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The Felon Slides Into His Lame-Duck Era

The Felon has started making comments that the mid-term elections were "rigged."  Some voices on the right called him out on the lie and stated the obvious: the GOP losses were so massive and so spread across the country that it would have been impossible to have rigged the results. Indeed, the Felon is facing a new world where like it or not he is becoming a lame duck.  Deference from Republicans is seemingly weakening and Thomas Massie, an out-going Republican who lost his primary when he was targeted by the Felon has introduced articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth and guaranteed that either now or in the new Congress convening in January there will be a public examination of Hegseth's failed war plans in the Middle East that led to the destruction of American bases, 23 servicemembers being killed and hundreds more wounded. Incredibly, the Felon continues to claim victory and even claimed that no servicemembers had been lost - an obvious bald faced lie. Then there's appointment of Josef Goebbels like Stephan Miller as chief of state suggesting there will be no let up in horrific deportation operations that pushed Latino voters into the Democrats' arms. The next two years will likely not be pretty as the new Congress launches investigations of the Felons failed policies and his shocking corruption and self-enrichment.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at this new reality:

When [the Felon] President Trump posted on Saturday that he’d asked Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to be the new White House press secretary, it felt like a callback to the freewheeling first-term Trump.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” . . . By weekend’s end, the possibility of the appointment had dissolved, though not without a subplot of speculation that Trump was confusing the impresario with another Dana White who had actually served as a Pentagon spokesperson during his first term. CNN reported that White had declined, and last night, Trump told reporters he never meant it anyway. “I was only kidding, but Dana loves the idea,” he said.

Perhaps. Trump has a long record of launching outlandish ideas and then playing them off as jokes when they don’t work out. If it was all a jape, then the weak stab at humor seems to underestimate the electorate’s frustration with his antics. If he was serious and got rejected, it’s even worse. . . . . “Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly a lame duck.” Now we’re getting a glimpse of what that looks like in practice.

Start with the cool reception that Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff received among Republicans. Representative Marlin Stutzman called it a “horrible decision.” Another legislator told Fox News that his reaction was “utter disbelief.” When a Politico reporter informed one member of the choice, they replied, “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.” . . . . but whether or not they acquiesce with the president matters less now that the GOP is so outnumbered in Congress.

One test of where House Republicans actually stand will come this week. Thomas Massie, a renegade GOP member who Trump helped defeat in a primary earlier this year, refiled articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today. Although Speaker Mike Johnson (speaking of lame ducks) had temporarily stymied Massie’s impeachment efforts in September by sending members home until after the midterms, the House is now back in session. Rounding up enough Republican votes to move the articles forward will be difficult but not impossible; a significant number of GOP members lost their seats last week, including many of the more moderate representatives, which means they are less in Trump’s thrall. Assuming that Hegseth is not impeached this month, it seems all but inevitable once Democrats take over. This weekend, presumptive Speaker Hakeem Jeffries said he’s a “hard yes” on impeachment.

Republicans’ losses have produced infighting elsewhere in the party too. As Miller moves to take over, fallout from his predecessor Susie Wiles’s tenure continues.

One person in particular left somewhat unmoored by the results is Vice President Vance, who built his entire profile on closeness to a politician whose toxicity is now made plain. In a long post-election X post, Vance pinned the midterm defeat on the Iran war. . . . But Trump does not seem inclined to cooperate. For one thing, he continues to defend the war. On 60 Minutes last night, he acknowledged the political fallout but said, “I think, historically, this will be a very good decision. Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not.” Speaking with reporters last night, he once again declared victory in the unresolved war with Iran and then claimed, falsely and callously, that “we haven’t lost anybody. No soldiers.”

At other times, though, Trump has sounded unusually chastened since Election Day. He told The New York Times that he looks forward to working with the Democrats. He also acknowledged on 60 Minutes that his deportation policy, which “might be too tough,” could explain the GOP’s shellacking. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border,” he said, “but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.” A deescalation on immigration enforcement seems unlikely with Miller as chief of staff, given his role in implementing that policy, but the fact that Trump was willing to offer conciliatory remarks suggests that he is beginning to recognize the challenges of life as a lame duck.

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2028 Is Going to Be Even Worse for Republicans?

The shock waves for last weeks blue tsunami continue to reverberate even as the Felon disclaims any responsibility for the election debacle and most congressional Republicans refuse to lay blame on the Felon and/or undo the policies the Felon implemented that fueled the revolt by voters in the first place.  Even JD Vance who  is struggling to reinvent himself in anticipation of 2028 a a presidential run and is asking everyone to ignore his role as cheerleader for the Felon's failed policies, is only willing to say that the Iran war was a causation while ignoring the Felon's cruel and deliberately inhumane deportation policy, shocking corruption, and the horrific "big beautiful bill."  Vance is not the only would be 2028 Republican presidential candidate that will have a difficult time recasting themself as a vote worthy candidate in two years.  With Rep. Massie introducing his impeachment resolution today against Pete Hegseth, more details of Republican misrule and likely war crimes will be coming.  Added to this is the Felon's selection of Stephen Miller - the architect of the anti-immigrant brutality - which will likely add more ICE outrages to the public consciousness and Hispanic voter revulsion. And then there's the reality that NONE of the Republican presidential candidates did anything to stop the Felon's excesses, self-enrichment and shocking corruption. A piece in the New Republic looks at the 2028 election cycle:

