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It will be a silent relief that there can be no possible claim that these elections, which had a high turnout and on which an astounding $5 billion were spent, were tampered with by foreigners. It is the final bust of any attempt to pretend that Donald Trump isn’t a real president, even as it wears out his effort to drain the swamp whose denizens, in both parties, he ran against. Also noteworthy is the failure or even demise of the former Democratic icons. President Obama bombed out in Indiana, as Oprah Winfrey did in Georgia, and Homeric Democratic efforts to crack Florida and Texas, where Trump himself campaigned hard, failed. (The sophomoric performance of the shirt-sleeved ex-president, claiming the economic boom was his, was especially painful.) The Democrats will have to live with Trump and his domination of the Senate, and Trump will have to change his playbook if he wants anything done in the next two years except the confirmation of judges and the unfettered execution of his foreign policy (matters where the House of Representatives has no jurisdiction).

The Democrats will have to live with Trump and his domination of the Senate, and Trump will have to change his playbook if he wants anything done in the next two years

There is a chance that the president and the bipartisan leadership in the Congress will actually try to reach compromise solutions of the great problems that their American constitutional system, for all the reverence paid to it, has failed to address. Immigration, health care, infrastructure, gun control, deficits and abortion issues are terrible problems and controversies that no configuration of administrations and congresses has been able to deal with. The collective government of the great United States of America has failed to govern in these matters. The last such wrenching issue that was successfully dealt with by the people elected to solve the nation’s problems was civil rights in the piping first two years of president Lyndon Johnson’s term, more than 50 years ago.