Tag: Trump

The Grown Children’s Crusade

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I’ve been promised there won’t be any more snow until at least Sunday.  Of course, I still have about ten hours of snow removal on the lower driveway so that kind of stinks.  But thank heavens for small mercies.  So, I’m more or less free until Monday and I look around at the world and see goofusses in every direction.  Now goofus is a technical term and I may be applying it to critters that technically are other things; dumbasses, mopes, mooks and just plain knuckleheads.  But as a generic term it’s a good stand in.

I saw a video of a woman at one of the anti-ICE riots who picked up a flash-bang explosive to throw back at the police and had it blow off some of her fingers.  This is not normal.  Women don’t typically become rioters.  This is a special brand of stupidity.  It’s like some kind of modernist version of the “Children’s Crusade.”  Let’s nickname it the “Grown Children’s Crusade.”  The guy who got himself shot last week was an ICU nurse.  I’m going to guess he wasn’t an antifa regular.  Someone must have told him that attacking ICE agents while carrying a hand gun was a risk-free exercise.  I’m guessing that was an antifa regular.

So, what you have is the Minnesota true-believers who cheered for the George Floyd riots to change the world have followed a new crusade to make Minnesota safe for illegal aliens.  In their atheist-adjacent LGBTQ-friendly churches they gather to egg each other on and then they head over to the local NGO where the city and state contacts provide whatever support the local antifa chapter needs to harass ICE without any accountability.  And that’s the difference between antifa and the useful idiots they are surrounded with now.  They have no idea what they are doing.  They remember Frey and Walz forcing the city and state police to stand down while antifa and BLM ran amok.  So, they think that’s how this works.  Idiots like Good and Pretti think they’re immune from harm because Walz and Frey tell them they’re doing the Lord’s work.

I read today that Walz has called in the state troopers to break up the protestors.  Is this a capitulation or just a tactic?  There is a story going around that the state and city leaders were involved in the planning of the interference with the ICE operations.  Perhaps Walz is worried about his culpability under federal law.  So many stories, so little knowledge.

The only question is will Trump stick to his guns or not.  If he caves to Minnesota then the same thing will happen in all the blue states.  And after that all the good that Trump is trying to do will be undermined.  And that’s the whole struggle writ small.  Stand up to the antifa mobs and if necessary, put them down when they threaten to riot and defy law and order.  I don’t have a clue as to what he will do.  So that’s enough for now.

These Are the Things I Think About

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Tim Walz has been dominating the left-nutjob news cycle for the last week or two.  But his compatriots in the “Gopher State” (also sometimes nicknamed more accurately as “New England of the West”) decided to provide him with some cover so they decided, “Let’s just go insane and force ICE agents to shoot us!”  Someone named Renee Nicole Good decided to menace ICE agents with her car and when they ordered her to get out of her car she drove toward the officer standing in front of her car and got herself shot.  She subsequently died and now she is a martyr for stupid leftists everywhere.  But refusing to be upstaged Walz has declared that he is going to call in the National Guard to repel the ICE agents.  Now that is what I call dialing the stupid up to eleven.

Things seem to be accelerating.  Well, why not?  I hope Trump is preparing to send special forces into the Minnesota Governor’s Mansion and provide Tampon Tim with the cell next to President Maduro.  And while he’s at it he might as well add Mayor Frey to his collection of annoying political losers.  Now some people are worried this stuff will boil over into civil war.  I’m not.  Now if we are talking about war, then we can find better things to worry about.  Russia, China even Iran have some dangerous military assets and a track record for war.  But Tim Walz does not have a history of fighting.  He is willing to allow rioters to burn down various urban centers in his state as is Mayor Frey.  But personally get involved in war?  No, he resigned from the National Guard when his unit was scheduled to go to Iraq.  So no, Walz doesn’t do war.  I read that Trump declared that he has proof that George Soros is funding the Antifa violence and he’s going to go after him for it.  Well, what has he been waiting for?  Don’t tell us, show us.  Give Soros the cell next to Walz.  I’m sure listening to Walz for even a short time would drive Soros to suicide.

