Donald trrump

Wednesday

Paul du Quenoy

Trump’s announcement lights up Palm Beach

“America’s comeback starts right now,” declared former and possibly future president Donald J. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club and private residence on Tuesday evening. Speaking for over an hour in uncharacteristically measured tones, Trump sounded downright businesslike, laying out the achievements of his first term, his aspirations for a possible future term, and the demerits of his once and likely future opponent Joe Biden. “President Trump’s tone,” Bryan Leib, a former Pennsylvania congressional candidate and executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, messaged me from the floor, was “calm, confident, and unifying.” About 18 minutes in, Trump matter-of-factly pronounced what everyone was waiting to hear: that he is a candidate for president in 2024.

Tuesday

Kara Kennedy

Why Murdoch dumped Trump

“He’s done.” That was the general consensus when I asked around about Donald Trump’s future in politics this week. And in the search for signs that Trump is in trouble, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are a good place to start. In the days since the disappointing midterm results, the New York Post, has already labeled the former president “Trumpty Dumpty” and praised his Republican rival Ron DeSantis as “DeFuture.” Trump's 2024 bid was relegated to page 26 on Tuesday, teased on the cover as "Florida man makes announcement." Things aren’t much better for the former president over at the Wall Street Journal. It has been crammed with anti-Trump op-eds since last Tuesday. One headline summed things up neatly: “Trump is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.

Rupert Murdoch
republicans
Erin Norman

The midterm results are good for Republicans, if not great

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.

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

This election was no loss for Trump

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.

Matt Purple

The Republican circular firing squad

The saying used to go that "Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line," though lately Republicans seem mostly to fall on the floor. The circular firing squad has become a mainstay of GOP politics, even when — and this is what really sets them apart — they win elections rather than lose them. Republicans seem to love few things more than turning the guns inward and squealing "fire!!" So it's been since the 2022 midterms. The circular firing began with the party's moderate wing, which is always down for a little anti-Trump warfare. Governor Larry Hogan was on CNN last weekend where he trashed Trump for allegedly costing Republicans not just this election but the last two as well.

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Dave Seminara

Our leaders will learn nothing from these elections

Elections are an opportunity for us to deliver messages to political leaders most of us will never meet. We can’t send Donald Trump a text, nor can we talk about inflation over an extravagantly expensive Jeni’s ice cream cone with Joe Biden. The best we can do is to vote and hope that in our collective numbers we can make ourselves clear. Yet early indications are that the leaders of both parties are poised to learn absolutely nothing from the midterm elections. Let’s examine some of their delusional reactions. The White House hasn’t commented on whether Joe Biden played the recent $2 billion Powerball drawing (which CNN recently accused of being systemically racist), but if he didn’t buy a ticket, he should have.

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Cockburn

Tiffany Trump’s Mar-a-Lago wedding: in pictures

After a rough week — in which American voters rejected several of his handpicked candidates at the polls — at least Donald Trump got to wind down at his daughter Tiffany’s wedding at Mar-a-Lago. It should have been one of the best days of the former president’s life, but as the Champagne was flowing and Trump was making a heartfelt father-of-the-bride speech at the reception, the Democrats gained control of the Senate. Cockburn had a snoop at the special day. Here are some of the best pics:   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) To Trump's credit, he makes some good-looking daughters. Clearly Ivanka got the memo that they needed "something blue.

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Ben Domenech

We can blame Mitch McConnell, too

So now it's time to figure out who to blame. The post-election spin from the world of Mitch McConnell is that the GOP's failure to flip the Senate is on Donald Trump and National Republican Senatorial Committee head Rick Scott, and that candidate selection and expenditures are the reason that we don't have a Republican majority in the upper house. For anyone who paid attention, this doesn't pass the smell test. In the wake of a number of fractious primaries, GOP Senate candidates essentially went dark in the summer, their ad budgets expended and without the resources to get back on the air. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer and the DSCC defined the Republican outsiders for a new audience of general election voters.

democrats
John Pietro

Time for the GOP to call out Democrats’ primaries meddling

If there is one lesson the Republican Party needs to learn from this year’s elections, it is that fringe politics and conspiracy theories are not popular. The GOP lost independents by three points to Democrats, a fatal statistic for any midterms. Poor candidate quality, a problem Senator Mitch McConnell pointed out to many Republicans’ chagrin, lost the party winnable seats across the country. The Democrats played a small part in this result through their cynical support for far-right candidates in Republican primaries who they suspected (correctly) would be easier to beat in November. Through various PACs, Democrats spent around $53.275 million to elevate 13 extreme Republican candidates, six of whom won their primaries. All six lost in November.

Friday

Cockburn

Scoop: top GOP donors to meet in Miami in plot to stop Trump

Everybody hates Donald? An emergency gathering is set to be held in Miami next week to talk about “the Trump problem,” a source tells Cockburn. Steve Wynn and other big-shot GOP donors are said to want to “move on from Trump,” so are coming together to decide how to keep him from securing the 2024 nomination. The former president has been said to be in a “terrible mood” and “throwing regular tantrums” after the failure of his chosen candidates in the midterms. He is also facing mutiny from previously die-hard fans who adored him before Tuesday, such as: Candace Owens: "Trump needs to take a good look in the mirror and he needs to take a good look in the room, and he needs to read the room accurately.

