The ‘secretary of war’ and his shameful history are facing bipartisan scrutiny

Can you smell the schadenfreude in the air?

Watching some of the worst people in the world get their comeuppance this week has been deeply satisfying. And the show isn’t over yet. While the midterms have wrapped up, the blame game is only just getting started, with Republicans desperate to find scapegoats for their shellacking.

Arwa Mahadwi is a Guardian columnist

The president seems to accept this is his last White House stint and is focused on renovating whatever he can get his little hands on

As you’d expect, the right is in a shambles right now. Elon Musk is making jokes about his “election-interfering space lasers” and pretending that he really, really doesn’t care that he threw away nearly half a billion dollars trying to influence the midterms. JD Vance is writing long essays on social media about how he agrees the Iran war was a bit of an oopsie.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, seems to be going through his own idiosyncratic grieving process about the Republicans’ historic midterm beating. The president has skipped all the way past shock, denial and anger and landed at the “admiring my beautiful renovations” stage of grief.

When the US’s first Muslim senator used Arabic in his victory speech, it cut through the torrent of vile racism Maga launched at him throughout his campaign

Repeat after me: yallah. YAH-luh. This versatile Arabic word means everything from “hurry up”, to “come on” to “speak to you later”. If you add a “bye” at the end, the meaning shifts to “please shut up, fool” or “speak soon friend,” depending on your intonation.

Next up: wallah. wa-LAH. Again, the definition changes depending on context and cadence. It can mean everything from “no way!” to “I swear to God.”

These resource-guzzling centres drive up utility bills and are hated across the political spectrum. Cue a clunky, but potentially influential, new name for them

Jesus may have turned water into wine, but Donald Trump has done one better: he turned Lake Ontario into Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. And then, for his next trick, he insisted we all stop talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and call it superintelligence (SI) instead.

Those, of course, are only a few of the name changes the president has ushered in. When he’s not golfing or commenting on senators’ buttocks, president Trump loves a rebranding project. Which makes sense: coming up with a new name is far easier than making meaningful improvements to people’s lives.

The first lady has been praised for ‘singlehandedly’ brokering a ceasefire in a Ukrainian city – though she might have had some help

Haters be damned: Donald Trump just keeps on winning. He won the inaugural Fifa peace prize last year and was presented with the completely real, totally not made-up “Man of the Century” award at a recent rally. The president has also spent the greater part of a decade claiming he was once crowned Michigan’s Man of the Year: a fantastic achievement considering there is no such award and Trump has never lived in Michigan.

But despite his many trophies, there is one honour that has proved elusive: the Nobel peace prize. Trump holds a bit of a grudge about that, recently terming Norway a “shithouse country” for passing him over for the award. In response, the country’s tourism board highlighted some of its nicest public lavatories with the tagline: “Norway makes shit houses great again!”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist