What Fresh Hell Is This?

A Guest Post from Alby Damned

Evidence keeps piling up that Mr. Brexit might be barking mad. Tuesday provided lots more grist for the 25th Amendment mill, with reports surfacing of bizarre talks with foreign leaders last weekend.

On Friday, Trump reportedly told Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, “You have a bunch of bad hombres down there. You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”

Sounds grim, but I have Mexico as the first war in my Trump fantasy league, so it’s good news for me. Besides, I bet you can find a million volunteers in Texas alone who’ll invade Mexico if you give them enough beer.

Less understandably, the popular vote loser decided Saturday was a good time to strain relations with our strongest ally on the Pacific Rim, Australia:

“This is the worst deal ever,” Trump fumed as Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull attempted to confirm that the United States would honor its pledge to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center. Trump complained that he was “going to get killed” politically and accused Australia of seeking to export the “next Boston bombers.”

Then yesterday Trump kicked off Black History Month by rambling on about his grievances with the press and forgetting who Frederick Douglass was, if he ever knew in the first place:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Rev. King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice — Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.”

I wouldn’t have been surprised if he named Rosa Parks Secretary of Transportation.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters remain marching mad, and all the calls, letters and pop-up protests are having a big effect – especially on Democratic office-holders.

It’s even swaying the ocassional Republican, as HuffPo’s Ryan Grim relates:

Yesterday, Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, was talking to a handful of reporters outside her office and I happened to be there. The phones were ringing off the hook, and she said it had been like that since Trump’s inauguration, and 30,000 had come in in a single week. That’s a lot of calls from Alaska. Up until this weekend, she said, almost all of them were about Betsy DeVos, the unqualified billionaire nominated to run the Education Department. Today, Murkowski said she’d be voting no, and said the calls helped sway her. … Activism can work sometimes.

How happy are elected Democrats about this? The title of Grim’s article says it all: After Trying Everything Else, Democrats Have Decided to Listen to Their Voters.

New polling indicates Democratic women aren’t going to settle for simply marching: 40 percent of Democratic women say they will be more active in political causes this year, vs. 27 percent for men.

Those with an eye toward 2018 can take some hope from the Great Reshuffling of American voters revealed by November’s elections. This Atlantic article demonstrates that minorities and college-degree whites are now Democrats, non-college whites with the Republicans. The shift isn’t complete yet, meaning it has implications for the 2018 midterms:

All initial evidence suggests Trump’s presidency will widen, rather than narrow, the fissures that emerged around his election. That means for 2018 and beyond, each party’s electoral target list may grow increasingly focused on the members caught, in effect, behind enemy lines: the last few Democrats representing heavily blue-collar districts and the larger number of Republicans in mostly white-collar suburban seats.

By those criteria, Republicans have a few more seats to defend than Democrats.

Wish I’d Said That:

“There is no argument that can be made that Ben Carson is qualified to be secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His only qualification is that he’s lived in a house.”

Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America

Alby Damned is the nom de guerre of retired journalist and talk show host Al Mascitti. He lives in Hockessin.