NO, TRUMP WON'T REALLY MAKE AN IMMIGRATION DEAL WITH DEMOCRATS -- HIS BASE (AND HIS CHIEF OF STAFF) WON'T LET HIM (updated)

A couple of days ago, I told you that President Trump "sometimes forgets the party's orthodoxy" but "always, always, always reverts to ... belligerent, zero-sum right-wing extremism." Last night on 60 Minutes, we got to watch Trump forgetting the GOP's orthodoxy for a moment. It won't last.

President Trump says he believes that his aggressive immigration policies may have hurt Republicans in the midterm election, acknowledging that his approach to deportations, in particular, was “too tough.” ...

“I think it both helped and hurt,” Mr. Trump said of his policies. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out, but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that — that created one violation or breaking of the law: that was that they came into the country illegally.” ...

The president said he believed that Democrats would be interested in a deal that reflected the thinking of more moderate parts of his base who want “killers” and drug dealers deported, but would be open to a deal for people who have been in the country “for 10 and 15 years.” ...

“When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as — you know, as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lot of good things, great jobs” he said, “and all of a sudden they’re being taken out of the country, it’s tough. It’s a tough thing.”

If you want to see how the Trump base is taking this, go to X and search "amnesty."

I’m kind of confused because I voted for no endless wars and mass deportations but feels like I’m getting endless wars and amnesty… I hope I’m wrong

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) November 9, 2026

NO AMNESTY. Not now, not EVER. EVERY SINGLE ONE must GO.

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) November 9, 2026

Greatest rug-pull in American history. An all-time con job. Trump is absolutely going to work with RINOs and Democrats to deliver amnesty on his way out. Donors over country. That’s his legacy. Where’s all the clapping seals 🦭???

— David Giglio (@DavidGiglioCA) November 9, 2026

Ten years later, Trump went on 60 Minutes to float an amnesty for illegal aliens. He's wasted ten years of our time, two terms in office and two trifectas and has left his party in shambles

— Hunter Wallace (@LutherEnjoyer) November 9, 2026

A right-wing influencer named Joey Mannarino, who has nearly 800,000 followers and whose tweet praising the Miller appointment was reposted by the president on Truth Social, writes:

Obviously, Trump is hearing similar complaints from his CEO friends.

But Mannarino is right to say that Trump "just nominated Stephen Miller to be Chief of Staff, so it won’t happen." Miller will talk him out of this. It probably won't be difficult. If I'm wrong -- if Trump fixates on this idea, and Miller can't dissuade him -- Miller will leave, and other hardliners in the administration may leave as well. They'll attack him for this in the media. They'll make his life hell.

I'm reminded of the moment in Trump's first term when he responded to a series of mass shootings by calling for an expansion of background checks for firearm purchases, then reversed himself under pressure from his base and the gun lobby. I'm also reminded of the way Trump, in 2021 speeches, bragged about the development of COVID vaccines under Operation Warp Speed, until attendees began booing him for recommending the vaccines. He stopped mentioning the shots.

You have to ask yourself whether Trump understands his own ideology if he can pick Miller to run his White House and announce his openness to immigration reform on the same day. (The interview was taped on Friday, the day Trump announced Miller's promotion.)

But Miller, the GOP base, and the right-wing media will get Trump back in line. He craves the base's love, and this is their #1 priority. If he persists, his poll numbers among MAGA Republicans will quickly plummet. (Trump cares a lot about that.) The GOP rank-and-file will cut Trump loose if he continues down this road, and will also cut loose any Republican member of Congress who supports this idea. That's why it won't happen.

******

UPDATE: For some reason, YouTube just recommended this video to me. It's from September:



Haberman says she doesn't think Trump will try to run for a third term in 2028.

I don’t think he wants that and he doesn’t need it. He will be the dominant figure in this party until he is no longer on this Earth, whether he’s in office or not.

But if Trump moderates on immigration and cuts a deal with Democrats, he will no longer be the dominant figure in the Republican Party. The dominant figure in the Republican Party will be whoever fights this deal the hardest, or, if it's enacted, whoever most persuasively promises to reverse the deal. Trump's dominance of the party will be over.

CRAZIER THAN CALIGULA

In a bizarre Truth Social post, President Trump has asked the mixed martial arts mogul Dana White to be his new press secretary -- and requested that White hire several of his UFC fighters (two of whom are Russian) as aides.

