Remember the “vibe shift”? Just last year, columnists and corporate boardrooms alike declared that the second coming of Donald Trump meant the old rules of politics and even everyday civility were roadkill.

“I feel liberated,” one top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a billionaire was very heaven. Because in Trump, the tech bosses had a politician who could work magic by forging a forever alliance between them and blue-collar America. This was the very core of Trumpism, the trick that wowed rightwingers around the world: how he could yoke together minimum-wage workers with the 1%; Latinos and black voters with those happy to dabble in a little light racism; the Epstein-haters with the Epstein class (who can forget Elon Musk’s email to Jeffrey: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”). And he did it by alchemising class antagonism into culture war. Forget about that pay rise – have you have heard about those Haitians eating dogs?

Silicon Valley, Wall Street and east coast media owners all saw Trumpism not as a political strategy but as a turn in the entire culture: a vibe shift to the right. They were wrong. Tuesday night was a comprehensive rejection of the president. Before the midterms, ultra-wealthy donors such as Musk poured billions into Trump’s proxies, but the working- and middle-class base were not having it. The relatively new coalition that put the orange man in the White House has been smashed apart by old-fashioned class politics.

When election analysts observe that the struggle of ordinary Americans to afford the basics of life now........

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