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I’d like to say just a few words about the happenings of this week

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Oh, Auntie Em, I had the most amazing, wonderful dream…

Things didn’t exactly turn from black and white to Technicolor while I sat up until 2:00 a.m. watching election returns, but at one point just after midnight I remember saying to my wife, “You know, this is fun!”  I hadn’t had this much fun during election returns since the last time I anchored the broadcast, almost forty years ago.

Watching the defeat of an evil empire of Christian nationalist, law-and-norm-ignoring fascists, even if it turns out to be only temporarily, the strongest emotion I’ve felt – am still feeling, almost three days later – is schadenfreude.  I know my mom (maybe yours too) would have gently scolded that’s it’s not nice to take pleasure in the suffering of others; I like to think that Elsie Joan would have allowed some grace in this case, where the “others” in question are people who have been so aggressively contemptuous of so many of our laws and of their fellow men that they deserve little sympathy.  I think they got what they deserved.

For your reading pleasure and historical backgrounding, here is a free link to the New York Times article with the inside story of how the Trump Administration went out of its way to shoot itself in the foot and make it possible for the lost-in-the-desert Democrats to complete a thorough and humiliating ass-whipping of a president and a party that felt they were bulletproof, all can’t-touch-this I dare  you to come against us.

It seems obvious to me that this election was a referendum on TFG in the sense that people have been so angry, and so offended, at what he and his black-hatted henchmen have actually done since January 2025.  At how they have failed to do things they promised that won them new political support in the last election.  At how they have actually gone about doing some of the things they did do in ways that appalled most everyday Americans (remember DOGE?).  At how they have made clear their disdain for the rule of law and even for the participation of the representatives of the American people in the House and Senate.  It turns out the post-election Associated Press polling backs that up.

People couldn’t get beyond the realities of life in Trump’s America: the Iran war and the senseless tariffs that combined to raise prices for us all while alienating our allies around the world; the barely-trained vigilantes ICE dispatched not to round up “the worst of the worst” but to terrorize immigrant society and kill a few American citizen protesters in the process; the unprecedented corruption and self-dealing; the self-aggrandizing efforts of a tawdry real estate developer to memorialize himself in our nation’s capitol – including the interminable gilding of everything that didn’t move out of his way – and the most godawful sycophants who were tiny-hands-picked by Trump himself as candidates (so bad that even staunch conservatives just couldn’t stomach them – yeah, I’m looking at you Ken Paxton).

Yesterday I read another interesting explanation behind the enormous vote “against Trump” not only all across the country, but especially from Black and Hispanic voters: they were responding to the Republicans assault on voting rights.  That is, Trump’s pressure on states to redraw their Congressional district lines ahead of schedule – because, he said, Republicans were “entitled” to more seats due to their winning margin in 2024 (that’s not ever a reason why lines are drawn the way they are) – led to the elimination of many majority-minority districts across the country.  And the litigation over that effort led to a Supreme Court decision that further gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that political  gerrymandering is perfectly legal so long as it isn’t intentionally racist.  Justice Samuel Alito further ruled that drawing districts designed to elect  racial minorities constituted “intentional race-based conduct” and that’s a no-no.

Many advocates feared the worst: Between the 2024 and 2026 elections, Republican-led states reassigned over 25 million people, or roughly 7.5 percent of all Americans, into different congressional districts. One report concluded that “the only realistic path” for Democrats to avoid decades of Republican rule—and for Black voters to have any shot at electing candidates who represent their interests—would be “a rare ‘blue wave’ election scenario” where “voters turn out at overwhelming rates.”

Tuesday was not just a wave. It was a tsunami. Preliminary data from the University of Florida Election Lab indicates that approximately 48.8 percent of eligible voters participated in the 2026 midterm election, making it the second-highest midterm turnout in over a century. Other early reports indicate that Black voter turnout in particular soared, rivaling the numbers of Barack Obama’s first presidential run.

