Politics

The exact scale of Democratic victory in the US midterms remains unclear, but a shortage of numbers has not prevented many media outlets proclaiming a historic shift, a stern rebuke to Donald Trump, and above all, a key augury for the 2020 presidential contest. Some polls imagine Trump in 2020 losing to any number of a wide range of hypothetical Democrats. I will differ. I have now lived long enough to see so many elections that were portrayed at the time as historic, decisive and/or transformative, but most of these supposed watershed contests were nothing of the kind. In several electoral cycles over the past half-century, we have supposedly seen the imminent extinction of Party X, or at least a near-death experience.

So much for small favors. Judge Timothy J. Kelly just came down hard on the administration that appointed him to the federal bench in September 2017. He granted CNN a temporary restraining order, ruling that the White House did not follow due process in depriving CNN reporter Jim Acosta of his right to a ‘hard pass,’ which permits him to enter White House grounds when pleases. He also noted that the doctored video that press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disseminated about Acosta performing a karate chop on a hapless intern who was trying to retrieve a microphone was ‘likely untrue.’ The judge’s verdict further demonstrates that Trump is the best thing to happen to Acosta and, by extension, much of the media.

Ivanka Trump holds rather more sway in the White House than a First Daughter should — that much is well-established. Yet this week we see that it is her step-mother, Melania, who calls the shots in her husband’s administration. Mrs T is the real force behind the throne, as Mira Ricardel has discovered to her cost. Palace intrigue doesn’t get more intriguing. Ms Ricardel, a close ally of National Security Adviser John Bolton, made the mistake of clashing with Melania over her ‘Be Best’ trip to Africa. Ricardel allegedly insisted a member of the security council should accompany Mrs Trump as she posed her way around Ghana, Malawi and Kenya in a pith helmet, cream jacket and trousers, and black-neck tie. Melania disagreed. https://audioboom.

Socialist know-nothing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the future of the Democrat Party. Nancy Pelosi is its past, but she’s probably its present too despite threats to deny her another Speakership. The Ocasio-Cortez contingent in the party has determined that Nancy Pelosi simply isn’t radical enough. That will be news to many on the American Right for whom she has served as a longtime bête noir and whose strident advocacy of San Francisco values provided fodder for countless Republican campaign ads and fundraising letters. For Republicans she’s a radical who favors amnesty, citizenship, and voting rights for illegal aliens, government funded abortion on demand, and impeaching the president. But in the current Democrat Party she’s a mushy moderate.

We’re all Trumpologists now. Like the Kremlinologists of the Cold War, monitoring the line-ups at missile parades to see who was in or out of the Politburo, we track the president’s Twitter twitches and off-the-cuff quips, then guess which way he’s going to go next. The Soviets were rational actors, and so was Donald Trump when he responded to the midterms. He called the split Congress a ‘beautiful, bipartisan-type situation’ — beautiful because the situation places Trump at the fulcrum of power, bi-partisan because no legislature will pass without both sides on board. Trump is the president who spent his first few days in the White House annulling Barack Obama’s executive orders.

It’s beginning to look as though Michelle Obama does not like Donald Trump. In her new memoir, Becoming, she explains why. Her beef with Trump centers on his embrace of the birther controversy about her husband, who was supposedly born in Indonesia or some other far off country — anywhere but America: ‘The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.

George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne, is putting on warpaint. ‘President Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid,’ Conway together with former acting US Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal wrote today in the New York Times. Obviously, the fact that George is Kellyanne’s helpmate supplies an extra frisson to the op-ed, but the arguments that he and Katyal advance are wholly persuasive.

Not rapture but, as Nanki-Poo said upon learning that Yum-Yum did not love Koko, ‘modified rapture.’ There was no blue wave. Rather, as I suggested last April, what we have been treated to is a ‘feeble rivulet.’ Yes, the Democrats flipped the House by a narrow margin. They needed 23 seats. As of this writing, they have 27.  They may pick up a couple more. So: a narrow victory, not the ‘tsunami’ that, Nate Silver, the World’s Greatest Psephologist™, had predicted. (To put things in perspective, Barack Obama lost 63 seats in 2010.) Meanwhile, as of this writing, the Republicans have gained three seats in the Senate. In both Arizona and Montana, the Republican candidates, Martha McSally and Matt Rosendale are leading.

The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom created a constitution with a separation of powers. President Trump woke up this morning to the reality that one half of a co-equal branch of government – the Congress – is now in the hands of the opposition party. In normal times, this would mean the usual Washington gridlock, the constitution having been designed to be deliberately inefficient. But these are not normal times. The President’s former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security adviser, and his personal lawyer are all awaiting sentencing on various charges. The President himself is under investigation, accused of being the creature of a hostile, foreign government.