Connexion
In 1952, the GOP ran on ending war and inflation. Sound familiar?
In their final poll ahead of the 2026 midterms, NYT/Siena found that the Democratic Party holds an 11-point lead over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, suggesting the GOP is all but certain to lose its congressional majorities. The same poll found that President Donald Trump’s approval rating has dipped to a new low of 34 percent.
A rebuke of this magnitude should be understood as more than the cyclical expression of displeasure at an incumbent. Rather, it represents a deep rejection of the direction the second Trump administration has taken since the heady days of spring 2025.
Earlier this month, AP-NORC polled Americans about their top issues going into the midterms. To no one’s surprise, the most significant was the economy and cost of living at 84 percent. But not far behind is the war with Iran, cited by 64 percent of respondents—20 points more than the number who said immigration, and five times more than said transgender issues.
On February 28, the United States, together with Israel, launched a surprise attack on Iran. This failed to produce regime change, but it did lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the destruction of Gulf energy infrastructure. Voters are reminded how intimately this war of choice impacts the cost of living every time they visit the pump, where (as of writing) a gallon of gas averages $4.26 per gallon nationally and diesel an unsustainable $6.32.
Backtracking on a core campaign promise of “no new wars,” unilaterally launching an aggressive war without a vote by Congress or public debate, and allowing it to continue for eight months and counting without a clear exit strategy are decisions that have irrevocably split Trump’s winning 2024 coalition and reenergized what had been an aimless Democratic Party.
As many have pointed out, including in The American Conservative, war with Iran was a destructive but deliberate policy choice, not an inevitability or a response to an urgent national security crisis. The coming massacre of the GOP did not have to happen.
There once was an era, in the not too distant past, when Republicans campaigned against endless war and unnecessary military spending with huge electoral dividends (and then kept their promises).
In 1952, the country was aching after 20 years of Democratic presidents. The Korean War was then in its third year, victory still out of reach despite tens of thousands of American casualties. Corruption scandals plagued officials in the Truman administration. And Truman himself, facing polling numbers even lower than Donald Trump’s, had bowed out of the Democratic primaries and was not running for reelection.
Under these circumstances, the Indiana Republican State Central Committee produced a brochure proclaiming that “THE ONE ALTERNATIVE to the warmongering, Socialistic scandals of the Truman administration is to vote straight Republican on November 4!” (Emphasis in original.)
The brochure encouraged support for every Indiana Republican under this antiwar, Old Right framing, but spotlighted the top of the ticket and statewide races. It urged voters to give former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower “the assignment of pulling America out of her mad, rocketing inflation… and of developing for America a foreign policy that is sane and secure, instead of rash and reckless!”
How many voters today would use that same terminology, “rash and reckless,” to describe the decision to outsource decision-making to the Israeli prime minister’s office?
The brochure, issued officially by the state party, also demanded an end to chronic overseas intervention in terms that will be familiar to the generation that came of age during the Global War on Terror:
3 WARS IN 35 YEARS (!) is the tragic record of the 3 Democrat Presidents of this century. Death, destruction and despair for millions of Americans. The unprecedented peacetime draft continues. More and more young Americans into bloody foreign battles. And at a cost which is bankrupting us all.
As a horrifying mirror image, in the past 35 years the last three Republican presidents have all entered wars in the Persian Gulf.
And while today the Trump White House attempts to dodge the economic fallout of the Iran War, which has cost taxpayers over $43 billion as of September and worsened inflation by roiling global energy markets, the Republican Party of 1952 had no trouble discerning the connection between government spending on empire and economic woes at home:
THE WAR BOOM continues only because the war is extended. This unholy conflict, producing only inflated dollars soaked in our young men’s blood, pushes our high prices, soaring taxes and monstrous national debt higher and higher and HIGHER!
No hesitation in recognizing the gruesomeness of war, or in emphasizing how dire a political issue becomes when you begin measuring the cost in blood. Contrast that healthy emotionalism with the distant obtuseness presented by today’s Republicans.
When a man whose wife was killed in action in March questioned Vice President J.D. Vance during a CNN townhall about the “failure in the leadership” responsible for his loss, the man tasked with publicly defending the administration pleaded ignorance.