And Black folks are mad as hell: In a poll of 700 Black women shortly before the election, for example, 87 percent said that the nullification of the Voting Rights Act and the surge of racially discriminatory attacks on the franchise made them more motivated to vote. A New York Times analysis of 2026 midterm trends shows that 91 percent of Black voters supported Democrats—a considerably higher amount than that of any other racial group.

Republican elites underestimated Black voter turnout and overestimated their own level of support. Now, instead of collapsing, Black representation is expected to remain relatively steady in Congress. Black candidates made historic inroads in statewide elections for offices like the Senate, which are not affected by redrawing individual district maps; and in the House, Black candidates won many contested seats, gerrymandering be damned.

Hey, would you look at that: actually voting makes a difference.

The results we saw in this week’s election were not just thanks to an overwhelming response from voters fed up with TFG and his sycophants in the Administration and in Congress.  Writing in Slate, Richard Hasen reminds us that thousands of people have been working, for years, to be ready to fight if Trump carried through on his threats to steal the election.

There were legitimate concerns Trump would go further [than he ultimately did], such as by seizing ballots or voting machines while states were tabulating ballots and certifying results. People also worried he would invoke the Insurrection Act or declare a national emergency as a pretext for a federal election takeover. He publicly said he wanted a federal takeover of elections in Democratic states. His administration refused to categorically rule out sending ICE officers or other agents to the polls, or to abstain from messing with state election certifications.

That none of this happened is a testament to the very hard work that has been underway for years. It was not just one individual or group that saved American democracy. Civil rights lawyers, who have been in the trenches for years fighting for voting rights, pivoted to fighting against attempts to steal elections. Nonprofit election protection organizations mobilized civic, business, and religious leaders to bolster support for threatened election officials. Foundations and voters stepped up to fund this intense work. Democratic and Republican election officials conducted war games, considering what to do if the DOJ showed up with warrants for ballots or to arrest election administrators. Citizen groups mobilized in case ICE agents showed up at the polls. Courts decided emergency election cases, often on absurdly compressed timetables, and judges across the legal and political spectrum held the line. Journalists relentlessly explored the weak spots in how elections are run, pressed the Trump administration for answers, and reported fairly about the risks. Voters turned out in droves and named democracy as one of their primary concerns, along with corruption, for their votes. They rejected election deniers who wanted to run elections in 2028.

Are you like me, have you noticed since the votes have been counted we’re seeing a few leaders of MAGA World seem to be maybe trying to find their way back out of the wilderness and into the good old Grand Old Party, the one that up until 2016 thought Trump the candidate was thoroughly unqualified to be president and an embarrassment on top of that, but who changed their tune by the time he finished his hostile takeover at the 2016 Republican Convention?  People like Ted Cruz.  Back then Cruz was strongly anti-Trump (and acted pretty provoked when Trump insulted Cruz’ wife) until after the convention; since then he has been a strong and verbal backer of the Republican in the White House.  That, in and of itself, is not unusual: for a politician, there isn’t much future in being a vocal opponent of your party’s leader.  Cruz is ambitious, and not stupid.

But if you go so far as to defend Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election (in the face of absolutely zero pieces of evidence to prove it), if you defend his decision to start an unprovoked war, if you generally want it known that you and he are asshole buddies, and then within hours of your boy suffering a generational “ass-kicking” (his words, not mine) you can’t piously blame the war for your party’s loss like you had nothing to do with it.  If Cruz disagrees with Trump on important stuff, and I believe he does, it would have been nice to see some of that political courage when it meant something.  Same thing for other Republicans.

Here in Texas, every Republican running statewide on the ballot Tuesday (Cruz wasn’t on this ballot) was beaten badly, including our three-term governor and lieutenant governor; Democrats will also take control of the state House of Representatives (but not the State Senate).  I find it telling that as Republican legislators consider how they will approach governing our state without their party having a stranglehold on all the offices, some are panicking.  Like Brian Harrison, who is so fearful of the scary Democrats having some power that he’s calling on Republicans to change the rules of the game: to use the time between now and the next governor’s swearing-in in January “to restore separation of powers and limit the emergency powers that Governor-Elect Hinojosa is set to inherit, which would allow her to destroy liberty in Texas by executive fiat.”

