Donald trrump

Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor's race against Democrat Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday night, shattering Democratic hopes of turning the commonwealth permanently blue. CNN and the New York Times projected Youngkin would win Virginia just after 12:30 am on Wednesday. The Times had Youngkin leading with 50.9 percent of the vote to McAuliffe's 48.4 percent with more than 95 percent of the total votes tallied. McAuliffe won Loudoun County by 10.5 percentage points, indicating that he would not rake in the massive votes he needed in the highly populated blue and blue-leaning counties. Biden, comparatively, won Loudoun County by 25 points during the 2020 election.

As much as former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe would like voters to believe it, Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin is not Donald Trump. Yet Youngkin has inspired the same level of desperation and hysteria as the former president from his opponents and the media. The Lincoln Project celebrated Halloween a few days early this year by sending young Democratic activists to a Glenn Youngkin rally dressed as white nationalists. They came clad in the Charlottesville special: white button downs, khaki pants, camo hats and carrying tiki torches. Images of the trick initially spread on social media with the allegation that the individuals were Youngkin supporters.

Heavens to Betsy! It seems that Tucker Carlson has gone full truther. Or, if you prefer, disinformer about the tawdry events of January 6, when a motley crew of Trump supporters and Oath Keepers, who often appear to be one and the same, somehow took it into their heads not simply to protest the outcome of the presidential election but to storm the Winter Palace. The trials of the perpetrators are ongoing. A House committee, which includes Liz Cheney as well as Adam Kinzinger, is investigating. And most Republican politicians, at least the ones with their eyes on regaining a congressional majority, are trying to put the episode firmly in the rear-view mirror. Not Tucker.

Last weekend brought some minor internet drama courtesy of Amanda Moore, a progressive activist who outed herself as having spent the past year “infiltrating” right-wing groups. On Twitter, she posted pictures that she'd taken with various luminaries of Trumpworld such as General Michael Flynn, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. She also claimed to have been given a counterfeit vaccination card from a member of a QAnon conspiracy group and to have worn a wire the whole time, recording the details of her meetings and chance encounters held under false pretenses. “We were literally at the same events,” she crowed at a photojournalist who sent a somewhat vulgar tweet mocking her.

Delaware used to be Cale Boggs country, almost as much as Massachusetts belonged to the Kennedys. Boggs served as governor, congressman and twice as Delaware senator, so in late 1972, when he was seeking a third term, the race looked sewed up. But as summer turned to fall, his 28-point lead evaporated. Voters started paying attention to Boggs’s rival, a Democrat youngster with fire in his belly and a spring in his step. Anti-Boggs ads said his best days were behind him. According to his fresh-faced opponent, Boggs was a ‘helluva nice guy’ but, after decades in power, he had ‘lost that twinkle in his eyes’. On election day, Boggs lost by a margin of 3,000 votes. The people of Delaware sent to Washington a 30-year-old thruster named Joe Biden.

In the waning months of the 2020 campaign, President Trump cast himself as the defender of the suburbs. It didn’t work. Suburban voters made Joe Biden president. But although Trump lost that election, the pro-suburb talking points he popularized didn’t go away. Last month, after California legalized duplexes statewide, the outrage came roaring back. Tucker Carlson fumed that soon 'drug-addicted vagrants’ would be terrorizing innocent American suburbanites. Right-wing Twitter personality Auron MacIntyre perceived a plot to destroy the wealth concentrated in single-family homes and force everyone to live in the 'urban decay’ of 'the favela’.

Last Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney seized the opportunity during a House Armed Services Committee hearing to apologize to Gen. Mark Milley. She went on to assail the 'despicable' questioning of her Republican colleagues, who wanted information about phone calls Milley had made to a Chinese official last fall, in which the general had assured him that, were President Trump to launch a nuclear attack against China (presumably out of sheer frustration, or perhaps idle curiosity to learn what the result would be), he would tip him ahead of the fact. This, of course, was a direct affront to the 70 percent of Wyoming citizens for had voted for Trump in 2020. Several days before that, Cheney had confessed to 60 Minutes that she had been wrong to oppose gay marriage in the past.