After offering condolences, Vance said, “When you talk about failures that we were—the administration, the Department of War, whoever you want to say—was implicated in, I want to know about that stuff. Because if there were failures, and I don’t doubt that there were, I just, literally the first time I’ve heard about this is this conversation, and I want to fix that stuff.”
The differences in Republican messaging between 1952 and 2026 are not purely reducible to the distinction between incumbent and challenger. Donald Trump and his surrogates used similar language campaigning in 2024 against Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their involvement in the Ukraine War. And after his election—again, by an 11-point margin—Dwight D. Eisenhower, while admittedly an internationalist, did achieve an armistice in Korea and a decrease in military spending.
The Republican Party may have changed, but the American voter hasn’t. When presented with a clear choice, and given the opportunity to vote for less war overseas and a prioritization of American concerns, he takes it, no matter which party makes the promise.
That is why anti-war conservatives won in 1952, and it’s why pro-war conservatives will lose today.
The post When Republicans Won on an Antiwar Platform—and Delivered appeared first on The American Conservative.
Liberals are trotting out the 2016 playbook once again.
Remember Russiagate? Remember former British spook Christopher Steele’s dodgy dossier? Remember Crossfire Hurricane? Remember when it went nowhere and destroyed all trust in the FBI? We now have a decent idea what Russiagate was all about: It was intended to create a strong base of support among Democrats for a proxy war with Russia. The trick was to link this project with the political passions stirred up by Donald Trump. It worked like a charm. There is now an army of liberals who are almost as obsessed with Russian President Vladimir Putin as they are with President Trump.
Russiagate was a classic psychological warfare operation. It used the old propaganda technique of “association” to build up the idea that Putin and Russia were entwined in some foundational way with the right-wing populism then finding such purchase among the American electorate. The people behind Russiagate were frustrated with the realist foreign policy being pursued in Europe by the likes of President Barack Obama and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Obviously,” Obama said in March 2014 after the Russian annexation of Crimea, “we do not need to trigger an actual war with Russia. The Ukrainians don’t want that. Nobody would want that.”
But Obama was wrong: Some people very much wanted that, including his own former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. And to get their confrontation, they first needed to build a core base of support.
The Clinton campaign could have chosen any number of issues on which to attack Trump in 2016. With the benefit of hindsight—and, as Trump recently blurted out, “over a million [Ukrainians] killed”—it is now clear why they chose the Steele dossier. Russiagate may have been a flop legally; its basic disconnection from reality made it a nonstarter in the courts. But as a propaganda piece it was an enormous success. When the Obama administration trod lightly on the Crimea question, few Democrats questioned it. Indeed, many saw it as proof of his return to rational, level-headed foreign policy after the excesses of George W. Bush. After Russiagate, no Democratic president could get away with such realism without triggering a wave of condemnation from Putin-obsessed liberals.
Well, it is starting to look like there is an effort underway to summon the ghost of Russiagate before the midterms in November. It started in the same city out of which the Steele dossier emerged: London. Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham went on a popular politics podcast and stated that Russia had intervened in the Brexit referendum. This ran contrary to what investigations showed shortly after the election and was seen as so destabilizing that the head of MI5—Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence agency—felt the need to make a statement downplaying (though not denying) Burnham’s comments. Why was Burnham beating this dead horse? The clue came in the days that followed.
Around the same time as Burnham’s interview went live, reports started to circulate that Ukraine had managed to strike a Yandex facility in Moscow. Yandex is Russia’s primary internet technology company, roughly equivalent to their version of Google. Shortly after the strike, a Czech member of the European Parliament posted a dubious looking chart showing that after the strike on Yandex, online activity around Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) accounts plummeted. The chart had no source and looked AI-generated. What is more, it showed data up until October 15th but was posted on October 11th. The chart was such an embarrassment that even the BBC had to concede that it was disinformation. But not before prominent foreign policy voices like Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group and even Zelensky himself seemed to endorse the idea that the Yandex strike had knocked out Russian propaganda accounts.
What a tantalizing possibility for your average liberal X user. The change in online political discourse that has taken place in recent years is partly a result of Elon Musk’s purchase of X, turning it into a space of open political discourse. But it is also part of a broader shift away from the pieties of the Obama-era liberal progressives. This shift has been jarring for many on the left, who have had to watch their previously hegemonic opinions become “cringe.” People previously heralded as “right-thinking” and “cool” have seen their worldview turned into a running joke in only three election cycles. Imagine if they could blame this shift on Russian propaganda bots that could be knocked out by a well-placed Ukrainian attack drone!
