Attention to the Unseen

Doug Sosnik and Sara Fagen write: We are two former White House political directors—one of us, Doug Sosnik, worked for Bill Clinton; one of us, Sara Fagen, worked for George W. Bush. We’ve come together to give our assessment of the 2018 midterms—no partisan spin, just the facts. The following PowerPoint slides outline what we think about the results and what to expect in President Donald Trump’s Washington for the next two years. Here’s what we’ve learned so far: A…

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Andrew Coan writes: The most surprising thing about Wednesday’s resignation of Jeff Sessions is that it did not happen sooner. President Trump has long been furious with his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and has had the power to fire him at any time. Trump’s decision to oust Sessions also removes Rod Rosenstein as acting attorney general for the purposes of the Russia investigation, leaving the fate of Special Counsel Robert Mueller uncertain. This drives home…

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Politico reports: Special counsel Robert Mueller is set to emerge from his midterm campaign hibernation period with a powerful new ally as House Democrats surged back to the majority in Tuesday’s elections. The lead Russia investigator, who in the days and weeks ahead has a series of important court hearings and key sentencing deadlines for cooperating witnesses, will soon have a friendly audience of Democratic chairmen on one end of Capitol Hill who are primed with subpoena power to fight…

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The Atlantic reports: President Donald Trump has forced out Attorney General Jeff Sessions just one day after the midterm elections and after nearly a year of berating him for recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. Sessions’s temporary replacement, his chief of staff, is now effectively Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s new boss. But he’s expressed repeated skepticism over the scope of Mueller’s inquiry in the past, raising immediate questions about whether he will try to limit it. Trump, who…

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Conor Friedersdorf writes: Oversight is the winner of the 2018 midterms. For two years, as the press documented suspicious activity in all realms of President Donald Trump’s life, many Americans wondered, “How corrupt is the president? How about his political allies, his business associates, his appointees, and the people who run his nonprofit foundation? Are they profiting off taxpayers or selling out the public interest?” Special Counsel Robert Mueller afforded some hope of a partial answer. His investigation has so…

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Politico reports: Democrats wanted a base of power in Donald Trump’s Washington and they got it. They also wanted to wake up Wednesday morning to a radically changed country. They wanted permission to dismiss the past two years as a fluke of history, a hallucination now fading. And they wanted something more: to rub the president’s nose in the dirt of defeat and repudiation so badly that it would be hard to see him doing more than limp through the…

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Adam Serwer writes: It’s fashionable in the Donald Trump era to decry political “tribalism,” especially if you’re a conservative attempting to criticize Trump without incurring the wrath of his supporters. House Speaker Paul Ryan has lamented the “tribalism” of American politics. Arizona Senator Jeff Flake has said that “tribalism is ruining us.” Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has written a book warning that “partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War.” In the fallout from Tuesday’s…

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Cas Mudde writes: While there was a Democratic “blue wave”, it was modest, in line with usual midterm shifts, particularly when one party is in charge of all the branches of government. Trump will celebrate this as a victory, which is not without merit. Sure, the Republicans lost many races, and some significantly when compared with the 2016 presidential elections. But they still held on to most of their positions. Trump’s biggest victory, however, was within the Republican party. When…

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Hassan Hassan writes: Three years ago, then Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter attributed Iran’s growing dominance to its being “in the game, on the ground.” He urged its regional rivals to do the same, thus expressing a widely shared sentiment in policy circles at the time: Arab Gulf states needed to rely less on the United States and play a greater role in their neighborhood. In many ways, that is exactly what these countries have been attempting to do since…

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Jonathan Chait writes: At a weekend rally, President Trump launched a riff that, even by the feverish standards of his closing campaign argument, stands out for its brutal authoritarian overtones. The president mocked Antifa demonstrators: “You see these little arms, these little arms,” he shouted, forming his fingers into tiny circles to illustrate their puny biceps. And then he invited his supporters to imagine these weaklings having to fight against Trump’s own militant cadres. “Where are the Bikers for Trump?…

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CNBC reports: President Donald Trump’s move to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border is so far shaping up to have a cost of $220 million, according to two U.S. defense officials who were not authorized to speak publicly. The initial cost estimate, a figure that could change based on the ultimate size and scope of the mission, comes as nearly 4,000 troops moved to the border Saturday as Trump has repeatedly warned of a caravan of migrants from Central America….

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Adam Serwer writes: The Democrats’ defeat in 2016 ushered in a parade of pundits who argued that the party had failed because it had assumed demographics were destiny, and had relied too strongly on what they labeled “identity politics.” The truth is closer to the reverse. In Texas and other states, Republicans have sought to engineer the demographics of the electorate to be whiter and older, the better to run culture-war campaigns that scapegoat religious and ethnic minorities for the…

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