1. Ryan Cooper: America repudiates Trump

Democrats convincingly won the 2018 midterm elections, though it was not as big of a wave election as some liberals had hoped. Just as in 2016, the polls were badly wrong in a number of states, particularly Indiana and Florida, where Democrats lost tough races they were predicted to win.

Nevertheless, it was a solid victory — and a clear repudiation of the odious politics of the Republican Party. The Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives with an estimated 7-point popular vote margin and won a number of key structural races at the state level. Michigan will now have automatic voter registration and nonpartisan redistricting, while Florida will re-enfranchise some 1.4 million ex-felons, just for starters.

This election is a clear demonstration that the Republican Party and its leader Donald Trump are badly out of step with the mainstream of American society. Polls have already demonstrated that many of its policy views are extremely unpopular, but talking to a pollster is a considerably different proposition than casting a vote for someone who will exercise political power. On Tuesday we saw that a sizable majority of the American public was willing to put their votes where their mouths are.

In this election, the Republican Party competed on some of the most favorable terrain it is likely to have over the next several cycles. The 2020 election year will see President Trump on the ballot, an extremely difficult Senate map for Republicans, several more states that are not under full GOP control, and quite possibly a much less favorable economic environment.

A battle has been won, and the next might win the war. https://theweek.com/articles/805997/america-repudiates-trump

2. Frank Rich: Trump Won’t Change Course — He Thinks He Won

Trump is the Republican Party. Most of the few remaining feckless, and, frankly, worthless “moderate” Republicans in the House were wiped out yesterday even as a quasi–Nazi sympathizer like Steve King won reelection in Iowa. So the notion that “the party” might rethink anything is a non sequitur. The only question is whether Trump would rethink anything, and the answer is a resounding no. His entire political program is white male nationalism, with a full arsenal of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and homophobia that he wields with both glee and malice for his own political (and often financial) profit. I doubt that he would change course even if there had been a two-chamber blue wave in the midterms. He certainly won’t change it now. As his morning-after tweetfest predictably reveals, he thinks he won. He is plotting more MAGA rallies for the start of the year. More immigrant caravans will soon be wall-to-wall on Fox. The moment presumptive Democratic House committee chairmen like Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler start wielding gavels, we will be hearing about how they are in the pay of George Soros and other shadowy “globalists.” http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/frank-rich-trump-wont-change-course-he-thinks-he-won.html

3.  Jonathan Chait: Democrats Won the House Because of Obamacare

Since 2009, the Republican Party’s posture on health care has been a giant lie. Republican elected officials promised in public to work cooperatively to solve the problems in the system, especially a broken individual market in which insurance was unaffordable to anybody with a preexisting condition. But both their political interest in denying Obama a victory and their ideological opposition to bigger government in any form drove them to a very different goal: blocking any bill at all. Republicans strung out negotiations with the Obama administration for a year, publicly blaming Democrats for rushing through a partisan bill while refusing to be pinned down on any concrete proposals or demands.

They insisted if Obamacare could be blocked — and then, after it passed, repealed — Republicans would design a better alternative that would do all the good things Obamacare delivered, without costing anybody anything. Supporters of Obamacare believed the absurdity of the lie could not be sustained, that the successful operation of the law would create beneficiaries who would demand its protection.

And yet it seemed for years on end that the lie would never be exposed. Republicans could sabotage the law at the state level, and Democrats would be blamed for its shortcomings. In places where Obamacare was helping people, its beneficiaries largely did not realize it. A stream of tragicomic reporting revealed people whose lives had been changed for the better by Obamacare believing they were not on the program at all, or voting for Trump out of the conviction that he would preserve or even expand the program. In this upside-down world, Republicans could work feverishly to take access to health care away from millions of Americans while piously promising to deliver it to one and all — and being believed. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/democrats-won-the-house-because-of-obamacare.html

4. Max Boot: The battle with Trumpism is just beginning

 Trump’s contemptible campaign did not help Republicans hold the House. To the contrary, it sparked a backlash in suburban districts among more moderate, better-educated voters. There is, I am happy to report, quite a lot of decency left in America. Hence the blue wave that swept the Republicans out of the House majority. The irony is that many of the Republicans who lost, such as Carlos Curbelo in Florida and Barbara Comstock in Northern Virginia, were relative moderates — albeit moderates who never did much to stand up to Trump. The remaining House GOP caucus, indeed the entire GOP, is likely to be Trumpier than ever, even as the majority of the country expresses its disgust with Trumpism.

But with the Democrats in control of the House, there will finally, belatedly, be some pushback. There are so many scandals to investigate, it is difficult to know where to start. This is the most dishonest administration in history, and it cries out for accountability. Imagine what Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), the possible new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, will discover if, as is his right, he requests the president’s long-hidden tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service.

Partisan rancor, already high, will reach stratospheric levels in the next two years. But that is the price of checks and balances — which have been mainly lacking so far. The election results restore some of my faith in our democracy, but I am sobered by the realization that the battle is far from over. It could last another two years, or even six years. It is quite possible the Democrats will overplay their hand and that Trump will use his demagogic skills to win reelection. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end of Trumpism. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-battle-with-trumpism-is-far-from-over/2018/11/07/e4bcc54a-e254-11e8-b759-3d88a5ce9e19_story.html

5. Masha Gessen: How the Media Normalizes Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Thousands of people are trying to make their way to the United States’ southern border. President Donald Trump calls them “criminal aliens,” a “national emergency,” an attack on the nation’s sovereignty, and a threat to the “safety of every single American.” He claims that “very bad people,” MS-13 gang members, and “unknown Middle Easterners”—by which he apparently means terrorists—are in the group. Of those last claims, even Fox News has seen fit to fact-check Trump and point out that his statements are unfounded. And yet the story of the procession across Honduras and Mexico has served to normalize more of Trump’s xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric.

