Editorial Roundup: United States
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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Nov. 6
The Washington Post wonders if Democrats are serious about affordability
Emboldened by the scale of Democratic victories in the midterms, a small group of liberals is trying to blow up a carefully negotiated bipartisan agreement that would make it easier to build in America. Failure to pass this compromise during the lame-duck session would send a loud message that the incoming Democratic majorities aren’t as serious about affordability as candidates said they were on the stump. And a deal this good for the economy is unlikely to materialize in the next Congress, which is why unions for the building trades and electricians are fighting to get it done.
Unfortunately, Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), the presumptive next House speaker, wants to reopen negotiations. His spokesperson said on Thursday that the deal “falls short in several areas.” Without expressing opposition, Jeffries’s office said: “We must once again support the clean energy economy and combat the climate crisis with the fierce urgency of now.”
Except the deal on the table is great for the environment. Democratic negotiators in the Senate consulted closely with their House counterparts. The agreement would make it much easier to build clean energy projects and the transmission lines needed to connect them to the grid. While some environmental groups criticize the compromise for reducing regulatory barriers to construct fossil fuel infrastructure, a recent analysis by the independent Rhodium Group concluded that the legislation would probably cut carbon emissions overall.
Given the soaring demand for energy, the reforms are necessary to boost production capacity and thereby lower electricity prices for Americans. The Rhodium analysis projects that if the bill passes, the average household would see its electricity bills drop $50 to $78 a year by 2040. The legislation also includes a provision obligating states to require large energy consumers, such as data centers, to pay for their electricity use.
Unfortunately, there is a potent “degrowth” faction inside the environmental movement for whom no deal would ever be good enough. These activists don’t want to create enough supply to meet energy needs. They want to make it harder to build, in the hope that scarcity will force society to reduce consumption. Down that path lies national stagnation.
Other Democrats may want an agreement but see an opening to maximize leverage. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California), poised to lead the House committee that oversees permitting reform, has argued for weeks that Democrats should hold out until next year to negotiate more favorable terms.
What these Democrats forget is that any deal in the next two years would require President Donald Trump’s signature. Trump’s announcement on Friday that Stephen Miller will replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff signals that the administration intends to take a confrontational approach to Capitol Hill. Selecting Miller bodes poorly for grand bipartisan dealmaking.
The path in the Senate could also become dicier if Democrats hold out for a better deal. Sixty votes would be needed, which requires Republican support. And several incoming Democratic senators, including James Talarico of Texas and Adam Hamilton of Kansas, hail from states with economies that depend on fossil fuels. Those senators might be joined by Mary Peltola of Alaska and Scott Colom of Mississippi, though they are in races that remain too close to call as of Friday night.
“It’s a bird in the hand. We’d be fools not to take it,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), one of the lead Democratic negotiators of the current deal.
The Trump administration on Friday attempted to shore up Democratic support for the package by advancing a handful of wind projects that had been held up for months under Pentagon review. That’s an encouraging sign that the legislation is not doomed, but the move also illustrates why permitting reform is necessary. Politicians shouldn’t be able to hold up energy projects at will and use them as bargaining chips.
Ultimately, this legislation is about unleashing the potential of American innovation from the grips of bureaucracy, which both parties have weaponized to block energy projects they don’t like. Giving up that power may be uncomfortable, but that is the essence of compromise.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/11/06/clean-energy-deal-democrats-should-not-walk-away/
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Nov. 4
The Philadelphia Inquirer says the midterms brought accountability to Donald Trump
The better angels won — again.
Just when it seemed all hope was lost, the American people on Election Day 2026 rejected the hatred, fear, and division sown by Donald Trump over the past decade. Empathy, compassion, and shared national identity triumphed over chaos, corruption, cruelty, and incompetence.
Somewhere, Abraham Lincoln is smiling.
Trump pleaded with Americans to pretend he was on the ballot. And they did, bigly.
Across the country — in red states and blue — voters backed Democrats, who took control of the House, Senate, and multiple governors’ mansions, including Pennsylvania. Gov. Josh Shapiro and Democrats now apparently command Harrisburg.
The midterm election was a massive and complete rebuke of Trump and all his anger, hate, greed, and costly policies.
Despite relentless efforts by the president and his enablers to alter the election outcome — through mid-decade gerrymandering, legal threats, voter suppression, money-for-vote offers, and baseless and exhausting claims of voter fraud — Americans peacefully waited in line, quietly mailed in their ballots, and carried out their civic duty.
