Connexion
Luke Nicastro talks to journalist and political analyst Gabe Fleisher about midterm predictions, how the political landscape will change after November, and what voters actually care about.
The post TAC Right Now: GOP Headed for Midterm Wipeout? w/ Gabe Fleisher appeared first on The American Conservative.
In a statement posted to Truth Social on Sunday, President Trump announced his “Complete and Total Endorsement” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election bid. “Bibi Netanyahu has been a Great Warrior Prime Minister,” Trump wrote, “and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Trump went on to describe Netanyahu as “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant,” adding that he was “the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much.”
The president also suggested that if Netanyahu did not win, the United States may rethink its military operations against Iran. “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi,” he wrote, “America will have to do this work [i.e., fighting the Iran war] ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.”
Israel will hold its parliamentary elections on October 27. Netanyahu, who is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, is seeking to win enough seats for his Likud party and its parliamentary allies to continue his premiership. His closest rival is former IDF general Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar party holds a narrow lead in most polls.
Although U.S. presidents have historically avoided endorsing candidates in foreign elections, Trump has broken with precedent to back political allies in Poland, Argentina, Hungary, Japan, Honduras, Chile, Colombia, and now Israel.
The post Trump Endorses Netanyahu in Israeli Election appeared first on The American Conservative.
Southeast Ohio is a long way from New York City.
People in Meigs County, Ohio, though polite, do not like to talk to strangers, which may be why election polling here is often inaccurate. To hear their candid views, you need to be someone they already trust, or with someone they do, in my case a college friend originally from this part of southeast Ohio. I had seen New York City on this same trip, and wanted to see some of the rest of the country.
Meigs is considered by many to be the northwestern fringe of Appalachia—not a hard argument to make. Many people live on farms, as their Scotch-Irish immigrant ancestors have for the last 200 years. The farms are far apart. Everyone is connected to one of the tiny towns in the area by old land surveys, modern tax collection, regional high schools, or by the church they drive in to attend.
The soil is not bad, though rocky in places, and farming is encumbered by hills. Summer is hot and humid, but the intermittent rain makes it easy to grow fruits and vegetables. People live off that in large part, selling to wholesalers and in small stands erected close to the main road. Signs were advertising cucumbers and sweet corn when I was there, so fresh they’d make Trader Joe himself blush. Many families also make crafts and raise bees for honey, which they sell to tourists who drive out from Columbus for a day in the country. The best local stuff, however, is offered by the area’s small Amish community. The Amish are shy, and you generally only know you’re in their neighborhood when you start to see the yellow and black “horse and buggy” caution signs.
This place feels as far away from New York City as one can get without time travel. The people out here voted Trump into office twice—“three times,” they’ll say with a chuckle—because they felt abandoned by the pre-Trump, city-dwelling elites. Folks are worried but not terribly concerned about the latest Mideast war. Every town has war memorials, many displayed at high schools and showing the names of local boys lost. They have gotten through that before and expect to do so again. The military is revered because it is one of the few government institutions they believe still sees them. They know Trump didn’t always tell them the truth, but he did speak directly to them, and that counted.
They like Vice President J.D. Vance but remain a little unsure. His roots are from the right place, however, and that matters around here. The possibility of anyone I spoke with voting for a democratic socialist is roughly the same as their voting to shut down the Dairy Queen in July. According to one source, Meigs County is around 79 percent Republican; more importantly, 71 percent of adults typically vote, solidly above the U.S. average. The Democrats should take note as they try to retake Ohio in this year’s elections.
Many in the area rely on food stamps. Yet people tend to see their benefits as deserved, since most work and pay taxes, unlike the way they see the people in big cities, who they think depend on the same assistance across multiple generations. It takes little more than a bottle of beer to hear anecdotes suggesting this perspective is racially tinged, as is locals’ view of democratic socialism. Public opinion here is still shaped by local daytime conservative talk radio shows listened to in the truck. Being here you understand that the jumbled beliefs people hold do not always make sense—but they vote based on those beliefs, whether you find them logical or not.
You sadly cannot talk about rural America anymore without talking about drugs. The Ohio Department of Health says Meigs County struggles with a high rate of drug overdose deaths, mostly due to fentanyl and meth. The county is one of the harder-hit areas of the state: In 2023, it recorded an age-adjusted unintentional drug overdose death rate of 94 deaths per 100,000 people. No one I spoke with admitted to any drug use or knowing anyone who used or sold drugs, but it is telling that there are 13 listed drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers in or around nearby Pomeroy, a town of only 1,573 people. It is easier some days not to try getting back on your feet.
This was not my first trip to this area. I went to high school and college in various parts of Ohio, and think I know these folks. I wrote a book about southern Ohio that was published long before Hillbilly Elegy came along. So I know more than to traffic in clichés about rural America, the meth, the uneducated adults with no teeth who went Republican because they hated the color of Obama’s skin. This place and its people are much too complex to be reduced to fodder for the Trump-era culture war.
After the elections in November, Meigs County will still be here. Most of its children will stay put as they grow older, while the political reporters who parachuted in will move on to the next election and the next town that supposedly explains America. Meanwhile, the distance between places like this and New York will grow.
The post What I Saw and Heard in Vance Country appeared first on The American Conservative.
In the Senate, Democrats could win a majority and still end up losing.
With just over two months until the midterms, there is good reason to believe polling that suggests Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives. President Trump’s approval ratings are in the tank, the least popular war in our nation’s recent history drags on, and voters are stressed about affordability and the economy generally. Perhaps most importantly, the map (and history) favors a Democratic rejoinder to the GOP’s sweeping victories during the last go-round in 2024.
And as November heaves into view, Democratic capture of the Senate—an idea that seemed implausible at the beginning of this year—is also firmly in play. In Maine, Texas, Alaska, and Ohio, four Republican Senate seats are at risk of being flipped (this is in addition to the cementing of Democratic leads in the formerly purplish, now apparently solid blue states of North Carolina and Georgia). Michigan is a potential weak point in the armor, since the seat in question is currently held by a (retiring) Democrat, but Abdul El-Sayed, the relatively untested Democrat running to replace him, is holding his own against veteran Republican Mike Rogers.
Democrats would need to win four of the five really close races—Maine, Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and Michigan—to take control of the Senate. That would put the math in the upper chamber at 51 Democrats to 49 Republicans. A bare majority. Enough to stall Trump’s agenda and paralyze the GOP, at least until 2028. Right?
There is, as it turns out, an interesting wrinkle. If Democrats win with a razor-thin majority, there might be one man capable of denying them actual control: John Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania. Fetterman has been at odds with the burgeoning class of progressives who have upended the Democratic establishment over the past two years. His zealous support for Israel and his open distaste for his left-wing confreres create a real possibility that, should the Democrats flip the Senate by a single seat, he would stand in the way of progressive legislation and scuttle efforts to go after President Donald Trump.
Trump has found in Fetterman an unlikely ally on some of the most important issues of his second term. Fetterman has been a fervent supporter of the Iran War, for example, and a constant critic of his Democratic colleagues on foreign policy. The freshman senator from Pennsylvania has appeared on Fox News 56 times since the beginning of 2026, mostly to talk up Israel, lambast Islamist terror, and decry progressive Democrats.
Nor is this support limited to TV hits: Fetterman has voted for Trump-favored initiatives, and Trump nominees, more frequently than any other Senate Democrat. And Fetterman has been a frequent “nay” vote on Democratic war powers resolutions. He was the sole Democrat to vote against the first war powers resolution after the Iran war began, which failed 47-53 in March 2026. Over the next five months, the Senate would take up the question at least a dozen more times, with Fetterman voting with Republicans against restricting the war nearly every time, including a May 13 vote he single-handedly defeated, 49-50. (An exception came in June, when four Republican defections let a resolution pass the Senate 50-48 despite Fetterman’s opposition, a largely symbolic rebuke that nonetheless marked the first time such a measure cleared both chambers.) By late July, with the tally past a dozen attempts, Fetterman was still the Democratic holdout. He voted with Republicans again on July 23 (47-49) and July 30 (49-50) to defeat two more.
Democrats don’t even control the Senate right now, yet Fetterman has single-handedly sunk Iran war powers votes at least four separate times since February. In a Senate under narrow Democratic control, Fetterman’s support for Trump’s wars could continue to kill his party’s efforts to wind these up.
On the topic of Israel, Fetterman’s outspoken support for the nation and its ongoing wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran has put him at odds with many Democrats, who are increasingly questioning the entire basis of the U.S.-Israel relationship. When Fetterman speaks on Israel, he sounds like a bona fide neocon, trumpeting talking points about how Israel is “our special ally” and that the nation-state is “the only democracy” in the Middle East. The situation has become such a flash point that Fetterman told NBC News in mid-July that it was his “red line” and that he would switch political parties if Democrats “officially become the anti-Israel party.”