But the people walking through Mexico right now are not an army or a hurricane. They are not even planning to cross the border illegally. International law guarantees their right to seek asylum. The U.S. has an obligation to consider their claims. Trump does not have a moral or legal leg to stand on when he talks about deterring the asylum seekers, much less when he promises to send the military to stop them. But most of the media, across the political spectrum, is standing right there with him. They may be mortified by some of the language that Trump uses in discussing immigration, but he has still succeeded in shifting their frame. They are being more polite than the President, but by discussing the effectiveness of “deterrence” and the immediacy of the caravan’s danger, they reinforce his politics of hatred and fear-mongering. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-the-mainstream-media-normalizes-trumps-anti-immigrant-rhetoric

6. Fareed Zakaria: The GOP has become the party of fake news and paranoid fantasies

It is commonplace to hear and read about President Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. And certainly there is lots of evidence that the GOP is animated these days by an unquestioning devotion to Trump and whatever his ideas may be at any given moment. But the problem is that Republicans are now becoming the party not of Trump but of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who in the 1950s accused the State Department of treason, called George Marshall — head of the Army during World War II, later secretary of state and defense — a traitor, and implied that the American government was being secretly run by the Kremlin.

The Republican Party today has become a vast repository of conspiracy theories, fake news, false accusations and paranoid fantasies.

Consider the most recent example. Trump has scared much of the country about a small group of Central Americans, fleeing poverty and violence, who are hoping to come to the U.S. border and apply for asylum. It’s perfectly reasonable to oppose letting them in, though it is cruel to demonize them constantly. But Republicans have not been content to oppose granting asylum. They have concocted facts out of thin air and invented conspiracies about who is behind this group of impoverished migrants.

Last week, one of the prominent hosts at Fox News, which is now the Pravda of the Republican Party, suggested that more than 100 Islamic State fighters had been caught “trying to use this caravan.” Trump, a devoted Fox News viewer, pounced on that claim, declaring that “unknown Middle Easterners” had joined the caravan. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) asked whether Democratic donor George Soros was funding this movement.

None of these claims has an iota of truth to it. But they are repeated and reinforced across the country. The notion that Soros is the dark mastermind behind all kinds of movements is now deeply lodged in the Republican Party — so much so that senior party leaders such as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa repeat it almost reflexively. Rep. Steve King (Iowa) has accused Soros of backing a grand scheme to systematically introduce foreigners in order to replace “Americans” — in other words, whites — with “somebody else’s babies.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-has-become-the-party-of-fake-news-and-paranoid-fantasies/2018/11/01/0f45ba88-de13-11e8-85df-7a6b4d25cfbb_story.html

7. Amy Davidson Sorkin: Trump’s Dangerous Midterm Musings: Renouncing Birthright Citizenship and Maybe Firing on Migrants

At the White House, on Thursday, after President Trump had wrapped up his remarks about immigration, a reporter in the room asked him to clarify a statement. The President had spoken, ominously, about dispatching the U.S. military to the border, where it would “do the job” of stopping a group of would-be immigrants from entering the country. “We hope nothing happens,” he said, but the military was “prepared.”

“Do you envision them firing upon any of these people?” the reporter asked.

“I hope not,” Trump said, in a tone that was more a warning than a reassurance. “It’s the military—I hope—I hope there won’t be that. But I will tell you this. Anybody throwing stones, rocks—like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police, where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico—we will consider that a firearm.” Later, when asked what he meant about the rocks, he added, “If they want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. We’re going to consider—and I told them, consider it a rifle.”

A rock is a rifle, and—in an even bigger conceptual leap that Trump repeatedly makes—a caravan “is an invasion.” The migrants travelling north by foot from Honduras and Guatemala are “pretty tough people” able to “blast through the Mexican military and Mexican police,” Trump claimed. They are unknown mystery men—“a lot of young men, strong men”—geared up for an assault. (In fact, the migrants include many women and children.) He continued, “I don’t want them in our country. And women don’t want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country. But the women do not want them. Women want security. You look at what the women are looking for.” Less than a week before the midterm elections, Trump has returned to the image that he invoked on the day, three years ago, when he announced that he was running for President: rapists on their way from Mexico. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trump-considers-shooting-migrants-and-abandoning-the-promise-of-citizenship

8. Jonathan Chait: Trump Isn’t Inciting Violence by Mistake, But on Purpose. He Just Told Us.

At a weekend rally, President Trump launched a riff that, even by the feverish standards of his closing campaign argument, stands out for its brutal authoritarian overtones. The president mocked Antifa demonstrators: “You see these little arms, these little arms,” he shouted, forming his fingers into tiny circles to illustrate their puny biceps. And then he invited his supporters to imagine these weaklings having to fight against Trump’s own militant cadres. “Where are the Bikers for Trump? Where are the police? Where are the military? Where are — ICE? Where are the border patrol? No,” he continued, lamenting the restraint his sentries have displayed, “we’ve taken a lot, we’ve taken a lot.”

Telling passage where Trump portrays Antifa as a Democratic paramilitary vs "his" "bikers," cops, military, ICE and border patrol. https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1059204301673979904/video/1 — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 4, 2018

This is a revealing setpiece of authoritarian theater. There is, first of all, the evocation of strength as a moral signifier. Trump’s people are strong and good, and his opponents weak and bad, a classically fascist ethos. Second, he conflates his private political militia, “Bikers for Trump,” with government agencies that are not supposed to operate as a political arm of the president (police, military, ICE.) Trump, of course, has always believed the government’s law enforcement apparatus should be at his personal command, and has in fact deployed the military to the border for the benefit of his party’s campaign messaging. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/trump-isnt-inciting-violence-by-mistake-he-just-told-us.html