It went virtually unnoticed in April when Donald Trump recruited Susie Wiles to oversee his fundraising operation and create a system for issuing endorsements. Wiles is a veteran political consultant in Florida, having worked for Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis and helped with Trump’s campaigns there. 'The president tells everyone around Mar-a-Lago that Susie is now in charge,’ an adviser told Politico. Despite media narratives of Jared Kushner’s withdrawal from Trump’s affairs, one source with knowledge of Mar-a-Lago’s inner workings said Wiles serves a 'buffer to give Kushner distance’. Wiles currently works with Kushner confidant Bill Stepien on endorsements. According to broadcaster Stew Peters, Wiles isn’t taking a paycheck for her work.

There used to be an old joke that there were more members of the FBI who were members of the American Communist party than there were actual believers in rule from Moscow. Something like that seems to have occurred with the much ballyhooed 'Justice for J6' rally in Washington DC. Justice, schmustice. Much as I had expected, almost no one rallied to the rally. A grand total of two people were arrested. Seldom has Washington seemed more peaceful. The notion that DC was about to be stormed may have given a lascivious pleasure to those liberals convinced that the enemy is not just at the gates but within them already. But that was never in the cards. Having been caught napping on January 6, there was no way a repetition of those sanguinary events would recur.

All eyes are on the flyover state of Ohio as the fight for the future of Trumpism unfolds. In January, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced he was bowing out of politics for good. His vacancy has set up a rare primary between two candidates offering two different versions of Donald Trump's amorphous ideology. One believes the former president's rhetoric should assimilate with bygone Tea Party-era politics and contemporary culture war talking points. The other is running on the populist rollercoaster that slung Trump into the White House. Rust Belt boy wonder Josh Mandel, who served in the statehouse and was state treasurer for almost a decade, touts a pro-Trump campaign 'to protect the Judeo-Christian bedrock of America.

Kemmerer, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has the political brain of a sucked egg, as her egregiously self-destructive decision to join her Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach President Trump following the events at the US Capitol on January 6 showed. In terms of personability and charm, Cheney is the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton. And in a state with a population of 581,024 people spread across 97,914 square miles where politics has always been something like a family affair, she is very much an outsider, even a stranger. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she lived in the Cowboy State for only a year or so when she was a sixth- and seventh-grade student in the 1970s.

A coup by any other name and maybe even a little light treason. Those are the accusations flying over revelations in a new Bob Woodward book about what Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley did after the January 6 Capitol riots. Milley reportedly held several phone calls shortly after January 6, with both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with his counterpart in China. According to Woodward, the general gave assurances to Gen. Li Zuocheng that he would alert the Chinese to any possible coming attack, nuclear or otherwise. There is no evidence President Trump was planning any kind of strike against China, or Iran, or Florida. No battle plans were being drawn. Miller supposedly took these actions after Trump signed an executive order removing US forces from Afghanistan.

Joe Biden is officially a victim of the new rules that every Democratic president is going to face from here on out. That's thanks to his party’s overzealously tying an impeachment around Donald Trump’s neck before the 2020 election. Both Biden and the Democrats are not going to like where those new rules lead when the Republican party, in all likelihood, takes back the House of Representatives in early 2023. Traveling back in time for a moment, remember that Donald Trump’s first impeachment was based on a third-party whistleblower who notified Rep. Adam Schiff of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

It’s a national disgrace, a catastrophe nearly two decades in the making. In a just society, everyone involved would be severely punished, but in the fallen state of modern America there will be no consequences, only more humiliation. Cockburn refers, of course, to Twitter, that monstrous invention where America’s politicians, journalists, ‘experts’, and ordinary people compete with one another to see who can be the most profoundly pathetic, unimpressive, and cringeworthy. Naturally, the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan allowed every player to put in their best performance.