If you’re looking for evidence that the right isn’t sure how to respond to the Republican Party’s historic collapse in Tuesday’s midterm elections, you could do worse than a graphic Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasted to her audience on Thursday. . . . She and her fellow Republicans have suffered a collective shellshock from the worst midterm defeat since Watergate. President Trump only wants to talk about his tacky building projects. Vice President JD Vance is nakedly trying to salvage his own presidential ambitions by throwing everyone else under the bus. Racist goon Stephen Miller is the new chief-of-staff. It’s a terrible time to be a Republican, and it will only get worse. All you can do is lash out.

If you want the full picture of Republican panic, however, you’ve got to look at another Fox graphic, this one built out of a tweet from former speaker of the House—and architect of the GOP’s 1994 midterm massacre of the Democrats—Newt Gingrich. . . .  It’s worth examining Gingrich’s thinking. Yes, he is a fossil. But he has managed to remain a consummate Republican politician in his semi-retirement, and his wife, airbrushing enthusiast Callista Gingrich, is Trump’s ambassador to Lichtenstein. Gingrich led one revolution in the 1990s and survived another. He knows his party. He also knows his party’s in trouble.

Gingrich doesn’t quite stick a knife into Vance, but he comes as close as he can. He shrugs off the vice president’s weaselly attempt to avoid blame for Iran, which is fair enough: As vice president of an administration overseeing that war, it is going to be very hard for Vance not to be saddled with the political and economic fallout, which will likely extend until 2028. Gingrich goes further, though, blaming Vance for defending Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting, failed gubernatorial bid in Ohio—essentially saying Vance not only has lousy instincts, but is a bad person too: “A good bit of the luster has come off the bloom.”

Well, what about the luster of the other blooms? It’s clear that Gingrich is eyeing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a safer and more competent successor, writing, “The number of people who want to draft [him] is staggering.” This may be true, but it’s also absurd, given that Gingrich has already (rightly) acknowledged just how important a role the Iran War played in the GOP’s midterm meltdown. Rubio is arguably the third most prominent public face of that war, ahead of JD Vance and behind Trump and...

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is also, absurdly, included in Gingrich’s list. For one thing, Hegseth is the most likely fall guy for the administration if two scalps are deemed necessary after Tuesday’s defeats (Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was cut loose on Friday, in favor of Stephen Miller). His department has been embroiled in more controversies than any other during this administration—some of which of unfathomably stupid, like his imposition of grooming standards, and others that are unfathomably horrific, like the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug runners in the Caribbean. . . . he’s fit to start culture wars, not oversee actual wars. He also has a wealth of personal problems, including infidelity and allegations of substance abuse.

There have been rumors that if Hegseth gets dumped from the Pentagon, the administration could try to save face by getting him appointed to replace Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, should she retire. But if you look at Tuesday’s blue wave, it would be hard to feel confident about Hegseth’s chances of holding that seat. If a Republican would struggle to win a statewide election in Tennessee, could you really count on them winning a presidential election?

Looking outside the administration, the options are hardly any better. Trump humiliated Ted Cruz in the presidential primary in 2016, running the simplest attack one can against the Texas senator: Nobody likes him. (Cruz may have another issue: He has four years left in his term runs. So if he were to somehow win the presidency in two years, then Democratic Governor Gina Hinojosa would be able to appoint his replacement. From there, it may get even worse. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has the charisma of one of those 12-foot Home Depot skeletons (and kind of looks like one, too). Former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is slightly less stiff, but it’s hard to see his gee-whiz vibes—not to mention his relative moderation—gaining traction in a Republican primary. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis looked like the natural successor a few years ago, but Trump hates him for trying to run against him in the 2024 primary, and there’s little reason to believe that the bad blood between them has gotten any better. It’s hard to imagine him winning a Republican primary while Trump is still kicking.

And that gets to the biggest problem, which Gingrich doesn’t mention: Donald Trump. He will exert a huge amount of influence over whom the Republicans chooses as his successor—not only because he will still be president, and thus remain the party’s leader, but he will also likely wield a massive war chest that Republican presidential hopefuls will fight over like children scrapping in the dirty for candy after the piñata pops. Republicans are delusional right now if they think they can turn the page. Gingrich’s list of possibilities is so pathetic in part because it bows to this reality, without explicitly saying so.

It’s possible, of course, that another charismatic outsider could emerge and win the day. But Trump had been sniffing around the GOP presidential nomination for years before 2016—there’s no one out there like that now. Even if there were, it would be hard to believe that after more than a decade of the Trump show, anyone would vote for a reboot of it.

