Was it the Iran war that cost the Midterms? Was it higher gas prices? Was it higher grocery prices? Was it data centers?

No, no, no and no.

Take the first. Average Americans don’t really care if a few dozen American soldiers get blown up in the Mideast. Sorry, but it’s true. And they care even less about a few hundred thousand Iranians.

As for higher gas prices, I hear a few complaints, but I see no change in behavior. People still drive monster pickups, and they still drive them aggressively. They’ll drive 30 miles to Costco for a 118” TV to load into their monster pickup (don’t scratch the bed!) and then complain that the gas for the pickup costs too much.

As for the price of groceries, gimme a break. No voters are unable to afford groceries. Data centers? What’s a data center?

Here’s what it was. Exit polls show that a very important thing to a great majority of voters was the perceived corruption of the Trump administration. Voters have learned to expect ordinary politicians to be corrupt. But they still don’t like it.

Trump was considered different than ordinary politicians, and for good reason. He was not a lawyer. He was not a smooth talker. In fact, he had an almost endearing quality (almost) of speaking incoherently. He had no political experience prior to his first term as President. His grandiosity and pomposity were cartoonish, but seemingly harmless.

He promised to change Washington D.C., and he seemed like the guy to do it. After all, why would a billionaire conspire to cheat a few nickels and dimes out of the American taxpayers? Indeed, Trump in his first term was noticeable honest, or at least uncorrupt.

In his second term, not so much. The New York Times asked him last January about the difference. Trump candidly answered that he got “no credit in his first term” and “nobody cared” that he was non-corrupt. From that, he learned that non-corruption was a non-starter. He was leaving money on the table.

Things changed in his second term. In fact, you could say he’s made up for lost ground, or at least made up for lost dollars.

The unseemly stuff is appalling. Qatar gave him a 747 jet, and he gave them security assurances and development deals. United Arab Emirates gave his family cryptocurrency firm about $2 billion and he gave them AI computer chips. Rich donors gave millions to Trump campaign funds, and he gave them executive pardons.

Trump’s venture capital firm received cheap stock from a drone startup, and the drone startup received a lucrative Pentagon contract causing the stock value to surge. A Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin secretly bankrolled Trump, Jr.’s wedding reception.

Days after the 2024 election, Trump invested in a struggling investment firm, and then the firm’s portfolio companies received a host of federal contracts and regulatory approvals.

It goes on and on. What is cited above is only a portion of the insider deals and outright payments received by Trump-related entities. Forbes estimates that Trump’s net worth has nearly doubled – it has increased by billions – since his election in 2024. And that does not include the increased net worth of his family and friends.

Trump has rendered quaint the notion that a billionaire would not stoop to using the Presidency to acquire additional billions.

As mentioned above, Americans have unfortunately come to expect their politicians to be corrupt. But Trump was different. He said he was. He seemed to be.

He wasn’t.

In 1919, a gambling ring paid the Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series in what became known as the “Black Sox Scandal.” Legend has it that after one of their stars, Shoeless Joe Jackson, admitted as much to a Grand Jury, a boy pleaded with him, “Say it ain’t so, Joe! Say it ain’t so!”

Joe’s response was, “Yes, kid, I’m afraid it is.”

What a difference a week makes. A week ago, Republicans were afraid to oppose the President. Today, they’re afraid to support him.

Texas is a good example. A long-standing Republican Senator voted his conscience over the last two years. For that, Trump ruined him. He endorsed and campaigned for a light-weight, corruption-ridden sycophant. With Trump’s endorsement and aid, the sycophant defeated the long-term Senator in the GOP primary.

Trump’s message was clear. Don’t cross me.

This week, however, all of Texas went blue. Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate lost by 18 points to an unknown Democrat. The GOP candidate in Texas lost bigly, not despite the Trump endorsement, but because of it.

The same story played out nearly everywhere. Republicans were torched for the sole reason that they were the party of Trump.