So, the Republican legislature was just fine with destroying the separation of powers so Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick do whatever they wanted without oversight, but we can’t trust a Democrat not to “destroy liberty” in Texas?  Who believes this crap?  What a pathetic bunch.

I am mindful that this enormous win at the polls for Democrats does not end the fight.  We still have as president the man who’s been stuffing bribe money into his own pockets while promising to end a war he started (and then not doing it), who thinks imposing tariffs on imports does not mean Americans pay higher prices for goods (it does), who doesn’t think he himself has any responsibility for his party getting its head handed to it at the polls (he does), who thinks his eye for design is high class (it is not), and who just today selected as his new White House chief of staff the one adviser who is most responsible for all the crap ICE has pulled since January of last year.  (Of all the terrible aides in this White House, why pick the one who sleeps hanging upside down to be in charge?)  Even if this Administration doesn’t try to stop Democrats from taking control of Congress in January, and I say that is not a given no matter what they’re saying now, we’ll still have two more years of this guy in charge.  Maybe we can take some pleasure in watching his minions defending their past actions when they get to testify before Congressional committees.  Now that’s entertainment!

83 millions reasons to be happy

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

If it is true that we like to see good things happen to good people, I suppose it’s also true that we like to see bad things happen to bad people.  I know I do.  So today is a very happy day indeed, to see that a New York jury has awarded $83.3 million in damages to the writer suing Donald Trump for “defaming her in social media posts, news conferences and even on the campaign trail ever since she first accused him in 2019 of raping her in a department store dressing room decades earlier.”  Most of that, $65 million, is punitive damages – punishment for the defendant’s conduct.  Well done, sir!

I’d be stunned (shocked, like Claude Rains was) if Trump ever paid the money – he has a long history of delaying and deferring and settling lawsuits for pennies on the dollar with adversaries who’d rather take something than nothing at all – but it is heartening any time he doesn’t get his way with his bullying and bloviating and insistent lying.  Lying, like just last night, when he repeated his worn-out self-defense of the original rape/sexual assault allegation, insisting “I don’t even know who this woman is.  I have no idea who she is, where she came from.”  In present tense.  Really?  Even if that were true years ago when the accusation was first made, how can you honestly claim today that you do not now know who she is?  Is telling the truth just that hard for you?  (“I know you lie, your lips are moving…”)

This has also been an opportunity for the former guy to give us another demonstration – as if we needed one – of his wide-ranging ignorance.  He used his own social media service this afternoon to say he disagrees with all the verdicts in this case, that he will appeal today’s decision on damages, that he blames Democrats for the suit in the first place (huh?), and that some unspecified “they” have “taken away all First Amendment rights,” presumably by limiting his testimony in court and restricting some of the witnesses his lawyers wanted to call.  Of course, “they” have not and did not do that.  At all.  But you knew that.

You knew that the First Amendment right to free speech does not mean that we are all endowed with the right to say any thing we want, at any time we want, any where we want, to any body we want, and that no one can do any thing about it.  The First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring your speech or other expressions of opinion, unless the speech in question falls into one of the categories which the courts have determined are NOT protected: child pornography, or a solicitation to commit a crime, for instance…or in this case, speech that is defamatory.

Judges have a right to run their courts; a higher court can punish this one if he is found to have violated the law.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen in this case.

Meanwhile, there are more courts hearing cases against you know who: the judge in the New York civil fraud trial against Trump and his business promised a ruling before the end of the month, and then there are the rest of the now-famous 91 indictments, including the it-seems-really-clear-he-did-it classified documents case in Florida.  AND some Republicans are starting to admit, publicly, that Trump’s acknowledged efforts to get the GOP to refuse to compromise with Democrats to pass an immigration bill…

…Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable.

…are bad for the party and bad for the country.  Of course, what is good for the party and good for the country have never been priorities for the former guy.