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Americans Want to Move on From Trump: He's Not Listening

 In the lead up to last week's mid-term elections, the Felon repeatedly told crowds to vote as if he was on the ballot.  Voters all across the country listened to that directive and voted for Democrats up and down the ballot, both to protest the Felon's Nero like rule and, just as importantly, to punish Republicans voters viewed as the Felon's enablers and/or accomplices. The result was a generational defeat for Republicans and victories for Democrats in places once never thought possible even six months ago.  The message to anyone not delusional is that the majority of Americans want the country to return to the rule of law, ICE thugs to be removed from the nation's streets, programs restored that were cut to fund tax cuts for the super wealthy, and the Felon restrained and his corruption and lawlessness stopped.  In true malignant narcissist form, the Felon has denied any responsibility even as many in the GOP who survived the electoral debacle want a course change as the GOP faces a likely far more difficult 2028.  By appointing Stephen Miller - the architect of the Felon's cruel and inhumane deportation push - as his chief of staff, the Felon has signaled that he intends double down on the very policies that voters strongly rejected.  Where this leaves Republicans seeking to move forward and rebuild in preparation for 2028 is not enviable.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at the election defeat and the lesson the Felon is ignoring:

Two generations ago, in the fall of 1974, President Gerald Ford and the Republican Party approached the midterm elections with considerable dread. That August, Richard Nixon had learned that he could no longer outrun his crimes in the White House. One tape recording in particular, the so-called smoking gun, proved that he had conspired with his aide H. R. Haldeman to obstruct the investigation into the Watergate break-in. The Republican elders Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes, and Hugh Scott told Nixon that impeachment in the House of Representatives was now certain, and conviction in the Senate likely. Nixon resigned, handing over his office to Vice-President Ford. A month later, Ford issued Proclamation 4311, pardoning Nixon for any crimes that he might have committed as President.

Until then, despite a dreadful economy, Ford had enjoyed approval ratings as high as seventy per cent. But the Nixon pardon was political poison, for both Ford and the G.O.P. His popularity plummeted by more than twenty points. And, in the midterms, the Democrats gained forty-nine seats in the House and four seats in the Senate.

This week, some commentators, having exhausted the usual marine metaphors for midterm blowouts (a “blue wave” quickly became a “blue tsunami”), scurried to find historical points of comparison for the astonishing nationwide triumph of the Democratic Party. More than a few settled on the post-pardon midterms of 1974.

In sheer magnitude, this week’s Democratic victory—a sweeping repudiation, above all, of Donald Trump and the low, dishonest decade he has defined—makes the post-Watergate humbling seem modest. Both houses of Congress flipped, giving Democrats a substantial majority in each. The new Senate Majority Leader needn’t worry if, say, John Fetterman strolls across party lines. Nine of the ten most populous states will have Democratic governors. For those already anticipating the Presidential race in 2028, it’s significant that all the traditional battleground states (which Trump won just two years ago) have elected Democratic governors. The Party scored in unlikely places, particularly in the Midwest and the South. Texas, the second most populous state in the Union and reliably red for a generation, will have a Democratic senator (James Talarico), governor (Gina Hinojosa), and state House. Kansas—seriously, Kansas—elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in ninety-four years. Democrats also chalked up amazing wins in both Carolinas. The geographic shift was as pronounced as the demographic one.

The diversity of “firsts” was heartening. The first Muslim in the Senate: Abdul El-Sayed, of Michigan. The first Black female governor: Keisha Lance Bottoms, in Georgia. The first Latino governors to be elected in Texas (Hinojosa) and California (Xavier Becerra). New Mexico will have the first female Native American governor (Deb Haaland), and Minnesota will send the first Native American woman ever to the Senate (Peggy Flanagan). Even the near-misses were stunners. . . . . This all happened after years in which the President and the Vice-President have deployed racist epithets, jokes, and myths.

The scale of the victory left no room for Trump to contrive a conspiracy theory and challenge the outcome. On Election Night, he was, by his perverse standards, gracious. He blamed Fox News for the Republican losses, “by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition.” Separately, he claimed, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” #Classic.

The results were driven by the most urgent economic concerns of the voters: the spike in fuel prices, which followed the misbegotten tariffs and the war in Iran; the high cost of groceries, housing, and health care; and, for some, anxiety about data centers, artificial intelligence, and what all this portends for employment. But what is so striking about Trump’s second term is that he entered office intent, it now seems, on flaunting his cynicism, his greed, and his scorn for the American people. It was as if he actually meant to squander his support as quickly as possible. How else to explain the heedlessness of his behavior in office? On Day One, he gave pride of place at the Inauguration to a lineup of moguls who had agreed to bow to his power and his ego. . . . As in any tin-pot autocracy, this was the price of doing business. Trump’s populism was always a fraud. Now he plainly didn’t care who knew.