You might say, "Well, at least White is a human being. That means Trump isn't as crazy as Caligula -- he gave a consul position to his horse!" But current scholarship says that Caligula wasn't serious about this, if it happened at all.

According to historian Aloys Winterling, author of “Caligula: A Biography” (2011), insanity isn’t the only logical explanation for such behavior. In his book, Winterling makes the case that many of the emperor’s wackier stunts, including his treatment of Incitatus, were designed to insult and humiliate senators and other elites. By bestowing a high public office on his horse, then, Caligula aimed to show his underlings that their work was so meaningless an animal could do it.

Mary Beard agrees:

One of the best known bon mots of a Roman emperor is Caligula’s quip that he fancied making his favourite racing horse a consul (he didn’t actually do it, he just said he planned to). Traditionally this was seen as a sign the man was completely deranged. More recently it has been interpreted as a bit of imperial banter, against the senate, whose point was missed. What the emperor was really saying was “You senators are such a useless lot that this horse would do a better job”.

If Trump were using this appointment to argue that the position is meaningless and a completely unqualified person could do the job, he'd be Caligula. But in this at least, Trump is crazier than Caligula.

According to CNN, "a source familiar with the matter says the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO declined the unorthodox idea" -- but that appears to be a trial balloon. I'm guessing that White isn't sure what will happen to him or his business if he says no, so he's putting out this word in a deniable way, and expressing some hesitancy, while planning to meet with Trump tomorrow.

White, who was in London on Saturday for a boxing event, was asked at a news conference about Trump’s post and responded by saying that he planned to fly to Washington right after and meet with Trump on Monday.

When asked how he would balance the job with the current positions he has in the fighting world, White seemed confused by the question and then said, “Yeah, I got a lot of jobs already.”

But he also posted this on Instagram:

It's as if he's asking himself, OMG, which answer will keep from being sent to the cornfield?

I believe the rumor that aides recommended a different Dana White, a woman who actually has qualifications for the job, and Trump just ran with the idea of hiring his longtime friend Dana White.

Omg. The internet is speculating that Trump announced the wrong Dana White.

[image or embed]

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards.bsky.social) November 7, 2026 at 4:56 PM

I assume that this is the kind of thing Susie Wiles prevented Trump from doing while she was still his chief of staff. She didn't try to prevent him from doing extreme things, or ill-advised but within-the-pale things like attacking Iran. She didn't push back against the shameless corruption (most of which, after all, has probably been made legal by the Supreme Court). She didn't prevent the hiring of Trump's last press secretary, the disastrous Katie Zacharia. (Zacharia, at least, had some relevant experience.) But if she weren't on her way out the door, she might have explained to Trump who the two Dana Whites are, and she might have stopped this madness.

Stephen Miller won't, any more than he'll prevent Trump from trying to arrest journalists.

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 issue on which Wiles and Miller seem to diverge: how to force journalists to reveal their sources in the government. Trump has pushed the Department of Justice to pursue criminal-leak investigations on national-security grounds, and there have been discussions in the White House and at DOJ about various tactics they could use—including arrests—as part of those efforts, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two of those people said that Wiles had pushed back. Miller, though, was in favor....

Wiles apparently made Trump a tiny bit less reckless. Miller will ignore the recklessness, or encourage it. He clearly believes that his mandate is to turn Trump intro the most extreme form of himself. When I see Trump ordering the Justice Department to investigate Democrats who are calling for oversight of administration officials, I'm guessing that Miller is cheering Trump on and urging him to go maximalist. I think grand juries and judges will rebuff Trump, but we could see some handcuffs slapped on journalists and Democratic members of Congress before Trump leaves office. No one will prevent this now. The brake lines have been cut.

TRUMP REVERTS TO FORM

In the immediate aftermath of the GOP's midterm wipeout, it appeared that President Trump was dissociating:

In the two days since Republicans suffered massive losses in the midterm elections, Trump has spoken twice in public. Both times he focused on rooms and renovations at the White House.

On Thursday, Trump signed a proclamation that designates the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room as a national monument in an effort to block any significant changes to them by future presidents....

The signing ceremony came a day after Trump spoke to reporters at the construction site for the new White House ballroom he’s building. Even though it was his first time addressing the media publicly after the Democrats swept several seats in deep red states to secure control of Congress, he focused his comments on the ballroom.

He also seemed surprisingly conciliatory toward Democrats.