But things definitely seem to be reaching some kind of crescendo.  Maybe I was wrong about Iran.  It’s starting to look like the anti-government protests are reaching some kind of critical mass where the mullahs might actually flee the way Assad did in Syria in December, 2024.  Imagine if the Iranians actually end the Islamic republic and go back to just being a normal country.  Suddenly Hamas, Hezbollah and half of the other crazies in the Middle East would lose all their funding.  Maybe all those terrorists would have to get jobs and work for a living.

But I will miss the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei chanting Death to the Great Satan!  Of course, the previous Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini chanted the same thing.  And you know, their names are really similar.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so!  And they look a lot alike.  I think they had the same beard.  Hey, maybe they’re really the same guy!  Maybe he just made believe he died to get the life insurance money.  Well, it’s too bad Jimmy Carter couldn’t have lasted a few more years.  He could have lived to see the guys who lost him his re-election bounced out of Iran.

These are the things I think about.

You Won’t Have Tim Walz to Kick Around Anymore

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Tim Walz, that hero of the George Floyd Riots (I mean protests), the only politician stupid enough to make Kamala Harris look like the smart half of the ticket, is not running for re-election.  Well, well, well.  How the knuckleheaded hath fallen.  Okay, now things will get interesting.  The ongoing investigations into Somali scams that ate up billions of dollars should be very interested in exactly what Tim knew and when he knew it.  Who knows, maybe Tim might have to defend himself in court against charges that he was complicit in the large-scale fraud that occurred in the state he ran as governor.  Or maybe he wasn’t part of the fraud.  Maybe he really is as stupid as he says he is.  If that’s the case then it’s the voters of Minnesota who are at fault.  They elected and re-elected this guy.  After all he was the one at ground zero when the George Floyd riots were getting started and he did nothing to stop them.  In fact, he enabled them in every way he could.  When some National Guard troops could have put a stop to the looting and arson, he let it happen and even justified it as “peaceful protests.”

And during the COVID fraud he went along with the school and work shutdowns and the mask mandates and all the other nonsense that crippled this country and deprived kids of their education.  Yes, at every turn Tim’s been a rolling disaster of a nincompoop.  Whether it was putting tampon dispensers in the boy’s bathrooms in the high schools or resigning his military position right before the Iraq War, Tim has been at the forefront of unmanly behavior wherever he was.

And yet the interesting thing is that Kamala Harris selected him, not only because he was almost as stupid as she was but because they thought he would appeal to white male voters.  As a white man I find this incredibly insulting.  They must think we really are idiots.  What normal man thinks Tim Walz represents him?  Even a cursory glance at his history or his statements would clearly show him to be a radical progressive with a clear hatred of traditional values and white men.  He is the antithesis of J. D. Vance and this was openly apparent in the vice-presidential debate during which Vance made Walz look like a low-grade moron (which he is).

So just a little over a year after Tim Walz helped Donald Trump become president of the United States again, Tim will be helping Trump show the country just what dishonest and incompetent politicians the Democrats are.  California, Minnesota, New York and Illinois are all floundering in debt and dysfunction.  Tim will be a symbol of how the leaders of that party are personally responsible for the fraud and waste that went on during the Biden presidency.  Walz may be lucky that he’s leaving now.  Even his incompetency may soon be eclipsed by the spectacle of Mayor Mamdani turning the largest city in the nation into a third-world hellhole.  But even so Tim Walz has earned himself a spot on the Wall of Shame.  Adios Knucklehead.  We hardly knew ye.

Be Careful, Donald

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Well, Trump is definitely disrupting things.  The question is can he keep the whole machine from shaking itself apart.  Venezuela doesn’t bother me.  That’s not even a real country.  It’s a mafia neighborhood with a money-printing machine in the basement.

Iran on the other hand is a much bigger and more dangerous neighborhood.  Their economy is in tatters and the middle-class is so starved that they dared to face off in the streets against the thugs that Khamenei employs to silence all protestors, with a crow bar.  Trump threw in a threat against the mullahs if they start murdering the protestors in the street.  And that is his place as leader of the “free world” I guess.  But is it just an idle threat?  And will these protests really go anywhere?