Of course, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where the Democratic Party “officially” announces that it is anti-Israel. What is far more likely is that certain new members of Congress will offer ever louder and more strident critiques as opinion polls show cratering support for a country increasing numbers of voters perceive as using American tax dollars to fuel violence and destruction across the Middle East. A Pew Research Center poll conducted May 4–17 found that adults under 30 view Palestinians far more favorably than Israelis, 58 percent to 32 percent. That gap is driven largely by young Democrats, 72 percent of whom view Palestinians favorably (just 26 percent say the same of Israelis).
The shifting ideological tides within his own party make Fetterman a lonely figure. It’s a major reason why he continues to appear on Fox News, an outlet that once derided the senator’s casual appearance but has a newfound affinity for the hoodie-wearing politician, whose consistent championing of Israel has turned him into a weekly guest. It’s the oldest trick in the capital’s playbook: Seemingly sincere, principled opposition melts away the second the political winds change. The other side becomes the same side, at which point it’s all gravy, baby.
After his humble beginning as a Bernie-bro-style populist, Fetterman has merrily morphed into a DINO (Democrat in Name Only). But he has found a new fanbase. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena University poll of Pennsylvania voters published Tuesday, Republicans are warming up to Fetterman. The senator’s break with his own party has made him more popular among Pennsylvania Republicans than the state’s GOP senator, Dave McCormick (73 percent of Republicans view Fetterman favorably, compared to just 63 percent for McCormick). Some of the voters in his own party, on the other hand, have turned cold: only 22 percent of Democrats view Fetterman favorably, with 69 percent holding an unfavorable opinion of him overall. Two-thirds of Pennsylvania Democrats say Fetterman sides with Trump too often, and roughly half say he’s been too supportive of Israel, a split verdict that has left his overall favorability at 46 percent, down slightly from 48 percent in a comparable 2024 survey. (All this has fueled talk of Fetterman perhaps switching parties, pulling what you might call a “reverse Arlen Specter.”)
Democrats will likely win North Carolina. They are extremely competitive in Maine, Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and Michigan (although Abdul El-Sayed is struggling to balance his progressive, insurgent messaging with a more establishment electorate). But even if things go swimmingly in the midterms, Democrats could wake up in January with a majority in name but not in fact—all thanks to John Fetterman.
The post The GOP’s John Fetterman Wildcard appeared first on The American Conservative.
José Antonio Kast entered office with a commanding mandate. An overseas conflict ended his honeymoon in two weeks.
José Antonio Kast had not been president of Chile for two weeks before a war on the other side of the world began to tank his administration.
Kast took office on March 11 with a commanding electoral mandate and a net approval rating of about 20 points. By the end of the month, however, his approval had already slipped underwater. The immediate cause had little to do with anything Kast had done. Chileans were furious about the surge in fuel prices caused by the Iran War, and they blamed the man who had just moved into La Moneda.
It was not supposed to go this way.
Kast was well-positioned going into the presidential race in 2025. Defeated convincingly by social democrat Gabriel Boric in the 2021 presidential election runoff, Kast had significantly expanded his political base in the intervening years. His electoral vehicle, the Republican Party of Chile — which he founded in 2019 — made major gains in local elections in 2024, which swung sharply to the right.
Kast campaigned on a law-and-order platform, promising to crack down on illegal immigration and organized crime, issues that have occupied an increasingly uncomfortable place in the Chilean political imagination since 2020. His promises to revive the economy also struck a chord. Chilean economic growth, heavily dependent on mining, has disappointed since the end of the Chinese commodity boom in the mid-2010s.
Ready to dispense with the left after Boric’s unpopular and unsuccessful presidency, Chileans delivered Kast a commanding victory in the 2025 presidential election. He defeated Jeannette Jara, the left-wing candidate and a member of the Communist Party of Chile, by over 15 points, winning 58.2 percent of the vote to Jara’s 41.8 percent. Chile appeared poised to join the broader rightward swing underway across Latin America.
Kast’s rosy-looking future, however, collapsed in very short order. The Iran War, which President Donald Trump had kicked off at the very tail end of February, put a massive dent in the Chilean economy just before Kast was sworn in. Chile is one of the region’s largest importers of oil and gas; with almost no domestic production, the country is particularly sensitive to changes in the global energy market. Its modest fuel stabilization fund, set up to help blunt the impact of sudden price swings, was insufficient to cover the massive shock brought on by the war, and by late March subsidizing fuel for Chilean consumers was costing the government nearly $150 million a week.
Kast entered office promising to lower the national deficit, a project that would be completely impossible to achieve if he were compelled to spend billions on fuel subsidies. The president therefore decided to abandon price stabilization and pass the costs on to Chilean consumers.
It was the only realistic option, but the move was nevertheless deeply unpopular. And it left a major hole in the pocketbook of the average Chilean: Between March and April, national gasoline prices surged by nearly 40 percent. And these price hikes affect more than just motorists. Nearly every good that is sold in Chile must travel by road at some point, and higher fuel costs filter into food, manufactured and imported goods, and eventually practically every consumer item in the country.
The adjustment was particularly painful for an economy as dependent on fuel-intensive industries like mining as that of Chile: Unemployment hit 9.4 percent in the March–May 2026 period, and the Chilean Central Bank revised its economic projections downwards twice (from 2-3 percent annual growth in 2026 down to 1-1.75 percent).
It was an extremely inauspicious way for Kast to begin his presidency, and his approval ratings have remained stubbornly negative ever since. There is little sign of relief on the horizon. The Chilean economy remains extremely weak, and the Iran War continues to drag on with no end in sight. With Iran and the U.S. deadlocked over the Strait of Hormuz, high oil prices will probably dog Kast for the remainder of his critical first year as president.
To his credit, Kast has attempted to rally. With energy that surprised many Chilean commentators, he pushed a massive economic reform package through the legislature. This “megareform,” as Kast calls it, significantly restructures the country’s tax system, lowering the corporate tax rate and heavily incentivizing both domestic and foreign investment. His administration also announced across-the-board budget cuts for most government ministries as part of efforts to bring down the deficit. But as important and meaningful as these initiatives are, their impact will take time to make itself felt, and they are unlikely to move the needle for Kast politically in the short term.
In one of the ironies so common to politics, the Trump administration’s actions in Iran have made it significantly more difficult for the U.S. to accomplish one of its major goals closer to home. Kast and his allies on the Chilean right are broadly pro-American, and would be pleased to accept U.S. help in reducing their country’s dependence on China. Chinese corporations are heavily invested in Chilean mining, construction, and transportation industries, and vast quantities of Chilean minerals feed China’s domestic manufacturing economy. But the precarious economic situation in Chile will make it difficult for the country to pivot, even if Kast would prefer to do so, and the Trump administration is unable to take advantage of the situation. Instead, America is allowing collateral damage from its interventions further abroad to politically kneecap a friendly government in its own backyard.
The post The Iran War Is Sinking Chile’s New President appeared first on The American Conservative.
Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rand Paul each have reasons to run in ’28.
Chances are good that the Republican nominee for president in 2028 will be named either J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio (as I write, the prediction markets put the odds at around 70 percent).
Yet we are still a long way from the first primary, and much could change. Republicans might get clobbered worse than expected in the midterms. Perhaps the AI bubble will burst and crash the economy—or maybe it won’t, and the robots will take our jobs ahead of schedule.
But whatever the situation, neither the vice president nor the secretary of state will cruise to victory completely unopposed. Other Republicans are sure to throw their hats in the ring, even if the prospect of victory is slim; some will run without expecting anything more than a boost to their profiles or a cabinet nod down the road.
Whence might such challengers come? Governorships are a good guess; it is a natural jump from running a state—particularly an important state (say, Florida)—to running the country. We could also see some candidates from less conventional backgrounds (broadcast journalism, anyone?).
One place, however, is almost guaranteed to supply a few contenders: the United States Senate. Our august upper chamber has served as the nursery of 17 presidents so far, and there is no reason to believe this role—which, given the body’s apparently incurable legislative sclerosis, may well be its most important modern function—has ended.
In the Senate today, there are three Republicans who are widely believed to be mulling 2028 bids. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Rand Paul of Kentucky each have the name recognition, command of the issues, and sheer chutzpah necessary for a credible go at the nomination. And each appeals to a distinct part of the conservative coalition.
Of the three, Cruz has done the most so far to further his presidential ambitions. He has maintained a big public profile and kept a fair amount of buzz going. While loudly backing the president on most issues, he has also broken from the White House in some key areas—notably tariffs and free speech—and gotten directly involved in a few Republican primaries (even endorsing opponents of Trump-supported candidates in Georgia and South Carolina). He has launched strident attacks on what you might call the “America First” wing of the party, picking public fights with Tucker Carlson and offering private criticism of his rival J.D. Vance. He has even been spotted in Iowa. It’s fair to conclude, as Texas’ other senator noted last month, that “Ted wants to be the next president.”