On Tuesday night, as it became clear that Republicans were suffering a historic smackdown, Trump told The New York Times, “We’ll, you know, look forward to working with” Democrats. Eyeing possible bipartisan deals, he said, “We’ll probably work something out.” Around the same time, during a brief interview with CBS News, the president said, “My message is, congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country.”

But now:

... near the week’s end, instead of ceding to the clear evidence of voter displeasure, Mr. Trump pivoted to a familiar move: more MAGA.

On Friday, the president ousted his onetime close adviser, Susie Wiles, from the role of White House chief of staff, replacing her with Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff....

The president’s choice sent a clear signal about the posture he intends to strike in his final two years in office and how little he intends to alter his approach....

Which of these is the real Donald Trump? All of them -- but the one who chose Miller is the one who really matters.

Many very smart people have trouble understanding Trump ideologically. In his first presidential run and the early days of his first term, these people would tell us that Trump had no fixed ideology and might veer to the left if he thought it would make voters love him.

In the brief moment this week when Trump seemed to be reaching out to Democrats, some people who should know better got the wrong impression:

Appearing on Zeteo with editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan, [Senator-Elect Abdul] El-Sayed was asked if he agreed with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who a night earlier pronounced that he wasn’t so sure that if Democratic majorities in the US House and Senate passed a Medicare for All Bill that Trump wouldn’t sign it.

“If he wants to pass Trumpcare-for-All, I’m ok with it. He seems to like to put his name on things,” said El-Sayed.

... “Donald, if you’re watching, we’ll put your name on it. You get to be the American president who finally guaranteed health care for every single American—met the unmet promise of America. You get to be that guy, so let’s talk about it.”

It's correct to say that Trump wasn't always a down-the-line Republican, and he sometimes forgets the party's orthodoxy. But he always, always, always reverts to his own brand of Fox News Republicanism. He's like a heliotropic flower that automatically follows the sun. At the end of the day, he'll always see liberals and Democrats as the enemy, and will always see the belligerent, zero-sum right-wing extremism of Fox News as simple common sense, the belief system of normal, regular people. In this, he's like millions of other Fox News grandpas all over America.

Trump might not have used this personnel move to reassert his right-wing extremism. Politico tells us that he's been thinking about replacing Wiles for some time -- but he was considering some people who were less hardline.

Some of the names Trump discussed privately over the last month were Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Randy Levine, the president of the New York Yankees. Lee Zeldin and Sergio Gor were also floated, according to two people close to the White House.

Politico notes that Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, lobbied Trump intensely. I'm not sure if this was part of her message, but I bet it's the selling point that persuaded Trump:

One person close to the White House said replacing Wiles with Miller would show his political base that the president remains committed to the MAGA mission.

“It’s a signal to the base that, you know, the White House hears you,” said one of the two people close to the White House.

Trump believes the people in his base are the median, normative, normal voters in America. He doesn't think anyone else matters -- all other Americans are freaks, weirdos, "radical left lunatics." So even if Trump had picked another chief of staff, he would have tacked to the extreme right in other ways, because, to him -- and to everyone who consumes large quantities of right-wing media -- that's tacking to the middle.

Trump has always been a racist. He's always been pro-plutocrat. But in some ways, he might have been a right-centrist if he'd been elected president the first time he launched a campaign, in 2000. Not anymore. He's too Fox-pilled.

*****

Replacing women with men is all the rage in Trumpland:

Wiles is the latest high-ranking woman to depart Trump’s administration and be replaced by a man. Trump previously parted ways with women serving as attorney general, Labor secretary and Homeland Security secretary, among others.

What does the new right-wing order consider an appropriate role for a woman? Wife and helpmeet -- but with a podcast:

[Stephen Miller's] wife, Katie, has a podcast where administration officials and Trump allies regularly appear, and one guest said that some feared they couldn’t say no to her requests to be a guest, for fear of getting in Miller’s crosshairs. Katie Miller appeared to confirm reporting in Politico that she lobbied for her husband to get the job, writing on X in response to the article, “If your wife doesn’t do this, find a new one.”

At a time when much of the GOP vanguard is seriously questioning whether women should be allowed to vote or hold jobs outside the home, podcaster -- in support of one's husband, or of the patriarchy in general -- seems to be an acceptable role for women. J.D. Vance's wife, Usha, has also become a podcaster, clearly in order to humanize her husband and help him win a presidential election two years from now. And, of course, every tradwife who preaches the virtues of being a stay-at-home mom is actually working as a podcaster or other form of online influencer. I guess this makes right-wing men feel that they're the only "doers," even the ones whose wives make so much money podcasting that they're the main breadwinners in their households.

