Midterms

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).

The late columnist Molly Ivins once quipped about the inhabitants of “the world’s greatest deliberative body” that “‘Get along, go along’ is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash 'em in for your home state? No, I'd say we could ask for more than that from our senators.” She was right, of course; we should ask more of our senators. But would that really help? Ensconced in chamber and institutionalized by the ways thereof, are our senators even capable of more? This is especially important when considering the current job performance of President Joe Biden, who has spent 36 of his 79 years as a member of the Senate.

According to a New York Times report, ‘At the midpoint of his term, Mr Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at any point since taking office. He spends ever more time in front of a television…’ This is too much of a theme of the Trump presidency to be dismissed as more fake news. During his 2016 campaign, the Donald confessed to developing positions on national security and foreign policy by watching retired generals on the Sunday shows. These days, Trump has access to the FBI, CIA and other intelligence organizations – but has repeatedly expressed that he does not trust them.

Holy Schitt! Just when you think there isn’t anything for Donald Trump to add to the lexicon of insults, he finds a new way, this time with the jejune epithet aimed at California lawmaker Adam Schiff, who is poised to become chairman of the House Intelligence committee. Trump’s tweet about him may be taken as an index of his inner apprehension about Schiff, not to mention Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who continues silently to stalk Trump, immune, at least so far, to his brickbats. The main reason for Trump’s turmoil is that he lost the midterm elections even if, as he explained to an alternately bemused and incredulous Chris Wallace of Fox News on Sunday, ‘I wasn’t on the ballot.’ So he was on the ballot until he wasn’t?

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.

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.

‘Remember, remember the 5th of November/ The gunpowder treason and plot . . .’ Well, it’s not Guy Fawkes who is planning to blow up things this November. It’s our version of the Picts: blue-dyed political marauders swarming over the ramparts in Hollywood, universities, Democratic campaign offices, and woke, acronymic former news channels. If you calibrate the performances just right, it can look like a confident pep rally. ‘We’re really going to show those knuckle-dragging, toxic male Caucasian deplorables this time! Two, four, six, eight, whom do you repudiate? Trump! Trump! Trump!’ The networks and newspapers and internet sites are abuzz with polls and prognostications.

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.

The law of political gravity favours the Democrats in the midterm elections less than two weeks away. They will gain seats in the House of Representatives no matter what they do, barring an upset of a kind that has happened only twice in the last 80 years. Curiously, both exceptions to the rule that the president’s party loses ground in the midterms were either side of the 2000 election. The Democrats under Bill Clinton picked up five House seats in 1998; the Republicans under George W. Bush gained eight in 2002. There were unusual circumstances at play in both instances: Republicans in 1998 were getting ready to impeach Clinton, while in 2002 the Bush administration was preparing for the Iraq War while the memory of 9/11 was still fresh in voters’ minds.

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.

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.