The last time protests accomplished anything in Iran was 1979 when the Islamists overthrew the Shah of Iran and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini out of exile to begin the Islamic Republic.  And that kicked off the Islamic Revolution by holding Americans hostage for over a year.  Is it possible that enough Iranians are angry enough to risk torture and death to kick the mullahs out of power and turn Iran back into a modern country?  I guess it’s possible but why now?

I read that inflation in Iran is currently at 43%.  That is definitely getting close to some kind of breaking point.  But standing up to men with machine guns and torture cells takes a lot of guts.  I’m far from convinced that anything will come of the Iranian protests.  Now maybe it will soften up the regime into cutting a deal with the West.  Maybe they’ll agree to end their funding of terrorist groups and in that way begin to have economic sanctions lifted against their oil exports other commercial enterprises.

Now, all of this going on at the same time that Ukraine and Russia are battling to the death may not be a coincidence.  Both Venezuela and Iran are Russian allies and trading partners.  These situations may be an attempt to destabilize the Russian economy.  Sanctions against Russia have been skirted in part by using oil tankers that trade outside of the western countries and this is the same strategy that Iran and Venezuela have used.  Perhaps Trump is ratcheting up the pressure on all of these “shadow fleets” to destabilize the economies of all three of these countries.

And maybe it will work.  Iran is badly hurting and Russia is beginning to suffer from the combination of sanctions and war fatigue.  And Venezuela was a sitting duck for US military and covert attacks.  Maybe Trump will get a trifecta of victories.  He might even get his Nobel Peace Prize.

But I’ll have to say it’s an exceedingly dangerous game he’s playing.  There must be dozens of Iranian sleeper cells that snuck in during Biden’s open border policy.  What if the mullahs grow desperate and decide to spread some chaos in the land of the “Great Satan” before they lose control of their own country?  I get so tired of these places on the map that are nothing but misery for their own people and anyone that gets involved with them.  Donald, be careful.

New Years Day 2026

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Here we are on the first day of a year that is bound to be a roller coaster ride.  The world is poised between plunging into chaos or shaking off the poisonous effects of the woke nightmare we’ve been subjected to since 2008.  Which one wins is anyone’s guess.  But just having the Bad Orange Man there in the White House is proof to me that all hope hasn’t disappeared.  All of his words and deeds rankle the enemies of normalcy whenever he speaks or acts.  He’s a constant source of rage for all of the people I despise so much.  And hopefully this year he’ll up the voltage even higher and burn out all their circuitry in splendid fashion.

As I said, there’s no guarantee that he’ll win.  There are an enormous number of horrible people in this country.  And they’ll stop at nothing to restore the Obama/Biden team in Washington.  And this team is composed of both Democrats and Republicans.  They’re creatures of the Deep State that profit obscenely from the constant siphoning off of the country’s lifeblood into NGOs and other fronts that profit the Left and attack normal people wherever and whenever they can.  But they have been hurt and hurt badly by the DOGE initiatives and Trump’s executive orders and even that law that the House got passed that ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by extension cut off the funding for PBS and NPR.  And this proves that fighting these entities is possible.  And if it’s possible we need to give Trump all the help he can get to win the fight.

So, I’ll start the year with a realistic but positive outlook.  Trump won’t win every fight.  He might even lose one or two houses of Congress in the mid-terms.  But that’s nothing new.  It’s almost expected.  But what he has shown is that he can get a hell of a lot done with the right team and the will to make things happen.

Normally people write New Year’s Resolutions.  Instead, I’ll make a list of things I hope happen in 2026.

  • Tim Walz resigns from the governorship of Minnesota.
  • Mayor Mamdani crashes and burns in his first year as Mayor of New York City. By that I mean that he has to renege on all his campaign promises (free busses, frozen rents, city-run grocery stores) and comes begging to Albany and Washington to keep him from being run out of town on a rail.
  • ICE deports several times more illegals in 2026 than in 2025. They’ve been ramping up and I think they’re figuring out the pain points for illegals.
  • The Ukraine War will end. Will Trump get a Nobel Peace Prize.  Nah!
  • Maduro will flee Venezuela for Cuba. The drug traffickers will shift over to Mexico and American oil companies will return to restore their oil industry to some semblance of efficiency.
  • The guy who shot Charlie Kirk will be found guilty and sentenced to death.