WHY ISN'T STEPHEN MILLER UNDER FIRE?

UPDATE: I wrote this before Stephen Miller was named Trump's chief of staff.

President Trump seems to have settled on Pete Hegseth as his midterm scapegoat. But why him? Why not the man who probably lost Texas for the GOP, Stephen Miller?

Hispanics moved right in 2024, largely because they were dissatisfied with the Joe Biden economy. The economy was their main issue in 2026, to Republicans' detriment this time -- but the huge outpouring of Hispanic voters was surely also a response to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on Hispanic immigrants, which focused primarily on arresting honest workers rather than criminals and incarcerated the detainees in horrific facilities, while frequently catching citizens in its dragnet.

The numbers tell the story:

In Texas, every county voted more Democratic than it did two years ago, when Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race. But the more heavily Hispanic the county, generally the heavier the shift....

Roughly 7 in 10 Hispanic voters supported Democrat James Talarico in the U.S. Senate contest, while only about 3 in 10 voted for Republican Ken Paxton. The group was essentially split in the 2024 presidential election, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of voters and nonvoters....

Democrats won every House district that touches the U.S.-Mexico border — which includes seats in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California — for the first time since 2008.

And it wasn't just Texas.

In southwestern Kansas, three Hispanic-majority counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump flipped to backing Adam Hamilton, who became the first Democrat in nearly a century to win a U.S. Senate contest in the state. Turnout also surged 27% over 2022 in the three counties, Finney, Ford and Seward.

So why aren't we hearing that Miller is on thin ice?

And while the White House has no control over the makeup of the Supreme Court unless there's a vacancy, why aren't we hearing that the president and his administration are peeved at the Court for eviscerating what was left of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision that led to many anti-Black gerrymanders -- and infuriated Black voters so much that they voted in large numbers, with remarkable results?

This has contributed not just to a possible — perhaps even likely — Senate victory in Mississippi, but to Democrats doing well across the South. Democrat Annie Andrews beat (appointed) South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham by about 4.5 points, 51.3% to 46.8%, in a state Trump carried by 18 points just two years ago.

Without the surge in Black voter turnout, Andrews would have won by under a point.

Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures was able to hold on to his seat in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District this year, despite GOP lawmakers diluting the Black vote after the Supreme Court gave their blessing to Republicans to gerrymander Black voters and Democrats in Louisiana v. Callais in April.

In 2024, under a court-drawn map, Alabama’s 2nd District was 48.7% Black by voting-age population. Figures won it with 54.6% of the vote. For 2026, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population to 39.9%.

Yet Figures still won 53.8% of the vote. Because of a relative increase in Black participation, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population by nearly 9 points, but Figures’ vote share fell by less than 1 point.

This is the second straight midterm cycle in which an outrageous Supreme Court decision fired up Democratic voters. Four years ago, it was the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Subsequently, an expected red wave turned into a trickle. And now this.

An earlier crop of Republicans might be telling elite-media reporters right now, perhaps under the semi-anonymous cover of "top administration officials" or some other phrase, that they think the Supremes might have gone a bit too far in Callais. Supreme Court justices aren't supposed to respond to political pressure, but they sometimes do. The right-wing majority on the Court clearly cares about the future of the Republican Party. In the past, Executive Branch might have subtly let them know they'd hurt their side.

As for Stephen Miller, previous Republican administrations might have recognized the toxicity of his approach, the way the George W. Bush administration recognized the toxicity of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approach to the War on Terror in 2006. (Rumsfeld resigned immediately after a Democratic midterm tsunami.)

But in the Trump-era GOP, this isn't allowed. Hegseth can be defenestrated because, despite his macho preening, he's not seen as the embodiment of Trump's aggression against Iran -- Trump is. If he's fired, the message will be "Trump's aggressive war against Iran was a good idea, and it still is a good idea, but it's been mismanaged." (No one actually believes this anywhere on the political spectrum, but it doesn't come off as an unmanly retreat on policy.)

Miller embodies the extremism and cruelty of the immigration crackdown. Defenestrating him would send a signal that Trump will be less cruel to immigrants going forward. Can't have that!