The result was a resounding denunciation of everything Trump has said and done over the past two years. Americans are tired and fed up with his war, pocket lining, tariffs, cruel and senseless immigration enforcement, wasteful and often illegal Washington construction projects, selling out of allies, attacks on science and research, and trampling of the rule of law.
The proof was in the ballot box.
Turnout was huge, underscoring the power of one person, one vote to make a difference.
Democrats won Senate races in deep-red states like Texas, South Carolina, Iowa, and Kansas, where they have not been competitive for decades. The romp is not over, as Senate races in Mississippi and Alaska remain up for grabs.
The results were historic, signaling Americans still appreciate the benefits of diversity over racism, misogyny, and hate. Abdul El-Sayed (D., Mich.) withstood vile attacks by Trump, JD Vance, and others to become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate, while Chris Pappas of New Hampshire became the first openly gay man elected to the Senate.
Meanwhile, Gina Hinojosa will be the first Latina governor in Texas and first Democrat to win that office since 1990. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms beat billionaire Rick Jackson to become the first Black female governor in U.S. history. And Deb Haaland in New Mexico became the first Native American elected governor in the U.S.
The Democratic candidates were outspent in nearly every race, yet they overcame relentless attack ads filled with lies, fear, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and hate.
Trump tried to energize his base with rallies in red states filled with profanity, antisemitic tropes, baseless threats of jihadists and communists, and a strange obsession with men’s physiques. But the MAGA magic dust was not enough to distract from $6-a-gallon diesel.
In the end, a parade of Trump-backed sycophants, phonies, hacks, and incompetents were thrown out of office or rejected, including Ken Paxton in Texas, Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio, Darline Graham in South Carolina, Susan Collins in Maine, and Scott Perry in Pennsylvania.
Many of the Republican losers backed Trump’s war, tariffs, and tax cuts for the rich that have resulted in higher prices, interest rates, and inflation. The GOP enablers shrugged as Trump enriched himself, his family, friends, and corporations while the president’s policies hurt farmers, senior citizens, minimum wage workers, and recent college graduates.
Democrats won by such wide margins in nearly every competitive race that Trump meekly said he would accept the results. Even for the man who cried election fraud almost daily and sicced the U.S. Department of Justice on election officials, the mandate from voters was too big to rig.
For one night at least, millions of voters beat billions of dollars. Billionaires, big corporations, and law firms that shamelessly cozied up to Trump endured a well-deserved shellacking. But the threat of oligarchs remains and must be confronted.
We the people trounced trillionaire Elon Musk, who poured nearly half a billion dollars of his highly government-aided fortune into backing losers in Texas and beyond. Musk remains a foreign and domestic policy danger, with the power to meddle in wars and elections while spreading his toxic hate and racist ideology on social media. Not to mention his destruction of government operations during his brief and failed tenure running the dubiously legal Department of Government Efficiency.
Democrats would be wise to use their newfound power to put a stop to the flood of money corrupting politics. Democrats must also focus on the needs of average voters and not special interests.
Voters have given Democrats a golden opportunity to remake the party, rebuild the country, and stop Trump’s madness and corruption.
Democrats must use their newfound power to work to lower prices, restore healthcare cuts, end the Iran war, regulate artificial intelligence, rein in data centers, release all of the Epstein files, tame the deficit, tax the ultra-rich, pass real immigration reform, invest in research, undo gerrymandering, back Ukraine, confront climate change, stop the deportation cruelty, and investigate Trump’s self-dealing.
The list is long, and the damage is great.
But the voters have spoken. They rejected the wannabe king and demanded the American Experiment continue.
Hopefully, this marks the beginning of the end for MAGA.
Trump, increasingly incoherent, remains a danger. But after a decade of dragging the country and the world through hell, he is officially a lame duck.
It took some longer to realize that Trump ain’t making America great.
Now it’s time for the better angels to get to work.
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Nov. 3
The Wall Street Journal says Trump and Netanyahu discussed ending U.S. aid to Israel … slowly
President Trump’s Election Day surprise that he will end aid to Israel is less and more than meets the eye. Less because he is acting on a proposal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and joint plans that have been in the works for at least a year. More because of what the move says about the worsening politics of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Asked on Fox News about antisemitism and Israel in light of Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan Senate campaign, Mr. Trump riffed until he announced something new: “As far as paying Israel, ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu and I have made a deal. We give Israel $4 billion a year, and we made a deal months ago that we’re stopping.”
Mr. Trump said Israel has prospered such that it no longer needs annual aid. “We’ve already agreed that by the end of this year we won’t be paying Israel. Now, we’ll help Israel if they need it. They’ve been a great ally,” he said, “much more reliable than most.”
