Most predictions of midterm election results focus on inflation, due in significant part to Donald Trump’s tariffs, and, in particular, rising energy costs, due to Trump’s war on Iran and to data centers.
I’ll certainly accept that these are major, even predominant, factors, in what I think is likely to be a blue tsunami on Tuesday, November 3rd. But there are other factors that may well enter in: abortion rights; Jeffrey Epstein; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) excesses; Trump’s own, his family’s, and his administration’s corruption; his threats against Canada and Greenland; his fondness for Vladimir Putin and Russia, and, correspondingly, his antipathy toward Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine, and Europe (other than Russia and Belarus) generally; and, of course, his physical, mental, and cognitive health.
That Republicans have failed to challenge Trump despite all this and much, much more is ample reason to doubt that, for fear of many of their own voters, they will ever serve as a check on a clearly deranged president.
I have a lot of disagreements with Republicans generally and Trump in particular, disagreements that transcend the issues I’ve listed above, indeed that preclude any vote for any Republican ever under any circumstances. And I’m no fan of the Democrats, who have repeatedly convinced me that they are determined to sit in opposition where they can complain about Republicans without ever being expected to actually accomplish anything.
Indeed, I would submit that the list of issues that I expect to lead to a blue tsunami is too limited in that there are so many more reasons to oppose Republicans and Trump. Like his vicious racism against people of color; his fondness for authoritarianism and authoritarian rulers; his obscene renamings of Denali, the Gulf of Mexico, and Lake Ontario; his misogyny, sexual assaults, and rapes; and his usurping of an evil enough constitutional oligarchy with an aconstitutional broligarchy. And probably more than I’m thinking of at the moment. All of which makes the Democrats’ enabling of Trump obscene.
Overseas, kids seem much more sensible, rising up against the powers that be in India and a number of European countries, albeit too often (and understandably) violently, playing into “law and order” (always ask, whose “law” and whose “order”) concerns and thus helping the far right to win power. We need some of that here in the U.S. (and for political leaders to act to meaningfully address affordability issues).
We won’t get it, of course, and that “of course” speaks volumes about the state of politics in the U.S.