The I's Have It, the I's have it
When a motion clears on a voice vote in our Parliament, the Speaker simply announces, "The Ayes have it, the Ayes have it." After the Republicans were Sanjay Rout-ed in Donald Trump's America, the verdict wrote itself: the I's had him, the I's had him. I is only the ninth letter of the alphabet. In numerology, it is supposed to be a neutral number. Add nine to a number and the sum of the digits doesn't change. In the thethrology of politics, it is less obliging. Nine suddenly is the critical number as the proverbial cat runs out of lives. Donald Trump's presidency is now Schrodinger's cat: dead, alive, neither, and both. Democrats think it's a dead cat. MAGA is meowing. Trump thinks it would have been alive and purring, "if I were on the ballot". I, me, myself.
The I of the storm! A column in The Print had tried to pin the midterms on four of them: inflation, institutional rot, the Iran war, and immigration. That was the polite version, written before the vote. Once the results arrived, the eye-test chart needed more lines, and the letters got smaller, sharper and substantially more spiteful the further down one went.
Democrats flipped seven Senate seats, including Kansas (which had not sent a man on a donkey to the Senate in nearly a century) and Texas, where the man of the ass James Talarico now sits, much to Elon Musk's chagrin. They took more than 40 House seats and the Texas governorship. Republicans flipped nothing. Not a seat, not a governorship, not a state chamber. Not one.
Iran came first. Americans are perfectly happy watching the bombs fall on faraway lands. What they could not stomach was a president who could not even bomb the way American presidents usually do. He started a war he could not finish and then signed a scrap of paper he could not explain.
Inflation followed close behind. Wars are fought abroad and paid for at home. When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, diesel became dearer. Diesel is not a luxury. It is what moves the trucks that move the eggs, the lettuce and the toilet paper. Pile the tariffs on top, a tax on every imported thing, dressed up as patriotism, and you have an electorate that remembers being told prices would fall on Day One. That day has not come in two years.
Israel was the same mistake on a larger scale. Never has an American administration been so devoted to another country's wars, including those waged by Israel. Gaza got unconditional cover. The young voters noticed it. So did a good many church-going folk who could not square the pictures from Gaza with anything they had heard on Sunday.
Islam. The Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, wears "Deus Vult" on one arm and "kafir" near it, and once reportedly chanted "kill all Muslims" on a drunken night in Ohio. Under him, the Pentagon spoke about the Muslim world as if the year were 1096. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won. Voters decided Abdul wasn't the extremist he was accused of being, but the extremists were in Washington. Ilhan Omar was raided before the vote and swept 80% of her seat. Campaign against a faith long enough and you end up electing senators from it.
Immigration was the predictable wound. Visa shutters came down, students were hounded, deportation flights became tamasha for the cameras, and citizens were detained for matching someone's idea of illegal. Latinos who had given Trump historic support in 2024 were repaid with harassment. Texas elected a Democratic senator and a Democratic governor. You cannot round people up and expect them to turn up for you.
ICE made it concrete. In January, in Minneapolis, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in her car. Seventeen days later, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as he lay on the ground. Both were American citizens. Neither had a criminal record. The average American is a good deal more decent than the Trumpians assumed. He will put up with a border wall. He will not put up with masked men killing nurses on his street. Ice, it turns out, melts.
Insider trading, and the strong whiff of it, supplied the corruption that needed no theory. Institutionalised, almost. Tariffs announced, paused and unpaused; war statements made and unmade; ceasefires announced and then withdrawn; sudden regulatory shifts. Every swing seemed to find somebody close to the administration on the right side of the trade. Voters have seen this pattern before; they simply had not seen it done quite so brazenly.
I, me, myself. Above all, there was the man who could not stop saying I. He floated putting his own name on the ballot. He suggested renaming the Strait of Hormuz the Trump Strait. On Wednesday, after the worst midterm for a sitting president in two decades, he said the result was no referendum on him, adding, "If I were on the ballot, we would have won." Even in defeat, the first word was I. Narcissus at least had the decency to stay by his pond. Trump keeps bringing his to the podium.
There were lesser I's too. Inequality. Interest rates. Insurance, as health premiums climbed after the subsidies lapsed. Independents, who decide American elections and decided this one. Incompetence, which needs no citation. But they all flow into the biggest I of the lot.
Inward-looking America. The America the world knew, warts and all, believed it got richer by trading, safer by allying and stronger by letting in the world's hungriest talent. It was the country that rebuilt Europe, policed the sea lanes and handed out 10-year visas like an advertisement for itself. Trump's America looked inward, counted its grievances and called it greatness. It fought with friends, flattered strongmen and treated cooperation as a con trick. A superpower that stares only at its own navel should not be surprised when the rest of the world stops looking up. The voters, to their credit, looked up on Tuesday.
In the Lok Sabha, the Speaker settles a voice vote with four words. The Ayes have it. America just held its own voice vote. The I's have it. Trump gets the noes.- Ends(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication)
Kamlesh (Kishore) Singh is News Director at India Today Group Digital, and one of India's more reliably unreliable opinion columnists. He is also a regular calumnist. Three decades in newsrooms carried him through the Asian Age, Today, CNN-IBN, Metro Now, and Dainik Bhaskar before this current innings, teaching him everything an editor needs to know, including when to break the rules. Off the desk, he moonlights as Tau on Aaj Tak Radio's weekly podcast Teen Taal, and keeps his satire for India Today's opinion pages.
