Tea at Trianon: The Numbers Don't Lie

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, November 5, 2026

The Numbers Don't Lie

From Tierney's Real News:

25 million Republicans stayed home because Trump wasn’t on the ballot and Democrats outvoted us by 11 million votes and those votes were targeted to races that Democrats needed to win to secure a wide margin in the House and Senate!
In plain English, about 11 million more Democrats showed up relative to their presidential baseline than Republicans did relative to theirs. In several states the Democratic candidate actually got *more* votes than Harris received in 2024. That did not happen on the Republican side at all.

If the standard “people just don’t vote in midterms” excuse were true, both parties should have seen roughly the same kind of drop. They didn’t. Republicans collapsed without Trump on the ballot. Democrats did not.

That is exactly what Trump has been saying. He was the one who brought those voters out. When he wasn’t there, a huge chunk of the coalition stayed home. The professional Republican get-out-the-vote operation, the consultants, the state parties, the “ground game” everyone was supposed to be running — it did not replace him. The numbers show it. (Read more.)