In the weeks prior to Burnham’s comments and the Yandex hysteria, there had also been attempts to find new financial links between the Trump administration and the Kremlin. The most promising of these for the neo-Russigaters seems to center on the Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority political body in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Publications like The New York Times and The Financial Times have recently run profiles about senior White House figures working for DC lobbying firms on behalf of Republika Srpska. (The political entity is currently living under cartoonish political constraints imposed by the European Union that effectively allow an EU-appointed judge to overrule domestic political decisions made by the democratically elected government.) But instead of engaging with the facts on the ground, the liberal publications focus on the fact that Republika Srpska’s leadership is “pro-Russian.”
This gives more speculative commentators the space needed to concoct a florid conspiracy wherein the government of Republika Srpska is not really lobbying for more political autonomy, but is instead a sort of front for Kremlin influence, operating as a proxy lobbyist for Putin in Washington. This focus on issues in the Balkans follows on from recent efforts by Republican Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina introducing the SRBIJA Act that targets Serbia itself as a Russian (and, apparently, Chinese) puppet. (The congressman had also previously tried to label Georgia as a Kremlin proxy, introducing the MEGOBARI Act in 2025.) Wilson and his ilk seem to know that keeping the anti-Putin dog and pony show going will require new targets after the Ukraine war.
The Israelis are getting in on the act too. In recent months, there has been a notable tendency of pro-Israel voices online to blame Russia for a variety of problems. Laura Loomer’s recent Damascene conversion is a case in point: She went from calling Zelensky a dictator to lauding him as a hero. No doubt this recent shift has something to do with the disappointing progress of the Iran war—and, since Russia and Iran are close partners, they probably see linking the conflicts as somehow geopolitically helpful. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has used the Yandex attack as evidence that the Kremlin is directing bot networks to attack Israel and stir up antisemitism worldwide. If these indications are anything to go by, if we are not currently in World War III, we soon will be as conflicts across the world are linked together and given a common ideological framing.
The evidence suggests there will be a second attempt at Russiagate after the midterms. The immediate goal will no doubt be to shore up support for the Ukraine war. But smarter operators behind the scenes may also understand that the situation on the Ukrainian frontline is hopeless, and that it is highly unlikely that the conflict will still be raging by the time Trump leaves office. They are therefore looking for new places to continue their pressure campaign against Russia—the Balkans, the South Caucasus, anywhere Kremlin influence can be plausibly alleged.
But can a new Russiagate build the same momentum as the original? Probably not; politics, especially in America, rewards novelty. Yet rehashing the issue may nonetheless help Democrats somewhat, especially given the change in America’s geopolitical position since 2016.
For the plain fact is that in the wake of the Ukraine and Iran wars, American influence is collapsing globally. By the end of the Trump administration, the superpower’s reach will be a shadow of its former self. This presents the United States with two choices. One is to realize that the unipolar moment is over and adapt, maximally leveraging what power and influence the country still retains. The other is to take the “British option”: to stubbornly pretend that your empire still exists, and continue to meddle in the affairs of others even as your own society rots from the inside out. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that both Russiagate I and Russiagate II originated in London. The UK is trying to lure the United States down the same disastrous path that its foreign policy elite took after the collapse of the British Empire. The only question is whether the Americans will follow them into the abyss.
The post Russiagate II: Loser Edition appeared first on The American Conservative.
In a post on X, Katie Zacharia confirmed Saturday that she was no longer serving as White House press secretary. “President Trump is a kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and hardworking man,” she wrote. “It was an honor to work for him.”
Zacharia, a relatively unknown figure prior to her selection as press secretary, started in the job on Monday and gave her debut press briefing on Tuesday. The performance was widely panned—including by other White House officials—and she also faced criticism for allegedly representing herself as an attorney, despite not having passed the bar exam.
On Friday, the Trump Administration decided to remove Zacharia from her position, making hers the shortest tenure of any press secretary in American history.
The post WH Press Secretary Katie Zacharia Confirms Departure After Five-Day Tenure appeared first on The American Conservative.
That makes winning the midterms difficult, to say the least.
