Donald trrump

The Democratic Party appears to see its red-state Senate races as sticky short-term exercises in triangulation and coalition-building, best conducted as far from the national spotlight as possible. It has neglected the opportunity of grouping this handful of candidates behind an assertive vision of its own future leadership in rural and small-town America. Take the Democratic senator Jon Tester, the only working farmer in the United States Senate. ‘Jon? He’s just real,’ said Martha Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe I spoke to. ‘He’s a real person. My concerns are his concerns. Public lands, Native American issues – suicide among our 18-24 youths being the number one.

Friday brought boffo news for the Republicans, just four days before the midterm elections that will determine if the party keeps control of both chambers of Congress. The Wall Street Journal succinctly captured the story: ‘Wages Rise at Fastest Rate in Nearly a Decade as Hiring Jumps: Unemployment rate held at a 49-year low in October; wages increased 3.1%.’ As the story went on to explain, a few factors converged to paint a particularly positive economic picture last month. ‘Employers shook off a September slowdown to add 250,000 jobs to their payrolls in October, above monthly averages in recent years, the Labor Department said Friday. With unemployment holding at 3.7 percent, a 49-year low, and employers competing for scarce workers, wages increased 3.

Will the King be toppled? No one is likely to observe of Steve King of Iowa, as nasty a piece of work as has ever served as a Congressman, ‘My heart is inditing of a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made unto the King.’ Intel and Land O’Lakes have rescinded their financial backing for him. King isn’t running any ads or even much of a campaign for reelection. His challenger J.D. Scholten, by contrast, has raised some $641,000 in the past two days. At the same time, the press is brimming with stories about young people turning out in droves to vote. The Cook Report has revised its predictions to indicate that the Democrats may win up to 40 seats in the House.

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.

Independence of mind is nowadays in short supply among the commentariat. Certain big background concepts have been propagated thoroughly enough that everyone knows just what to write as soon as anything happens. If there’s any doubt — or worse, any resistance — wave upon wave of goodthink browbeating will put a quick end to it. And if that fails, a dissenter’s sheer sense of futility may do the trick. What’s the point of insisting that two and two is four when everyone else in the clever class insists it’s five? Edmund Burke never gave up.

‘This “bomb” stuff,’ as Donald Trump referred to it this morning on Twitter, took a new turn with the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, a Floridian who is suspected of trying to spread something other than sunshine across the US. He stands accused of mailing pipe bombs to a variety of leading Democratic politicians as well as CNN. Trump, always attentive to his own needs and wants, had been lamenting the fact that attempted bombings had stolen media attention from what he referred to as the GOP’s ‘momentum’ for the midterm elections. By the afternoon he was venting in the East Room of the White House.

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.

Poor Paul Manafort. His defense attorney Kevin Downing asked if he could appear in his street clothing rather than a dark-green prison jumpsuit for his sentencing on Friday. Manafort, who has spent millions on bespoke suits, has always placed a premium on his public appearance. Judge T.S. Ellis III, however, was having none of it: ‘This defendant should be treated no differently from other defendants who are in custody post conviction.’Another former Donald Trump associate also got kicked in the shins this week, but the source wasn’t a federal judge. Instead, it was Trump who delivered the blow, dismissing his old chum and confederate Michael Cohen as a nobody.

Geronimo! Elizabeth Warren, whom President Trump has repeatedly mocked as ‘Pocahontas,’ has now issued the results of a DNA test indicating that she does indeed have Native American ancestry going back some 6-10 generations. A video released by Warren shows her receiving the news from one Carlos Bustamante, a professor of genetics at Stanford University. According to Bustamante, ‘The facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree.’ Trump has been fixated with Warren’s heritage.This was supposed to be his new ‘birther’ issue. In Iowa last week, he observed that he would like to ‘finally get down to the fact as to whether or not she has Indian blood.’ Why this was the case he did not indicate.

Shortly after yesterday’s outlandish Oval Office episode, several national political reporters under age 40, such as the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, claimed total ignorance of Kanye West’s discography — as though impressed with themselves for being oblivious to one of American pop culture’s most titanic figures of the past decade and a half. Maybe they’ve really somehow never heard ‘Jesus Walks,’ ‘Gold Digger,’ or ‘Power,’ which would cast slight doubt on their ability to gauge the political sentiments of the population they purport to cover. Or maybe they just feel compelled to throw Kanye down the memory hole now that he’s taken up with Donald Trump.

For all the encomiums she delivered to Trump and his coterie today, Nikki Haley delivered an unexpected blow to the Trump White House by announcing her resignation. Her announcement caught Trump flatfooted, coming after the previous evening’s revelries at the White House, where he turned a ceremony for newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh into a political pep rally that is likely to further enrage his detractors and opponents. The sudden defection of one of his big stars is exactly the kind of television programming that Trump loathes, particularly on the eve of the November midterm elections, which Politico says look increasingly ominous for Republican control of the House of Representatives.