I’ll conclude this piece with my choice for what should be the song of the sesquicentennial. But first I have an Open Thread to get through. Starting with, do you know who this guy is?:
Right now Congress protects him by staying silent. His party holds the gavels. Committees look away. Subpoenas never get signed. The money flows wherever he points. The whole machine runs on one fact. Republicans control the House and Senate, so nobody with real power forces him to answer for anything.
That arrangement expires on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
Here is where the numbers sit as I write this. Republicans hold the House by a margin you could fit in a phone booth. Democrats need a handful of seats to take the gavel back. The president’s party loses around 28 House seats in a midterm on average. Trump’s approval sits in the high 30s. His standing with independents has fallen into the low 30s, the same ground that came before the roughly 41 seat wipeout Democrats handed his party in 2018. Voters name inflation and the cost of living as their number one worry, and on that issue his disapproval runs as high as 78 percent in some surveys. The generic ballot favors Democrats by a comfortable spread.
A House majority hands the opposition three weapons the founders designed for exactly this moment.
The first weapon is the power of the purse. Every dollar this government spends starts in the House. A new majority decides what gets funded and what gets starved.
The second weapon is the subpoena. Committee chairs gain the power to demand documents and put witnesses under oath on camera. The Epstein files, the crypto contracts, the pardon paperwork, the war decisions, all of it becomes fair game.
The third weapon is oversight backed by the separation of powers. A coequal branch finally does the job the Constitution assigns it. Hearings and investigations. A daily, grinding accounting in public.
Now let me put the psychology together, because the policy fights are only half the story. The other half lives between Donald Trump’s ears.
This is a man who measures his entire worth by how the room looks at him. Strength is the brand. Winning is the brand. Take those away and there is little underneath.
He cannot stand ridicule. He never has. Watch how he treats anyone who laughs at him. The walkout on that Wisconsin farm was a small man’s response to a moment he failed to control, and that moment lasted 50 minutes. A relentless Democratic House does not stop at 50 minutes. The pressure runs 730 days. Subpoenas in the morning. A fresh damaging headline before dinner. Cameras everywhere. No off switch.
He copes with reality by denying it out loud with his 3 am social media posts. The election he lost was rigged. The war that rages is over. The prices that climbed are falling. The golden age is here. That coping works only as long as nobody with power stands next to him holding the evidence. A Democratic House stands next to him for two years holding all of it.
When all is said and done, I believe that a man who lives for applause does not sit still inside a building where the applause has stopped and the questions never end. He looks for the exit.
Did I mention that he ruined the Sesquicentennial? He’s also certifiably unfit to remain as President. No quotes here. Just read it.
Oh, and here’s last night’s Trump oratory at Mt. Rushmore:
Donald Trump has kicked off America’s 250th birthday weekend with an extraordinary partisan attack on the “communist menace” in America, framing its supporters as “the enemy of July 4th 1776”.
The president asserted that US exceptionalism is rooted not only in its constitution, but its distinctive culture and identity. He condemned recent attempts to “beat the American spirit out of us” and “alienate us from our history”, vowing to an overwhelmingly white crowd: “We are going to give our country its identity back.”
Trump then abandoned any pretence of making a traditional head of state’s speech designed to rise above the fray, unify political parties and strike a chord with citizens of all persuasions.
Instead, four months before November’s midterm elections for US Congress, he picked up on a theme he has repeatedly hammered lately: casting progressive Democrats as communists, who pose an existential threat to America. He was speaking hours after Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York and a democratic socialist, delivered a pro-immigrant address widely seen as a rebuke of Trump and his “Make America great again” movement.
Trump also tied his anti-communist rhetoric to the anti-immigrant theme that fuelled his election. “As we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack,” he said.
“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.”
He described communism as a greater threat to American liberty than the first and second world wars and the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. “It’s the enemy of the constitution,” he declared. “Above all, it’s the enemy of July 4th, 1776 … Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.”
Remember, kids, Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn, who helped craft Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist agenda. Trump’s taken the Wayback Machine to 1954. Neither McCarthy nor Trump had/has any sense of decency.
It’s truly a shame that this has to be my Song Of The Sesquicentennial. We had begun to make our way past the necessity of this song. But the racist and nativist nature of Trump and his coterie of corrupt enablers bring it front and center because Trump declares that America is a country fit for only some Americans:
What do you want to talk about?
“Resignation” in this context doesn’t mean much. Trump could walk off today and there is so much institutional damage to remediate. There are too many centrist dems who will treat a Trump resignation as a total victory and refuse to do the work to excise the maga cancer. The only way we beat back the tide of authoritarianism is with investigations, treason trials, and hangings. Children of liquidated fascists should be fostered to civilized, real American families.
Excellent insight from a man that studies the political playing field. I never thought that far ahead, Orange Jesus kepts me occupied with his deception, division and lies. I have always thought evil 😈 of this magnitude would perish in their sleep. I’m surprised to live in a time there’s two evil political powers national and Mayoritorial effecting Delaware politics all at once.