Can a Blue Wave Rein In the Felon

So far the signs appear to be that Republicans may lose control of both houses of Congress as the Felon's failed policies - think tariffs, trade wars and a war of choice in Iran - are turning previously thought safe seats in red states into contested, toss up districts.  Meanwhile, having driven the economy into a ditch and alienated long time allies, the Felon's corruption and obsession with lining his own pockets would make some crime bosses blush.  Sadly, short of finding 60 votes in the U.S. Senate for an impeachment conviction, the nation faces the prospect of more economic damage and betrayal of allies and citizens alike.   I'm not one to be over confident and it is crucial that anyone and everyone who opposes the ruin the Felon is bringing to the nation get to the polls and vote, preferably early and in person.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at where the nation finds itself and the crime syndicate operating from the White House.  What cannot be predicted is what the Felon will do if he finds himself diminished and better yet reined in by a Democrat controlled Congress and perhaps a re-energized judiciary.  Here are article highlights:

Signs of a midterm blue wave are everywhere, and yet it would be journalistic malpractice not to attach some nervous caveats to any prediction. Polls are sketchy. Campaigns have never been more subject to the desires of the wealthy. What is more, the President of the United States has the impulse control of a toddler, though most toddlers have neither the authority nor the inclination to spark an insurrection, destabilize the Western alliance, live-stream an execution, or threaten to end “a whole civilization.” We are subjected daily to the caprices of a mind both unregulated and amoral. As Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the Commander-in-Chief is “fascist to the core.” You may prefer milder terminology. Fine. But, after a decade defined by Donald Trump’s unceasing presence, a growing percentage of the American electorate appears to recognize the uniqueness of this President and the mayhem that he has instigated from the Oval Office.

We are, collectively, on guard against undue optimism. Still, if the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage.

A decade ago, those who believed that Trump’s ascent represented a grave and multifaceted danger, a national emergency, were often met with sneering dismissal. The right generally regarded Trump’s most vocal opponents as pussy-hatted snowflakes, woke snobs indifferent to the struggles of working people. They were, in a word, “deranged.” . . . . All that distinguished Trump was “aesthetics”—“He is vulgar. He is rude.”

In the passage from lame duck to pensioner, Trump still has plenty of time to inflict further damage on the Republic while milking it for profit. He is the sum of his whims and his rages, and, a change in Congress or not, he will likely go on flouting the law, tightening the screws on universities, cultural institutions, and the press. What he seems to value most of late is the humiliation of his enemies and, even more, the accumulation of vast wealth. Since the second Inauguration, the Trumps and their satraps have operated with all the commercial cunning of the Corleone family; the White House is their front, their Genco Pura Olive Oil Company.

Every week brings word of a new grift, a new meme coin, a Melania doc, a pay-for-access club, or fresh funds from Gulf grandees looking for leverage. The other day, we learned that Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald, Jr.,’s ex and the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, texted a maga donor insisting that he pay off her hundred-thousand-dollar Amex bill in exchange for favors from, in no particular order, the I.R.S., Tucker Carlson, and Kid Rock. . . . The Administration counts on an exhausted nation’s distraction. This may well have been the singular lesson that Trump absorbed from his moral instructor, Roy Cohn: if you keep up a steady stream of bullshit, if you keep denying and counterattacking, all of Monday’s trespasses will be forgotten by Tuesday.

What more and more voters are coming to understand is how profoundly they have been betrayed. And this is not just about the price of gas and groceries, though “affordability” is scarcely the joke the President thinks it is. Vladimir Putin long ago set out to mock the United States for its hypocrisies. You are no better than us—that was his message and his cover to crush dissent at home and the liberties of an independent Ukraine. When Trump threatens Greenland and Canada or greases a media merger in his interest, he is proving Putin’s point. When the titans of tech obediently line up at Trump’s Inauguration and fund his ballroom, Putin smiles. . . . because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil.

But if we are uncomfortable using a word like “evil,” how else are we to describe the spectacle of the President unleashing Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the history of humankind, to slash the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development? According to an article in The Lancet and the intensive research of Atul Gawande, a surgeon, a former assistant administrator for U.S.A.I.D., and a writer for this magazine, the agency’s support—focussed on fighting malaria, polio, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and H.I.V.—saved at least ninety million lives in the previous two decades. Researchers estimate that the cruelty-by-budget-cut has been responsible for the loss of as many as seven hundred thousand lives.

This is among the many depredations that this supposedly mainstream Administration has committed. In 1788, at a ratifying convention in Richmond, James Madison defended the newly drafted Constitution, but warned that its fulfillment would depend on the quality of the people as well as the document’s written principles. “To suppose that any form of Government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people,” he said, “is a chimerical idea.” Election Day is November 3rd. In some states, voting has already begun.