Trump's Narrative vs. Pelosi's Subpoenas: The Ground is Shifting Beneath Republicans

With the Democrat takeover of control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the days of Republicans killing investigations in to Donald Trump's likely criminality and perhaps worse are over.   While sadly re-elected, Devin Nunes' agenda of cover ups and conspiring with Trump are over.  Longer term the results in urban and suburban districts ought to send warning flags to Republicans.  As the cities and suburbs grow and rural populations shrink - and aging whites die off -  the day may be fast approaching where the GOP agenda of racism, bigotry, and reverse Robin Hood no longer wins in many statewide races outside of backward rural/red states which are the federal equivalent of welfare recipients that they so strongly condemn.  The big unanswered question also remains of what House and Mueller investigations of Trump may reveal .  A piece in Politico looks at the new political reality:

Democrats wanted a base of power in Donald Trump’s Washington and they got it.

They also wanted to wake up Wednesday morning to a radically changed country. They wanted permission to dismiss the past two years as a fluke of history, a hallucination now fading. And they wanted something more: to rub the president’s nose in the dirt of defeat and repudiation so badly that it would be hard to see him doing more than limp through the balance of his first term, much less with a credible path to a second.

Those things Democrats did not get. To the contrary, the GOP defeat was not nearly as severe as the Democratic one in 2010 . . . . This leaves 2018 as the “Yes, but” election—not fully satisfying but by no means fully deflating for partisans of either side.

Yes: the Democratic march into once-unfavorable suburban terrain across the country was impressive. No amount of prattle about the “expectations game” or historical averages can diminish the reality that Nancy Pelosi is poised to retake the speaker’s gavel and the vast appropriations and investigatory power this gives the opposition party to check a hostile executive.

But: There is scant evidence of a mandate for a scorched-earth pursuit of Trump, and Tuesday’s gains in the Senate for Republicans (as well as the recent Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle that likely contributed to this outcome) underline the risks of this approach. . . . the electoral path Trump navigated to the presidency in 2016 remains plausible in 2020.

But: The midterms offered redundant evidence (some GOP strategists have been warning of this for a generation) that the party’s base is predominately rural in a country growing more urban and suburban, predominately white and culturally conservative in a country growing more diverse and culturally tolerant. Do Republicans really think that losing a majority of people who voted – as they did in 2016 and did again Tuesday night – but clinging to power through institutions designed to buffer democracy like the Senate and Electoral College is a wise strategy long-term?

The suburbs, which formed the bedrock of the Republican Party for half a century, are increasingly Democratic ground. The slow suburban exodus from the GOP has accelerated and even expanded beyond the Midwest and Northeast to the South and across the Sunbelt. Name the big metro – Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia – and chances are there’s a Republican incumbent who lost Tuesday night or barely escaped.

By accident or design, however, divided government of the sort Trump will now preside over is the historical norm. In the 38 years since Ronald Reagan’s victory, presidents have faced having at least one chamber of Congress controlled by the opposition party in 28 years.

In general, however, those presidents had a degree of modesty about their new circumstances that would be unusual, so far, for Trump. . . . No one is expecting Trump to come forward in coming days with a message of self-critique or self-correction that by all evidence he believes is wholly unnecessary. In fact, [Trump] the president is likely to cherry-pick the results, pointing to the red-state Senate romp as evidence of the popularity of his agenda while dismissing the suburban losses as minimal, a culling of losers and malcontents that will ultimately strengthen the GOP herd.

Trump’s response was typical of the night’s mixed outcome: Yes, he kept the Senate, but was happy to avert his gaze from whatever traps House Democrats have in store for him.

One can hope that judicious House investigations and the Mueller investigation will ultimately expose Trump - and hopefully Pence as well - and help even red states to lurch back to objective reality.