That’s proven by the state initiatives which were not tied to Trump. The people mainly voted for the conservative side on nameless social issues like taxes (even California defeated the foolish wealth tax) and transsexuals on women’s sports teams. But they punished named Republican candidates for no reason other than they were the party of Trump.

The only exception worth noting was in Florida, where Governor DeSantis could credibly claim that he was no Trumpster. But even in Florida, the GOP nearly lost a Senate seat to a wild-eyed socialist. In Michigan, they did lose to a wild-eyed socialist – and they went on to lose in every other battleground state. Every single one.

That’s the bad that has already happened. Here’s the bad that is yet to come.

Republicans will recognize the lesson of Texas and elsewhere. Trump is no longer an asset to their political future; he’s a liability. He’s poison.

Trump will of course be impeached by the newly Democratic House, and he will be tried in the newly Democratic Senate. Expect very damaging testimony about corruption – as in Russian oligarchs paying for Trump family wedding receptions, and high-level official dalliances, and “$100K wire transfer by the end of the day,” and cryptocurrency windfalls, and 80-year-old Trump’s infatuation with young attractive Press Secretaries, and Presidential pardons for sale, and the ham-handed attempt at re-naming the Kennedy Center, and on and on.

After all that dramatic made-for-TV testimony, Democrats might even find enough Republican Senators to get to the 67 necessary to remove him from office. What better way for a Republican Senator to say to the folks back home, “I’m no Trumpster” than to vote to remove him from office?

Regardless, the best cabinet Secretaries are likely to resign. Marco Rubio will quit so that he can run for President in 2028 against the sitting Vice President. Steve Bessent will preserve his reputation by returning to Wall Street to make billions.

Their replacements will not be confirmed by the newly-Democratic Senate, and so they will be “temporary” appointments. The stature of a person who is attracted to these “temporary” positions will be commensurate with the title they stand to receive. In short, they won’t fill the shoes of their predecessors.

Trump will not have another federal judge confirmed by the Senate after January, 2027.

Foreign leaders are high-fiving, these days, if that’s something that’s done in foreign lands. Little foreign leaders from powerless countries like Canada and Greenland derived power at home by defying Trump even before this tsunami. Imagine their boldness now.

Bigger foreign leaders will be sorely tempted to test the beleaguered President. Putin may think, “If I invade Poland, Trump will oppose me or not. If he opposes me, that means the rest of America will support me. On the other hand, if he does not oppose me, that means I face no American opposition. Either way, I get Poland.”

Same thing with regard to China, Taiwan and Xi. Not to mention the crazies in Iran. Weak American Presidents make for a weak American presence.

And so, I arrive at a conclusion that is reluctant, especially since I voted for the man three times (or maybe I voted against his opponents three times).

Trump should resign.

There are several principled reasons for this. A resignation would of course immediately put the kibosh on impeachment proceedings. I suppose the Democrats could continue with their Congressional investigations, but they wouldn’t have the same teeth or be the same media show.

JD Vance as Trump’s successor would not be tainted with Trump-poison as badly as Trump himself. He might even be able to find some talent for a cabinet.

The overall GOP would be much less tainted by Trumpism. There is some chance that we could regain power in the states and maybe even win the Presidency in 2028. (However, the Senate and House are probably lost until at least 2030. There will be no Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices until at least 2030, by which time Justices Alito and Thomas will probably have been replaced by Justices that are much less conservative.)

Democrats would of course rejoice for a moment at Trump’s resignation. I don’t like happy Democrats any more than you do. But let’s form a strategy more nuanced than, “Whatever makes Democrats happy for a moment is the thing we should not do.”

A recent piece in Real Clear Politics pointed out that the American people agree on a lot of things, notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that politics is polarized these days.

For example, the American people agree that the borders should not be open. They agree that people should present a photo ID when voting. They agree that men should not compete in women’s sports.