In both style and substance, a Cruz presidency would look like a restoration of the pre-Trump GOP. It would be the Bourbons reclaiming the throne after Napoleon, a turning back of the clock to those pre-lapsarian days when tariffs were unambiguously bad, Israel was unambiguously good, and the party hymned in unison before the smiling icon of St. Ronald Reagan. Cruz is the candidate of what used to be called fusionism: interventionism abroad and a blend of free-market economics and social conservatism at home. Although Trumpism (to the extent one can still speak of such a thing) represents a repudiation of one-and-a-half legs of this “three-legged stool” and the base appears to have mostly moved on, fusionism is still the creed of a large part of the GOP’s donor class. Particularly if Vance is the guy to beat, this creates a clear lane (Rubio, of course, would pose greater difficulties).
On a personal level, Cruz’s prospects would be helped by his clear intelligence, keen political instincts, and experience with a previous presidential run. But his likability needs work; House Speaker John Boehner’s memorable description of him as “Lucifer in the flesh” has been echoed over the years by other congressional confreres, and it is hard to shake the impression that retail politics may not be his strong suit.
Next, there is the senior senator from Missouri (full disclosure: I worked for Josh Hawley from April 2025 until last month). Hawley has been less obvious about 2028, and it is far from certain that he will run. Still, the speculation swirls. And Hawley has done a few things to fuel such conjectures, including setting up a new group to push pro-life causes, zeroing in on hot-button issues like AI that escape the attention of his less supple colleagues, and speaking at venues ranging from the Teamsters’ convention to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
While broadly supportive of the president, Hawley has worked hard to create an independent image and separate himself from the GOP mainstream (indeed, in the Senate he has a reputation as something of a lone wolf). His basic commitments are a hardcore social conservatism, a zealous economic populism—including an embrace of organized labor that makes him an outlier among Senate Republicans—and a broadly non-interventionist foreign policy. In an important sense, then, Hawley offers Trumpism without Trump—which seems like something the base could go for, at least abstractly. He also brings to the table (relative) youth and a talent for soaring oratory, along with a squeaky-clean evangelical background and serious intellectual chops.
But he has liabilities of his own. Hawley would have a hard time gaining traction if Vance is the heir apparent, since the vice president occupies the same “articulate populist under the age of 50” lane. The emphasis Hawley lays on abortion—he is perhaps the most committed pro-lifer in the Senate—and his intense evangelical Christianity could turn off a post-Dobbs electorate. He has been basically absent from the Iran War debate, despite his otherwise strong realist credentials. And although the potency has obviously faded, his pseudo-cancellation after January 6 could come back to haunt him.
Finally, we have Rand Paul. Paul, who also vied for the 2016 nomination, has publicly mused about a bid, telling CBS earlier this year he was “50-50” on running. And if he ran, Paul emphasized to his interviewer, it would be because “we need to have a free market [and] free trade wing of the party, one that’s not eager for war.” Here, then, is the choice for the GOP’s individualist, small-government contingent; Paul offers a libertarianism more moderate and respectable than can be procured from the likes of Jo Jorgensen & co.
And unlike another Kentucky libertarian, Paul has recently made it a point to play nice with the White House. As chair of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), he swallowed his fiscal hawkishness and dutifully shepherded the president’s second reconciliation request—which contained more than $70 billion in new government spending—through markup. He has also used his committee gavel to go after high-value targets like Anthony Fauci, who comes before HSGAC this week for a grilling on his Covid conduct.
But Paul’s constituency, though passionate, is small. And his 2016 campaign fizzled out early after a fifth place finish in Iowa. It remains far from clear that he could improve upon that performance.
To return to the observation with which this column opened, by far the most likely scenario is Vance or Rubio at the head of the ticket. Yet it is more than idle speculation to contemplate other contenders.
In fusionism, populism, and libertarianism, we see three broad visions for American conservatism. Whether the senatorial champions of these tendencies run in ’28—and how well they perform—could tell us much about where the right will go after Trump makes his exit.
The post Three GOP Senators Who Could Complicate a Vance/Rubio Coronation appeared first on The American Conservative.
Israel already proved that a foreign country could buy a U.S. election—and with the president’s blessing.
President Donald Trump delivered a speech last week expressing concern about foreign powers interfering in U.S. elections, specifically in the 2020 presidential election. He singled out China in particular.
Time and study will determine the validity of the president’s claims.
What we do know for certain is that the most expensive House primary election in U.S. history just happened in May and supporters of a foreign power spent record amounts essentially to buy a seat in the U.S. Congress.
Trump’s latest claims led Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who lost that primary election, to ask, “When’s the speech about Israeli interference in U.S. elections?”
Massie lost the Fourth Congressional District Kentucky U.S. House seat, which he has held for 14 years, to challenger Ed Gallrein, a candidate heavily backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and a host of other Israel lobby groups, which reportedly spent over $9 million on the race. The grand total was much higher, with Louisville Public Media reporting last week that “Most of the $37 million spent in the contentious GOP primary between Congressman Thomas Massie and Ed Gallrein was by PACs funded by pro-Trump billionaires, pro-Israel groups, and dark money.”
The “pro-Trump billionaires” are also powerful pro-Israel donors: casino mogul Miriam Adelson, hedge fund manager Paul Singer, and investor John Paulson.
Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), which spent nearly $4 million on the race, boasted at a victory party,
Let me say very clearly tonight, That was a fight worth having and a victory worth celebrating. Someone who repeatedly undermines support for Israel, traffics in isolationism at a moment of global danger and refuses to stand with the Jewish state when it matters most—there has to be consequences.
Translation: Massie is a consistent opponent of U.S. foreign aid, including to Israel, and he believes American tax dollars should be “spent improving things here at home, not waging war and genocide,” referring to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and to U.S. funding of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
As RJC head Brooks noted, there were consequences for Massie prioritizing America first, compliments of the Israel lobby, which acts on behalf of a foreign country’s interests.
So Massie’s original question stands: When is Trump going to give a speech about the foreign interference in this Kentucky primary election?
Likely never. In addition to Israel’s American lobby, Gallrein was also endorsed by Trump, who had soured on Massie for a variety of other reasons, among them, the Kentucky congressman’s refusal to support the president’s “Big, Beautiful” spending bill last July and also Massie’s insistence that the Trump administration release the Epstein Files, the classified documents related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (a promise once made by Trump himself).
If there was major foreign election interference in the Kentucky primary in May, and there was, the president had firmly sided with the outside player. Some foreign meddling in U.S. elections is apparently preferable to others.
This does raise questions about loyalty—loyalty to whom, or to what?
The president obviously wanted Massie defeated because he felt the Republican had been disloyal to him, personally, and to his agenda. That’s pure Trump. But he also effectively sided with Israel and its American supporters.
Another Trump critic from the right, podcasting giant Tucker Carlson, is now also the object of criticism from the president for his supposed disloyalty over many of the same issues that animate Massie.
In a recent interview, Carlson answered this charge with one of his own: “Trump has been disloyal to the United States—totally disloyal to the United States. He cheated on the United States with a foreign power.”
With the Trump administration continuing to fund the unending death in Gaza, starting the Iran war, and even siding with the interests of Israel, first and foremost, even if by default, in a Kentucky election, Carlson may have a point about this president.
On the eve of his primary election, a still-hopeful Thomas Massie told a reporter that his primary race was about “whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress. And what they found out is that my seat is really expensive.”
It was extremely expensive, but in the end, a foreign country did essentially buy an American election via a powerful lobby that agitates on its behalf.
Don’t expect any White House concerns about this anytime soon.
The post Trump’s Worried About Foreign Election Interference. That’s News to Massie appeared first on The American Conservative.
Fourth time’s a charm for Marine Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen has a new lease on life.
Last Tuesday, a court cleared a path for her to contest France’s presidential election next year. And she took it with celerity. “There is no longer any scenario in which I could not run,” Le Pen announced on TV that evening. “I am a candidate.”
This will be Le Pen’s fourth bid for the job, and her chances appear better than ever. Multiple polls conducted over the past several days show her comfortably defeating all comers in both phases of France’s two-round election system.
Of course, much could change in the nine months remaining until the vote. The field is immensely crowded; by one count, there are over 30 declared or potential candidates who could vie with Le Pen (not all with equal seriousness, of course). As their ranks thin, we could eventually see right and left-flavored moderates rally behind a single, unifying figure—Edouard Philippe, say, or Raphaël Glucksmann.
Then there is the unavoidable fact that Le Pen has lost thrice before: Whatever the polls say now, running the same candidate on the same platform obviously risks the same result.
And she’s not entirely out of the legal woods yet. It’s still possible that France’s highest court, to which Le Pen’s case has been referred, could impose house arrest with an electronic ankle monitor, which would massively complicate campaigning and possibly tarnish her image.