Trump has shown contempt for the law, as he hollowed out the Department of Justice and ordered federal agents to menace American cities from New York to Minneapolis to Los Angeles. He has shown contempt for culture and education, as he threatened and defunded one invaluable institution after another. He has shown contempt for competence, by stocking his Administration with preposterous, often odious, fourth-raters: Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller

Abroad, Trump’s contempt for restraints on his power has been equally conspicuous. The United States’ closest allies found themselves coping with his arbitrary tariffs, his threats to shatter alliances, and his periodic intimations of invasion.

The most consequential result of the midterms has been to break the fever of Trumpism and to diminish its threat to democratic institutions, to personal and civil liberties, and to decency itself. Trump’s unique brand of lurid authoritarianism has finally lost appeal, and he has lost the plot. The election was also a vindication for those who had refused to submit. We are all too familiar by now with the many politicians, law partners, billionaires, C.E.O.s, university presidents, and others who cowered before Trump. Part of the reason we will survive the Trump era is that many more did their work honorably. Judges, civil-rights lawyers, academics, election officials, curators, artists, and countless ordinary citizens stood up. Their resistance to Trump’s bullying, corruption, and heartlessness has gained new political force.

This is a moment of enormous relief and celebration. Trump can still do damage, and, in defeat, may prove even more unhinged and vengeful. But restraints in Congress and beyond are now far stronger. This aging autocrat, repudiated by an electorate he once believed to be under his spell, has been significantly weakened.

The next Congress will succeed not through an obsession with retribution and punishment but by delivering on the myriad hopes and demands of the voters who elected its members. The Democrats of 2026 have won an extraordinary opportunity. What they make of it will determine what this election means. 

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The Felon Doubles Down With Stephen Miller

The Republican Party suffered a generational defeat this past Tuesday - some in the GOP are calling it a catastrophe - with the full extent of the losses still trickling in.   The two undecided U.S. Senate seats continue to trend in favor of the Democrats (if they prevail, Democrats will hold 56 seats) and more defeats in House races continue to come in.  Many in the GOP believe there needs to be a reckoning for the electoral disaster and a reset to attempt to address the issues voters clearly cared about. Unfortunately for this voices of sanity are being ignored by the Felon who, if anyone is responsible for the GOP disaster it's him, is signaling that he his going to double down on his policies which voters rejected.  Indeed, the Felon appointed Stephen Miller, the Josef Goebbels look alike, who is the architect of the brutal and cruel immigration policy that has thousands in concentration camps and has seen the murder of U.S. citizens, as his new chief of staff (it's unclear if Susie Wiles resigned or was fired).  As a piece in Politico lays out, many in the GOP fear Stephen Miller's rise to chief of staff is a signal that there will be no party-wide reckoning after their midterm wipeout. Miller's horrible anti-immigrant push is responsible for driving away millions of Hispanic voters who helped turn Texas blue, and the yet Felon rewards him causing many to fear that the Felon will do nothing to pause his policies that voters have thoroughly rejected as the GOP struggles to find a way forward in 2028.  Here are highlights from Politico that look at the GOP quandary:

[The Felon's] President Donald Trump’s decision to name hard-line loyalist Stephen Miller as his top aide cemented what many Republicans were already privately fearing: There will be no party-wide GOP reckoning with this week’s midterm bloodbath.

Instead, with Trump still in office for another two years, most have grown resigned to the reality that the president is going to lean in on a confrontational approach with Congress — and is not willing to change course.

Trump’s decision Friday to elevate Miller, the architect of his unpopular mass deportation policy and an advocate of fierce partisan confrontation, crystallized the frustration.

“There needs to be some self-reflection for Republicans,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said in an interview about the midterm losses Friday morning. “There should be some heads rolling at the White House because we lost badly.”  Hours later, heads did roll. Trump announced Miller would replace Susie Wiles as his new chief of staff. “Horrible decision,” Stutzman said in response.

How much lawmakers will distance themselves will be put to the test quickly: House Republicans will have an immediate opportunity to break with Trump and the war next week, when Rep. Thomas Massie said in an interview with POLITICO he will trigger his articles of impeachment against Secretary Pete Hegseth. “There are a lot of questions about Hegseth,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Friday.

Some senior Republicans are privately nudging Trump officials to ditch Hegseth before the vote, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. The White House is sticking by Hegseth so far, however.

House Republicans will also have a chance to elect new leadership next week, including a new chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. But in a sign of what’s to come, none of the candidates — including Reps. Brian Jack (R-Ga.) and Rudy Yakym (R-Ind.) — nor any other GOP leadership candidates have publicly suggested doing more to break with Trump.

We had a lot of Republican leaders out there saying ‘everything’s fine.’ And you kind of had the boomer generation saying, ‘Well, yeah, back in my day, interest rates were 15%, so everything’s good,’” said Davidson, a 56-year-old former Army Ranger. “Well, you had a lot of hardworking young people who felt really ignored, and they they went to the polls and said, ‘Stop ignoring us.’”

Davidson said Republicans need to start discussing their problems quickly, or suffer the electoral consequences again. “Bad news doesn’t get better with time. So avoiding talking about something doesn’t solve the problem,” he said.