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genghis donald trump boomer republicanism establishment
Ben Domenech

The time to move on from boomer Republicanism is now

Having been saddled by everyone involved with the largest portion of blame for Tuesday's election disappointment, Donald Trump's descent into the pit of despair takes exactly the form you could expect: a series of Mean Girls rants about everyone more popular than he is in the Republican Party. There has been much talk over the years about how there's a Good Trump and a Bad Trump, but the truth about our 45th president is that, just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of the Hulk, he's always angry — he just controls it better when times are good. Now that times are bad — or as bad as they can be when you have millions more Republicans voting than Democrats and you just dislodged Nancy Pelosi from power — he is reverting to his true form. It ain't pretty.

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump, accidental Paul Revere

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.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

The normie election

Since Tuesday’s shocking midterm results started trickling in, the chattering classes have scrambled to make sense of yet another election we forecast so very poorly. The media promised a red wave of epic proportions; instead, President Biden had the best midterm elections of any US president since 2002, despite his dreadful approval ratings. In the lead-up to the vote count, poll after poll found that Americans’ top issues were inflation, the economy, crime and immigration — kitchen table issues on which the Democrats have performed abysmally in recent years. Everything pointed to a very bad night for the president’s party. So why didn’t voters send a clear message to Democrats about their misplaced priorities, as we in the media were so sure they would?

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Cockburn

Hurricane Nicole backs Ron DeSantis over Trump

The red wave didn’t happen, but Mother Nature is unleashing waves of torrential rain on Mar-a-Lago ahead of the wedding of Donald Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, to billionaire Michael Boulos, set for this weekend. Cockburn can’t help but marvel how Hurricane Nicole spared Ron DeSantis’s reelection on Tuesday, but is now, along with Republicans everywhere, unleashing some Old Testament-style vengeance on the Trump family. Tiffany Trump is reportedly “flipping out” as Mar-a-Lago has been partially evacuated and staff sent home ahead of the impending storm. Much like the red wave Trump was prepared to take credit for, Page Six reports that many Trump friends “might not make it” to the party (just as they failed to make it to their own victory parties earlier this week).

Amber Duke

J.D. Vance was practically destined to win Ohio

Republican J.D. Vance wiped the floor with Democrat Tim Ryan on Tuesday night. It was a surprise for all the professional pundits only because the Ohio Senate race had been obscured by all kinds of white noise. The mainstream media worked overtime to paint the contest as a toss-up and the Democrats insisted they were going to flip the seat. Just a couple of weeks ahead of the election, multiple polls had the race at a statistical tie. Vance ended up winning by seven points. Several Republican consultants told me that they never believed the race would be close. Ohio, they pointed out, was ground zero for the working-class realignment that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016. Trump won the state again by eight points in the 2020 presidential election.

Wednesday

Dave Seminara

What I learned making calls for Democrats and Republicans

I’m a registered Republican in Florida yet the only email offer I received to be a campaign volunteer this season was from the Democrats. Is this a function of Google subverting my Gmail inbox or Republican dysfunction? I have no idea, but I was surprised to get a message on November 4 from “Official Democratic Headquarters” asking me to make phone calls on behalf of Democratic candidates. “With so much on the ballot this Tuesday — from Social Security and Medicare to reproductive freedom and even the future of our democracy — we need all hands-on deck to help Democrats win across the country,” the message read.

Paul du Quenoy

At Mar-a-Lago as the red wave died out

It was a dark and stormy election night at Mar-a-Lago, former president Donald Trump’s Florida home and private club, which is the marquee residence of our island resort community of Palm Beach. In the world outside American politics, Tropical Storm Nicole was gathering strength and bearing down on us. Earlier in the day, the Island (always with a capital “I,” unless you’re not really a resident and don’t know any better) was placed under a hurricane warning. About an hour before the party started, the town issued a mandatory evacuation order to take effect at 7 a.m. the following morning. All this was forgotten as euphoric Republicans gathered inside the gates, snugly out of the gusts and downpour.

Ben Domenech

The winners and losers of the 2022 midterms

In every election, there are the winners and losers, but there are also winners and losers away from the ballot box, which oftentimes are more important and have a longer tail than the vote-getters. In the 2022 midterms, here are the winners and losers as I see them. Loser: Donald Trump Well, this one is obvious. The former president weighed in with all his political energy behind multiple candidates in this cycle, particularly in divisive primaries and statewide races where he often chose outsiders over more experienced candidates. The Trump fatigue factor was clearly a problem this time around, with his choices in some races utterly rejected by voters.

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Stephen L. Miller

Time to cancel Trump’s Political Apprentice

Donald Trump did not emerge from the wonkish world of conservative politics and policy. He was a product of the national media and international entertainment industry, and he brought that unique swagger to the White House in 2016, after several years of flirting with the idea in interviews. He honed his image of a savvy know-it-all billionaire businessman on NBC’s The Apprentice. The show was number one in the network television ratings for several years, as Trump plucked C- and D-list celebrities to compete for his affections. But the success of the over-the-top WWE showman persona that put Trump in the White House has not rubbed off on the political candidates whom he's selected over the course of the last three elections — 2018, 2020 and now 2022.

midterms
Roger Kimball

How did I get the midterms so wrong?

How wrong can you be? About as wrong as I was about the character of the midterm elections. I thought there would be a red wave, fueled in part by high-octane orange fuel. Clearly I was wrong. It is no consolation to know that I was hardly alone in my assumptions. Nor is it much consolation to hear from Donald Trump that it was a “GREAT EVENING” because there were “174 wins and nine losses.” I didn’t check his math, but even if accurate it is obvious that there was no red wave. Several of his high-profile candidates lost, most conspicuously Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The fact that he lost to a man who is ostentatiously a mental incompetent added insult to injury.