Okay, that’s enough.  Happy New Year.

Now You See it, Now You Don’t

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After any significant snowfall we now experience an obligatory freezing rain follow-up.  So, I wake up this morning to both driveways essentially skating rinks.  For fun I took a shovel as a rudder to keep my balance and stepped onto the steep top of the lower driveway and allowed gravity to propel me forward.  It was smooth as glass and by the time I got to the bottom, I was moving pretty fast.  So, I leaned over and headed for a snow bank.

I spent about two hours sanding the top driveway (the bottom one was hopeless) and then went out to buy another 360 pounds of sand for the future.  Of course, after lunch it started raining hard and the 45–50-degree temperature melted most of the ice on both driveways.  Well, what can you do?  Basically, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t so, “Yay New England!”

So that put the kibosh on my plan to get finished with the marketing chores I need to perform for the book launch.  But I’ll get going soon.

I read some more news items on-line.  This is a seriously mixed-up world both domestically and internationally.  But I remain optimistic that the Trump administration can make a substantial difference in the lives of Americans if he keeps his eyes on the factors that are limiting the ability of young people to marry and have children.  If he finds ways to address this; some kind of Marshall Plan for this country I think he can get the Zoomers solidly in his camp.

And I’m not saying that will be easy.  Our economy is seriously distorted by the off-shoring of manufacturing.  But Trump has a lot of levers he can push to force business to do his bidding.  And I think he should use every last one of them to restore the middle-class.  Everyone since Aristotle has known that only countries with a large thriving middle-class are worth living in.  I think he should build houses and pay women to stay home and have kids.  If enough incentives are offered, I think it would change the direction of our demographic collapse and at the same time make this a much more human and interesting place.

Well, we’ll have to see if Donald is up to the challenge of “making America great again.”  And without a doubt I’m rooting for him.  I hope he doesn’t get too wrapped up with his Venezuela project or spend too much time refereeing the Ukrainians and Russians.  I’m satisfied with leaving the Europeans to muddle through that disaster on their own.  There’s nothing but death and misery happening there.

So, as we approach the New Year, I’m still mostly optimistic about 2026.  I think the economy is starting to show signs of life and that could make a big difference for the mid-year elections.  If by some stroke of luck, we hold onto the House and Senate it’s possible Trump will talk the Senate into abolishing the filibuster and just pass a bunch of laws that will make this country normal again (like having a balanced budget!).

Well, that’s enough for now.

Maybe I’ll Swing Down to Mar-a-Lago

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Today was an interesting day.  The younger grandkids came over with their mothers to make Christmas cookies with Camera Girl.  In addition to the real cookies, they also got to make “sugar cookies.”  This is some kind of sweeter cookie dough that they then adorn with multi-colored granulated sugar and other impossibly sweet ingredients like chocolate sprinkles.  And they didn’t just sprinkle it on.  They poured it on like cement coming out of a truck.  It was horrifying.  No one but a child could stand the saccharine sucrosity of that unholy concoction.  But of course, no one would force me to ingest that mess so I smiled indulgently and feasted on a few of the legitimate confections that were created in the kitchen.  And they were very, very good.  Sure, they’re not good for me but it’s Christmas and this is the time to overindulge.

And later on, my proof copies of “The Sniper” were delivered by the Amazon truck.  He brought them to the bottom driveway and then had to skate across the ice that had melted from the snow and then refrozen over-night.  I apologized to him for the hazard but he laughed it off and said he’d seen much worse today.

Now these “proof” copies have a watermark across the cover that says “not for resale” or something like that.  But seeing my work (or Jake Barter’s anyway) in the flesh, as it were, was kind of fun.  After all, what could be more official than finding your product inside of an Amazon box?  Why, that’s the very definition of American commerce in the twenty first century.  Thank you, Jeff Bezos!