Mr. Netanyahu brought up ending aid, the President added, “because he understands that this is one of their points of contention.” The left uses the aid to score cheap rhetorical points against Israel and Republicans who support it, Mr. Trump said. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point . . . It’s almost too easy a target.”
The U.S. aid is often misunderstood. It took off in earnest only after Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, in which the Jewish state proved it could be regionally dominant. Phasing out U.S. aid has since been an aim of the Israeli right, and in 1996 Mr. Netanyahu initiated a gradual end to U.S. economic aid to Israel. Since 2008 only the military aid has remained—now $3.8 billion a year, including joint missile-defense research, set to expire in 2028.
Our reporting bears out that Mr. Netanyahu first proposed winding down this aid. He said as much to our Elliot Kaufman in 2024, and he spoke about it with Mr. Trump in 2025. The idea is to leave behind whatever patron-client relationship remains from the 1970s, when aid accounted for some 10% of Israel’s GDP—it’s now 0.5%—and instead invest jointly in military R&D as partners.
At first the President was receptive. But when Mr. Netanyahu raised it again in a December 2025 meeting, Mr. Trump wasn’t convinced that ending aid was in either country’s interest. Israel had to budget 6.5% of GDP for defense in 2025 and was planning to use U.S. aid to buy F-35s, F-15s, defense interceptors and more before 2028. On the U.S. side, nearly all the $3.8 billion in aid has to be spent in America, and the U.S. receives preferential access to Israeli military technology while keeping it out of Chinese and Russian hands.
With a high-tech and defense-tech power like Israel, which has a habit of learning from its combat experience and improving U.S. systems, there’s a strong national-interest case for U.S. military aid. That’s especially true if it’s restructured as U.S. investment in missile defense, counterdrone tech and subterranean warfare, as well as AI, quantum and the like.
Mr. Trump came around to the Netanyahu idea; if Israel no longer wanted aid, why force it? Discussions advanced to phase out the aid over several years, starting at the end of 2026. That’s why the President’s statement on Tuesday that it would all end in two months caught Israelis unaware.
Did Mr. Trump misstate the point? Or did he deliberately put it in the way he felt would be most politically advantageous?
The President may think it will help him, perhaps with young voters or the very online segment of his base, to be seen cutting off Israel. This augurs poorly for the Jewish state, even if it would rather tear off the Band-Aid with Mr. Trump, and map out a more sustainable relationship, than have a hostile Democratic President end aid as punishment after 2028.
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Nov. 6
The Guardian says Silicon Valley is losing its political power
This week’s midterms showed that the political bill for the AI boom is falling due. The Democratic sweep intensified fears over runaway spending, mounting debt and resistance to datacentres, sending tech shares tumbling. On Thursday Wall Street suffered its worst day since the pandemic as $3.2tn was wiped from markets. Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot, is hoping to float within the next fortnight for $1.5tn (£1.1tn), but it may not now get even a trillion dollars. The dominant AI chipmaker Nvidia saw its value crash by more than $400bn. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, lost $113bn in two days.
While a few very rich people may be a little less wealthy, the sell-off may not be a bad thing. It brings a needed dose of reality to an industry whose spending plans and valuations depend on heroic expectations of future profits. That is a view held by many influential figures – from Goldman Sachs’ research boss to Nobel laureate Daron Acemoğlu. AI may transform the economy. That does not guarantee investors will earn back the sums being poured into it.
Donald Trump is the other big loser. He rejected concerns about AI and the need to impose stricter rules despite most Americans wanting more safeguards. He called concerns about the potential dangers of AI development a “hoax”. Republicans paid a price for his refusal to listen. Mr Trump argued computing capacity was a national asset that needed to expand rapidly, while dismissing resistance to the infrastructure and the companies building it. The US president was deaf to voter frustration over electricity prices, water demand and disruption. Democrats could campaign against those costs falling on residents while the gains went to tech billionaires and their companies, which donated money to Mr Trump’s favoured causes.
Mr Musk’s SpaceX, a combined space, satellite-connectivity and AI group, warned in its June 2026 prospectus that new regulations could derail its growth plans. He spent $200m in Texas for Republicans as Democrats took aim at AI datacentres in a state where there was rising voter discontent over the industry’s rapid expansion. Mr Musk could not buy this election. Democrats won a US senate seat, the state governorship and wiped out every other statewide Republican office, taking the Texas house with a comfortable margin. Across the US, the blue wave saw wins for Democrats who have been critical of datacentre construction and pledged to slow or pause their rollout.