On this last point, though, it’s interesting to note that most Le Pen supporters don’t seem bothered by the fact that the same ruling which allowed their candidate to run also upheld her conviction for embezzlement. No doubt, many see it in the same light as MAGA voters regarded the charges against Trump: lawfare, plain and simple.
It also helps that the details of Le Pen’s crime—using funds meant for European parliamentary staff to pay party aides working on domestic issues—aren’t particularly lurid or egregious. She didn’t pocket the money; there’s no question of personal enrichment. Besides, as one right-wing weekly observed:
It is only natural for the parliamentary aides of a sovereignist party—one that places the nation above all else—to devote their talent, energy, and time to the affairs of that nation, rather than contributing to a bureaucratic and technocratic system whose ultimate goal is, in reality, nothing less than the weakening, perhaps even the subjugation, of that very nation.
After a decade of macronisme—that same “bureaucratic and technocratic system” applied to France itself—such energetic, single-minded commitment to the nation clearly has immense appeal. To many voters exasperated by a simmering cost-of-living crisis, a civil society coming apart at the seams from uncontrolled immigration, and a geopolitics that threatens to extinguish French power and sovereignty (whether through surrender to Brussels or vassalization by Washington—or Beijing), nothing less than national regeneration is needed.
This is exactly what Le Pen and her National Rally (RN) promise. Pour la France, la Renaissance is the party’s new campaign slogan. For France, rebirth.
And a growing number of voters feel comfortable turning to the RN as the agent of this rebirth, thanks to the success of Le Pen’s patiently executed dédiabolisation campaign—which has seen, over the past fifteen years, the expulsion of her cantankerous and ultra-controversial father, the rebranding of the more menacing “National Front” as the gentler-sounding “National Rally,” and the slow development of a party infrastructure able to notch victories at all levels of French politics.
The RN also draws strength from its appeal to the France that lies beyond Paris—which is to say, most of the country. Le Pen made a point of kicking her campaign off in La Flèche, a smallish town more than 150 miles from the capital. And she spent Bastille Day in Nice, on the 10th anniversary of an Islamist terror attack in the city that left 86 dead. (In Paris, meanwhile, Macron condemned “nationalism” in a speech to the military, then convened the latest meeting of the unfortunately-named “coalition of the willing” to commit more money and arms to Ukraine.)
The fact that it is Marine Le Pen and not Jordan Bardella—her 30-year-old lieutenant, who would have been the RN candidate had last week’s ruling gone a different way—further plays to the party’s advantages. Some had hoped for a Bardella candidacy, reasoning that a young, handsome, and so far scandal-free figure stood a better chance than the old warhorse Le Pen. But Bardella carries baggage of his own. Compared to his chief, he is significantly cozier with the business community, friendlier to the EU, and markedly less populist on things like pension reform. And he has recently acquired a taste for the high life—dating a literal princess, frequenting all manner of fancy functions—so much so that one analyst pronounced it “a return to the bling-bling style of Sarkozy.” All this sits fine with France’s better-off, of course, but not with the RN’s salt-of-the-earth voters, who vastly prefer the style and substance of Le Pen (and in her absence might well have been tempted by that Gallic Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon).
Indeed, one of the more interesting dynamics to watch will be the relationship between Le Pen and Bardella—who are, in an unusual arrangement for France, running as a ticket (Le Pen would be president, and Bardella prime minister). At that first campaign stop in La Flèche, some reporters picked up a bit of frostiness from the junior partner. According to Le Monde:
[Bardella] seemed absent, his face closed, indifferent to the candidate’s jokes or political arguments. When the crowd chanted “Marine for president,” one voice prompted laughter by responding, “And Jordan too!” What had once seemed likely was now a punchline.
Asked about his political mentor’s new status, Bardella responded with a measured formula: “It’s neither relief nor disappointment.” The contrast was striking with the radiant smile he displayed during his last joint appearance with Le Pen the previous Saturday.
(Sensitive, perhaps, to the speculation this engendered, Bardella gave an interview over the weekend reaffirming his commitment to the cause—and the leader.)
The historian Pierre Gaxotte once compared the French electorate to an Edam cheese: “Red outside and white inside, revolutionary to obtain a pension and conservative to preserve it.” More than anything else, it is the ability to tap into this peculiar left–right dynamic that accounts for Le Pen’s appeal today. She promises both the complete overthrow of a rotten establishment and the restoration of the material and social conditions which that establishment failed utterly to protect. Ever more of her countrymen seem to believe she can deliver.
The post A French Rebirth? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Unpopular below-the-belt issues are liable to dog the Dems in coming elections.
I watched the New York Pride Parade on livestream. The parade is a major event in NYC, attended by well over a million people. Today, 11 years after Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage, the movement that once celebrated equality alongside most Democrats looks very different. The near-complete embrace of trans rights as seen in the parade, especially as it affects children, is likely to harm the Democratic Party in coming elections. (FYI, I’ll use the word “gay” as shorthand here for the various constructions, the most complete of which is the unhandy LGBTQQIP2SAA+.)
One of the most noticeable changes in the Pride Parade was the replacement of the once-ubiquitous rainbow flag with the “trans flag,” adding pink, brown, white, and black. Trans people were present in large numbers, had their own floats, and were noticeably name-checked by most of the speakers and signs I saw.
As in years before, Democratic politicians were also quite visible. But this year the senior pol, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), was booed. Some in the crowd turned their backs on him, and when the parade paused, they shouted out about how he did not support trans rights. Chuck yelled back he was the first major politician to ever attend a Pride Parade, back in the ’90s. Meanwhile, the all-in, modern trans-supporter Mayor Zohran Mamdani got some of the biggest applause of the day.
In Gallup polls from 1996 only about a third of Americans supported same-sex marriage. But by the mid-2010s, the figure had flipped and remained about two-thirds into the 2020s. This change culminated in the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. In 2024 the Republican Party even removed opposition to marriage equality from its platform. Importantly, the Court ruling followed—not preceded—the broader cultural shift.
The emphasis that led to acceptance of gay rights was driven by several factors, key among which was the emphasis on marriage involving consenting adults, many of whom were already cohabitating in various statuses. Advocacy focused on the universal human rights already part of American law and society, such as the right to work, to own property jointly, and so on—nothing more than asking people to accept someone else’s private life. It did not include sexual “rights” for children.
Then something happened concurrent with the first election of Donald Trump. While it once was sufficient to support basic rights, the Pride Parade started to include overt anti-Trump messages. Signs started to read “Trans rights are human rights,” and the new flag was debuted. Far from “celebrating victory, defending the gains, and staying vigilant while winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives,” many gay groups did the opposite. They radicalized.
Democrats increasingly viewed gay activism as an important component of their electoral coalition. The letter Q and the term “queer” came to symbolize the idea that one’s sexuality was a political act. In the 2016 presidential election, gay voters embraced Hillary Clinton, promoting irrational fears as bizarre as Trump endorsing imprisoning gays in concentration camps. This voting pattern reflected a broader social shift, where identity-based politics became increasingly central to how one voted. The Democrats took full advantage of this, fanning the flames further in the next election cycle with careful allotments by gender identity (as well as race, disability, etc.) throughout the Biden administration, especially in the military.
The move from basic rights to gender identity made things much more complex as Trump took office a second time.
The gay rights movement prior to Obergefell v. Hodges demanded equality and mutual respect. No one’s straight life would change when gay marriage became legal. But then the shift started toward children, and the political advantage Democrats enjoyed because the majority of American supported same sex marriage began to fail. They advocated that gender—or sex?–was no longer biology but an undesired social construct. Medical schools began teaching newspeak like “chest-feeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” “birthing parent” for “mother,” and “person with a uterus” instead of simply “woman.” Many libraries became repositories of sexual education, often aimed at elementary-age kids “considering” becoming trans.
Divas in drag became a library staple in progressive areas. Teachers at some schools were expected to morph into gender coaches for those same kids, and rules were made that allowed schools in some areas to keep all this from parents, no matter how young the child. Schools in general also took the lead in transitioning to all-sex toilets, with biological boys being allowed to change in front of girls whose opinion of this was never considered.
It required a Supreme Court decision to allow states to keep biological boys out of girls’ sports. Quickly evolved medical standards saw doctors encouraged to perform “gender-affirming care” for pre-pubescents who were supposed to be experiencing gender dysphoria at an age when they likely could not correctly spell the term. This care, often called “support,” included things sometimes irreversible such as chemical puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical interventions. Parental involvement varied, but in some cases was brought down to zero.
Democrats, greedy for votes, supported this all as received wisdom. No debate was allowed. Opponents were shouted down and canceled, called bigots and fascists, labeled homophobic. Even the author of many young voters’ childhood favorite books, J.K. Rowling, was ostracized because she did not support trans rights the woke way. Democrats intend to take this way of thinking into the midterms and the next presidential election. It is very unclear that this is a good idea.
