[W]thout inflation and high gasoline prices ... Trump and his cabinet of brutally unqualified sycophants and the cowardly Republican Party would not have been punished so severely.
[T]he Democrats' advantage is overwhelming. But Trump has pursued a policy of increasingly concentrating power in his own hands and circumventing both Congress and the courts.
The Beijing summit did not produce a major agreement between the great powers on the region, but it firmly established that Middle Eastern crises are now deeply tied to the great-power dialogue.