Brand New Swamp. The Thune Conundrum. Chips Down for Jensen Huang? Bessent Moved to Military Base. Ode to Harmeet. Houellebecq. More
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth won the first battle after the midterm shellacking of the GOP merely by not being impeached. Elsewhere, the shellacking continued: Scott Colom wrested a Mississippi Senate seat from Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, becoming the first black senator elected from Mississippi since Reconstruction. Also here and here.
Since there are still several Republicans serving in Congress, they bravely decided to elect their leadership. I was going to say “new” leadership, but oh my goodness. Senate Majority Leader John Thune will become Minority Leader, while coatless Rep. Jim Jordan will be House Minority Leader, which puts him on the Speaker path. American Greatness noted Republican recycling efforts.
The Federalist was merciless: “Senate Republicans Double Down on John Thune’s Failed Leadership.” “John Thune Isn’t to Blame for the GOP Wipeout,” counters the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section:
Republicans took a drubbing in the midterms, and the search for a scapegoat continues. For some in the party’s activist class, a leading candidate is soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader John Thune. Agitators on the right call him out-of-touch and ineffectual. They say he’s why the GOP got trounced.
Those critics are wrong. The midterms weren’t Mr. Thune’s fault.
When the American people re-elected President Trump in 2024, they did so because they wanted the 2019 economy back, not because they particularly liked him. Two years into his second term, Americans haven’t gotten the 2019 economy they wanted, but they’ve gotten a lot of Mr. Trump. Costs are high, the Iran war remains unresolved and Mr. Trump remains committed as ever to total chaos, all the time.
On Nov. 3, the American people sent him a clear message: We’re tired of it.
“A GOP House of Ideas, or Hacks” is the response of the cerebral ones who write Wall Street Journal editorials:
Republicans on Tuesday chose Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan to lead what’s left of their minority in the House, and there’s no doubt the former wrestler’s specialty is grappling with the opposition. But to dig the party out of its deep hole, he’ll have to rebuild his conference’s intellectual capital—on taxes, healthcare and much else….
Newt Gingrich’s minority built a reform agenda on spending, Congressional ethics and welfare reform. … The best the GOP could muster in 2025 was extending the same tax cuts while mucking up the code with Mr. Trump’s carve-outs for car loans or tips that did nothing for economic growth. Hapless Republicans are now musing about the need to raise taxes to rescue Social Security even without any reform.
“Trump Got a Few Things Right” writes James B. Meigs, but Karl Rove worries: “What if Trump Still Thinks He’s Winning?” Not that the Dems are home free. Rove writes:
Democrats will be in the majority in Congress, but they’re also in a pickle. They constantly shouted “affordability” during the campaign but didn’t give voters much of an idea of their solutions. They had slogans like “more money in the pocket,” but not much beyond that.
Will Democrats also recycle leadership and make Senator Chuck Schumer Majority Leader and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House? MS Now frets that this might be the case:
It’s an old political adage: You can’t beat somebody with nobody.
At the moment, that’s the big problem for the handful of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill — both new and incumbent — who are calling for new leaders in the House and Senate. It’s also a problem for the torrent of online commentators critical of the current Democratic leaders: Who, exactly, would replace them?
But what if there is someone? “The new darling of the Democratic left is … Chris Van Hollen?” is a Politico headline. AOC is shaking up her team again in anticipation of running for something bigger than House leadership. Reemergent sage George Will proposes that on January 3, Democrats will run into reality:
In November, Democrats did well with voters, but beginning on Jan. 3, reality gets a vote. Consider four subjects: climate change, campaign finance, Medicare-for-all and racial gerrymandering.
Meanwhile, beleaguered Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang may be forced to gear down. The Nvidia board reportedly is preparing to oust Huang after his sexual relationship with an alleged Chinese spy was revealed. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes that the Huang scandal was “hiding in plain sight.” China’s spy service bets on lust and arrogance, according to Ignatius:
Keith Riggin, a former CIA station chief in Beijing who later advised U.S. companies on the Chinese intelligence threat, says he gave American executives a simple warning about beautiful women who might approach them in Beijing: “You don’t get any better-looking when you go to a place like China.”
It appears that the Nvidia espionage scandal is making Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick look less handsome because of his handling of sales of chips to China. Axios reports that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent confronted Lutnick over Nvidia concerns in the Situation Room. Learn more about sexy alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang, the 31-year-old short trader who called out Huang’s “China problem,” and an alleged previous Jenson Huang paramour.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is leading the economic pressure campaign against Iran, has been moved to a military base because of Iran’s threats against his life. “Iran’s Assassins Are on the Loose” is the headline of a Wall Street Journal editorial:
The IRGC is still on the loose, its Quds Force working to attack Americans, Jews and Iranian dissidents around the world. That’s how Iran’s terrorist regime operates, and it won’t stop even if a smiling thug shakes Mr. Vance’s hand and again promises that Iran will let oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz when it gets everything else it wants.
There were some encouraging results in the midterms. “Thankfully, Child Transgenderism Lost on Election Day” is the headline on a story at RCP. Roy Eappen writes:
This reality has been overlooked in virtually all the coverage of the Republican bloodbath in House, Senate, and gubernatorial races. It’s true that Democrats romped to victory across the board, including in many races where their chances looked slim as recently as a few weeks ago. It’s also true that the new crop of elected Democrats still broadly embraces the most extreme gender ideology, especially when it comes to children.
Yet in three blue and purple states, gender ideology was explicitly on the ballot, and voters sided with common sense and protecting children. This story deserves more attention because it shows that Democrats are out of touch with a large percentage of their own voters.
I somehow managed to overlook Corey DeAngelis’ excellent “Even Blue States Support Female Athletes,” which tells the same story, a few days ago.
Warning. “When Democrats Say ‘Medicare for All,’ They Mean Medicare for None.” Will champions of patient-centered health reform seize upon and explain this important point?
Poetry to Our Ears. “An ode to Harmeet Dhillon” in the Washington Examiner.
Making Book. French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s novel “Submission” is one of the great literary works of our day. It describes a France falling to Islam without so much as a whimper. Houellebecq is facing prison time for “insulting Islam.” Simon Heffer writes about “The war against Michel Houellebecq” at Unherd. Heffer writes:
The decision to charge Houellebecq has been criticized as a freedom of speech issue; and so, to an extent, it is. French law in that respect differs somewhat from English, but doubtless his lawyers will have hours of lucrative fun arguing over the difference between inciting people to do something unspeakable and simply warning that society is moving in a direction where something unspeakable is likely to happen. Nearly sixty years after Enoch Powell was in the same position over dire prophesies he made in his so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
Into the Future. Ross Douthat of The Free Press writes that President Trump still has hard choices to make that will determine his legacy. And Barton Swaim questions whether incoming Democrats are a rational opposition in “Midterms Add Madness to Chaos.” Point to ponder:
Writing in these pages in 1985, Irving Kristol alluded to the political scientist Martin Diamond’s dictum that American democracy “is based on one key assumption: that the people are usually sensible, but rarely wise.” Readers can judge if the people acted either sensibly or wisely by licensing one form of chaos to restrain another, but that is what they did on Nov. 3.
