Politics

What does the Democratic Party stand for other than visceral and vocal opposition to President Donald Trump? Ask the average Democrat on the street, and you’re likely to get a million different answers; it’s one of the major reasons why the party has been struggling to define itself since Trump shocked the universe with his upset victory in November 2016. ‘The Resistance’ will settle for nothing short of pitchfork leftist populism, a rambunctiousness that party elders tend to regard as juvenile.Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker-in-waiting, has tried to demonstrate a more mature face of the party to American voters less than a week before the polls open.

It is a curious fact that while English conservatives identify with the colour blue and English lefties with the colour red, the opposite is the case in America. I have struggled to recollect why the Democrats chose blue in 2000 but rather suspect it had something to do what Dr Christine Blasey Ford would call the ‘prefrontal cortex’. Many human decisions are taken on emotional grounds and emotion, as we are taught, is often governed by childhood memory.

Does Robert Mueller have a secret sex life? A Republican activist named Jack Burkman, who previously touted the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was assassinated by members of the Deep State, has apparently been investigating the past life of Trump’s chief investigator. His aim was to ferret out misdeeds by the G-man whose true interest was supposed to be the G-spot. The amateurish plot against Mueller fizzled out fairly quickly, but it has caught the interest of the FBI. It seems to have centred on a former female paralegal who knew Mueller at the Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro law firm in 1974, though not very well, by her own accounting.

This morning Matt Drudge tweeted, ‘A segment on Fox News this morning where hosts laughed and joked their way through a discussion on political impact of terror was bizarre. Not even 48 hours since blood flowed at synagogue? Check your soul in the makeup chair!’ A new Gallup poll indicates that one week before the midterms, a number of voters may also be checking out from supporting Donald Trump. His numbers dropped from a 44 per cent approval rating a week ago to 40 per cent. Trump has made the elections a referendum on himself, which means that he has bet the house, so to speak, on whether or not the GOP retains the Senate and House. If it does, he emerges as America’s strongman.

Pittsburgh is less a city than a loose federation of urban villages, of which Squirrel Hill provides a classic example. A long-thriving heart of Jewish life and culture, an authentically rooted community, Squirrel Hill is now irrevocably scarred by the murderous actions of one monster, whose crimes will leave a legacy of social harm and intimidation for a generation. Robert Bowers’s attributed words about wishing to kill Jews leave no doubt of the explicitly political character of the act. No worthwhile definition of terrorism could fail to include an act like this. But as in any case of terrorism, identifying an act is only the first stage in a much larger process of interpretation and rhetorical expansion.

Spending too long online can take its toll, no matter your age. The majority of under 35s grew up squinting at backlit screens with bags below their eyes, poring over forums and AOL Messenger, pornography and Netflix. Yet somehow it’s baby boomers who are the worst victims of the internet: technologically dumb, easily scammed, and often more susceptible to fake news. And it looks as if Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man arrested in connection to the pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats and left-wing celebrities, is the latest spectacular example of a silver (or in his case, it seems. hairplugged) surfer going off the deep end.

Seven days before the Brexit referendum, the Labour MP Jo Cox was out campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union, when she was shot, stabbed and murdered by a far-right maniac shouting ‘Britain First’. People were shocked, and shock instantly turned to rage. This is what happens, they said, when you fan the flames of right-wing extremism. Pundits pointed at a provocative UKIP poster that showed a queue of migrants from the developing world and said, in Trumpian capitals, BREAKING POINT. That was a clear incitement to violence, they said. The whole political/media class thought that was that. The staff at Vote Leave (the official, pro-Brexit campaign, who hadn’t put out that poster) were despondent.

Donald Trump, only a few hours ago seen as a master manipulator in the run-up to the midterm elections, has lost the narrative, at least for now. ‘This egregious conduct is abhorrent to everything we hold dear and sacred as Americans,’ he said today. ‘I just want to tell you that in these times we have to unify, we have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.’ When Trump is reduced to issuing such emollient statements, he is decidedly on the backfoot.Tonight Trump is scheduled to attend a rally in Wisconsin. Media scrutiny will be more intense than ever.

Robert Mueller is getting stoned. Not in any corporeal sense, I hasten to note. Rather, his investigation appears to be focusing on any ties that the Trump campaign may have had to the voluble former Nixon operative Roger Stone. Like Michael Cohen, who once proclaimed that he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, Stone is now noisily professing his loyalty to the president. ‘The special counsel pokes into every aspect of my social, family, personal, business and political life, seeking something — anything — he can use to pressure me, to silence me and to try to induce me to testify against my friend Donald Trump,’ Stone declared in a recent video. ‘This I will not do.