Election

Newly-minted Maryland Senate candidate David Trone threatened to “execute” a delivery worker at one of his business locations in Tempe, Arizona, according to a police report exclusively obtained by The Spectator. Trone, who has accumulated millions of dollars as the founder and co-owner of the country’s largest independent wine and spirits retailer, Total Wine & More, was in Arizona on December 15, 2021. It was there that he allegedly threatened to execute Crescent Crown Distributing merchandiser Cody Huard, who was at the time making a delivery at the Total Wine Tempe location; Huard called the police following a heated run-in with Trone.

The biggest horse race in Kentucky this year isn't the Derby; it's this fall's gubernatorial race, pitting incumbent Democrat Andy Beshear against a to-be-confirmed Republican. The contest is set to be a bellwether for the 2024 elections, in which Republicans must oust several name-brand Democrats if they are to win control of the Senate. Unlike so many statewide primaries in recent years, Kentucky isn't even a proxy battle between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Both have formally and informally backed the state’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron. Instead, it's a fight between the candidates with the most money versus those with the most statewide organization.

There are two categories of people who most desperately want Donald Trump to be the Republican Party's nominee in 2024: people who love Donald Trump, and people who hate Donald Trump. The people who love Donald Trump are obvious about it. The people who hate him are obvious about it too — but only if you pay attention. Consider this latest ad from Liz Cheney, targeted to run in New Hampshire, where Trump will be holding a town hall on CNN this evening. It's not designed to convince anyone to change their minds about Donald Trump. It's not designed to boost any non-Trump Republican candidates. It's designed to troll Donald Trump in ways that people who hate him will enjoy — but more importantly, to boost Trump's chances of becoming the Republican nominee.

“What a revoltin’ development this is.” That catch phrase from the 1950s sitcom The Life of Riley succinctly describes America’s political morass today. It sums up Washington’s diddling over the debt ceiling, the administration’s inability to close the southern border and, most of all, the dismal quality of the two presidential frontrunners. The phrase, “what a revoltin’ development,” was Chester A. Riley’s description of his woeful situation at the end of each episode — sitting on his front steps, bemoaning his fate over the consequences of some bad decision or ill-conceived scheme. Then, we sympathized as viewers. Now, we identify as American citizens, looking at the country’s leadership. Let’s begin with the sitting president.

Have Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations gone south? The failure of Herschel Walker to become the next senator from Georgia has further dented Trump’s image as the omniscient grandmaster of the GOP. One after another, his candidates in the midterm elections, ranging from Kari Lake to Doug Mastriano, from Dr. Oz to Blake Masters, have proved to be losers. The indictment of the Trump Organization on no less than 17 counts on Tuesday does not help Trump’s image either. Nor does Special Counsel Jack Smith who is relentlessly amassing evidence about Trump’s serial crimes as the leader of the January 6 failed coup and his illegal retention of top secret documents.

Perhaps the greatest defeat the Roman Republic ever suffered was at the hands of Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. Livy estimates that some 50,000 Romans were slaughtered and nearly 20,000 captured. Hannibal lost fewer than 6,000 men. It was a brilliant tactical victory for the Carthaginian general. The sun and wind were at his back. He had deployed his men in a convex semicircle with his weakest troops in front. When the armies assembled for battle, Hannibal ordered his men to shuffle their feet to stir up the dust. The Romans, half-blinded by the dust and the sun, plunged headlong against the protruding bulge of Hannibal’s line, easily pushing it in upon itself. Yet too late did they realize that only the tip of Hannibal’s line was falling back.

If you live in the world inhabited by Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, you’ve seen the man perform all sorts of difficult tasks: getting elected over all the odds, overcoming every media onslaught. You’ve seen him do it all — except lose. In any objective sense, Trump is a middling electoral performer who has only ever cleared exceedingly low bars. Yes, he overcame steep odds in the 2016 election, but that election should have been a cakewalk for Republicans against an historically unpopular Democratic nominee running to extend her party’s rule for a third term. While he oversaw deep losses in the 2018 midterms, but no less a political athlete than Barack Obama had also sustained an even worse defeat in 2010.

The dust is still settling around the congressional midterms, but it looks like Republicans will retake the House by a very slim margin and Democrats will have an ever-so-slight lead in the Senate. But with stubbornly moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Republicans can be fairly confident the upper chamber will not try to advance the most extreme parts of President Biden’s agenda, even if they do increase their majority by one seat in the December runoff in Georgia. And of course, because of the flip in the House, those uber-progressive proposals will never make it up to the Senate. The governor’s houses in Maryland and Massachusetts may have flipped blue, but Republicans knew they were lucky to be holding them in the first place.

If conservatives interpreted Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 the way Trump supporters are being told to interpret the 2022 midterms, there would be no conservative movement today. Of course, the 1964 election was an actual defeat, while this year’s elections were an advance for the new Republican right, which succeeded in its first task — gaining power in the GOP — and has strengthened its hand in Congress. The right has picked up a Senate seat with Ohio’s J.D. Vance, and Republicans look likely to control the House of Representatives come January. The GOP won the majority of votes cast in House races, nearly 52 percent overall. The official narrative of the election is meant to drive the right to suicide.

Bye-bye, Beto. Well, the self-serving political show-off known to Karl Rove in his Wall Street Journal commentaries as Robert Francis O’Rourke, of El Paso, Texas (“Roberto” in Español = “Beto”). Texans rejected his latest overtures and entreaties, re-electing Republican Governor Greg Abbott by an 11 percent margin on November 8. The margin ought to have been larger, given Beto’s lack of serviceable credentials, and it would have been, save for all the outside money and media fawning that came Beto's way. Still, 11 percent did the job. It finished, in Texas at least, Beto’s career of self-promotion, removing him from the reach of the credulous and naïve. At least I hope so!

Is he a stone cold loser? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, not to mention its owner Rupert Murdoch, certainly appear to think so. The verdict on Thursday was crushing: “He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.” The “he” in question is, of course, Donald J. Trump, or, as President Joe Biden likes to put it, the former guy. Except that he isn’t really. So far, the Trump balloon has failed to pop, at least in the GOP, propelled ever upwards by fresh injections of helium, or, more prosaically, cash from an obedient base. The conundrum that Trump presents has long been that the only thing worse than him serving as leader of the GOP might be him not heading it.