A piece at The Atlantic also looks at what Miller's rise could portend and how it signals that the Felon seemingly is unwilling to either admit responsibility for the election debacle or cease policies that have driven voters into the arms of Democrats.  Should the Democrats win in Mississippi and Alaska, they would only need four Republican cross over votes to convict the Felon if he were to be impeached.:

In the days before MAGA’s midterm disaster, [the Felon] President Trump began complaining about his presidency. He felt stuck. The war in Iran wouldn’t end. Inflation wouldn’t subside. Little was going his way. But in the president’s mind, there was one exception: “Stephen is the only one who gets stuff done,” Trump repeatedly griped, a person close to the White House told us. “I need more people who get stuff done.”

Stephen Miller, one of the president’s hardest-charging and longest-serving aides, had managed to maintain Trump’s trust, even though he is the architect of the administration’s sweeping mass-deportation campaign that many in the GOP blame, in part, for the Republicans’ historic wipeout this week.

Where Wiles served as something of a guardrail—making sure Trump was fully briefed and that he understood the risks and pitfalls of any decision—Miller has played the role of an accelerant for a president who already has rash tendencies.

One person familiar with Trump’s decision to elevate Miller told us that the president wants somebody who “will crack skulls,” adding that Trump “doesn’t want to be reined in.” Another described Miller as someone with significant Capitol Hill experience who could manage the coming clashes with Democrats. White House officials have held high-level conversations in recent days, including with Miller, about areas where they can work with Democrats. But another person familiar with Trump’s thinking said there was no need for a chief of staff who could work the Hill to pass legislation, because nothing was going to get done. “The next two years are going to be nonstop political warfare,” this person told us—and Miller can be the face of that fight.

Inside the White House, officials understood that Trump would never blame himself for Republican midterm losses, and the West Wing has spent the past few days wondering whom Trump would punish. When The New York Times published a story about the defeat—with verbatim leaks of Trump’s top political team joking ahead of the election about how grim it all looked—Wiles found herself taking heat from the president. Two people familiar with the matter told us that Trump felt that the story, which featured Wiles’s allies seeming to laugh at Republican failure, was a betrayal, and he expressed his displeasure to her.

At the core of Miller’s agenda was a sweeping deportation program. Masked ICE agents detained people in quiet neighborhoods and Home Depot parking lots, while Miller demanded that dramatic deportation quotas be met. Americans, polling showed, began to view the tactics as extreme, particularly after the killing of two Americans in Minneapolis early this year. Trump’s political team has privately blamed Miller’s aggressive immigration policy in part for the defeat on Tuesday, because violent ICE clashes and ethnic profiling on the streets have alienated both Latino voters and moderate independents.

Miller has already been operating as a de facto chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security and the president’s mass-deportation campaign. He hosts conference calls six days a week with top officials from agencies across the government who are enlisted to help ICE with the crackdown.

Stephen Miller, his supporters say, is the right person to steer the final two years of Trump’s presidency. Despite the scale of this week’s Democratic victory, the president has rarely reached across the aisle in the past. In recent days, he made his feelings known with a new red hat displayed on the Resolute Desk. It was emblazoned with a single word: VETO.

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Republicans’ 2028 Presidential Map Just Blew Up

For many the magnitude and depth of the Democrat blue tsunami is still sinking in. Yes, the Felon's hubris, terrible tariffs and Iran war and general misrule powered much of the revolt and revulsion by voters literally across the country.  Add in the corruption of the Felon and those around him and the arrogance of the billionaire and oligarch set while millions of Americans struggle and there was even more fuel for the fire burning down the GOP.  As for congressional Republicans and in state legislatures that saw themselves go down to defeat, their blind allegiance to the Felon and refusal to check his excesses played a role, but so did their decades long push of the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda that harmed the many while pandering to the wealthy and white "Christian" nationalists.  The likes of Elon Musk have forgotten that the excesses of the Gilded Aged helped usher in the progressive era as the American public seems to be waking to the reality that this group has nothing to offer them and seeks only to pick their pockets and push even more transfer of wealth to the few.  Yes, over two years things could change again, but at the moment the GOP presidential map for 2028 has been blown up as laid out in a piece at Politico.  The other looming issue will be who can be the GOP presidential standard bearer. A piece in the New York Times predicts that JD Vance is toast. Marco Rubio sold his soul to the Felon and most other Republicans blatantly prostituted themselves to the Felon, something that may haunt them. Here are highlights from Politico:

The Democratic landslide Tuesday was not just a rebuke of President Donald Trump but a political earthquake that could fundamentally transform the country’s electoral map.

Suddenly, the Republican path to 270 electoral votes appears considerably narrower. But that’s not all. The red-and-blue presidential map as we know it is crumbling.

“After a generation, it looks ossified — there’s just more swing states now,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa), the incoming House Budget Chair and student of political history. “We had the same map for a quarter-century but that’s changed.” The transition starts in Texas, where after more than a decade of rosy predictions of blue, the GOP Alamo finally fell.

