"Nothing would have been worse than a midterm result vindicating President Trump’s first two years in office."

"It’s particularly nice to see Vladimir Putin’s favorite Republican member of the House, Dana Rohrabacher of California, voted out of office."

Says Bret Stephens, one of the the NYT's conservative columnists, quoted in "For a Second There, We Stopped Talking About Trump/What else does the Democrats’ new House majority portend?," which is a conversation between him and the liberal NYT columnist Gail Collins, who responds, "This is the world Trump has made: Bret Stephens sitting in front of the TV cheering whenever a Republican goes down."

There's also this from Collins: "You know that I’ve always had a thing about how the country’s divided between empty places and crowded places. It’s partly based on a perfectly rational assessment of needs. But it’s also partly based on a longstanding distrust that Trump has made truly poisonous. Kind of scary."

I think that means the people who don't choose to crowd together in urban areas are wary, suspicious creatures, and Trump figured out how to activate them by playing upon the character flaws and neuroses that were the reason they were living out there in the first place.