The House of Representatives -- against the wishes of the Republican speaker -- seems poised to vote today on a direct rebuke to Donald Trump's willy-nilly tariff regime. This is interesting news at the start of a midterm election year, but it probably won't actually serve to rein in Trump. Even so, it would be only the second time the Republican Congress expressly pushed back on Trump for any reason at all, so it is at least noteworthy.

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Sometimes, when candidates or groups spend money campaigning for an election, the strategy works and the desired outcome is achieved. Other times, however -- especially when money is spent to "game" an outcome in sneaky ways -- the effort can backfire spectacularly. The latter just occurred in New Jersey, in a special election to fill a U.S. House seat.

Recently, the Democratic Party as a whole has been rethinking their insistence on "purity tests" for their candidates. Condemning fellow Democrats for not toeing this ideological line or that one can wind up in a "perfect being the enemy of the good" situation, as what otherwise would be good candidates with a decent shot at winning a race are turned away because they do not fully agree with some bit of Democratic orthodoxy or another. This can wind up hurting the party, as Republicans use such squabbles for their own benefit by highlighting the sometimes-extreme stances Democratic candidates have been forced to take. But while the Democratic Party as a whole is rethinking such strategies, certain interest groups are still demanding utter fealty on their own pet issues. What just happened in New Jersey is a prime example of this.

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Did everyone have a nice time in church yesterday?

I ask that question ironically, because while the big main event yesterday wasn't technically religious in nature, it is the closest thing we have to a national American religion that everyone can participate in equally: watching the Super Bowl. There is no overt praying (but plenty of spontaneous praying by fans of the team that is losing), no pastor or minister or priest or rabbi or imam, and no hymns. There was an actual wedding this time around (a first, surely?) but it was part of a staged musical event and therefore doesn't really count as a religious service per se. Nevertheless, an enormous slice of the American public gathered together around their television sets and all watched the same thing for hours on end. That's as close to a national worship service as you can get, even though it was completely secular.

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Today Donald Trump proved yet again that he is nothing short of a stone-cold racist. He reposted a message on social media that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. That's really all you need to know about it, other than the fact that (for once) it was so unbelievably offensive that, hours later, it was deleted. The White House blamed an unnamed "staffer," to which Black voters everywhere responded: "Yeah, right." Trump's hatred for the Obamas is well-known, of course, but even some Republicans complained at this latest racist outrage from Trump.

Of course, this wasn't the only outrage from Trump this week, just the most recent and most racist. There were plenty of others in the competition for the "outrage of the week" gold medal. So far, the one that is leading in the standings is Trump's new push to "nationalize" elections and have the Republican Party "take over the voting." In related news, the F.B.I. raided Fulton County's elections department and confiscated all the ballots from the 2020 presidential election, because Trump still cannot face the hard, cold fact that he lost that election. Now that all the ballots are in Trump's weaponized Justice Department's hands, look for an upcoming announcement that they have "found 11,780 votes" for Trump, as he had requested long ago. Welcome to Banana Republic America, folks!

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Today marks the end of an era. The geopolitical legacy of the 1980s has now disappeared. Today the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the United States expires, with nothing left in its place. Some are predicting that this could set off another nuclear arms race that could see all the nuclear powers beefing up their nuclear arsenal, while other countries decide it is time for them to join the nuclear club.

It is sad to see the world slipping back into the dynamics of the Cold War, especially for someone like me who came of age in the 1980s. Back then, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had over 50,000 nuclear warheads between them, at one point even rising above 60,000. Today, Russia and America have a little over 10,000 nuclear weapons between them, which is a significant reduction. Other nuclear powers combined have a few thousand of their own (China now has about 600, while France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea all each have fewer). China has been ramping up its production, and with all constraints now lifted the United States and Russia may begin doing so as well.

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Up until now, some Democratic worries about the upcoming midterm elections have been dismissed by the "It could never happen here" crowd as unfounded nightmares. They pooh-pooh such worries as being laughably outlandish and accuse people who express these worries for overreacting about things that couldn't possibly happen right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. But this week should make such scenarios a whole lot less laughable and a whole lot more worrisome.

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The government shutdown is over. Today the House passed the Senate funding bill and sent it to Donald Trump, who signed it into law. Which means all parts of the federal government are now open, and a full-year budget is in place for everything except the Department of Homeland Security (which only has a two-week extension). So the stage is set for the negotiations to begin over the reforms Democrats want to impose on ICE and the Border Patrol and all other federal immigration enforcement agents.

Democrats were smart to only allow a two-week extension of the D.H.S. budget. Republicans had wanted four or even six weeks, but that would have meant a big loss of political momentum and intensity. Two weeks maintains both, and keeps the pressure on to get something done right away. A bill will likely have to be written by early next week in order to pass through both houses of Congress by next Friday (the new deadline).

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I do realize it is Groundhog Day, but I am going to refrain from making the easy references to the movie of the same name, mostly because the elections in question happened over the weekend, not today. But it's undeniable that Democrats are on a repetitive roll, winning special election after special election -- and even when they lose one, they manage to shift the margins by double digits their way. Which all bodes well for the midterms, although how much of a harbinger this might all be is always an open question.

This weekend's special elections both happened in Texas: one for a vacant seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and one for a state senate seat. Democrats romped to victory in both.

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We're going to begin today with a prediction that is completely unrelated to what happened last week. Because next Friday the 2026 Winter Olympics will begin. Our prediction: the U.S.A. is going to get booed. Loudly. It'll probably be most noticeable during the opening ceremonies, but will likely sporadically pop up throughout the games. Perhaps this is why Donald Trump decided to skip the whole thing and send JD Vance in his place? Maybe Vance -- who is not as well-known worldwide -- won't get booed as loudly as the catcalls would have been if Trump had been there?

This all seems like a safe bet, since Trump has spent the past year being as belligerent and offensive as possible to pretty much every other nation on Earth (with the possible exception of Russia and a few oil emirates). Trump has insulted country after country, belittled and denigrated their leaders, thrown America's weight around as the world's biggest bully (and a psychotic one, at that), and threatened the post-World-War-II world order in almost too many ways to count. Trump has used the rest of the world -- Europe in particular -- as his punching bag all year long. So it shouldn't be any surprise if people from the entire world join together in a chorus of boos to let Trump and America know exactly how low we have sunk in the world's opinion.

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Democrats now stand at one of those rare junctures in politics where things can move quickly and public opinion is pretty solidly on their side. They have leverage, and even more importantly they have a deadline which makes this leverage immediate and potent. Rather than some dragged-out debate that goes on for months, change can be enacted within days (or at the most, weeks). And the opposition is already crumbling. As I said, that is a rare confluence in politics.

The ingredients for this opportunity include the fact that the last government shutdown didn't really solve anything other than punting the deadline out to the end of January. It also includes the negative shift in public opinion over Donald Trump's immigration roundup tactics, which had been slowly building up but then accelerated in a big way after two American citizens were shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis -- with both of their deaths filmed by other citizens from multiple angles. This spurred bombastic overreactions from government officials, who in both cases immediately called the dead people "domestic terrorists," while taking no blame whatsoever for causing their deaths. The stories they told about the encounter were immediately shown to be nothing more than a pack of lies when the videos appeared, because all the videos so plainly contradicted just about every statement the government had been making.

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