And after a cursory inspection it looks pretty good.  The cover art is clear, the text lines up well on the pages and the paper feels right.  I’ll page through it and make sure nothing is missing or marred.  But I think everything looks like it’s a go for next month.  I’ve applied for Author status on Goodreads and I’ve authorized my marketer to set up my ad campaign and choose the keywords or whatever they call the bait that’s meant to entice the algorithm to catapult me to viral ubiquity.  I wonder if this magic requires the sacrifice of a hecatomb or at least a black lamb.  All of it seems like black magic to me.  But I figure it’s definitely worth my while to give the whole thing the old college try.  After all. What has Brandon Sanderson got that I ain’t got?  I mean other than $41.7 million dollars of Kickstarter funding, that is.  By February I may be waist deep in royalty checks.  Movie studios may be fighting each other to get me to sell them the movie rights.  I’ll probably get a call from the White House begging me to use my vast clout and get involved in the negotiations to end the Ukraine War.  I’ll probably spend a few hours in Oval Office advising Donald about domestic and foreign affairs and signing autographs for Marco and J.D.  Who knows, maybe I’ll swing down to Mar-a-Lago and advise the President on how to lower his golf handicap.

Well, we’ll see.

Diplomacy, Gerrymandering and Ice Cream

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Friday will be a very long day.  Excuse my absence from the site.  I’ll do my best to catch up later.

Well, I’ll have to say I was shocked that Hamas gave up the twenty living hostages.  I am a little suspicious of their claiming to not have all of the remains of the dead hostages.  Maybe they’re still holding onto some of the living that way.  But all in all, it seems like the Arabs are applying the screws to Hamas and that is a good sign.  Trump is getting some credit even from the leftist media and that is also encouraging.

And I hear that the Supreme Court is about to declare some parts of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.  Specifically, I think they’ll say that the present maximizing of black representation is a form of anti-white discrimination and that may be an incredible change to the breakdown of seats between the Democrats and Republicans in places like Alabama and Mississippi.  Good.  Gerrymandering makes a 60/40 state like Massachusetts into a 100/0 state in terms of representation.  There are zero Republicans in the US House of Representatives from Massachusetts.  Why should there be any Democratic reps in places like Oklahoma or Utah?  Just draw the district maps so that the Republican suburbs and exurbs out number the urban Democrat strongholds and presto change-o no Democrat reps!  Sounds like a plan.  Thank you, Massachusetts!

Now I hear Trump is going to meet with Zelensky and then give the Ukrainians Tomahawk missiles.  That’s a very powerful weapons system.  And then I hear he’s going to meet with Putin.  Well, he’s really going to have to pull a rabbit out of his hat to end this war.  But let him try.  I just hope we don’t start taking incoming from Russian surrogates.  I was just beginning to hope Trump was serious about making the world more peaceful.  Fingers crossed.

Even though we’ve already had frost on the ground Camera Girl was able to find a live preying mantis in the yard and now it’s taking up residence in our house.  She even bought some crickets at Petco and hopes to keep it alive for the duration.  I warned her this might be a very short reprieve.  I think they’re not programmed to live very long after maturity.  Well, I hope to take some macro shots of our little houseguest before he kicks off.

Unbelievably we’re still getting raspberries from the patch and we had them today with vanilla ice cream.  But we’re down to the nitty-gritty.  I think we’ll be getting a hard freeze in the next week or so.  And I’ve taken a bunch of photos of the wolfbane because by Halloween they’ll be wilted too.  Today the bees and the flies were the only insect life I saw around the yard.

So, a beautiful September and beginning of October is transitioning to more wintery weather but spirits are high and with any luck I’ll survive my three-week ordeal with First Selectman Cthulhu with only superficial damage.

Excelsior!

Did Donald Trump End the Arab-Israeli War?

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You know, the longer I live on this planet, the less I think I know about reality.  I can remember as a small child in grammar school hearing about the various Arab-Israeli conflicts.  And it was always assumed that only the wisest and most sober of men would ever be able to untie the Gordian knot that was that conflict.

