The post-midterm Trump has surprised no one by continuing to contradict himself. While admitting on "60 Minutes" that his deportation policy had been “too tough,” he almost simultaneously appointed hard-line epitome Stephen Miller as his chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. According to Jonathan Blitzer (The New Yorker Daily, Nov. 6),
“Miller has directed many of the government’s most radical acts. ... The military’s bombing of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific can be traced back to Miller. ... [Trump’s] new chief of staff may well show us how ugly and painful the last stage of Trumpism can be.”
In The New Yorker of Nov. 7, David Remnick quoted the crude words written on X by Laura Loomer, described by Remnick as “a court bigot for the Administration.” In Loomer’s reading of history, “America was always intended to be a majority White country. Not a cesspool for third world minorities.”
Unlike some other lawbreaking, norm-violating and self-contradicting heads of government, Trump allows journalists to ask questions before a battery of TV cameras. At times, moreover, he is memorably truthful. On CBS’s "60 Minutes" he said it would be easy to say he would forgive his enemies, but he couldn’t. “Can I be honest?” Trump said, adding, “I probably cannot do that now because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.”
Yet, is this what the leader of the U.S. would say to Israelis and Palestinians who, whether or not they like it, must live next to one another? Is this what schoolchildren should hear from their country’s president?
'Major Factor' in Midterm Voting
The Times of Israel informed Israelis that in that "60 Minutes" interview Trump acknowledged that a “great dislike, incredibly, for Israel” was “a major factor behind the Republican Party’s losses in the November 3, 2026, midterm elections.” The newspaper also wrote that Vice President JD Vance "suggested last week that Republicans would have to change their relationship with Israel if they want to win future elections.” And that “on the morning of the elections, Trump said the United States would cease providing $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of 2026.”
Those are significant sentences. Whether the U.S. administration actually reduces its military backing of Israel remains to be seen. Virtually all polling has seemed to confirm Trump’s and Vance’s reading that the undergirding of Israel by the U.S. was a major factor in the Republicans’ midterm drubbing.
In the second half of 2025, Americans watched Gaza’s children starve, saw thousands of old women and men forced up and down the coastal strip as if they were bags of coal, heard of Gaza families bombed in their homes, and looked at hungry youngsters shot while racing to collect a food packet. What was witnessed could not be refuted, forgotten, or explained away.
That harrowing reality of 2025 was followed this year by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which was not merely the exact opposite of Trump’s promise to America of “no more foreign wars.” It also placed a financial burden on all Americans, for which many seem to have blamed the special relationship with Israel.
Although Trump said this dislike was “incredible,” in fact it may have been entirely natural.
How the Democrats Perform
“Corruption” has been identified as another major factor behind the midterm results. Although not absent in the aforementioned special relationship, Americans seem to have noticed this corruption in many aspects of public life and punished the Republicans for it.
How the new Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House function will obviously influence the 2028 presidential contest. Interviewed on YouTube by Tim Snyder (author of the short 2017 book “On Tyranny”), Ro Khanna, who has been re-elected to the House of Representatives from what can be called the Silicon Valley constituency, said categorically, “Chuck Schumer must go.”
Schumer leads the Democrats in the Senate, not in Khanna’s chamber. It will be interesting to see if Khanna’s fellow Democrats in the Senate think like him. In any case, none can deny the significance of the midterm upheaval. Many America-watchers have shared the amazement expressed by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times of Nov. 10:
“As a reporter who has covered the South for decades, I find it hard to put into words my reaction to seeing Georgia elect a Democratic Black woman governor, Texas elect a white liberal senator and, as seems increasingly likely, Mississippi elect a Black man to the U.S. Senate.”
Big Stick and Big Money
Although I’ve traveled far and wide, and also encountered dozens of nationalities while remaining in India or the U.S., I don’t remember ever meeting anyone from South America’s landlocked nation of Paraguay. Still, like others learning about the tragedy, I was hit by the distress of the nearly 3 million Paraguayans who had put their savings in Ueno Bank, one of the country's most prominent financial institutions, before it collapsed.
Evidently Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, who’d been one of Trump’s close Latin American allies, is now facing criminal charges over the crisis, and is in pretrial detention in a military facility. The lower house voted unanimously to impeach Peña on Nov. 5, just minutes after he tendered his resignation. The Senate voted to remove him from office the next day. Another Trump ally, Javier Milei, Argentina’s president since 2023, had apparently helped the earlier escape from Brazil of Flávio Bolsonaro, who had failed to defeat President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Three countries — Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina — surround Paraguay, which has a population of around 7 million. It may be a small nation, as is Serbia in Europe’s Balkan region, where at the end of October a regime widely viewed as authoritarian was defeated. However, like the defeat of Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic, Peña’s ouster will be welcomed as yet another setback for the project of running the world with a big stick allied to big money. Larger (and sufficient) numbers in Brazil, and now in the U.S. too, have voted against that governance model.
