After a Crushing Defeat, Trump Doubles Down

The governor-elect of Georgia is elated about her party’s victories in the South, but knows realignment is far from secure.

Today, we’re sharing an episode from a brand-new show called “METRO,” made by the Serial podcast team and the reporters here at The Times who cover New York City. Every other week, Sarah Koenig and her team will tell stories about the city and its most fascinating raw material: New Yorkers. They’ll bring you investigations, personal stories, essays and interviews that take the bigness of New York and make it human scale and relevant, no matter where you live. You can find all episodes of Serial’s “METRO” wherever you get your podcasts and in The New York Times app.

Warning: This episode contains strong language. Last spring, the political picture for Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, was downright bleak. President Trump was back in the White House. Schumer’s Democratic caucus was largely powerless to stop him. And restless Democratic activists were calling for Schumer to resign. Fast forward to this week. Democrats have roared back to power in both the Senate, where the party flipped seven Republican seats, and the House. And now Schumer, who personally recruited several of the winning candidates, is poised to become the next Senate majority leader with an unambiguous goal: reining in Trump. On Thursday afternoon, I visited Schumer’s office in the U.S. Capitol to talk about all of that during a 45-minute interview. In between profanity-laced descriptions of the president, Schumer laid out his plans for Senate Democrats over the next two years, including investigations into the Trump administration and legislation seeking to lower Americans’ cost of living.

The midterm elections were an electoral tsunami for Democrats: a complete collapse of the Republican coalition and a landslide victory. Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times, examines the results to figure out which voters showed up, which stayed home and how much billions in campaign spending mattered.

The party clinched the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, giving Democrats a powerful platform to counter President Trump.