In the last consumer price index report before the midterm elections, inflation was up to 3.7 percent. It’s still a far cry from the 9.1 percent peak under former President Joe Biden, but that offers little comfort to vulnerable congressional Republicans.
President Donald Trump’s job approval rating on the economy sits at just 33.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. On inflation specifically, only 27.2 percent approve of the job he is doing, while nearly 70 percent disapprove. A Fox News poll this month found that 77 percent disapproved of Trump on inflation, while a meager 22 percent approved.
It is against this backdrop that Republicans will be defending their narrow congressional majorities. And while the polls in some of the most competitive Senate races look iffy, the national electoral environment is indisputably bad for the GOP.
These dire conditions have arisen as a result of Trump’s own choices. The biggest driver of the most recent inflation is a spike in energy prices caused by the Iran war.
Just as Biden chose to do another COVID stimulus right as lockdowns were ending and people were going back to work, Trump chose to start a war with Iran he cannot now end.
Biden was warned by political allies that what he was doing would exacerbate inflationary pressures on the economy but persisted anyway, dooming his party’s congressional majorities and, ultimately, his presidency.
Trump was warned that the Iran war would have similar political consequences. He was counseled by his own team that the regime in Tehran was not as close to collapse as outside agitators for war were claiming, and he was advised that an attack would cause the Iranians to close the Strait of Hormuz and choke off oil supplies.
Like Biden before him, Trump ignored all these warnings and pressed ahead. The electoral impact is likely to be similar.
Biden had defeated the socialists who demanded passage of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries, only to then follow their lead on opening the border and jacking up federal spending.
Trump had routed the neoconservatives, running many of them out of the Republican Party entirely, yet ended up giving them the war George W. Bush never did (albeit mainly because W. couldn’t, having already taken their lead on Iraq).
Both disasters were predictable and predicted. Trump even had the benefit of watching Biden so spectacularly misread his mandate. Trump’s successor-turned-predecessor’s errors paved the way for his own return to the White House.
And yet here we are.
Trump’s tariffs have also been unhelpful. Voters associate them with higher prices, even when the connection is dubious. (Though it is true that tariffs raised some prices.) But at least Trump had made some kind of case for trade protectionism and reshoring American jobs on the campaign trail, even if the electorate was then more concerned about the cost of living than jobs and unemployment.
While Trump appealed to Republicans with disparate views on foreign policy, there was little in his first term and virtually nothing in his 2024 campaign to indicate to voters that a war with Iran was in the offing.
Inflation was always going to be a difficult issue for Trump. Even if he did nothing to make the problem worse, price increases are cumulative. In most cases, he was only going to be able to cause the rate of inflation to decline, slowing price increases rather than immediately dropping them back down to where they were in his first term.
But inflation likely would have continued to come down if he had avoided the Iran war. His positions would then have been more defensible, even if midterm elections are typically hard for the party that controls the White House.
Trump could have more plausibly made the resurgence of inflation Biden’s legacy. Now he shares responsibility for this, and his party will almost certainly share the same fate as the Democrats in Congress who enacted Biden’s spending plans. And this GOP Congress didn’t even get to vote on the war (unless you count the war powers resolutions voted on after hostilities began).
Trump says the latest round of inflation is a small price to pay for preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yes, high gasoline and diesel prices are preferable to nuclear annihilation, if you believe those were the stakes.
Most voters don’t, however. And Trump himself was ready to end the fighting back in June. This war is continuing because of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump went down this road. But if and when the president succeeds at breaking this oil logjam, he will not receive the same credit for fixing a problem he helped create.
Now Trump is on the campaign trail, sometimes in the reddest parts of the country, seeking to stop an electoral bloodbath like that suffered by the GOP in 2006, when another ill-advised Mideast war shredded its congressional majorities.
Trump, in other words, is furiously trying to fix a problem of his own creation.
The post Trump, Like Biden, Has Become a President of Inflation and War appeared first on The American Conservative.
The late senator’s legacy threatens Darline Graham’s political future.
“Lindsey liked war,” said President Donald Trump on the day of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) funeral in July. “He’s never seen a war he did not like.”
Now Graham’s sister might find out that voters even in ruby-red South Carolina like the Iran War a great deal less than her brother did.
Appointed three days after her brother’s death to finish out his term, Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC) faces an actual election in South Carolina, where Republican senators have been safe for at least 20 years.