Not only do the people in general agree on these things, ordinary Democrats tend to agree on these things, too. (This is not true of every Democrat, of course; a few Democrats – and Republicans, too – are real loons.)

But these policies that most people favor – and most Democrats favor, too – are often opposed by elected Democrat politicians. Why do they oppose things that the Democrat rank and file support?

The short answer is that the elected Democrats are extremists.

OK, that’s the short answer. Elected Democrat politicians are more extreme than ordinary Democrat voters. But it leaves unanswered the bigger question: Why?

The longer answer to the bigger question is that the Democrats have become captive to large, left-leaning special interest groups. They are captive to the unions (especially the teachers’ unions), the environmentalists, the racial minority groups (especially the Blacks), the worldwide socialism movement (e.g., the George Soros family), and now the Muslims.

Each of these interest groups is far left in its own way. The environmentalists are utopian. The Blacks still see the Democrats as their Civil Rights saviors, since most are too young to remember Jim Crow. The Muslims have been at war with Western Civilization for, well, forever. The socialists are leftists by definition. Sadly, the teachers’ unions are more a union and less a group of teachers. Like all unions, they prefer collectivism over merit. 

These interest groups donate massive amounts of money to the elected Democrats. In return, the donors demand that the elected Democrats stand against the will of their voting constituency and in favor of the will of these leftist donors.

In short, elected Democrats are bought off.

The great scandal of our age in politics is that Democrat politicians have chosen their personal interest in getting re-elected over the policy interests of ordinary Democrats. An honest news media would report it.

Well, that was ugly. I wish someone had warned us.

I used to think anything and everything could be blamed on voter fraud, but not this slaughter. We just got our butts kicked.

If this were softball, they’d have invoked the 10-run rule by about 8 pm. If this were a date, she’d have crawled out the womens’ bathroom window before the entree arrived. If this were a job interview, they’d have dismissed you early. If this were a naughty sext message, you would have accidentally sent it to your mom.

Two years ago, we had everything – the Presidency, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the majority of voters. Now, we’ve lost the Senate and House. They’re threatening to pack the Supreme Court. The Presidency is occupied by lamest of lame ducks since the day Daffy Duck got shot-gunned by Elmer Fudd, just before somebody or something said, “Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”

As for the voters, they took a bye. At least the Republicans did.

So, where to now? The good news, as we just proved, is that two years is a long time in politics. Democrats who persist in damning the duck won’t get much traction two years from now. If the duck was not on the ballot today, he’ll really not be on the ballot in 2028.

But his Vice President might. Better if he’s not, I think.

For a Republican to shed the duck feathers, to break this curse, to win the Presidency, it will take either (1) another patently senile Democrat leader, and we can’t count on that, or (2) a Republican with some guts, some smarts, some distance from the duck, and – perhaps most of all – some charm. JD lacks at least two of the four.

There are others, however. Marco Rubio is the greatest diplomat since Henry Kissinger, and maybe since Benjamin Franklin. He’s somewhat removed from the duck, but, then again, perhaps everyone in the administration will be duck soup.

Outside the administration, there’s Ron DeSantis. I like Ron, but I have a hunch that he’s not the one.

Nikki Haley? Nah, too many X chromosomes to get the Republican nomination. Ted Cruz? Nah, too much a senator (a very good one, I’ll add). An unknown? Nah, too unknown. 

Enough of that. Here’s my bigger message.

Don’t despair; it’s not worth it. This latest “most important of our lifetime” election will not change your life today, next week, next month or even next year. It’s mostly a media event. It’s click bait.

Sure, it may change the lives of our children, but maybe it’s time to stop treating our children like children. Maybe the governance of their country by the people of their choosing is their problem, huh?

Political junkies are like sports junkies. As a political junkie myself at times, I’ll confess that both types have small lives. Both types seek through their tribe a substitute for friends they never had. Both types seek the gratification of winning without the effort of competing. Both types seek an emotional connection unburdened by the obligations of commitment and closeness.