In one post-election survey, cultural issues, including transgender issues, mattered more to swing voters than even immigration and inflation. Reality also plays a part. Predictions that a second Trump administration would seek to overturn same-sex marriage have not materialized, despite a conservative Court.
Instead, his Secretary of the Treasury is a married gay man with kids. Republican candidates have improved their messaging, focusing on education policy and parental rights, framing the issue as oversight and consent rather than identity or discrimination. In fact, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County held that Title VII protects gay and transgender workers against discrimination at work, growing gay rights. Changes Trump made have negatively affected trans people in the military, but never drove things broadly back toward Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” days.
Public attitudes toward gay Americans shifted more rapidly than any other civil rights issue in U.S. history. They are shifting again. The public increasingly appears willing to separate support for gay equality from support for gender-identity activism. Whether Democrats recognize the distinction, that voters are sensing overreach, is an important question for the next election.
The post Democrats Can’t Kick the Trans Obsession appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Democrat Graham Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race Wednesday evening following new allegations of sexual assault, the latest in a string of scandals dogging his campaign.
After days of speculation and high-profile endorsement revocations, from including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Platner announced his withdrawal from the race.
“We are not doing it because of the allegations, we are doing it because of the structures being taken away from us by those in power,” he said in a video statement.
POLITICO on Monday reported new allegations of sexual assault from a woman who had dated Platner. Jenny Racicot, the accuser, had in an interview with the New York Times previously described “positive memories” of her time with the candidate despite Platner showing up drunk to her home, an incident during which she now says that Platner sexually assaulted her. Platner denied the allegations in a Monday video statement.
Platner won the Democratic primary for Senate in Maine last month amid controversies including a Nazi-related tattoo, offensive comments online, and the Times’ report on past relationships.
His withdrawal comes just days before a deadline that would allow the Maine Democratic Party to replace him on the ballot by July 27.
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Justice Barrett could learn from Civil War jurisprudence.
With a flurry of cases decided last month, the Supreme Court has officially wrapped up its latest term. Much of the attention was absorbed by the Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, a decision that provoked outrage and indignation from immigration hawks.
But amidst this furor, another important decision flew under the radar. This was Watson v. Republican National Committee, in which the Court ruled 5–4 that federal law did not prevent mail-in ballots from being counted even if they were received after election day. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion drawing on precedent and historical practice to uphold a Mississippi law allowing absentee ballots postmarked on or before the date of an election to be counted as long as they arrived within five business days of the election.
Yet she seems to have misread the record.
In her opinion, Justice Barrett argues that the arc of history bends toward greater absentee voting. She observes that, during the early years of our republic, voters necessarily cast their ballots in the districts in which they lived, but that this changed during the Civil War when soldiers were permitted to “vote from afar by absentee ballot.” The plaintiffs in Watson had raised the point that, in most cases, Union soldiers didn’t actually vote by mail—rather, states tended to prefer “field-voting,” by which ad hoc polling places were created wherever the armies happened to be. Barrett was apparently unconvinced; in her view, this was simply a matter of state preference or local expediency, and the use of mail-in ballots (which did also occur) was just as legitimate.
Curiously, though, in her opinion she cites the case of Chase v. Miller as an example of the in-person voting regime swept away by the exigencies of war. Decided by Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court in 1862, Chase concerned absentee or non-district voting in a local election in Luzerne County. Chase and Miller were two candidates for district attorney; and, as the election in which they vied occurred in the fall of 1861, it was the first the area had seen which featured the “soldier vote” of volunteer soldiers casting ballots in the field.
What makes this an odd citation for Justice Barrett is that the decision in Chase articulates precisely why in-person, in-district voting is so important. Judge George Woodward, who authored the opinion, carefully explained why his state’s constitution could not be set aside even in the middle of a civil war. At the heart of this was a Jacksonian defense of the “free and honest suffrage on which all our institutions are built.”
In Chase, the Court was asked to interpret a provision of a section of a somewhat obscure 1839 law against the Pennsylvania Constitution’s requirement that voters reside in a recognized election district 10 days prior to the election. That law, which had passed on the rather chaotic final day of a legislative session, was essentially a reprint of an earlier law which required that any vote must be within two miles of the “usual place of voting” for a volunteer in actual service (it was intended, in other words, to provide members of the state militia with flexibility while on duty in the state).
The upshot was that to recognize the ballots of Pennsylvanians serving in uniform further afield, the judges would have to set aside their state’s constitution. This they declined to do. Pennsylvania’s lawmakers, Woodward wrote, could not have had “any thought whatever of legalizing military voting outside of our own territorial limits;” their intent was purely to give citizen soldiers in service within the state an opportunity to vote outside their domiciles.
Ever the Jacksonian, Woodward thought that the idea of absentee voting-–even for soldiers literally fighting a war—was so dangerous that it was “scarcely possible to conceive of any provision and practice that could, at so many points, offend the cherished policy of Pennsylvania in respect to suffrage.” This suffrage, he pointed out, was “a sacred trust committed only to that portion of the citizens who come up to the prescribed standards of qualifications;” it could therefore only “be exercised by them at the time and place and in the manner pre-arranged by the public law and proclamations.”
The absentee voting contemplated here was inherently suspect to Woodward, inviting “the most odious frauds.” Rather than maintaining what we would now call a “chain of custody,” this system would allow the ballot boxes into which soldiers would place their votes “to be opened anywhere, within or without our State,” with no guards or reassurances other than the authority of commanding officers who “may not themselves be voters, nor subject to our jurisdiction.” The fear was less that Pennsylvania’s boys in blue would commit fraud than that the “political speculators, who prowled about the military camps” would find and seize “opportunities to destroy true ballots and substitute false ones, to forge and falsify returns, and to cheat citizen and soldier alike out of the fair and equal election provided by law.”
Underpinning this view was a fundamentally democratic approach to jurisprudence. The Court’s decision, Woodward wrote, was not “stringent, harsh, or technical.” It was, rather, “a natural and obvious reading” of the constitution, of the sort that everyday Americans would “instinctively adopt.” In other words, laws mean what they say, and “judicial glosses and refinements are misplaced when laid upon them.”
Justice Barrett and the majority in Watson could learn from this regard for the sanctity of the vote. An emphasis on in-person voting isn’t anti-democratic. Quite the opposite. The preservation of our republican institutions depends on precisely the understanding of citizenship and political community that Judge Woodward articulated over a century and a half ago. As Justice Alito put in his dissent, “from this Nation’s founding until the last few decades of the 20th century… having an ‘election’ on a particular day meant completing ballot collection on that day.” We would be wise to again embrace “free and honest suffrage” over the vagaries and capriciousness of our modern approach to voting.
The post In Mail-In Ballots Decision, the Supreme Court Ignored History appeared first on The American Conservative.
The country is in desperate need of state capacity, or at least some space to breathe.
Peru appears to have kicked a habit that many suspected was ingrained: It has almost certainly elected Keiko Fujimori as the next president by a narrow margin. Although the counting up of the final votes and the recounts will go on for some time, by all appearances Keiko has secured a knife-edge victory—her margin of victory will probably be less than half a percent.
The victory marks a welcome reversal for Peru’s highest profile politician: Keiko herself has lost the past three presidential elections, the most recent two by less than half a percent. The trend had many speculating that Fujimori had a hard ceiling on her support in Peru that she would never be able to overcome to win the presidency. She is a deeply polarizing figure. The daughter of president-cum-dictator Alberto Fujimori and the leader of the party he founded, Fuerza Popular, she represents one of the most dynamic and successful periods of Peruvian history, but also her father’s brand of corrupt authoritarianism.
Alberto Fujimori crushed the Marxist Shining Path rebels, a brutal Maoist insurgency that had plagued the country for years, and his economic reforms pulled Peru out of a decade of economic stagnation, accomplishments that made him highly popular but which came with a high cost. The countryside has never forgotten the brutal reprisals the military and popular self-defense forces committed against civilians in areas with a Shining Path presence, and the ex-president spent the final years of his life incarcerated in a Peruvian penitentiary for crimes against humanity.
But Alberto Fujimori’s accomplishments are looking ever more appealing, and worth the potential risks, in modern Peru. In the past five years, crime has skyrocketed—since 2021, homicide rates have nearly tripled, while extortion is now commonplace. Drug cartels, gangs, and other criminal organizations have taken advantage of the country’s political instability to grab ever-larger portions of the economy at the expense of everyday workers, shaking down taxi drivers and slaughtering miners with impunity. The economy, meanwhile, has remained anemic, far from the heady days of the late ’90s and early 2000s.
