7 November—Still more readers—one yesterday, two today—report not receiving the daily link. The Monitor can’t do anything but apologize even though it’s not our fault. We must remind readers that we don’t unilaterally delete any address from our mailing list and have posted a Daily Disquisition every day since whenever. And if you really care it’s not that hard to go to the website yourself.

And everybody is beautiful and we love you all. Just like you know who. Except, of course, the poor souls on his enemies list, which will make Richard Nixon’s look like a list of wedding guests. The scumbag’s revenge.

On the subject of Trump, then, we’ve received some brief, pithy comments reacting to yesterday’s lamentation on the result of the presidential election. El Liberalissimo simply emailed “Shit!” (That had in fact been our title for the essay before the bowdlerized “You asked for it . . . ,” by the way.) A rational Republican remarked, “How could they!!?!!” “Fucked again!” from another exasperated Republican.

And, alluding to our perceptive and entirely accurate reference to the great unwashed, a brilliantly mordant reader observed, “Rumors have it that he’s going to give out a lifetime supply of soap to the hordes.”

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Today is the 150^th anniversary of what’s considered the first appearance of the elephant representing the Republican Party. It’s actually not the first, just the one remembered as such. And that’s what counts. So this is Thomas Nast’s cartoon with the GOP pachyderm that was published in the 7 November 1874 Harper’s Weekly:

Nast’s “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion. And such a Lion! and such a Jackass!” had appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1870. This is it:

But the jackass representing Democrats actually went back to the 1828 presidential campaign, in which Andrew Jackson’s opponents called him a jackass. Rather than rejecting it, he used the image of the strong-willed equine in his campaign posters. He went on to defeat incumbent John Quincy Adams to become America’s first Democratic president. That was a very nasty campaign, by the way, as most were back then. Knocking copy and vicious mudslinging are nothing new . . .