Would President Vance really ditch Israel?

Never hesitate to state the obvious: Everyone with eyes to see is recognizing that the US midterm elections have been sensational. The Democrats have achieved a stupendous – “historic” according to the Financial Times – triumph; the Republicans have suffered a crushing, Stalingrad-scale rout.

Let’s focus on the rout: This is the moment when, on the same day, a New York Times front page main headline promises to explain the GOP’s “historic collapse” while Tucker Carlson starts his show with a wry “well, that was a disaster” (adding that he really means “disaster,” as in the sinking of the Lusitania, not rain at a wedding party).

You may suspect both America’s paper of liberal Centrism and the former Fox host turned MAGA dissident of bias or, at least, Schadenfreude. Yet bias is simply irrelevant in this case, where, for once, the facts really do speak for themselves: The great, enormous, humungous GOP midterm catastrophe is quantifiably worse than the 2006 drubbing the party received for George W. Bush’s Iraq War insanity or the “shellacking” – in his own words – voters administered to Barack Obama and his Democrats in 2010. As the staid Economist has summed up the Republican fiasco, this is “not a normal midterm swing against a sitting president, but the biggest wave-election since the aftermath of Watergate more than 50 years ago.”

What is even clearer than that the Republicans have been devastated is that one man in particular has taken a stunning hit: US President Donald Trump. He may insist that he was not on the ballot as much as he likes. No one is fooled. Of course, he was, if not officially – as no president ever is during midterms – then all the more in reality. This was, the Wall Street Journal has noted correctly, “one of the most decisive repudiations of a president in modern history.”