The dire state of the country played right into Keiko’s hands during the campaign. Her campaign platform drew the parallels explicitly:
At the beginning of the 1990s, Peru faced its greatest challenges in recent history: the advance of terrorism, which threatened national integrity; inflation exceeding 7,000%; and more than half of the population living in poverty. In the face of that scenario, the country had firm political resolve and clear leadership, headed by President Alberto Fujimori, which made it possible to adopt exceptional measures to regain control of the territory, restore order, and defeat terrorism. Through order, firmness, and the unity of the Peruvian people, the country managed to reverse that crisis, defeat terrorism, stabilize the economy, and lay the foundations for growth. Fuerza Popular, together with the citizenry, was a fundamental part of that process of national transformation. Today, Peru can do so again: overcome insecurity and economic stagnation with discipline, promote investment, and ensure the essential conditions for the well-being and development of all citizens.
Keiko campaigned on a three-pronged plan of public order, economic reform, and social security (in that order), many of which call back directly to some of her father’s policies—creating a system of rural command centers to enable rapid military and law-enforcement response to organized crime, for example. It’s unclear how well the approach will carry over; although many kinds of criminal organizations are not unlike the Marxist guerillas of the Shining Path, others operate on a completely different scale and business model. And, given the history of Fujimorista counterinsurgency tactics, there is significant risk of civilians being caught in the crossfire.
But the reality of the situation is that having any plan at all is likely to be a major improvement for the country, which has been languishing in complete confusion since 2018. Since the election of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2016, Peru has had eight presidents; none have served out a full term. Peruvian presidents have rarely had the support of the country’s legislative branch, which has accumulated significant power at the expense of the executive branch and has successfully impeached or otherwise removed from office four presidents in the past decade, not counting those who resigned while impeachment efforts were ongoing or the farcical attempt at a self-coup mounted by Pedro Castillo in 2022.
In President Keiko, Peru may finally have a chance at a durable political situation. While she won the presidency by a thin margin, she has the signal advantage of controlling the largest and most institutionally cohesive party in Peru’s Congress, along with a relatively friendly judicial branch. That trifecta, if wielded with even a small portion of the political instinct of her father, could work wonders for the country.
On the whole, it is rather unlikely that Keiko will be able to fulfill her campaign promises of recreating a Peru with high growth and low crime. Though not an untalented politician, she has never demonstrated the vision or capacity possessed by her late father. But her victory will probably allow Peru to begin rebuilding its state capacity and administrative integrity, resources which have been seriously depleted during the past decade of national instability.
The post In President Keiko, Peru has a Chance for Stability appeared first on The American Conservative.
The voters are in a state of electoral ataxia that makes political forecasting impossible.
Britain has had six prime ministers in the last decade and is about to install a seventh. This seems inevitable following the stunning victory of Andy Burnham, the erstwhile mayor of Manchester, in the crucial Makerfield by-election Thursday night. He received 55 percent of the vote and crushed the life out of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, is now under intense pressure to hand over the keys of Number Ten Downing Street to wannabe Burnham tout de suite. Around 81 MPs are needed to trigger a leadership election under Labour’s rules. Burnham’s people claim they will have over 200 names by Sunday.
Starmer insisted as recently as two days ago that he was not going to quit, whatever happened in Makerfield. He had a job to do and he was going to finish it, having won a thumping general election victory only two years ago. If a leadership election happened, he said, he would be a candidate in it—as is his right.
But that now seems a forlorn hope, even a state of delusion. The political reality is that Andy Burnham’s momentum is unstoppable. Last weekend, a succession of senior Labour MPs, led by the Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, will be lining up to persuade Sir Keir that he should agree to an “orderly transition” to avoid a damaging leadership election that would only extend the crisis.
Starmer can reasonably claim that this is not a crisis of his own making. It is ambitious politicians like Burnham, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, former Defence Secretary John Healey, and others who have plunged the government into chaos by resigning serially from his cabinet. He has a point.
Starmer won Labour’s biggest election victory in twenty-seven years in July 2024. “People have said to me it’s not possible, it’s not possible to turn the Labor Party around,” he noted earlier this week. He points out that some things have been going right under his watch: Immigration is down, inflation is down, GDP is up, and wages are rising. Starmer took the wise decision not to get involved in Donald Trump’s Iran adventure. He has been gradually removing trade barriers with Europe. Only this week, he took on the tech billionaires with his plan to ban children under sixteen from using social media. (Not that many people believe it will work.)
However, the first priority of an MP is not policy success but job security—his own. Starmer’s unpopularity has plunged in recent months and has been as low in polls as any of his unloved Tory predecessors. Burnham is much more popular, though whether that will last once he is in the top job remains to be seen. To paraphrase Tony Blair, Starmer was the future once.
The apparently irresistible rise of Reform UK is what has induced a state of panic on the Labour benches. The party lost 1,100 seats in the May council elections, mostly to Farage’s people. Northern MPs, often in vulnerable constituencies, feared that Labour, and their seats, were doomed under Starmer.
Reform has been leading Labour in the national opinion polls for the last thirteen months and Farage had been drawing up plans for his first government. Now suddenly all that has changed.
After Makerfield, Reform looks to have peaked, says Labour-supporting commentators. Farage is back in his box. Andy Burnham is the Reform killer and looks Labour’s best bet to win the next general election.
Well, maybe. We have been here before. The Tories changed their leaders like football managers five times in eight years and they just got more unpopular each time. There is no particular reason why Andy Burnham should be able to turn Labour around.
He stood for leader twice in the past and was rejected. He has been dubbed Andy U-turnham for his policy flip-flops on immigration, borrowing, benefits, and Brexit. It’s hard to know what Burnham’s appeal is beyond the fact that he is not Keir Starmer, whose very speaking voice has been a turn-off for many voters.
It’s not really about personalities anyway. The Brits are angry and alienated. There is widespread discontent at the rising cost of living, illegal immigration, unaffordable housing, NHS waiting lists, the benefits culture. “Alarm clock Britain,” as middle- and lower-level wage earners are called, is getting poorer. Petrol prices, energy bills, groceries all seem to be racing ahead of the official inflation figures. Many blame mass migration, welfare claimants, and environmental policies like Net Zero.
British voters seem somewhat lost politically. Old class loyalties have disintegrated. Cynicism reigns. Politicians are thought to be “in it for themselves,” like the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, who recently admitted embezzling £400,000, or the Labour Lord Peter Mandelson, who was hand in glove with Jeffrey Epstein.
This alienation has led to apparently contradictory results in elections. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with 55 percent of the vote—more than all the right-wing parties (Reform, Restore and the Conservatives) put together. Yet only six weeks ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform won around 50 percent of the votes in this very northern English town in the local elections. What are we to make of this?
Nigel Farage is claiming that many potential Reform supporters voted tactically for Labour in order to get Starmer out. That is a clever piece of spin, but somewhat improbable. Andy Burnham has been trimming his left-wing policies, but he is still a self-styled “socialist” and is more pro-immigration and “woke” than the prime minister. Burnham is expected to install his main backer, the left-wing Miliband, as chancellor. The Energy and Net Zero Secretary is everything white working-class Reform voters are supposed to hate: a green zealot who opposes immigration controls and wants, if anything, to increase spending on welfare. Burnham is on record as saying he wants the UK to eventually rejoin the European Union, so why would Reform voters, who invariably backed Brexit, lend their votes to him?
It makes little sense. Nor does Farage’s claim that Reform were robbed by the intervention of the far-right ethnonationalists of Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, which supports remigration and a restoration of the death penalty. Adding Restore’s 3,000 votes to Reform’s 16,000 still leaves them far short of the almost 25,000 received by Burnham.
Voters are just mad as hell, to echo Howard Beale in Network, and won’t take it any more. They lash out in all directions. It is a state of electoral ataxia that makes predicting election results almost impossible.
Four months ago, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour’s vote collapsed and they lost one of their safest seats to the Green Party. In Makerfield, the once-mighty Conservatives returned 2.2 percent of the vote. Yet on the same day they won their first by-election gain in half a century in Aberdeen South—formerly a Scottish National Party stronghold.
What goes around doesn’t come around any more in British politics. It is here-today-gone-tomorrow politics, as this once-great imperial power learns to live with economic and geopolitical decline—and really doesn’t like it.
The post Angry Brits Could Make Burnham PM—Then Turn on Him appeared first on The American Conservative.
A fierce critic of President Donald Trump is on track to become the next mayor of Washington, D.C.
Janeese Lewis George, a self-described democratic socialist who made resistance to Trump and his policies the core of her primary campaign to replace the current mayor, Muriel Bowser, bested a field of anti-Trump candidates in this week’s Democratic primary in the nation’s capital. g, Lewis George’s main opponent in the primary field conceded the race on Thursday while trailing by 16 percentage points.
Bowser, who has governed D.C. for nearly a dozen years, announced last November that she would not seek a fourth term, framing the move as a natural moment to step back. “It was time for me to pass the baton on to the next set of leaders who are going to take our city to the next level,” Bowser told NBC.