And no administration official can chide the Supreme Court for a crackdown on Black Democratic voters because criticism would suggest that the administration wants to create fewer impediments to Democratic voting. Can't leave that impression!

Of course, the real midterm villain for the GOP ought to be the tariff-imposing, endless-war-fighting, inflation-ignoring, ballroom-building, emolument-siphoning president. In a different America, Republicans might be privately signaling that they'd vote to remove Trump in the Senate if House Democrats impeached him. But they still don't believe they could do that, even though it might improve the general public's impression of their party. Maybe they'll opppose him on a few things in the future. More likely, they'll close ranks around him, because they feel they have no choice.

WHY AREN'T SCOLDY PUNDITS TELLING REPUBLICANS TO MOVE TO THE CENTER?

I want to show you two maps from The New York Times. The first is a (preliminary) map showing where 2026 Democratic Senate candidates improved on Kamala Harris's 2024 margins. (At the link, click "Shift from 2024" to see this.)

Nearly every arrow is blue.

I'm not sure when the map was made. It doesn't show much in Maine, where the vote count has been somewhat slow. But there's a state map of Maine now, and it looks a lot redder:

The reason is obvious: Troy Jackson beat Susan Collins in Maine by a slightly smaller margin (6.6%) than Kamala Harris's defeat of Donald Trump in 2024 (~6.9%). Nearly everywhere else in the country, 2026 Democrats massively outperformed Harris in 2024. But not in Maine.

So here's my question: Why aren't pundits wagging their fingers at Democrats and saying that in order to be a truly competitive national party, Republicans will need to forgo MAGA/Fox News/Heritage Foundation/Stephen Miller extremism and become a party of Eisenhower Republicans, or at least Susan Collins Republicans?

I know that Collins wasn't effectively a moderate. She didn't stand up to her party when it counted. But many Maine voters thought she did, even this year. That's the reason she didn't lose in a landslide.

So whey aren't the Matthew Yglesiases and Ezra Kleins saying that Republicans need to field candidates who are moderates on abortion and immigration and taxes and healthcare? Why aren't they saying that Republicans are too in thrall to their most zealous, most extreme voters and groups and now need to reach out to the middle? Why aren't the pundits telling us that Republicans are in an elitist bubble and have lost touch with real Americans, the ones who hate AI and data centers and Flock cameras?

I say this because it sure looks as if Republicans have learned nothing from Tuesday's drubbing. The big story of the day is the fate of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Oh, sure, the possibility that he might be impeached in the lame-duck session by a Republican-controlled House, or fired by Trump, suggests that the GOP has learned something. But consider what might happen after that, or instead. The New York Post reports:

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Wednesday ruled out voluntarily leaving his job to take a Senate appointment....

The former Fox News personality’s cleanest offramp, ironically, is joining the Senate by gaining Tennessee Gov.-elect Martha Blackburn’s support to appoint him to her vacated seat....

A ... person close to Trump said that if he were in Hegseth’s shoes, he would be begging Blackburn for the Senate appointment.

Hegseth has mismanaged the war. He's mistreated the military. Even Republicans know he's unqualified. And he's very, very far right. In a mirror-image situation, if Democrats were in power and just lost a midterm shellacking, then announced that they wanted to reward one of the unpopular president's most criticized and most ideological subordinates with a Senate seat, there'd by so many denunciations of the "tone-deaf" Democrats that the New York Times opinion section and The Atlantic might have to publish special issues to print them all. The decision wouldn't be seen as merely a red-state governor tossing a disgraced right-winger a bone. It would be described as symptomatic of a party-wide crisis in the Democratic Party, a sign that Democrats were in deep denial, their radical-left fever still unbroken.

Or imagine a different parallel. There's a Democratic senator who, like Blackburn, has just been elected governor and will need to be replaced: Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota. Imagine if Klobuchar appointed Ilhan Omar to her Senate seat. The cries of pundit horror would be audible from space.

Klobuchar is a left-centrist -- she certainly won't appoint Omar. I assume she'll appoint Angie Craig, the moderate congresswoman who lost the primary to the progressive lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, who's now a senator-elect. But even if Craig isn't appointed, the appointee will be someone who's not a lefty ideologue.

In this situation, most Democrats would make a safe, "respectable," down-the-middle pick. Republicans don't bother with that. They just go far right whenever they have a chance. And our political culture thinks that's just fine.

