Republicans now begin their hard, cruel journey back to reality

The Globe and Mail · Robyn Urback · 2026-11-06 11:00 UTC

Tuesday’s midterm elections in the U.S. sent a shockwave through the Republican Party

In an active shooter situation, desperate hostages will lie motionless on the ground, pretending to be dead, in hopes that the deranged maniac with the gun will walk on by. For the past 10 years, Republican lawmakers have adopted the same technique to survive in a party held captive by U.S. President Donald Trump. Except these lawmakers have survived by pretending to be brain-dead.

For a decade, Republicans have had to feign belief in the absurd – the outrageous, the immoral and the outright false – in order to maintain their political viability: fantasies that Canada is an enemy and Russia is a friend; that tariffs make economic sense; that the 2020 election was stolen; that Mr. Trump and his cronies are not hideously corrupt; that there is a strategy and objective to the war in Iran; that masked thugs can round up people in the streets, and shoot and kill Americans that fall even slightly out of line.

Andrew Coyne: U.S. midterms are a rebuke to the Republicans, but not the wipeout they deserved

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