JokersUpdates.com: Current Affairs - TNR: Verdict Number One: America Has Big-Time Buyer’s Remorse About Trump

Elections are the one opportunity we have to see what the people think. And what they think is clear: Trump sucks.

The single most surprising election result on Tuesday night? For my money, and it wasn’t even close: Democratic challenger Jay Jones’s thumping—yes, thumping—of Republican incumbent Jason Miyares in the race for Virginia’s attorney general. Jones was a two-term member of the state House of Delegates—nothing special. In early October, news broke of text messages he’d sent a colleague in 2022, in which he said he’d shoot a prominent state Republican ahead of killing either Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, and in which he apparently wished death on that Republican’s children.

When I first read about this, I assumed that not only was Jones cooked—he was tied or a little ahead in the polls at the time—but that he’d likely bring down Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger as well unless she called on him to leave the race. I mean—worse than Hitler. Death to that other guys’ kids. You literally cannot get any crazier, any weirder, any more appalling than that.

Jones won by nearly 7 percent, or more than 300,000 raw votes.

Did he win because Virginians found his pro-forma apology especially persuasive? Did he win because people decided that saying a political foe was worse than Hitler is now just fair game, or because voters agreed that that Republican’s children seemed expendable? Highly unlikely.

He won because people hate President Donald Trump and what he’s doing to this country. And in an election that provided, as elections invariably do, a jillion takeaways, let’s not lose of sight of what is obviously and toweringly takeaway number one: Americans have developed a big-time case of buyer’s remorse about Trump, and a very solid majority of them despise what Trump has perpetrated against America.

https://newrepublic.com/article/202710/2025-election-verdict-america-remorse-trump?utm_source=Bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SF_TNR