FOR THE RIGHT, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, UNEXPECTEDLY

I don't have to tell you how big a win this was for the Democrats -- a flip of seven and potentially nine seats in the Senate, the possibility of the largest House majority either party has had in this century, a sweep in Texas statewide races -- senator, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general (and the demise of the most overtly bigoted candidate in America, Bo French, in the race for Texas railroad commissioner, as well as wife-beater Max Miller in his Ohio House race and Brandon "AK Guy" Herrera, a gun-fetishizing content creator fond of Nazi jokes and misogyny, in a House race in Texas). Lauren Boebert is losing! Virginia Foxx trails her Democratic opponent by 99 votes! It was an amazing day.

What happened was something that seemed impossible for most of recent U.S. history: the Republican Party and the American right were held accountable for their actions.

Here's how American politics has tended to work in recent decades: Republicans gain power and make the rich richer while forcing the non-rich to run twice as fast just to stay in place. Republicans start endless wars that accomplish nothing for the American people. Republicans (with the help of the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party) empower large businesses even at their most reckless, sometimes with devastating consequences for ordinary Americans. Republican jurists restrict the voting rights of non-whites, seize reproductive rights from women, and allow the super-rich to spend unlimited money in order to buy elections.

And even when voters get fed up with Republicans, the response of voters often seems muted, especially in the past decade. After four years of Donald Trump, Joe Biden won a decent-size popular-vote victory, but he needed to eke out wins by an eyelash in several swing states in order to secure the win. In 2022, Democrats were able to prevent a Republican wave election after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, but Trump, who appointed three of the justices responsible for the Dobbs decision, came roaring back two years later.

It's quite possible that yesterday's shellacking of the GOP will be reversed in two or four years' time, but for now it feels good. It feels good because we can draw a straight line from the actions of America's worst supervillains to so many of the Democratic wins.

Trump's brutal immigration crackdown largely targets hard-working Hispanics rather than criminals. The people who chose this approach -- Trump himself along with Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, and the worst of them all, Stephen Miller -- outraged Hispanic voters so much that they turned the red state of Texas purple, and for the moment more blue than red, in one election cycle.

Republicans on the Supreme Court overturned the final provision of the Voting Rights Act that protected Black voting power. In response, Black voters in the South turned out in large numbers, leading to big victories in Georgia, the Carolinas, and possibly even the Mississippi Senate race.

Trump himself gets the blame for the pointless and inflationary war and the pointless and inflationary tariffs. The strikingly unpopular Elon Musk stands in for the entire arrogant tech oligarchy; James Talarico singled Musk out as a villain and won by double digits.

Voters chose Democrats because they hate data centers and hate Flock cameras. They chose Democrats because they hate the way Trump, his sons, his son-in-law, and all their friends have enriched themselves in the past two years. Jon Ossoff and other Democrats made that a major issue and won big.

What's gratifying is that this doesn't seem like just a "thermostatic" win for Democrats -- the normal adjustment to a win by the other party two years earlier. It's much bigger than that, and it's for obvious reasons.

The Trump administration thought it could get away with assaulting rural hospitals, making health insurance more expensive, allowing infectious diseases to spread, cheerleading an AI boom that's threatening jobs. The Republican Party thought it could shout "Sharia law!" and "Men in women's sports!" and voters would ignore Trump's obsession with the ballroom and the arch and the Reflecting Pool, along with his proud indifference to ordinary people's pain, economic and otherwise. Republicans thought their usual playbook -- portraying themselves as the only true Americans while demonizing their opponents -- could get them through anything. It didn't work. That's deeply satisfying.

NO, TRUMP WON'T QUIT OR FLEE TO RUSSIA, AND OTHER FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE MIDTERMS

I hope no one believes this:

Jamie Rowen, an international law expert and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned on a Saturday episode of All Rise News that President Donald Trump and his strongman allies appear to be laying plans to flee to friendly dictatorships if they lose power and face prosecution at home.

"You can imagine that if he loses an election that he thinks was rigged, even if it very clearly wasn't, and he loses by a sizable margin...that he too might face some type of criminal investigation for all of the crimes that he is currently committing," Rowen told journalist Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News.

She suggested Trump, too, would seek refuge in Russia, saying he "will have colluded with, say, Putin to figure out a way to escape to that country."