Mostly, this so-called connection is a shared hatred. It’s “Fuck the other side!” Seriously, would you want to be friends with James Carville or Tucker Carlson? Or Donald Trump or Chuck Schumer?

Save your emotions for people who are worth it and for things within your control. Enjoy the grandkids. Get in shape. Watch the snow fall. Walk the Camino de Santiago. Go bowling – with friends, not the tribe.

It doesn’t matter whether your tribe wins the Senate or the Superbowl, I promise you. You have only one life. Don’t waste it as a spectator – or a tribesman.

Michigan is a very American place. Yes, the Muslims dominate Dearborn but, by and large, it’s a place of hunting, car making and good schools.

Unlike California or (it pains me to say it) my home of Colorado in recent years, Michigan is still a place of ordinary Americans. It’s the heart of America, though a bit to the northeast.

Those ordinary Americans are frustrated this election year by another Mideast war, President Trump’s motorized mouth, higher gasoline prices (but still not high by world standards), President Trump’s motorized mouth, the remnants of President-ish Biden’s senility (for which we should sympathize), the radical policies implemented by Biden’s handlers who cravenly exploited that senility (and deserve no sympathy), and President Trump’s motorized mouth.

Michigan is a good proxy for America in weighing how America “feels” about those issues. I use the word “feels” quite deliberately. We ordinary Americans vote our feelings, not our analyses. We’ve been taught from a young age, after all, that feelings are never wrong. If my feelings on a given issue differ from yours, then we’re both right!

Everything on the Michigan ballot this year is dwarfed by one monumental issue of feelings. The feeling is this:

Do you hate the Jews?

The question is not phrased that way, of course. But almost.

The Senate candidates in Michigan are a solid, well-respected mainstream Republican – think Gerry Ford from Grand Rapids – and a Muslim named Abdul El-Sayed who has advocated the usual panoply of socialist solutions such as punitive tax rates, freebies for everyone except those who deserve them, defunding the police, and so on.

In the minds of ordinary Americans, the socialist solutions are, unfortunately, mistaken but not disqualifying. In fact, this election will produce a number of candidly socialist winners, including in Colorado.

Socialism is a fashion. It will sometimes be all the rage, much like bell-bottom pants, and then it will fade to the status of a joke. Rinse, repeat.

But El-Sayed in Michigan has another policy which is timeless and troublesome. He hates Jews.

El-Sayed’s hatred is often in the guise of hate for the Jews’ nation, Israel. And hate for their defense. And hate for their money. And hate for their culture. And hate for their religion.

He’s fine with Jews so long as they disclaim all that, maybe.

Most tellingly, El-Sayed collaborates with people not running for elective office who are more forthright, such as Hasan Piker. He has unequivocally refused to condemn their Jew-hate.

El-Sayed finds solace on the other side, as well. Known Jew-hater and demagogue-for-all-seasons Tucker Carlson slithers to the front of the line. 

El-Sayed won his Democrat primary by beating a Democrat with a track record as an ordinary politician who appealed to ordinary Americans, albeit mostly Democrat ones in view of her vote to impeach Donald Trump and to codify Roe v. Wade. It was a hard-fought primary, and El-Sayed won by much less than the polls predicted. As losing primary candidates do, El-Sayed’s opponent endorsed him for the general election.

Then Jew-hater Hasan Piker published yet another antisemitic video. It went so far as to blame Israel for the price of American bananas and to blame America for “killing Palestinians.” El-Sayed refused to condemn it or even distance himself from it. Citing El-Sayed’s “hate,” the Democrat who lost the primary to him withdrew her endorsement and replaced it with an endorsement for the Republican. This was a Democrat who voted to impeach Doanald Trump, mind you.

When a Democrat beats another Democrat in a primary, and the week before the general election the beaten Democrat withdraws her endorsement of the winning Democrat and replaces it with an endorsement of the Republican, something is amiss.