Democrats’ success there was stunning. Not only did they flip a Senate seat with a double-digit win, they claimed nearly every statewide office and took control of the state House. It’s plain as day: the GOP’s largest presidential prize is now an unambiguous swing state. And if they can’t retain Texas’s 40 electoral votes, Republicans have virtually no path to the presidency.

Yet that’s only the beginning of the cold new reality Republicans face as they climb out of the political wreckage of a historically bruising midterm and contemplate how they’ll retain the White House in 2028.

Democrats are effectively forming a pincer maneuver, meeting from east and west toward Texas and squeezing Republicans from either coast inward.

The Democratic hold along the Pacific remains impregnable and they showed renewed strength in the interior west on Tuesday, easily retaining governorships in Arizona and New Mexico while reclaiming it in Nevada. Arizona — the state of Barry Goldwater, John McCain and Jon Kyl — just reelected somebody derided four years ago as an accidental governor with a 13-point margin.

Colorado hasn’t been truly at risk for over two decades and only continues to grow a deeper shade of blue, light years from the conservatism that prevailed there for so much of the 20th century. Gov.-elect Phil Weiser won by nearly 30 points against an extremist Republican Tuesday. And now Kansas appears to be closer to its western neighbor than its Plains cousins. Adam Hamilton didn’t just win a Senate seat, he defeated an incumbent by five points and appeared to help Democrats prevail in a governor’s race there was still too close to call well after Midnight there.  . . . With the booming growth in the Kansas City suburbs, Kansas could become the battleground state that Missouri was for so many years.

Moving north, Iowa, which Trump carried three times, showed unmistakable signs of returning to the battleground it was for decades. Democrat Rob Sand won the governorship by 10 points, a remarkable margin in a red-tinted state; Josh Turek won the Senate race by about four and Democrats picked up three House seats in a state that only has four altogether.

Democrats handily retained governorships in the so-called blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and won the governorship and a Senate seat in Ohio, which some in the party were convinced had become a hopelessly red state.

[T]o move east and south is to find only more devastation for Republicans. Their only real footholds in the Northeast are the governorships of New Hampshire and Vermont — and Pennsylvania Sen. David McCormick, who may be a presidential candidate perhaps sooner than planned. With Sen. Susan Collins’s defeat in Maine, Republicans have no senators in New England for the first time since the founding of the GOP.

This is a long way of saying, Republicans almost certainly won’t be finding electoral votes in the Northeast. Headed South, Virginia is an Atlantic cousin of Colorado, a suburbs-heavy state that is thoroughly Democratic now. And North Carolina looked a lot like Virginia Tuesday, electing Roy Cooper as senator with a staggering 20 point margin and turning out a handful of GOP House members.

In the past, the Deep South grew safer for Republicans, but South Carolina elected Annie Andrews — its first Democratic senator since 1998 on Tuesday. And Georgia demonstrated that it has firmly become a Democratic-leaning swing state now, closer to a Midwestern Blue Wall state than its Southern neighbors. The first Black woman to become governor in American history? Keisha Lance Bottoms did it with ease, winning by six points. Sen. Jon Ossoff won by an extraordinary 18 points and, in fact, Georgia Democrats won every state office and took back the state House for the first time since 2002.

Yes, Republicans remained in control across much of the rest of the South, but the “Blacklash” nearly cost the GOP a Senate seat in Louisiana and it may yet in Mississippi, the most heavily Black state in America.

So where on the map do Republicans put together 270 electoral votes?  Just six reliably blue states — New York, New Jersey, Illinois and the three West Coast states — hand Democrats 135 electoral votes, getting them halfway there.

If the Sun Belt, including Texas and Florida, is up for grabs there is no obvious path for Republicans even in a slightly better political environment — one where Gov. Greg Abbott loses by, say, four rather than seven.

But, to be fair this could be a low ebb for the party: a historically bad midterm driven by an increasingly despised president, unpopular war and the high gas prices it wrought. But will the demographic challenges Republicans faced with Hispanics, Black voters and suburban white voters on Tuesday be appreciably different in two years, should President Trump still retain his grip on the party?

Put more directly, would Vice-President JD Vance fare better than Tuesday’s GOP candidates in Georgia, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada? It’s hard to see. Tuesday shows, however, that political coalitions today can quickly shift — and the so-called red states Republicans thought they could count may be as elusive in 2028 as they were in 2026.

Georgia and Arizona will become what Virginia and Colorado are today if Republicans don’t pursue a post-Trump reformation and find a way to appeal to educated and more diverse voters. “There are no permanent majorities in American politics,” said Boyle, reviving a truism as glaring and hard to miss as Texas going blue.

