On this day in 1980, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein declared war on Iran. The conflict lasted eight years and killed hundreds of thousands. The U.S. backed Saddam, helping him mount attacks, including the use of poison gas.
Happy Monday! Itâs Swin. Itâs very hard to overstate the magnitude of the blow dealt by American voters and the political opposition last week to Donald Trump and the ratcheted-up, warmongering, economy-rending fascism of his Republican Party.
Democrats are (deservedly!) still celebrating, as their historic wins keep growing. And no, youâre not imagining it: Trump and the GOP are very much demoralized, frantically hunting for scapegoats, and freaking out about coming legal consequences and Democratic-led probes into two long years of depraved lawlessness.
And yet⌠in spite of all the sweeping midterm victories, there is one Democratic loss that cannot be ignored. Itâs destined to sting in the minds of many left-wing operatives and politicians, who will long ask what could have been.
In todayâs âFirst Draft,â weâll dive right into what is perhaps the Demsâ sorest bruise hidden behind their collective euphoria over Election Night. Plus, Trump initiated a farcical weekend of frantic speculation about whether he was going to make UFC CEO Dana White his new White House press secretary. Really. On we go.
They âDidnât Even Tryâ
As Democrats cheered and MAGA sobbed and turned on itself, conservatives tried to find some semblance of a silver lining in the midterm results. One word they cling to: Florida. The Sunshine State âheld the line,â according to Ron DeSantis, its MAGA-courting governor and President Donald Trumpâs former-rival-and-sometimes-ally.
DeSantis is only sort of right. The Trump White House watched in horror as they suffered collapses in deep-red terrain such as Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Mississippi, and beyond â but the party did manage to stave off losses in the closely watched governorâs race and U.S. Senate election in Florida. The âblue tsunamiâ didnât slam into the state the way it did in others. It did, however, spritz it, even while Trump-backed Byron Donalds beat David Jolly in the gubernatorial contest and Ashley Moody secured the Senate slot, besting the unabashedly left-wing Angie Nixon, someone whom plenty of influential mainstream Dems dismissed as destined to lose.
To quote an American classic: âIt donât matter if you win by an inch or a mile â winningâs winning.â Still, the problem for those intra-party skeptics, and for the Florida GOP, is that those races were a lot closer than they should have been, to the point that Floridaâs Republican elite were having heartburn up until the races were called.
They had good reason to worry. Since Election Day last Tuesday, Iâve talked to prominent strategists and pollsters from the Democratic and Republican sides, all of whom worked on or were close to those competitive races in the Sunshine State.
This is what they told me.