But Donald Trump will do it?  Look, I love Trump.  He’s some sort of bizarre cross between P T Barnum and Pericles by way of Madison Avenue.  He’s the first American politician since Andrew Jackson to side with the regular people.  He towers over his enemies like a colossus.  But how in the name of everything reasonable can he end an intractable war between peoples who hate each other so viscerally that death is preferable to compromise?  And yet, if the news is to be believed, Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first step of the Trump Peace Plan; return of all the hostages alive and dead and Israeli stepping back to some first line of withdrawal.

But how many different ways can this process fail?  The list is infinite.  Even with complete good faith on both sides I can imagine endless scenarios that could upend this effort.  And when in the history of the mid-east has there ever been good faith on both sides?  Never.

Now in Trump’s favor, this negotiation includes many Arab and Moslem countries acting as surrogates to prod Hamas toward ending the war.  There is a desire on the part of almost all of the middle eastern countries to end the ceaseless cycle of attacks and counterattacks that makes this whole region of the world hell on Earth.  Could this finally be the day when sanity and the will of the vast majority of people there manage to smother the fire of violence under their collective bodies and end this disgusting abomination of death and hatred?

I’ll have to confess, I just can’t come around to believing it.  It would require these people who have done horrific things to each other for more than half a century to somehow find a miraculous solution to their problem.  It’s as if both sides are forced to navigate through a minefield that both sides have mined but neither side still has reliable maps of.  At any moment disaster can strike and any disadvantage on either side can inspire the other side to press for a kill shot.

The whole thing sickens and disgusts me to the point where I just want to forget it exists and move forward without ever thinking of it again.  But the last time I did that, planes started flying through buildings in New York.

So here we go again.  Good luck Donald Trump.  I guess if anyone can pull off the deal of the millennium it would be him.  But I almost think he’ll have more success with Ukraine than Gaza.  Sure, they’re almost as crazy there but as bad as it is I don’t think the level of hatred between the Russians and Ukrainians can ever come close to the savagery of what happened two years ago.  Maybe a little prayer would help.

Or Maybe It’s All a Mirage

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There is an interesting phenomenon going on with political party affiliation shifts.  And it’s happening in both red and blue states.  There is a noticeable shift happening toward the Republican party and away from the Democrats.  Now, in most of the blue states this isn’t a game changer.  Here in New England, it will have negligible impact.  If a sixty/forty state becomes a fifty-five/forty-five state there’s no noticeable change in policy.  But there are a few swing states where a trend like this could be more than just a tweak.  And even some pretty blue states are flirting with electing Republican governors (e.g., New Jersey).

I’m on record as saying blue states electing republican governors is just a relief valve to prevent the state from blowing up its budget due to Democrat fiscal insanity.  Massachusetts has to do that all the time.  Anytime they’ve had a Democrat as governor for more than eight years they have to elect a Republican just to get out of bankruptcy.  And the definition of a Massachusetts Republican is just a progressive who can add and subtract numbers.  There are no noticeable conservative actions by him just slightly cheaper progressive policies.

But in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and even Nevada the shift of even two or three percentage points can be enough to change state legislatures and even add a senator or two to the red side.  And a lot of these voters switching parties are younger.  I’ve seen that where I live and believe me, I’m buried deep in enemy territory here.  So, if it’s happening here then it’s definitely happening in the swing states the same way only more so.

Now, I’m not so idealistic to think that there won’t be any elections where the Democrats make gains, maybe even big gains.  But what we’re seeing is people waking up to the inherent differences between the parties.  Biden and his regime allowed law and order to collapse in the cities and blue states.  That wasn’t something that could be ignored.  If Mamdani wins in November in New York City that will throw a spotlight on just what happens when an honest to goodness communist tries running the largest city in the United States.  I think his administration may turn out to be the most valuable advertising the Republicans could ask for going into the midterms.  If Mamdani goes with the policies he’s been espousing it should frighten the hell out of anyone living in a blue state or city.  It’s a possibility that we are looking at the perfect political storm happening just when it could do the most good.  Could Mandani turn New York City red the way Dinkins did back in the 1990s and got Rudy Giulianin elected twice?  I think it’s unlikely but not impossible.  But I do think he can provide a cautionary tale for the rest of the country and maybe help Donald Trump hold onto his Republican Congress.

Or maybe it’s all a mirage.  Time will tell.