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I wanted to share TPM Reader JB’s take on the November 8th election, even though it’s not mine. As is so often the case, what can be valuable about a take isn’t whether it’s “right” or you agree with it, but whether it allows you to see a set of facts in a new way.

Here’s JB’s view followed by a short rejoinder with my own …

Interesting little detail here. Back in October when Kevin McCarthy thought he’d be presiding over a big House majority he said he had yet to see any impeachable offenses committed under the Biden administration. Now the Freedom Caucusers, who hold his fate in their hands, are holding that statement over him. As CNN reporter Melanie Zanona puts it, McCarthy’s now singing a different tune. Indeed, he’ll sing, dance, do a slapstick number. McCarthy is now begging to be Speaker. I’m with Rep. Dusty Johnson (R) of South Dakota when he tells CNN that even though it’s really not clear how McCarthy pulls this off, somehow they figure he gets it done. I agree.

For some time now a number of you have been asking if I can send my Editors’ Blog posts to members by email. So I’ve decided to give it a try. Each day I’ll pick what seems to me the most meaty and important post and that will go out to members by email. Never more than one a day and not every day. But that will be the general format. Along with that post, in a simple and unadorned format, I’ll include a few links to other posts and additional sources of information that are worth your time to check out. We don’t want to send you anything you don’t want to get. So, if it’s not for you, there’s a clear link at the bottom of each email that allows you to change your email preferences to not get any emails from the Editors’ Blog. Try not to do a general unsubscribe because, if you do, we can’t send you any updates about TPM events or important things going on at the site.

Coming out of the 2022 midterms, conventional wisdom pointed to one lesson for the GOP: Voters didn’t like Big Lie MAGA Republicans. The Big Lie and MAGA have become all but indistinguishable. But to the extent they are distinguishable, if you came to the game on the back of a Trump endorsement, you probably didn’t fare well in 2022. The best example are all those Big Lie secretary of state candidates in swing states. Every last one of them lost. That and related defeats are what has given rivals in the GOP at least an opening to challenge Trump for leadership of the party. After years when he could make or break anyone in the GOP, in 2022 Trump looked like an electoral loser. Conventional wisdom is usually most noteworthy for what it misses. But the signal here was so strong as to be undeniable: Trump had a stranglehold on the GOP. But in a general election his embrace was toxic, except in solidly red states.

Today we have a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of Michigan against Neil Matthew Walter who the United States government charges with making threats against the lives of Congressman John Garamendi (D-CA) and FBI Director Christopher Wray. On checking Walter’s Facebook page investigators found “numerous comments stating beliefs that half the Senators, the FBI, CIA, police, Tom Cruise, and Elon Musk are involved in a child slave rape ring, listing various locations where these rings are located, one of which identified the United States Capitol Building.”

In other words, yet another QAnon/MAGA domestic terrorist riled up by the endless parade of incitement usually centering on Democrats running pedophilia rings. Another player in the same bucket as the man who bashed in the head of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband days before the midterm election.

Walter’s interest in Cruise and Musk just adds a bit of variety to the mix.

We build stories out of the messy, contradictory realities of our lives. Rich Fierro is the hero of the mass shooting at the Club Q, the gay club in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We need more heroes and fewer events that create them. Fierro is a retired Army major who appears to have had something approaching a flashback, a reflex response from the brutalizing violence he experienced in Iraq when Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire in the night club.

These are the indelible memories, psychic damage that haunt so many veterans. In interviews, Fierro has said they haunt him too and were one of the reasons he left the military. In this moment, though, they were lifesaving. Fierro rushed, tackled, disarmed and violently beat Aldrich, alongside another patron and a trans dancer in the club who helped subdue him. Numerous accounts include the evocative detail that the dancer helped subdue Aldrich by stomping him with her high heel.

After retaining the Senate, Democrats’ biggest win in the midterm election was locking House Republicans into a slender and brittle majority. Though holding the House would have been a boon for Democrats, it also came with significant disadvantages. There’s a thermostatic dynamic in American politics. One party in power for too long spurs a desire to provide some check on the incumbent party. It also builds up partisan energy in the opposition. 2024 is the year when everything is at stake, when either party could take total control of the federal government. Joe Biden holding the presidency provided a check on the worst that could happen from a GOP congress in 2023 and 2024. After that, all bets are off.

This morning the NRSC, the GOP Senate campaign committee, sent out an urgent email soliciting funds for Herschel Walker to contest the Georgia runoff election. No surprise there. Warnock and Democratic committees are doing the same. Let’s look at the details.

Here is what you see when you click through to donate.

I see we’re back to the question of whether Donald Trump should be allowed back on Twitter, whether Elon Musk will allow him back, what it will mean? All I can add to this debate is that getting hung up on this question is undignified and unwise. Put simply, it makes the supporters of civic democracy and Americanism sound weak, helpless, lacking the courage of their convictions and beliefs, afraid. (As I was writing this post, I heard that Elon Musk had announced he was reinstating Trump on the platform.) Much of this stems from the really wrongheaded idea that Trump leapfrogged to the commanding heights of American politics in 2015 because he got so much TV coverage or because people engaged with his tweets on Twitter. That was never true. All sorts of bad conclusions flow from that misapprehension.

Many of you are asking me what I make of Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint Jack Smith to serve as a special prosecutor to oversee the investigation into Jan 6th (he won’t take over current cases) and the Mar-a-Lago investigation. I think it’s fine. I strongly suspect, though here I’m talking more hunch, that it’s also bad news for Donald Trump and probably various associates.