What’s amiss is what his primary opponent alluded to: El-Sayed’s hate for Jews.

It’s troubling that his primary opponent is about the only Democrat to condemn El-Sayed’s antisemitism, at least publicly. Then again, I’ve noticed Democrats have gone quiet on their decades-long obsession with the epithet “Nazi” in their name-calling of Republicans. I wonder — truly — if “Nazi” has become a term of endearment to them. Indeed, that has happened in parts of Europe.

We’ll see tomorrow how this plays out. Will El-Sayed gain enough votes among people on the left and the right who hate Jews to offset his loss among those who don’t? Will this bigotry – the world’s oldest, most destructive and cruelest – become socially acceptable again, and then societally destructive again?

As Michigan goes, so goes America – and the world.

Bank robber Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks. His famous answer was, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Sutton would be puzzled by today’s Democrats. They cheat, just as many politicians do. But the Democrats cheat in ridiculous ways with little material reward.

The most recent example is cheating in Alaska, as if that’s so far away nobody would notice. Here’s the story.

One of the Alaskan Senators is a Republican named Dan S. Sullivan. If rival Democrats could find another Dan Sullivan and put him on the ballot, they realized they might be able to confuse enough voters into mistakenly voting for the wrong one. That could split the “Dan Sullivan” vote and get their Democrat challenger elected.

Devious, you say? In the minds of the Democrats, that was a feature, not a flaw.

The Democrats scoured the state to find someone with the name Dan Sullivan. They found him. Only his middle initial was wrong. His name was Dan J. Sullivan, rather than Dan S. Sullivan.

He tried to get on the ballot with an “S” in order to heighten the confusion, even though his real middle initial was “J.” The Alaskans ballot regulators didn’t bite, but he did get on the ballot as Dan J. Sullivan. Close enough for some confusion.

The Democrat challenger is one Mary Petola, pictured above. Cute glasses.

Petola and her campaign swore they had nothing to do with “Decoy Dan,” as the impersonator is being dubbed. “Nevah heard of him,” they said. “We’re not involved,” they say.

Then Petola fired her Campaign Manager, apparently just for fun. The Campaign Manager thereupon called up the New York Times, and sang like a bird.

She told the NYT that (1) she plans to sue Petola’s Democrat campaign for wrongful termination (these Democrats are a litigious bunch), (2) Petola and her campaign completely orchestrated the entire Decoy Dan imbroglio (I’m shocked!), and (3) that the Campaign Manager had changed her mind about the facts she just reported to the NYT, and wanted the NYT to forget the whole thing. (I suspect her lawyer was on the other line, warning her about violating her non-disclosure agreement.)

To their credit, the NYT did not forget about the whole thing. They did what newspapers are supposed to do; they reported it. And now, most other media outlets have similarly reported it.

Everybody is asking the Petola campaign for a statement confirming that they lied, or at least another statement containing the same lie. Petola is instead hiding behind a bushel of nothing-burger statements that neither confirm nor deny, whispering to herself, “Just hold out till Tuesday!”

Did the Democrats not realize that their scheme was high-risk? They’ve now discredited their Alaska campaign and also tainted (more) their overall brand. Willie Sutton would have advised against this high-risk, low-reward strategy. So why did they do it?

I have a theory.

Democrats are so wound up in their anti-Western Civilization crusade that they enjoy breaking the rules. They break campaign laws and honesty principles and decorum rules for the same reason they graffiti the subway, mug old ladies, burn Jewish delis, get high, and vandalize Teslas.

It’s not for the money or for any other material gain; it’s because it feels good. They’re psychopaths.

I’m about to say things you don’t want to hear. But I’m a prognosticator, not a cheerleader (even though I voted for Trump three times). So here goes.

The Democrats will retake the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections. They’re ahead by eight points in the generic Democrat/Republican poll.