Another Paradise Under Threat
For spectacular peaks, rivers, animals and birds, few states in India rival Arunachal Pradesh. This large border state lies to the south of vast Tibet, east of the kingdom of Bhutan, and north of India’s Assam state. Bigger in area than Assam, Arunachal has a much smaller population, less than one-twentieth of Assam’s. China’s supposedly autonomous Tibet region, we might mark, is almost 15 times (!) the size of Arunachal while possessing only about three times its population.
Today that small population of Arunachal, around 1.4 million, appears to be profoundly unhappy because the waters of their loved river Siang are likely to be stored in a new large dam called SUMP, short for “Siang Upper Multipurpose Project.” The scheme was the theme of a Nov. 3 article in The Telegraph of Kolkata by Sanjoy Hazarika, son and seasoned scholar of India’s northeast. Hazarika wrote:
“To the Adi community, which is the dominant tribe of Arunachal Pradesh (it has 26 major tribes), the river is revered as Ane Siang, or Mother Siang. The river itself debouches from the Tibet Autonomous Region of China as the Yarlung Tsangpo after a long journey over that great plateau and plunges through the deepest gorge on the face of the earth before entering India.
"The river’s name itself carries significance for the Adis: Si-ang is actually two words, meaning water (Si) and heart (ang), broadly translated as the heart of the river.”
Another story in The Telegraph (Nov. 6) quotes the ominous words that “Adi activist and engineer Katon Moyong” addressed to Pema Khandu, Arunachal’s chief minister:
“Pema Khandu, the time for discussion is over. No dam means no dam. If you build dams in smaller tributaries, our community will help you. But you have to exterminate Adi people if you want to build a dam on Siang.”
This story in The Telegraph added: “The Centre and the BJP-led Arunachal Pradesh government have argued that the project is needed to counter the potential downstream effects of China’s upstream hydropower developments on the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet.” Here is more of what Hazarika had said in his article:
“It seems that the Central government decided to speed up the process as India’s riposte to the world’s largest dam being built by China in the Namcha Barwa gorge in Tibet. That dam was reframed as a potential security threat and the SUMP was promoted as a bulwark against any water ‘pressure’ that China could seek to exercise.
“While the SUMP, if and when completed, would be the highest and largest dam in India, it would still be less than one-fifth of the Medog dam, and it would also have the disadvantage of being located downstream.
“The massive infrastructure building on the Himalayas — on either side — has extensive adverse consequences for our planet, not just our region.
“The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau are known as the water towers of the world. They are being plundered by deforestation, tunnelling, highway-building and other large projects. This is no idle talk — we have witnessed how, in Nepal, a huge chunk of ice from a melting glacier crashed into the upper reaches of the Trishuli river and triggered a tsunami-scale wall of water and debris that buried thousands of people. That took place as recently as August.”
“The government cannot appear to be Janus-faced. Internal harmony and stability are critical in this attractive, peace-loving state [of Arunachal] for its own sake. Not just because it is a strategic space.”
Can anyone doubt that further ill-advised tampering with the maltreated Himalayas, and with associated sacred rivers, would attract unforgiving notice from current populations and future history alike?
Price of Exclusion
Sadly, evidence of hardships faced by members of India’s religious minorities – Muslims, Christians and others — only accumulates. Here’s a report from the state of West Bengal by Debraj Mitra in The Telegraph of Kolkata, Nov. 9:
“A 35-year-old voter from East Burdwan urgently needs a new motorbike. As a trader of fibre-doors used in bathrooms, he must visit distributors regularly. At a couple of showrooms, he was told that a new bike could not be registered in his name until he had been reinstated on the voters’ list.
“The Muslim man found his name missing from [it]. The logical discrepancy he was flagged for stemmed from a minor mismatch in the spelling of a widely used prefix for Muslim names.
“His birth certificate and [another] card have ‘Sk’ before his name. His voter, Aadhaar and PAN cards have ‘Seikh’. (The word Seikh or Sheikh or Shaikh is frequently abbreviated to Sk.) He has filed an appeal [which] remains pending, like hundreds of thousands of other appeals.”
“‘My motorbike is almost 15 years old. I need a new one urgently. But I can’t get one. It means this [flawed voter revision] has not only taken away my democratic right (to vote) but is also affecting my livelihood,’ said the man, who lives with his wife, baby daughter and elderly parents.”