In an interview with POLITICO last week, Lewis George promised to “actively tell our employees to resist” attempts by Trump to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department. The 38-year-old Lewis George, who is a native of D.C., represented the district’s 4th Ward on the D.C. Council since 2021 where she became a progressive fixture, pushing for housing assistance and proposing the Green New Deal for Housing, an agency that would be dedicated to building publicly-owned, affordable housing with strict environmental and labor standards.
On the Council, Lewis George championed violence-intervention programs over tougher sentencing, notably casting the lone vote against a 2023 anti-crime bill she said would disproportionately jail black residents pretrial. Her opponents characterized this vote as evidence she was weak on crime.
Responding to the likelihood of Lewis George’s victory, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that his administration might “take back Washington” and threatened to run the city on a federal basis. “We won’t put up with it,” Trump said. “We’re not gonna lose our businesses.”
Following her primary victory, Lewis George said she was open to working with Trump, noting that “every mayor has had to work with any president of the United States, no matter their party.” But she added that she would not “comply in advance” with federal actions she sees as undermining D.C.’s autonomy.
The post Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George Wins DC Mayoral Primary appeared first on The American Conservative.
Any political tide that raises Rubio will drown the GOP.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had his mic-drop moment in the James S. Brady Press Room, moonlighting in yet another Trump administration post—this time filling in for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at the podium while she is on maternity leave.
Reporters guffawed at Rubio’s ’90s rap references and then filed stories talking him up as a 2028 presidential prospect, especially in contrast with Vice President J.D. Vance (who was actually in Iowa at the time).
It’s not totally insane in the membrane, as the kids said 33 years ago. President Donald Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser is a talented guy. Rubio has now been in the national spotlight for over 16 years and has matured since his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination a decade ago.
But Rubio is also being feted as a throwback to pre-Trump Republicanism, which is also why he is currently being overrated for 2028. That’s not to say that a Rubio nomination can’t happen. There are, however, some roadblocks that are being widely ignored in favor of viral clips that make people misty-eyed for the return of Ronald Reagan.
The Trump vice president that Rubio should be compared to isn’t Vance, but Mike Pence. Pence was supposed to build a bridge between Reaganism and Trumpism. While he dutifully served the president and his political fortunes would likely look different if Trump’s first term had ended on January 5, 2021, Pence largely failed at this project and has since gone in a different direction. Rubio has been much more successful because he understands Trump’s appeal better and has internalized some of the populist critique of older GOP ways of doing business.
Rubio could have much more comfortably and confidently defended Trump’s foreign policy than Pence did in his 2019 exchange with former Vice President Dick Cheney that was an early indicator of where both veeps were going to end up. Rubio would have been better able to articulate Trump’s departures from past Republican foreign policy and also his continuity with it.
But the energy around Rubio comes primarily from people who would like to see a major departure from Trump not just in style but also substance. He would need to retain these supporters while remaining in Trump’s good graces. He probably needs Trump’s explicit blessing to leapfrog Vance. Ask Nikki Haley, who has a similar appeal to Rubio, how easy it is to walk this tightrope.
As much as they hate Vance, the Never Trumpers will ruthlessly exploit this tension if Rubio runs. Why? Because there is nothing a Never Trumper hates more than a Republican they suspect agrees with them about Trump personally but has made different (and especially successful) calculations about how to navigate his leadership of the party.
Second, a lot of Rubio’s admirers imagine that the Republican Party needs an articulate defender of Trump’s Iran War. If Iran is still dominating the conversation by the midterm elections, much less 2028, that assumption is going to be severely tested, to put it mildly.
The third underrated challenge Rubio faces is that the political conditions would have to be bad enough for Vance to be vulnerable in the primary but good enough that the secretary of state would have a decent chance in the general election. There are a few such scenarios that seem plausible: a Vance scandal, a Trump–Vance falling out. But Rubio’s boosters heavily overestimate how big of a difference his communication skills can make in a bad national political environment for Republicans.
Rubio’s basic political pitch hasn’t won in the Republican primaries since at least 2012, despite having high-quality candidates making it (including Rubio himself in 2016). It hasn’t won a national election since 2004. And Trump’s own second-term appeals to “morning in America” at a time when voters are more in an American Carnage mood have generally fallen flat.
The favorable media coverage would quickly evaporate, shifting instead to “Where’s Marco?” stories about his diplomacy.
Finally, while Rubio wants to be president and Trump wants his successor to work for it, his calm and good humor suggest that he isn’t running yet. He does not feel the pressure of a campaign. He has the luxury of time, and when that is no longer true, things may be different.
As we said in the ’90s, mo’ campaigns, mo’ problems.
The post The Case for Rubio ’28 Is Overstated appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled Tuesday that the procedure state Democrats used to hold a referendum allowing the state government to draw a new congressional map was unconstitutional. The new map could have added as many as four seats to the Democratic delegation in the upcoming midterm elections.
The court’s 4–3 decision was based on the state constitution’s stipulation that constitutional amendments go through a lengthy process including multiple votes in the state legislature and an intervening election. The court held that this process had not been complied with.
Writing for the court, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey stated that “the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the… Constitution of Virginia. This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.”
The ruling is a blow to the Democratic Party, which is engaged in an ongoing redistricting battle with Republicans to increase the odds of winning the House in the November midterm elections. That battle has been made even more difficult by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that special congressional districts for minorities, long required under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, constitute illegal racial gerrymandering.
The post VA Supreme Court Strikes Down Dem Gerrymandering Referendum appeared first on The American Conservative.
For MAGA, familiarity may matter more than experience.
It’s been an interesting 2026, to say the least. The Iran War, which is exposing ideological divisions within MAGA, has brought the American right to an inflection point. A movement that once prided itself on rejecting foreign entanglements is now grappling with their familiar logic. For supporters, that tension raises an uncomfortable question. Was MAGA ever a coherent political doctrine, or was it always something more flexible and more personal?
That distinction matters because it shapes what, and who, comes next. If MAGA is defined more by proximity to President Donald Trump than by principles, succession becomes a question of loyalty, not policy. In that world, the next standard-bearer isn’t the most consistent or experienced but whoever can inherit Trump’s connection to his base. And that is why the most overlooked potential candidate in the 2028 Republican primary field may also be the most obvious: Donald Trump Jr.
The odds-on-favorite, however, is not Don Jr. It’s Vice President J.D. Vance. Seen as the heir apparent, Vance has recently been criticized for remaining silent as the Trump administration’s policy decisions drift from campaign promises. More concerning, Vance has been largely absent from social media during the Iran War. By staying quiet, he’s largely sidestepped his loudest critics on X. That caution may preserve his frontrunner status, but it also exposes a weakness.
In a movement driven by confrontation and authenticity, absence reads less like discipline and more like detachment. Nevertheless, Vance has maintained his status as the clear-cut favorite, earning a 48 percent chance to secure the Republican presidential nominee based on the latest Harvard/Harris poll published on April 26. He also holds the lead on prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, well ahead of the next contender, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Rubio is an intriguing prospect in his own right. Having previously run for president, there is little doubt that Little Marco would jump at the chance to lead the Republican ticket despite public proclamations that the pair have no interest in squaring off against one another. One thing Rubio has going for him is that he has won the admiration of Trump, a surprising turnabout after Trump once mocked the former Florida senator on the campaign trail in 2016. But that’s long in the past now. These days, Rubio looks more like Trump’s right-hand man than Vance does.
When Trump attends UFC events, it’s usually Rubio by his side. When Trump made an appearance at the College Football National Championship in January, it was Rubio smiling with Trump in the press box. Most strikingly, on the first night of the Iran War, Vance and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard were in a Washington, DC situation room. Rubio, by contrast, was seated next to Trump in a makeshift command center at Mar-a-Lago.
All of which explains why Rubio’s stock, which once appeared nonexistent, has shot up in the betting markets and also in recent polling data. And though Trump could put the entire question to bed with a single Truth post, the president has remained coy when asked who should lead the ticket in 2028, arguing that either man would make a fine candidate. Trump’s reluctance partly reflects his stated (if joking) interest in running again, encouraged by allies such as Steve Bannon. More likely, Trump hasn’t chosen a successor because the pick will define his legacy. Getting the pick wrong could render MAGA a flash-in-the-pan movement instead of the historical upheaval that he and his supporters view it to be.
Perhaps the most intriguing prospect left unnamed is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the man whose governance has most closely mirrored the stated promises of MAGA. Sure, DeSantis is an Israel hawk, but who isn’t in Trump’s own administration? And despite his affinity for the state of Israel, DeSantis has been strong on domestic policy. He fought Covid restrictions, pushed aggressive immigration enforcement at the state level, and, perhaps most importantly, engaged in high-profile confrontations with major corporations over cultural and political issues. And on artificial intelligence, something voters are increasingly concerned about, DeSantis has been fantastic, correctly pointing out that Americans should be wary of handing over their futures to the corporate class in Silicon Valley.
