tabula rasa 🏳️‍🌈

Barack Obama’s recent riffs about President Trump (“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory!”) and Trump’s rambling response (“I passed three cognitive tests. I’m the only President that agreed to take them. And they’re hard, you know? Obama—Obama couldn’t have passed it.”) underscored the split-screen reality of the midterm elections, Susan B. Glasser writes. “Two Presidents, two Americas. For ten endless years, our politics has been all about the vast gap that separates these two men, and the near-impossible task of trying to understand how a country that elected Obama twice could, so soon after, do the same for Trump. Watching them both on Wednesday night, toggling between screens and alternate universes as they shot barbs at each other, was a reminder of how very long we’ve been stuck in this loop. “What’s different this time is a sense—and, until there are votes counted and races called, it’s just a sense—that real-world events have intervened to make this less of an intractably divided country and more of a place where at least some shared truths are still possible.” Glasser reflects on Obama, Trump, and the midterms that may see the country bridging its divides: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/62…

The former President’s riff on Saddam Hussein, the Cheesecake Factory, and our gold-besotted leader was not only funny but politically brilliant. newyorker.com/news/letter-fr…

After years of gloom in the shadow of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and others of their ilk, progressives and liberals around the world are finding cause to celebrate. On Monday, Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, defeated the far-right challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, in his country’s Presidential runoff. Between Lula’s victory and events earlier this year in Hungary, where the long-ruling nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was ousted in elections, the White House has lost two hugely symbolic allies in its broader right-wing global culture war. No clear winner has yet emerged in the Israeli election, in which Trump had endorsed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and which saw a historic turnout of Arab voters. And the U.S. President may be humbled further in next week’s midterms, as Democrats eye taking both the House and the Senate. At the same time, protests have broken out across the world. People have taken to the streets in India, France, Belgium, Spain, Albania, and Italy; among their demands are access to affordable housing, job opportunities for young people, relief from the cost of living, and greater investment in schools. “There’s no simple narrative bringing together all the separate uprisings,” Ishaan Tharoor writes. But across the world, on the streets and at the ballot box, the right-wing movement is facing a backlash. Read Tharoor’s latest column: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/-a…