Since 2016 I have written about the fire. This year alone: the purge at the Pentagon. The diesel from Moscow. The Justice Department letter telling California ballot counters that a prosecutor was reading over their shoulders. A man gets good at whatever he does every morning, and I got good at alarm.
Then November 3 came, and my side won. Democrats took the House and the Senate. Some House races remain uncalled a week later. None changes the result.
Two days before the vote, I published “Nauseously Optimistic.” I expected to win, and I expected to be sick about it. I got half of that right. On Wednesday morning I sat at the keyboard with nothing to be furious about. It lasted most of an hour.
I am 80. I grew up Republican, back when the word described a tax position and not a hostage situation. I left by degrees: Vietnam, Selma, Nixon. Leaving teaches you how to lose an argument with your family and then how to lose elections. It teaches nothing about the other thing.
So take the strongest case against me. I spent October warning that PrumpTutin’s Justice Department would contest the vote. The vote happened. The Supreme Court refused the department’s emergency appeal the day before the election. A federal judge threw out its attempt to delay certification of Alaska’s Senate race. Trump told The New York Times he was “absolutely willing to accept those results.” The alarm rang, and the building stands. A reasonable reader says the alarm was wrong.
I started fighting fires at 16. A building that stands after the alarm doesn’t prove the alarm was false. Sometimes it proves somebody showed up. Judges showed up. Clerks counted ballots under grand jury subpoena. Voters showed up in numbers too large to litigate.
Then came Friday. Three days after the loss, the Justice Department dropped its own lawsuit over roughly 20,000 California ballots it said noncitizens had cast. It quit a week before a judge was due to examine its list. Its lawyers told the court the relief they needed was “no longer available.”
Read that as an admission. If 20,000 illegal ballots existed on Monday, they existed on Friday. A fraud case survives an election. A case built to change a count dies the moment nobody can change the count. The department told the court which kind it had filed.
So the win is real, and so is the rest. The new Congress takes its seats on January 3. The department is still appealing Alaska. Grand juries are due to hear from California election clerks this month. Trump followed his acceptance with a picture of a red hat bearing one word: VETO. He keeps the veto, the pardon, the military, and the Justice Department until January 20, 2029. Voters took his rubber stamp and left him the pen.
A subpoena asks a question. It does not recall a missile, rehire a general, or restore a sanction. This is a scant victory. A scant victory beats a generous defeat, and I have collected enough of those to tell them apart by weight.
I had one good hour with nothing to be angry about. On January 3 the Democrats pick up the gavels, and from that day the failures have two authors. I will have to write about both. I have no practice at that either.