Democrats say they intend to make AI companies answerable for the environmental and societal costs of their infrastructure buildup as well as the harm their products cause. The new Congress is likely to be much more ready to shield voters from rising prices caused by datacentre expansion, ensure independent safety testing for advanced AI and clarify liability for possible harms. Democrats’ willingness to take public fears about AI seriously is welcome. People need confidence that elected governments can protect their livelihoods and communities.
Whatever happens to tech stocks, the genie of AI won’t be put back into its lamp. This year alone the technology was given as the reason 120,000 Americans lost their jobs. Politicians ought to strengthen workers’ bargaining power and ensure that productivity gains are fairly shared. Just letting the markets decide will only deepen the economic insecurity and political distrust that is corroding democracy.
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Nov. 8
The Boston Globe says Donald Trump’s vendetta against Ilhan Omar is worse than it seems
Wielding the power of law enforcement against political opponents is bad enough. But the Trump administration’s legal vendetta against Representative Ilhan Omar also reflects something more ominous: an ongoing effort to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, often on the same kind of flimsy pretexts the administration seems to be searching for in Omar’s case.
Last month, federal agents — specifically Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigations unit — executed a court-authorized search warrant and raided Omar’s home in Washington, D.C. The focus of their investigation appears to be Omar’s immigration paperwork and whether she committed fraud to obtain US citizenship decades ago.
According to The Wall Street Journal, sources familiar with the probe say that the federal government is trying to build a case to denaturalize and deport the Minnesota representative, a Democrat and longtime thorn in the Trump administration’s side.
Omar arrived in the United States in the 1990s. Her father — since deceased — brought her and other family members over from a refugee camp in Kenya after fleeing the civil war in Somalia, and she became a citizen in 2000.
One of the questions investigators are digging into is whether she or her father lied about her age on their immigration applications. At the time, her paperwork said she was 17 years old, which meant that she automatically qualified for citizenship alongside her father. Had she been 18, she would have had to go through her own separate process.
To be sure, lying on immigration filings is illegal and can be used as grounds to denaturalize someone.
But the evidence for falsifying immigration papers in this case seems thin — and points only to possible wrongdoing by Omar’s father, not the congresswoman herself.
Omar has been a citizen for nearly three decades, and Homeland Security officials under the Biden administration already investigated a similar matter regarding Omar and decided they didn’t have sufficient evidence of fraud to pursue the case any further.
What’s alarming about the revived Omar investigation is not just the individual details of her probe but that it’s just one case in a broader effort under the Trump administration to denaturalize American citizens at an extraordinary pace. In 2025, the Trump administration issued guidance to US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement offices to refer 100 to 200 denaturalization cases per month. And according to The New York Times, as of April, the Department of Justice has targeted nearly 400 people for potential denaturalization proceedings.
By contrast, before Trump’s second term, denaturalization cases were extremely rare. Between 1990 and 2017, the United States filed, on average, just 11 denaturalization cases per year — often targeting individuals who posed a threat to national security. There was only a slight increase after Trump was first elected in 2016, with the government filing about 15 denaturalization cases per year between 2017 and 2025.
The raid on Omar’s home also sets a bad precedent, which is why it should be roundly condemned by Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike.
If the White House feels emboldened to pursue denaturalization proceedings against people it perceives to be political enemies, then what stops a Democratic administration from digging into high-profile conservative figures’ immigration backgrounds? After all, questions around Melania Trump’s or Elon Musk’s immigration process have swirled for years, but does that mean they should be singled out and investigated so long after becoming citizens?
In Omar’s case, it’s certainly possible that immigration fraud occurred. The New York Times, for example, recently reported that Obama-era investigators found some evidence that Omar entered a sham marriage with a British citizen to help him get a green card, and they suspected that the man is her own brother.
But if that turns out to be true, Omar should be held accountable as a citizen — not a foreigner who ought to be deported. After all, that marriage occurred after she was naturalized.
Stripping someone of their citizenship should be extremely rare. The time for the government to litigate any potential problems with a person’s immigration petition is during their application process.
Once someone becomes a citizen of the United States, they should be treated like natural-born citizens, and their citizenship should not be conditional. Even if they commit a crime, then they should be taken to court and held accountable for that crime, just like anyone else.
But going after citizens, especially so long after they have become naturalized, over minor details in their immigration applications — like, say, Omar’s age — is clearly an effort to make all naturalized citizens feel like their citizenship status will never be guaranteed. And that’s a threat to the very freedom that this country has long promised foreign- and natural-born citizens alike.
ONLINE: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/11/08/opinion/ilhan-omar-trump-denaturalization/
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