But no matter how strongly he has governed, should DeSantis run again in 2028, he is probably destined to suffer the same fate he did in 2024 when he clashed with Trump on the campaign trail. His lack of aura and his reluctance to get his hands dirty in a movement built in the trenches remind MAGA voters more of the Bush-era GOP than the brand Trump built. Interestingly, DeSantis illustrates a broader dynamic that will not only shape the 2028 primary field but the MAGA movement to come, in which executing the agenda of MAGA is not the same as embodying the cultural instincts of the movement. In a political climate where identity outweighs policy, that gap may hurt the ambitions of MAGA’s most prominent elected politician outside Trump.
If the 2028 nominee field is defined by proximity to Trump and personal charisma, there is one other figure worth considering before returning to Don Jr: Tucker Carlson. While Carlson shows some movement in the markets and retains credibility with disaffected MAGA voters, his recent distancing from the administration and his combative ideological purity make him a movement commentator rather than a movement candidate. That leaves one potential candidate we have yet to fully consider: Donald Trump Jr.
In April polling conducted by YouGov, Trump fils proves he is a viable candidate. Thirty-one percent of respondents said they would consider voting for Don Jr., while another 13 percent named Trump’s son as their “ideal choice.” Though 13 percent may seem modest, it was the second-highest number behind Vance, who scored 36 percent on the question. When asked who they believed was most likely to win the presidency if nominated, Don Jr. was the second choice behind Vance. And most notably, Don Jr. performs best with voters aged 18–29, while struggling with those over 65. That signals something important; for many young Republicans, Don Jr. is undoubtedly seen as a figure for the future.
Then there is the Harvard/Harris poll released in late April which shows Trump Jr. at 18 percent support in a potential 2028 primary race. That figure is two points higher than Rubio but markedly behind Vance who earned 48 percent support. In another April poll, conducted by McLaughlin, the younger Trump netted 15 percent. He hasn’t declared a run, but the polling shows a real base to build on. Of course, whether he believes it is the right time or is willing to scuttle his friendship with Vance is another question altogether.
But the world of politics is fraught with backstabbing and disharmony. Though Don Jr. helped Vance secure the vice presidency in 2024, that doesn’t mean he’ll step aside if he fears a loss could damage his father’s legacy. And Don Jr. has something Vance will never possess: the name, the brand, and the instincts that made his father a generational political figure. No one else in the field can claim that.
In the end, the question facing MAGA is not simply who can carry Trump’s agenda forward, but who can embody the man himself. If the answer is rooted less in policy than in identity, loyalty, and instinct, then Donald Trump Jr. is much more than a dark horse. He is a logical extension. And in a primary likely to be defined by Trump, that proximity may matter more than anything else.
The post Donald Trump Jr.: The Candidate No One Is Talking About appeared first on The American Conservative.
Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a measure allowing Democrats to draw a new congressional map, a victory the party says could help it gain up to five House seats as it seeks to reclaim control of Congress.
The initiative passed with a narrow majority of 51.6 percent in favor, with 48.4 percent opposed. It will allow the state government, controlled by Democrats, to bypass the state’s independent redistricting committee and redraw its congressional districts before the upcoming midterm elections in November.
The new map is expected to leave just one Virginia just Republican representative out of the state’s delegation of 11. The current Virginia House delegation is made up of five Republicans and six Democrats.
Glenn Youngkin, the former Republican governor of Virginia, called the initiative an “egregious power grab.” Democrats say they are just responding to Republicans, pointing to Texas redrawing its congressional map in 2025 to add potentially five more seats for Republicans in the state.
The post Democrats’ Virginia Gerrymandering Referendum Narrowly Passes appeared first on The American Conservative.
For the veep, it would seem a time for choosing.
Vice President J.D. Vance should have touched down in Islamabad today for round two of peace talks with Iran, but at the time of writing, negotiations have been put on ice. The last-minute cancellation undermines the Official Media Narrative™, which liberal outlets like the New York Times have been suspiciously eager to propound: Vance has opposed the war in cabinet meetings, and now he has a golden opportunity to end it, saving his political fortunes in the process.
Vance tends to inspire wishful thinking, and attracting positive projection isn’t a bad quality in a politician. Mark Halperin, a veteran journalist with a knack for horserace election coverage, wrote last week in the Daily Mail that Vance’s team exudes “zero panic” about 2028, believing their man remains a frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Halperin seems to think they’re not optimistic enough: “If the election were held today, Vance would still be the most likely next occupant of the Oval Office. Not by a whisker, but by a margin.”
All of the above—from the Iran war hopes to the 2028 dreams—sounds, to me, utterly fanciful. Round one in Islamabad seemed to make the two-week ceasefire even more fragile, with President Donald Trump announcing a blockade of the Hormuz Strait right afterwards. (This Tuesday, Trump extended the ceasefire hours before it was set to expire, but for all we know he’s just setting up another sneak attack.) As for the next presidential elections, here’s a fact Halperin didn’t mention: Vance is the least popular vice president ever, having plummeted 21 points in public approval since taking office.
Still, 2028 is a long way away, and if Vance can secure some kind of diplomatic understanding with Iran that averts the resumption of war, he’ll lay the groundwork for a political comeback. But to win the presidency, Vance will need to answer a question that more and more people are asking: Who is he?
First, he’s a man of contradictions:
I could go on, but you get the idea (and in journalism, “three makes a trend,” so it’s my right to stop there). The story that Vance tells about himself seems increasingly detached from the Ding an sich, the thing itself—the man as he appears to truly be.
This widening gulf threatens to worsen a reputational issue that has bedeviled Vance for years: the perception that he doesn’t really believe anything and merely strives for power. The conservative political columnist Gerard Baker recently wrote that when you search for “Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from a succession of useful transactions.”
Acquaintances of Vance insist that such charges are unfair, that he holds convictions and adheres to principles even if he, like all politicians, must sometimes make compromises. Regardless, the perception poses a serious problem. Americans prefer political candidates who seem authentically relatable and candid about their private views, as academic studies have shown (political “scientists” have a penchant for proving the obvious).
And as Jude Russo, the managing editor of The American Conservative, noted on a recent episode of TAC Right Now, Vance “has no political profile that preexists the Trump moment.” By contrast, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vance’s chief rival in the looming battle to succeed Trump, built a political career from the ground up, establishing an essential identity distinct from the president he currently serves.
For Vance, riding shotgun in the Trump wagon has been perilous (though not as physically dangerous as for Mike Pence, on whom Trump sicced a rabid mob during the January 6 Capitol riot). Vance doesn’t steer Trump’s decision-making, though he’s compelled to defend the crashing results—and to square them with his own political persona.
So when Trump launched a war with Iran, the collateral damage was Vance’s restrainer bona fides. And when Trump instigated a spat with Pope Leo, who has criticized that war, the Catholic convert Vance found himself pitted against the Vicar of Christ. “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said last week.
Good Lord, that’s bad.
Vance gave those remarks during an event hosted by Turning Point USA, an organization for young conservatives. His appearance highlighted the bind in which Vance finds himself on religion, foreign policy, and everything in between. “Jesus Christ does not support genocide!” yelled one heckler as Vance criticized the pope’s views on war and peace. “You’re bombing children!” Vance handled the awkward moment reasonably well, but he seemed hot under the collar.
A less contentious moment was equally telling. Asked which “influencer” he would recommend for young conservatives, Vance listed the TPUSA moderator sitting to his right, the comedian podcaster Theo Von, and himself. It was not just a tacky answer, but an evasive one.
Unmentioned by Vance was America’s most prominent conservative commentator, who happens to be a friend of the vice president: Tucker Carlson. In recent weeks, Trump and Carlson have been attacking one another in escalatingly heated terms. Vance, by not recommending the latter, sided, in effect, with the former. Days later, news broke that Tucker Carlson’s son Buckley, who had served as deputy press secretary for Vance, was leaving the post.
The younger Carlson says he’s starting a political consulting firm, but the move followed pressure from pro-Israel activists looking for a scalp. I wrote last November that Vance can strike a balance in the right’s “civil war” over Israel. But that seems more difficult now, thanks to an actual war with Iran. The Zionists want the U.S. to “finish the job” and destroy Israel’s main adversary, and they demand obeisance from Vance, whom they don’t trust. Meanwhile, conservatives who prefer Vance over Rubio believe the U.S. launched the war on Israel’s behalf and want him to secure the peace. Neither side is looking to compromise.
Now’s a time for choosing: Which side is Vance on? He’s been courting billionaire megadonors, including pro-Israel extremists like Miriam Adelson. Perhaps he’s their man. And yet, behind the scenes Vance has opposed the war with Iran, assuming America’s top newspapers have got the story right. So perhaps he’s ours. Instead of recommending we listen to Theo Von, Vance should tell us, and prove to us, where he really stands—so that we can find another candidate if needed.
The post Is J.D. Vance Our Guy? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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