Top of the Ticket

Donald Trump could become a two-term president. His path to re-election is not very hard to see.

Start with the fact that political math is not especially complex. In all but the most unusual presidential elections, there is little doubt about how 80% of the electorate will vote. Around 40% will vote for the Democrat, no matter whom he or she may be, and about 40% is sure to vote Republican.

Imagine if Vice President Mike Pence killed President Obama’s first Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, in a gunfight. Even in the current craziness of American politics, that would be unthinkable, right?

On Friday morning, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will watch their Cassini spacecraft take a suicide dive into Saturn’s atmosphere, thus ending two decades of spectacular exploration of the giant planet and its multiple moons.

When the intensifying effect of climate change was brought into the news coverage of Hurricane Harvey, some conservatives objected. They said it was horrid that the “liberal media” was politicizing a disaster that had upended so many people’s lives. Now, the same complaints will probably be raised in the wake of Hurricane Irma.

Imagine if agents of the federal government showed up at your door and said you had to leave your friends, your family, your job and your country and move to whatever place your ancestors came from.

In my case, if that ancestor were the most recent, I would be heading for Norway, the country from which my mother’s grandfather emigrated in the 1860s.

Hurricane Harvey has exposed the weakness of the three shibboleths that have been the guiding political philosophy for two generations of Republicans. Those three shaky imperatives are that 1) lowering taxes is always a good idea, 2) government programs can always be cut and 3) economic growth must always be given priority over environmental concerns.