If you don’t get into the mind of the person you are talking to, you can say whatever you want. It won’t be heard. Norbert Haug, former Vice President of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport

When Trump started running against “an invasion” of Latin American immigrants, I thought he was wrong, thinking he should be running on the economy (which is, after all, booming). It turns out that I was wrong and I should have realized it when The New York Times ran a major article on white women Trump supporters saying that Trump is protecting them. At some point during last Tuesday night, Mark Shields commented that the only times the party in power didn’t lose seats in the election after the presidential election was Kennedy in 1962 and Bush in 2002. In both cases, we were, seemingly, on the cusp of war, the Bay of Pigs with Kennedy and Iraq with Bush. Trump campaigned on immigration being an invasion that the Democrats would allow and only he could, or would, protect us from, he turned himself into a sort of war-president – on the backs of helpless and hapless immigrants, I want to add –  like Kennedy or Bush. Anybody who thinks Trump is stupid is fooling themselves. 

The Democrats won the House and that is a big deal. I think. A lot of progressives, running as progressives, won but a lot didn’t. I had a big emotional – and small financial – investment in Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams, and all three lost. I hadn’t expected that – I guess because I was too emotionally attached to be realistic – thinking that the three could expand the electorate.

I hope the new house doesn’t get bogged down in the Russian collusion bullshit. Yeah, the Russians helped Trump – or tried to – but, so what. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that Trump is a crook and a con-man but I don’t think the help he received rises to the level of an indictable crime and spending a lot of time on that will end up being as self-destructive as Newt Gingrich trying to impeach Clinton.  Although it would be fun to see the new  House investigate the Georgia governor’s election.   

Where the Democrats made the biggest gains seem to be the suburbs and I think that is a reflection of suburbanites being increasingly more identified with their cities. it is where the action is and where people go there on big nights out. 

I ran into an interesting statistic the other day. The fourth district of California, the western Sierra slope from Tahoe to Sequoia National Park voted for Trump over Hillary 54 to 39.3% but they voted for Kamala Harris 63.3 – 36.7%. My immediate reaction was that this confirms my belief that the main problem the Democrats have is that they are running people who are not liberal enough, that they are running the same old, tired, candidates who are indebted to their corporate masters rather than running younger candidates who are willing to fight for Single Payor, a real minimum wage, and free college – in other words, those things the big corporate donors are against. 

But, as soon as I thought about it, I remembered that, in California, the election is between the two candidates who had the highest vote during the primary. In this case, the highest vote getters were Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez, both Democrats and, although Harris was the more liberal and Sanchez is an old-fashioned pol, she wasn’t running against a Republican so the results are not really a good test.

What does seem to be a good test, however, is the Florida race, Tallahassee’s liberal mayor Andrew Gillum verses Trump backed Ronald DeSantis from Florida’s 6th congressional district. I don’t really know much about either candidate – except what I’ve read in the last two days – but my bias is towards Gillum (and everything I read about him confirms that bias, what a surprise).  

The scandal won’t go away, largely because Donald Trump and his lawyers have propelled it forward. Amy Davidson Sorkin, the first line in a snarky article in the New Yorker about Trump’s incompetence in trying to make the Stormy Daniels problem go away. 

For me, one of the surprising things about the Trump Administration is Trump’s petulant incompetence. From early in his presidency, when his Travel Ban came up to the Supreme Court and Trump’s website still said: “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the country” that forced the Supreme Court ruling against the ban on religious rights grounds, to leaking Israeli intel to the Russians, to bragging about lying to Trudeau, Trump continually seems to undermine himself. Then he does something even more surprising, orchestrate a subtle campaign to get Justice Kennedy to retire. In an article in the New York Times, Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman detail that campaign. It is scary reading and I recommend it.