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Even Where MAGA Won, MAGA Lost

If one looks at the racial and religious make up of candidates who won office in the 2026 mid-terms, it was a victory for a multi-racial America and a defeat for white supremacist and "Christian" nationalist Republicans. While white evangelicals voted roughly 82% for Republican candidates, the shifts away from the GOP were huge, with young voters, especially young white males, swung sharply to Democrats.  Part of this huge shift was due to horrible policies of the Felon and the GOP that have driven the economy into a ditch through the illegal Iran war, insane tariffs, and the "big beautiful bill" that showered tax breaks on the very wealthy while largely screwing the rest of the American populace. The sea change shift to Democrats may well not be permanent - Democrats need to deliver on voters' concerns and need put bills on the Felon's desk and dare him to veto them - but as a piece lays out in The Atlantic, the elections were a defeat for white supremacist MAGA members even in places where Republicans managed to squeak out wins.  We now have black, Hispanic and Native American governors and a very multi-ethnic group of U.S. Senators (we may yet see a black senator from Mississippi) and members of the House of Representatives who are the antithesis of the white privilege world pushed by the Felon and the MAGA base.  Here are article highlights: 

One of the biggest Republican wins in an otherwise-terrible midterm night for the GOP was the victory of the Trump-supporting Byron Donalds in Florida’s race for governor. Donalds will become the first Black governor of that state. If you could resurrect Jefferson Davis and tell him that the governor of Florida will be a Black Republican married to a white woman, he would crawl straight back into his coffin.

That this was MAGA’s big win in a night of defeats is remarkable, given the movement’s hostility toward diversity, and its nostalgia for an America where rigid race and gender hierarchies were enforced by the state. Even where Republicans won, in other words, President Trump’s racially exclusive conception of American citizenship lost. Trump could browbeat corporate America into eliminating DEI programs; he could threaten colleges to let in fewer students of color; he could direct the full power of the federal government toward deporting immigrants. But he could not will away the America that actually exists.

The America that emerges from the midterm elections is not the monochrome world of Madison Avenue ad campaigns from the 1950s. It is a diverse country, made up of many different kinds of people, all of whom are American. The victories of Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Aaron Ford in Nevada, and David Crowley in Wisconsin, in addition to that of Donalds, mean that there will be more Black governors than ever in U.S. history. In Texas, where Mexican Americans were subject to legalized forms of racial discrimination until the mid-20th century, Gina Hinojosa will become the first Hispanic governor. Xavier Becerra is the first Hispanic governor to be elected in California, and Deb Haaland will become New Mexico’s first Native American governor. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota will become the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. And Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan will become the first Muslim U.S. senator.

This happened despite the president, and the many Republicans who followed his lead, trying to make the midterms about a familiar theme: the country being invaded by strange people who do not belong here, let alone in the halls of power.

President Trump and others called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” and Vice President Vance said he should “show a little gratitude to the country that gave him everything.” (Like Vance, El-Sayed was born here.) After El-Sayed won, he told Trump, “I know you struggled with my name. You can just go on and call me Senator.” Republicans fearmongered about “Sharia law” before losing every major statewide office in the Lone Star State. In Minnesota, candidates attacked Somalis, running spots about “Somali gangs” taking over.

Trump won in 2016 and in 2024 while leaning into this strategy of scapegoating ethnic and religious minorities, which convinced many politicians and media figures that the strategy was deviously effective, or at least that it didn’t turn too many people off. After all, in 2020 and 2024, Trump grew his coalition, gaining support among Black and Hispanic voters as well as white ones. But the strategy could not overcome the economic headwinds Trump himself created with tariffs and the arguably illegal, inarguably ill-advised war in Iran. Many voters in 2024 also believed that Trump would focus immigration enforcement on criminals, instead of on a violent and indiscriminate campaign that would involve schoolchildren and their families hiding in their homes and masked gunmen shooting Americans dead in the streets.

I am not going to make the same mistake as the Trump Republicans after 2024 did and declare a permanent realignment of the U.S. electorate toward my policy preferences. Economic mismanagement and the war were clearly the primary drivers of Democratic success. What these wins do say, however, is that the real America is not the “Real America” of conservative fan fiction inspired by the years 1945 to 1964. Real Americans are not just those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, or whose ancestors served in the Revolution or Civil War, or who describe themselves with pathetic euphemisms such as “Heritage American.” As Abraham Lincoln once said, newcomers who believe in the principle that “all men are created equal” have “a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration; and so they are.”

As soon as the returns made the extent of the bloodbath clear, MAGA personalities began blaming the nation’s diversity for Republicans’ losses. The conservative podcaster Benny Johnson posted, “In 1970, the White population in Texas was 89%. In 2000, it was 50%. Now it’s less than 39%. Demographics is destiny.” The Trump adviser Laura Loomer declared, “America was always intended to be a majority White country. Not a cesspool for third world minorities. America was founded as a Christian country. Not a Muslim country.”

Contrary to Johnson, demographics is not destiny—if it was, Texas would have flipped a long time ago and Trump would not have won there by double digits in 2024. Millions of nonwhite Americans have conservative beliefs, and most of them would be happy to vote for Republicans who treated them as Americans instead of invaders. As for Loomer, not only was America explicitly not founded as a Christian country, but we also fought a civil war over whether it was a white country—and the side taken by Loomer lost.

You cannot call for people to be exiled because of their ethnic background and expect them to vote for you.

In September, Trump said, “America does not belong to those who hate it. America belongs to those who love it.” But the way MAGA talks about the America that actually exists—as opposed to the one it imagines once existed—doesn’t sound like love at all. Whether or not Americans believe in multiculturalism, we are multicultural. One is an ideology; the other is a fact.

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Trump Gets His Orbán Lesson

Election results from Tuesday's mid-term election continue to trickle in and it is becoming ever more clear just how badly Republicans - deservedly - suffered at the hands of voters.  In Texas, the results are nothing short of a cataclysmic earthquake: Democrats swept almost every state wide office including Senate, governor, Lt. Governor and attorney general, and took control of the Texas House spelling the end for horrible Republican backed legislation.   In North Carolina Democrats likewise took control the North Carolina House and numerous Republicans who likely thought they had safe seats went down to defeat. Here in Virginia, a number of congressional Republicans went down to defeat and three progressive constitutional amendments - covering abortion access, same sex marriage and voting rights of former felons - all passed with comfortable margins. Indeed, the Republican losses were so massive that it appears the Felon's previous plans to challenge the results may come to naught. Meanwhile, JD Vance is trying to distance himself from the Felon seemingly realizing that hooking his future to the Felon's star may have been a truly bad idea.  With luck, Republicans who survived the GOP rout will feel no need to further prostitute themselves to the Felon. A piece at The Atlantic compares the Felon's humiliation with that of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán whose efforts to turn Hungary into an autocracy crashed and burned earlier this year.  Here are article excerpts:

The president of the world’s greatest democracy admires autocratic leaders. He speaks with great affection about Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. But the model that he and his MAGA acolytes have long apparently hoped to emulate was that of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who ruled for some 20 years by boring into Hungary’s democratic institutions, including the media and the courts, and either gutting or corrupting them.

Trump tried his best, and it has now led him to the same dead end. Last spring, Hungary experienced the highest voter turnout since the country’s 1990 transition to democracy. Voters threw out Orbán and his party, Fidesz, in favor of a former Fidesz member, Peter Magyar, who’d tied Orbán to autocracy, corruption, and decreasing living standards. Orbán, who was widely expected to do whatever he could to subvert the vote, realized he faced a result too big to challenge. The numbers were overwhelming in every corner of Hungary, and Orbán could not remotely make even a laughable case for casting doubt on the result.

Trump and his party experienced a similar fate as they suffered the consequences of their brazen attacks on American democracy, of allowing the stench of corruption to envelop the White House, of starting a foolish and unpopular war, and of promising a better economy and instead delivering inflation and high gas prices. Like Orbán, he had to sit helplessly and watch his party take beatings from the Democratic Party in places where Democrats were supposedly almost extinct.

The president’s reaction to this crushing loss has been remarkably muted. As vote counting began, Trump spent his time excoriating not the Democrats but, for some reason, Fox News. . . . and claimed that Fox’s ratings were down “because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats.” In fact, Trump said, Fox was ignoring a CNN poll that showed him to be more popular among Republicans than Abraham Lincoln.

As the night wore on and Republican losses piled up, Trump, who often posts barrages of messages, was unusually quiet. Shortly after 10:30 p.m. eastern time, he reacted to the accelerating bad news by donning the suit of armor made of his high-tensile-strength narcissism. “I wasn’t on the Ballot,” he whined, “and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” . . . The problem is that Trump, over the past weeks, challenged Americans to vote as if he were on the ballot, and millions of people apparently took him up on the offer.

By late evening, Trump’s transformation into Orbán was complete. He said—again without his characteristic combativeness—that he would accept the outcome of the election and that he would be willing to work with Democrats. Whether he means to hold to those commitments is anyone’s guess.

 Whether Trump has sincerely accepted the victory of the Democrats and intends to cooperate with them in governing the country is, in a sense, irrelevant: The more important reality is that he faces an electoral result too decisive to challenge, as Orbán did. I was among the many who feared that he might inundate state election authorities with lawsuits or even try to seize ballots, but those possibilities evaporated before midnight. So many votes had been cast, even in red states, that any attempt to undermine the result would look either violently dictatorial or patently ridiculous.

Trump, like Orbán, wanted to seize power using democratic means, and then eviscerate any future challenges to his power by destroying those same practices and institutions. Like Orbán, Trump’s arrogance, contempt for the law and toleration of corruption, and staggering incompetence pushed even former supporters beyond their limits. Unlike Orbán, he does not have to leave office, and he could provoke any number of crises between now and the 2028 elections. But he seems genuinely deflated by the scale of punishment that the American people have inflicted on his party and his chosen candidates.

The Hungarians, many of whom perhaps thought Orbán was destined to be a permanent fixture in their life, relearned the lesson of their Cold War liberation: Mobilization, organization, and voting can bring down an autocracy. Last night, Americans proved that the same methods can forestall one.