Susan Collins Struck Down by Lesson Donald Trump Was Supposed to Learn

After twenty-eight years of sustaining political life purely on a diet of grave ambivalence and tightly calibrated grimaces, Senator Susan Collins was declared electorally deceased Tuesday, crushed beneath the very steamroller she insisted was merely performing routine asphalt maintenance. Emergency medical technicians arriving at Bangor headquarters confirmed that her signature brow, which had weathered four decades of moderate gale-force winds, had finally fractured under the weight of toxic collateral damage. "We always assumed Susan’s defensive perimeter of performative hesitance would shield her indefinitely," whispered an anonymous aide, sweeping up shards of uncommitted vote tallies. "She truly believed that if she voted to acquit a hurricane, the storm surge would politely bypass Kennebunkport." Local voters, however, apparently ran out of patience waiting for Donald Trump to absorb the remedial civic seminar Collins repeatedly swore he had enrolled in. Post-mortem analysts confirm her cause of defeat was blunt-force accountability, an exotic condition historically unknown to New England centrists who mistake hand-wringing for cardiovascular exercise.