech’s Data Center Boom?
Buried under the headlines last night was a quieter revolt, and it was nearly unanimous. Communities across the country voted on 44 local ballot measures to ban or pause data center construction. They passed 43 of them. Ohio alone had 21 on the ballot. The village of Sunbury, with fewer than 9,000 people, banned data centers above 25 megawatts with 78% of the vote and killed a planned $2 billion Amazon project in the process. Granville, Hubbard, Urbana and Upper Sandusky all passed restrictions with better than three quarters support. Maine towns voted in 180 day construction bans. Amy Acton won the Ohio governorship after backing a statewide moratorium. Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and Gina Hinojosa in Texas both ran on pausing the build-out. In South Carolina, an industry super PAC dropped $1.5 million to save Republican Senator Darline Graham, and she lost anyway to Democrat Annie Andrews. Mitch Jones of Food and Water Action said, “Big Tech has failed to deliver, and everyday Americans have won.” Working people have watched their power bills climb and their water tables drop to feed Silicon Valley’s AI gold rush. Last night they said enough.
Is JD Vance the First Rat Off Trump’s Sinking Ship?
Less than a day after the wipeout, the vice president posted roughly 600 words on X, and the knife was aimed straight at the man who picked him. Vance wrote that there’d be plenty of infighting and gaslighting, and that the economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough. Then he cut to it. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote, adding that the president himself had said so the night before. Vance said the top four answers from Trump voters who flipped to Democrats were the Iran war, the cost of living, abandoning America First, and the relationship with Israel. And he dared his own side to argue that losing the Senate for six years was worth it. One pollster told him the GOP would lose the generic ballot by 13 points. CNN’s Jonah Goldberg called Vance the biggest single loser of the night. Remember, this is the same JD Vance who defended that war from the start. Now, with 2028 in view, he’s trying to sell it as somebody else’s mistake. When the people who built the ship start grabbing the lifeboats, you know how bad the leak is.
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Is Mike Johnson the Next Rat Jumping Off Trump’s Sinking Ship?
Here’s another one over the rail. Punchbowl News reports Speaker Mike Johnson told his staff on a call that he won’t run for minority leader. He’s stepping down from leading the House Republican Conference altogether. This is the man who went on Fox News in late October and said, “Republicans are going to win. I’ll be the speaker in the next Congress.” Instead, as of this afternoon Democrats have won at least 228 House seats, and the New York Times estimates they’ll land around 258. For perspective, that’s bigger than the 242-seat Republican majority after the Tea Party wave of 2010, and bigger than the 257 seats Democrats held after Obama’s 2008 landslide. Johnson owned the strategy and the messaging, and it collapsed. Now the fight over the scraps is on. Jim Jordan has formally announced for minority leader, and Steve Scalise has jumped in against him. Underneath that is a bigger fight over whether House Republicans keep bending the knee to Trump for two more years or finally start acting like a separate branch of government. The Speaker who refused to check this president is gone. The question is whether his replacement will have any more courage.
Is Pete Hegseth About to Be Thrown Overboard to Save Trump?
And here’s the rat who may get pushed. CBS News reports Trump has been asking advisers, in person and by phone, whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should keep his job after the midterm losses. Some aides want the blame to land on Admiral Brad Cooper at Central Command and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, who ran the Iran war. Others say Trump hasn’t decided. One source says Ron DeSantis is being floated as a replacement, confirmed in the lame duck and installed when his term as Florida governor ends January 5. The Atlantic reports Trump is hunting for a scapegoat among the advisers who promised a quick war, and nobody promised louder than Hegseth. Republican Senator Thom Tillis said on election night that Hegseth “has a reckoning” coming. Thomas Massie’s eight articles of impeachment, filed in September over a war Congress never authorized, now have a real path once Democrats hold the gavel in January. Incoming Oversight Chair Robert Garcia told Hegseth to lawyer up. Even Susan Collins called his latest purge of generals deeply troubling. And in South Carolina, Nancy Lacore, a Navy admiral Hegseth fired, flipped a House seat Trump carried by 13 points. The White House says the president has full confidence in him. We’ve all heard that one before.
Texas Voters Crush Elon Musk’s Half Billion Dollar Buyout
We’ll close with the biggest loser of the night, and he wasn’t on any ballot. Elon Musk spent close to half a billion dollars on these midterms, a huge chunk of it in Texas. That included a last-minute $160 million rescue mission for Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign. It didn’t matter. James Talarico beat Paxton, and Gina Hinojosa knocked out Greg Abbott, a governor Musk had bankrolled for years. Democrats hadn’t won a statewide race in Texas in more than three decades. They won two in one night. CNBC looked at Musk’s America PAC and found it spent nearly $87 million across 44 federal races. Its candidates lost 29 and won three, with a dozen uncalled. Roughly 93% of that money went to losers. Musk’s response on X was that his election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time. Talarico had hammered him all fall for trying to buy the race. On election night, he didn’t even say Musk’s name. He said, “Our unity is a threat to their wealth and power.” And now a Democratic Congress can start asking hard questions about Musk’s federal contracts and his DOGE days. Here’s the lesson from Texas. Money can buy ads. It can’t buy a people who’ve decided they won’t be owned.
And that’s the way it is, Today is Wednesday, November 4, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