Not this year. A late September poll by the right-leaning Trafalgar group showed a neck-and-neck race between Graham and her Democratic challenger, the pediatrician Annie Andrews, with the Republican leading by only 1 point. Another survey from Insider Advantage, taken in the same period, also revealed a 1 percent difference favoring Graham. A Rasmussen poll released Friday showed Graham at 49 percent and Andrews at 45. Six percent of respondents were not sure.
By contrast, Lindsey Graham defeated his 2020 Democratic opponent by 10 points.
A number of red states this election year are seeing unusual surges by Democratic candidates due to voters’ concerns about rising gasoline prices and general inflation, and South Carolina is no exception. Andrews has not only centered her messaging around high costs but tied them to the Iran war. And the Democrat repeatedly emphasizes that Darline Graham voted three times for that war to continue.
In their only debate, televised on Sunday night, Andrews highlighted the war again while the Republican senator hewed to the standard neocon posturing worthy of a Graham.
“My opponent… had the opportunity to vote to end the war,” Andrews charged. “But three times in a row, she voted to continue it.”
“Why in the world would we stop now when they’re still dangerous?” Graham said. “And we are close to ending the war. Again, I think the president wants to end the war. I know he does. We all want the war to end.”
This is the closest Graham came to sympathizing with South Carolina voters who have tired of the war and the resulting price spikes. It felt like some recognition that the situation was dire on this front, for the state and for her campaign.
Still, the hawkish hits kept coming.
“But I support a strong military,” Graham added. “I believe in peace through strength.”
“I fully believe that we need to stand with Israel,” Graham added, predictably. “The same people that want to hurt and attack Israel want to come after us.”
“The terrorists that were close to getting a nuclear weapon will come here,” she said, repeating the common neocon refrain. “So, we need to stand with our strongest ally.”
She even tried to blame the war on Democrats.
“Let’s not forget again how the war started,” Graham continued. “The Democrats let Iran get a nuclear weapon almost.”
The 2003 Iraq War, including the fight-them-over-there-so-you-won’t-have-to-fight-them-here rhetoric, was popular at one time in “Bush Country,” as South Carolina has been called.
Today’s Iran War? Not so much. Andrews has capitalized on antiwar sentiments as she tries to yank a Senate seat from the Republicans.
“This reckless war in Iran has helped drive fuel prices to record highs,” Andrews said at a campaign stop. “Darline Graham has voted multiple times to continue this war that is directly responsible for the six-dollar diesel.”
“We need to lower the damn diesel,” she said.
When Lindsey Graham was still Andrews’s target—and when she had far less chance of becoming Senator than she does today—her rhetoric was even sharper on the war. “Lindsey Graham wants to send your sons and daughters to war,” Andrews said in March. “Your sons and daughters are the reason I am in this fight.”
Her focus now is on the impact of the war on voters’ pocketbooks. Judging by the polls, that new rhetorical strategy is working.
As a South Carolinian, I would still put my money on Graham winning. But the closeness of this race would have been unthinkable absent the political context created by Trump’s war. Moreover, many South Carolinians are uncomfortable with how the sister of the late Senator was awarded a high office by bloodright. Adding to the difficulty for Darline, a sizable number of South Carolina conservatives had supported Lindsey’s closest primary challenger, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), who ran as an “America First” war skeptic. Many who had pinched their noses and voted for Lindsey may not do the same for Darline. Some Norman supporters have even pushed for a write-in campaign.
The Iran War itself probably won’t sway the election, but the higher prices very well could, and voters do know the former led to the latter. Voters watch the news. They budget. They pump gas.
They also see Republican leaders treating them as if they were stupid.
“Everybody’s frustrated about fuel prices, obviously, but that’s not related to policies, that’s not related to Republicans in office,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recently said in an interview, adding “this is related to the Strait of Hormuz.”
Well, what else could be related to the Strait of Hormuz? Perhaps the Iran War—a signature policy of “Republicans in office,” especially the one in the White House.
Antiwar Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently shared that clip of Johnson and asked, “Who wants to tell him?”
Exactly. No one needs to tell South Carolina’s voters that the war is helping cause their financial pain.
Trump is right: Lindsey Graham loved war. His greatest legacy is arguably the U.S. war with Iran.
