Never Trust the Republicans Who Stood with Trump

Last night wasn’t just an election. It was the night America remembered who we are. It was a reckoning, a loud reminder that the heart of this country still beats, even after everything they’ve done to silence it. The people didn’t just speak; they shouted. They told the Trump regime that fascism is not okay. That we’re not doing this anymore. That America is not his to destroy.

And by the sound of Trump’s posts on Trash Social today, he knows it. His words read like a man watching his power slip through his fingers, unable to understand what is happening, or what’s coming.

He wrote, “In nine short months, we have delivered Historic Results for the American People and, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

Historic results, yes, but not in the way he thinks.

At this moment, we are living through the longest government shutdown in our nation’s history. Flights are being canceled because there aren’t enough air traffic controllers to keep the skies safe. Families are still waiting for SNAP benefits to feed their children. Millions are on the verge of losing their health insurance, and with it, their medical care, because Trump is taking away the subsidies that made it barely affordable at all. That’s historic. That’s what his leadership looks like.

Last night gave us hope, but it also gave us responsibility. Because this isn’t a finish line. It’s a checkpoint in a much longer fight. And we must not only remain strong, we must remain focused. In the coming days, Republicans will start showing their fear, fear for their own power, their own seats, and we cannot trust them to suddenly find their conscience now. They will make promises. They will play reasonably. They will pretend they’ve changed. But these are the same people who stood beside Trump while he gutted our democracy, the same ones who justified cruelty, corruption, and collapse. We can accept their help if it serves the people, but we must never mistake survival instincts for redemption.

We’ve been here before, when we forgave too quickly and forgot too easily.

After the Civil War, when the Confederacy fell, its leaders begged for unity. They said it had never really been about slavery. They said they just wanted peace, that they were misunderstood patriots defending “states’ rights.” The North, exhausted from war, believed them. Forgiveness came fast, and accountability came slow.

That forgiveness became the soil for Jim Crow. The same men who had once owned people now wrote laws that bound Black Americans in new chains. They promised reconciliation, then built systems of terror. They called it redemption. They built monuments to traitors and called them heroes. They rewrote history books so children would learn that the Confederacy was noble, that it had fought for freedom instead of against it.

Within a generation, their lies became our national story. Lynchings replaced battlefields. Poll taxes replaced shackles. And the very people who claimed to have changed used that forgiveness to rebuild the same cruelty in a new form. They didn’t repent, they reorganized.

This is, of course, a very simplified summary of a complicated time in history. But the fact remains: forgiving because it’s easy is not how you rebuild a country that was broken by cruelty. It’s how you guarantee that cruelty finds its way back.

And that’s the pattern. Every time we forgive without truth, the same hands that broke democracy get another chance to do it again. Every time we confuse unity with forgetting, we give cruelty a second life.

The lesson is always the same: without accountability, cruelty returns.

Even now, in our own lifetime, we’ve watched it happen. In Myanmar, the generals who spent decades crushing their people promised reform. They dressed their dictatorship in democracy and convinced the world they’d changed. Sanctions were lifted. Hope was allowed to breathe. The world wanted to believe in progress, so it did. But the moment no one was looking, they staged another coup. They burned villages. They murdered families. They called genocide “defense.”

The pattern never changes. They destroy. They repent. They rebrand. They return.

This is, again, a simplified version of a long, painful history, but the truth underneath it is universal. Every time cruelty is excused in the name of peace, every time the powerful are spared for the sake of unity, the same story writes itself again. That’s why this moment matters so much.

Because we are standing in the middle of that same story right now, and what we do next decides how it ends.

Congress failed us. Every Republican who enabled this regime failed us. And now every one of them will pretend to be the hero of a story they tried to burn down. Last night felt good; it felt like a breath we’ve been holding for years, proof that decency still matters. But this can’t be where we stop. This is where we begin again.

Because they’re still out there, spreading lies and calling it news, dismantling healthcare and calling it freedom, targeting the vulnerable and calling it strength.

Trump said tonight, “Obamacare is a total disaster.”

No. The disaster is the cruelty that made healthcare a weapon. The disaster is a government that turns hunger and illness into leverage. The disaster is believing that empathy is weakness and corruption is strength.

They’ll try to make us forget that. They’ll soften their words, polish their tone, and call it reconciliation. But fascists always say “peace” right before they reload.

So yes, celebrate. Feel the hope. Hold it, because it’s real. But don’t let comfort make you forget what vigilance costs. The good news, the truest news, is that we’ve been here before. And every time this country remembers who it is, we come back stronger.

Last night wasn’t the end of fascism. It was proof that the American spirit still has fight left in it. The question isn’t whether they’ll try again. They always do. The question is whether we’ll remember how it felt to stand together and say, “Not this time.” Not again.

Because this is how we win, not by forgiving what should never be forgotten, but by remembering. What we proved last night is that democracy doesn’t die in one blow. It dies in neglect, and we are not neglecting it. We are the ones pulling it back to life, piece by piece, truth by truth. And if we keep showing up, they can’t take it from us again. This is going to be a long year until the midterms. But last night we proved to each other that no matter how bad this gets, and it will, we are in it together. We will get through this dark period in our history, and we will come out the other side stronger, ready to build back the America we were promised.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather