The Least Inexplicable Mystery Ever

 

Donald and Ivana posing with the gold dripping off the walls of the Peterhof Palace in what was then (1987) still Leningrad, a memory that's evidently with him as he personally glues gold or gilded plaques to every vertical surface in the Oval Office.

My hot take is we most of us knew this was going to happen, the 85-seat Democratic majority in the House and ten- or twelve-seat majority in the Senate and revolutions in state governments all across the country, though we were too superstitious to say it. In a way it shouldn't be surprising at all—the Republicans fucked up so badly in so many ways. 

Trump and his thugs in the first place, obviously, in their exercise of the office, with Elon's DOGEboys condemning tens of thousands to death of starvation or disease as they tore down foreign aid programs and rampaging through the civil service, and ICE terrorizing the Asian and African and Latino communities of Los Angeles and DC and Minneapolis and others, and then the random "Liberation Day" tariffs, not that everybody noticed all of these depredations but everybody had to notice some of them, and everybody heard about some of his wanton destruction of Washington landmarks, especially the razing of the East Wing of the White House, for the worthless and ugly projects that were pretty certain to be paid for by taxpayers. And the rapacity on his part and those of his wife and children and son-in-law and friends and employees collecting billions of dollars in what looked plainly like bribe money. 

And the Justice Department persecution of people who had committed the offense of thinking Trump might have commmitted some kind of crime. And the Israeli-American offensive in Iran for reasons they were never able to explain (beyond Netanyahu's assurance that Iran if not attacked would be targeting the US with a nuclear weapon that was going to be ready in the same two weeks as Trump's healthcare plan, that is, never), but that did immediately start pushing up fossil fuel prices to the new highs from which they still haven't recovered nine months later, even as workers' incomes can't keep up with the resulting consumer inflation. 

And then there were the Republican legislators unable to accomplish more or less anything at all after their initial billionaire tax cut, under the leadership of a Senate majority leader who simply disappeared, possibly comatose, and a House Speaker who kept his members home more often than not (it 's been in session for 72 days in 2026, or 27% of the year, and still hasn't passed any appropriations bills, farm bill, or supposedly desperately needed AI regulation, possibly the most unproductive Congress of all time), in fear that they might have to answer questions about Trump's presence as a likely child-raper in the Jeffrey Epstein papers. The Republicans and their consultants did manage to come up with some candidates for the mid-term elections, but what inept, clownish, and downright evil candidates they were, especially the ones handpicked by Donald Trump because they'd done him a favor once or their rival had refused him a favor, , or because he believed they had TV star potential from Central Casting or because he maybe was just drunk on his power to do it, and his cultist base voters rammed them through. Ken Paxton! Max Miller! Darline Graham! Floridian Mike Collins in Michigan! British-Hungarian Steve Hilton in California (former official in the David Cameron government, became a US citizen around the time he thought he might enjoy being California governor. at the age of 52)! Shameful collaborating incumbents like Susan Collins and Cindy Hyde-Smith, criminal insurrectionists like Scott Perry and Andy Biggs! All-round monsters like Vivek Ramaswamy!

What's really been emerging since the mid-term campaign began, which was, Trump-style, Inauguration Day 2025 (not coincidentally, when the big-time grift began, too, with the $250 million raised for the inaugural committee from corporate interests plainly looking for favors from the new government, money that certainly wasn't all spent, but nobody knows where the surplus has gone), is how terrible these people are, how bad they are at governing, how poor at thinking through a problem, how crazed in priorities, how nasty-minded, how slavish in their approach to the Big Boss, how arrogant with everybody else, how dumb, how mean, how ill-bred. 

We'd had a powerful glimpse of it back in 2020, during the pandemic, but then it didn't seem nearly as bad, I guess, with the proverbial adults in the room, the intelligence community and Pentagon successfully stopping Trump from lurching into this and that war or sending troops against demonstrators, the attorney general defending him against the FBI and Mueller investigations of his Russian intrigues but refusing his absurd demands to prosecute the FBI investigators back. Even with the pandemic itself his idiocy about ivermectin and ultraviolet light and his delegation of responsibility to his fool son-in-law and his unconcealed desire to jigger the numbers didn't seem all that crucial as the PPE became available again and the vaccines got developed and the death rate dipped, and I don't think most people had any understanding of how unbalanced and dangerous he might be, or believed what we told them about the Russia connection, and the money greed, and the ignorance and  cruelty.

Now that's all gone. He's less and less able to bear any kind of criticism, especially from those who are supposed to be advising him. He seems to have learned that he can get away with anything he chooses, shooting that guy in Fifth Avenue as he used to say, and his bribe taking and other ways of profiting from the office have become too big and too open to ignore. The same goes for the impulsive building projects, where he looks more and more like a mad Roman or Russian emperor, literally building himself a triumphal arch and covering his palace interior walls with gold like the palaces of St. Petersburg. Nobody's stopping him! Congressional Republicans quake in the Capitol hallways in fear that he might endorse a rival in the next primary. And it's clearest in his stupidest economic mistakes, those tariffs and that war on the transportation of fossil fuels. You don't have to be exceptionally well educated to see that those things are making prices rise, and people have definitely been seeing it, including many those who would normally be voting Republican themselves. He's a terrible president, and the people who should be checking him are doing a terrible job! It's not one thing or another, it's the inescapable whole!

While meanwhile Democrats have been looking not terrible. As ever, it's not about where they're positioned relative to the Overton Window, it's really about their air of just being serious and wanting to make things better. Complaining about the tariffs and the war, to be sure, and promising to do away with them, but that's no more than a beginning. 

I mean socialists and not-socialists alike, in different constituencies of course, Ocasio-Cortez sells better in The Bronx and Cait Conley (say) in the Hudson Valley. That's OK! That is, not 100% OK, there will no doubt be cases where one of them is right and the other one wrong, and it might be a case that really grinds your guts (I'd have voted for Conley the way Linda Sarsour endorsed her, with reservations on the Palestine issue), but disagreements, even really deep moral disagreements, are a part of human life. But you can see that both of them are fundamentally good people, serious about wanting to improve the lives of their voters because it's the right thing to do, an impression you don't get from Trump's servile flunkies (I use Conley as an example because I specifically listened to a radio debate between her and her Democratic primary opponents, and she wasn't my favorite of the four of them, but I was convinced she'd absolutely good if she won the general, as she now has done against the redoubtable Mike Lawler).

The non-socialist Democrats tend to have something in common that's not "centrist" or "moderate" or particularly political at all, but attractive to a lot of voters of different ideological stamps: a background in a profession that gets recognized as serious: so many in the military (Conley is one of those), and a lot in medicine, some teachers and social workers, and then the ministers and pastors of whom Georgia's Raphael Warnock is the premier example and Methodist megapastor Adam Hamilton of Kansas and schoolteacher–Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico of Texas are the latest stars, invariably leading the newspaper reporters and pundits to marvel over how religion is no longer the exclusive property of Republicans; what the reporters don't understand (except for NPR's Jason DeRose in an excellent recent story) is that the religions we're talking we're talking about are of fundamentally different kinds (even where they're cohabiting in a single congregation (as I think they often must, especially among Catholics, while mainline Protestants, Jews, and Muslims are more self-sorting): the authoritarian, which exhorts the parishioners to goodness, and what you might call the practical, which instructs by acting goodness out in a "ministry of presence" that spends more time listening than preaching.

There's a way such people can become a kind of liberal or even radical by praxis, just by doing their jobs well without working out anything theoretically or giving themselves a label. A good and experienced obstetrician knows women need abortions sometimes without necessarily getting worked up about it until the right is threatened. A good and experienced pediatrician understands some kids need help because they are trans, the same way. A good and experienced platoon leader in a reasonably integrated force understands that the soldiers' job is less to kill a lot of people than to protect one another, unlike that ass Hegseth, and develops an almost instinctive grasp of the diversity-equity-inclusion principle of respect for differences, unlike that slime Vance. 

It's an almost unique situation; whoever your House candidate and other candidates were, socialist or not, they were better people than their Republican opponents, and thanks to Trump's antics and violences enough of the voters in enough of the constituencies, especially the young ones,  knew it. The least inexplicable mystery ever.

The inevitable Hokusai.