We can assign numbers to this. Let’s look at the prediction markets rather than the polls, since the polls are wrong so often. The markets say there’s a 92% chance the Democrats will win at least a one-person majority in the House. In fact, the markets say they will gain about 20 seats. They need only a few of those 20 to have a majority.

The House will then commence yet another impeachment of President Trump. Only a bare majority in the House is necessary for an impeachment. With a 20-seat majority – or even with a one-seat majority – the impeachment effort will succeed in the House.

In the course of that House impeachment, the Democrats will have the power to elicit testimony about the matters for which Trump is being impeached. It won’t be pretty. There will be testimony about Trump’s self-enrichment schemes such as bitcoin. There will be testimony about his family-enrichment schemes such as the Russian oligarch paying big money for Trump Jr.’s wedding reception.

There will be testimony about who ordered the slow-down of Starlink over Ukraine, an order that appears to have cost civilian lives. There will be testimony about decisions in the Iran war, and second-guessing of those decisions. There will be testimony about Trump’s decision to fund Russia with sales of diesel fuel.

There will be testimony about issues we don’t even know about yet. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters acknowledge that he impulsively says inflammatory things. Imagine what he’s said in the Oval Office. We won’t have to use our imagination when there’s testimony under oath about it.

The Democrats controlling the hearing will have a field day. Think Watergate, but with all the guardrails removed. Replace Senator Sam Ervin who headed the Watergate Committee with Representative Hakeem Jeffries in the House.

The end result in the House will be an impeachment vote that Trump will lose. All Democrats will vote for impeachment, and 20-30 Republicans will, too, like rats leaping from a drowning ship.

Then the matter gets taken up by the Senate. The Senate has the power to re-hear the damning testimony elicited in the House, and they will. The nation will be mesmerized for months.

Now is when it gets interesting. Unlike the House, the Senate vote to convict must be by more than a bare majority. It must be a two-thirds vote. In a 100-seat Senate, that means 67 votes.

If the Democrats have about 52 seats – which is the most likely outcome of the upcoming midterms – that means they will need about 15 Republican votes along with all 52 of their own votes in order to get to 67.

The Republican lawmakers don’t like President Trump. Call them RINOs if you will. Call them statesmen if you will. But don’t call them afraid of Trump. Not after the midterms when Trump gets hammered and he’s the lamest of lame ducks.

If anything, the Republicans will be eager to show their independence from a man who was always an outsider, and, in the opinion of many, a bully and a lout. And at that time, he will have been tarred with scandal upon scandal in the course of the impeachment proceedings.

There is thus a very real possibility that the 52 Democrats will get those 15 Republican votes, to get a total of 67. Even if they are held to 49 Senate seats in the midterms, there is a real possibility that they will get the 18 Republican votes necessary for a conviction.

If the Democrats get those votes against Trump in the Senate, that constitutes a removal from the Presidency. Trump will undoubtedly say that the removal is invalid for this reason or that, but he probably won’t get many on his side, even within his administration. Trump’s effort to defy the Senate conviction will probably get very little traction (but the Jan. 6 guy with the buffalo hat will be there again).

J.D. Vance will become president for the remaining term. You might think this is great news – we get MAGA but without Trump. It’s a little like the Democrats’ Woke II – all the same Woke I craziness but rebranded.

But no, it won’t be great news. The country will be torn apart, much more so than in Watergate. Moreover, Vance’s reputation will be in tatters along with Trump’s. There will be testimony that Vance was in the room when Trump said whatever, or made some decision, and Vance expressed no objection. Expect the tar to splash on everyone, even Marco Rubio who probably won’t deserve it.

And so, the Democrats will win in 2028. They’ll have the Presidency, the Senate, the House, and, with Court-packing, the Supreme Court, too. It will probably be for at least eight years. God help us.

I wish I were wrong about all this, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I’ll trust the prediction markets, not my wishes.