"That's all I can keep thinking," Rowen said. "They are laying a plan for all of them, no matter what the consequence in their countries are, to flee to other dictatorships that support them."

Nahhh. Like James Carville's repeated assertion that Trump will quit after the midterms, this doesn't jibe with anything we know about Trump, and it ignores the safeguards that will continue to protect Trump even if his party faces the largest imaginable drubbing: (1) A half-cetury-old Justice Department opinion says that a president can't be prosecuted while in office. (2) It will still be impossible to convict him in the Senate if the House (by a simple majority) impeaches him, because Democrats will need at least a dozen votes from Republican senators to reach a two-thirds majority, and Republicans still won't be ready to defy him. (3) The Supreme Court has protected virtually everything he does as president from legal scrutiny. (4) Even after the midterms, Democrats will still be Democrats, and therefore they'll be afraid to take bold action against Trump, especially because the mainstream media will be urging them not to.

And Trump hates travel. We've known this since the 2016 campaign. Politico reported this just before Election Day that year:

... for Trump, near-nightly returns to Manhattan — from as far west as Reno, Nevada — mean a chance to sleep in his marble-and-gold hued 66th floor penthouse in Trump Tower....

Even when Trump doesn’t return to Manhattan, he almost always overnights in one of his many other properties: the sumptuous Mar-a-Lago in Florida, the exclusive, private Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, or his Trump-branded hotels in Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas. Through Saturday, only four nights in October had Trump not slept in a bed that he or one of his companies owned.

If Trump has ever traveled to a non-Trump property just for the pleasure of being in a new place, I'm not aware of it. His sons and son-in-law might flee if faced with serious legal peril, but Trump won't.

Carville's belief -- that the job will be too frustrating for him after a Democratic Congress is sworn in -- is belied by this:

It was the day before the election, and the president had decided to come [to the Reflecting Pool], a place that excites him, to talk about many of the topics that make him happiest. Trouble is, almost none of those topics have anything to do with the issues that are driving this election.

At a time when voters have made clear they’re most concerned with the high prices of gas and groceries and a new war in the Middle East, Mr. Trump used his final in-person appearance before Americans head to the polls to talk about drain pipes, top soil, limestone, fountains and his favorite kind of columns.

“The pipes now are totally renovated,” Mr. Trump said. Propped up next to him was a poster board showing an aerial view of the pool, with this caption: “Back, and more beautiful than ever!”

The “brand-new pipes,” Mr. Trump said, are “very important in terms of the algae and other things. And it’s a complete job, and we’re very proud of it.”

Also:

The Trump administration has submitted its proposed overhaul of East Potomac Golf Links for federal review, calling for a new championship golf course and a $304.5 million seawall around the Hains Point peninsula....

The 55-page concept proposal, obtained by The Washington Post, was submitted Friday to the National Capital Planning Commission....

Building makes Trump happy. If a Democratic Congress makes trouble for him elsewhere, he'll still have this. And if the Democrats try to block his projects, he'll get to engage in one of his other favorite activities -- siccing lawyers on people, either to get what he wants or to prevent them from getting what they want from him. For Trump, it's all lifefuel.

Remember that Trump first gained fame as a builder -- he was probably the most famous builder in the world in the 1980s -- but after that, he wasn't really building anything. He'd buy up buildings, refurbish them a little, and slap his name on them, to no great media fanfare. He'd make deals to brand other people's buildings, which he mostly didn't own. He was a TV star and a brand name, not a builder.

But now, using your tax dollars and bribes from rich people, he gets to be a builder again. It's like going back to the bloom of his youth. He's reliving his glory days. Why would he give that up?

*****

And will today's results be the Democratic rout we're all hoping for?

In the House, absolutely. In the Senate, I think Democrats will prevail, but there are still some worrisome polls in Maine, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, and Alaska, and the huge overestimation of Abdul El-Sayed's lead in the Michigan primary has me concerned that the polls could be wrong again. So I wouldn't bet the rent money on a Senate flip. (I would bet the rent money on a House flip.)

I think Democrats will win enough of the worrisome states to get to 52 (which is necessary to preclude a possible post-election John Fetterman ratfuck) -- and possibly beyond. I feel surprisingly confident about Kansas, and Iowa might work out also. But the extreme "reach" states -- Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi -- probably aren't happening. (I think Florida is the least likely of those three, because the combination of old white Fox addicts and Cubans makes the red wall insurmountable.) I'll be delighted if I'm wrong, though.