The New Yorker:

In a week of political exits, a reminder that Trump’s time is coming soon, too.

By Susan B. Glasser

Was this the week that America finally started clapping back at Donald Trump? Actions trigger reactions; we all know that. Yet, remarkably, Trump has spent the first nine months back in the White House plowing forward as if, channelling Lenin, there was all mush and no steel to meet his advance. Only a man who truly feared no political consequences could have chosen to hold a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate on the weekend before important off-year elections and amid a federal-government shutdown that is causing millions of poor Americans to wait indefinitely for monthly food assistance. In the face of such evident political malpractice, many wondered whether a video of the event, which showed a scantily clad woman gyrating in an oversized Martini glass, was an A.I.-generated stunt to make Trump look bad. But, no, it was real. He is actually that brazen.

It wasn’t just the party. No other President would have announced, barely a month before a statewide election that was already a referendum on his divisive leadership, that he was freezing billions of dollars in funding for an urgently needed new Hudson River rail tunnel to bring New Jersey commuters into New York City. In Virginia, home of the year’s other marquee gubernatorial race, an estimated two hundred and thirty thousand-plus federal workers, representing nearly six per cent of the state’s workforce, are currently going unpaid as a result of the shutdown—a crisis that Trump, after months of doge firings and rants about the evils of the Deep State, appears to care nothing about. Once again, the President has proved that he is often as helpful in getting out the vote for his adversaries as for his friends.

Go to link