It meant a lot to him. It could also cost his sister his Senate seat.
The post Could Lindsey Graham’s War Cost His Sister a Senate Seat? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The execution of Nidal Hasan, the former U.S. Army major who carried out the mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, will not be live-streamed, President Donald Trump announced Thursday.
“He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had said last Thursday that the execution would be conducted by firing squad and that it would be “public,” and the Pentagon said it would be live-streamed.
Americans overwhelmingly oppose live-streaming the execution—80 to 18 percent—according to new polling by the Washington Post and ABC News.
After the Pentagon’s announcement, the Trump administration debated calling off the livestream, CNN reported Tuesday. During those conversations, the president learned Hasan is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair, raising concerns for Trump about the event’s imagery.
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Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece, resigned on Tuesday amid allegations of corruption.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Guilfoyle engaged in repeated misconduct, including a threat against a host nation official and influence peddling. In one instance, Guilfoyle allegedly requested $100,000 from a Trump donor to pay down her credit card bill, promising access to the Trump administration if he obliged.
In a statement announcing her resignation, Guilfoyle thanked President Donald Trump for the chance to serve and denied improper conduct. “These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity,” she said.
Earlier Tuesday, the new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia revealed that the Trump administration had asked Guilfoyle to resign.
Trump later in the day addressed the allegations of misconduct. “She was doing a good job, but we didn’t like what we were reading,” Trump said.
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The left just can’t forgive someone who should be one of them but isn’t.
My oh my, they really have it in for my old friend Roy Cohn, you’d think his real name was Adolf Hitler. The rogues’ gallery wall has been enlarged so every schmuck Roy ever took to the cleaners can state his case. Roy died of AIDS forty years ago, although, being Roy, he insisted he was suffering from pneumonia or something else just as banal. Roy was a homo, but in a closet so deep, it would accommodate every shoe and garment that Imelda Marcos ever purchased without paying.
There’s a new hatchet-job out about Roy, one whose title I don’t even know, but I read a review of it and it wasn’t pretty. There’s never been anything nice printed about Roy, and when I say never, I mean never, ever. What was it about Cohn that made every trendy liberal, most trendy gays, and definitely all left-wing phonies loathe the guy? That’s an easy one to answer. Roy was gay but in the closet, as gentlemen gays tended to be back then, and he was—horror of horrors—right-wing. The haters screamed hypocrisy about him being in the closet, but it was nothing of the kind. Roy came from a very Jewish background, and his mother would not have liked to see her only and extremely precious son galavanting down the village half-naked and sporting a trumpet up—well, never mind.
Roy was a conservative, something the phonies on the left considered worse than murder. Roy was unapologetic about his politics, and flaunted his friendship with William Buckley and others on the right side of politics. Last but not least, Roy had been unapologetic about the Rosenbergs, the two traitor-spies for the Soviet Union who got the chair back in 1953 for giving atomic bomb secrets to that nice guy, Joseph Stalin. “If I could have pulled the switch, I would have,” said Roy, and so would this writer.
My personal relations with Roy were friendly, if quite distant. I first met him in El Morocco, the number one nightclub of New York back in the ’50s and early ’60s. He came to my table and chatted with a gangster-gentleman friend of mine, Tom Corbally, the international adventurer and flier of the Second World War. He railed against Bobby Kennedy, the then–attorney general to his brother, President JFK. Roy made a lot of sense and I was delighted to meet him.
Roy and Bobby Kennedy had been colleagues when trying to root out reds from the government and the army, not to mention Hollywood. Bobby switched and became the liberal to end all liberals, but not Roy. Many years later, when I was sued by the Italian wife of Henry Ford for something I had written about her background—she was not an aristocrat born, but had convinced an innocent American like Henry the Deuce, as we called him, that she was a Colonna, or something like that, nothing very serious, mind you, but plebs tend to anger about such matters—Roy was her lawyer.
I ran into him at Studio 54, at the bar, and he said to me that he would try and lower the temperature because “in this country not being born an aristocrat is hardly libelous.” I thought what he said was great, and he kept his word. Instead of milking La Ford, he pointed out an obvious truth and convinced her to drop the suit against—I believe it was Esquire, or perhaps the Post.
About four or five years ago, in Provincetown, Michael Mailer and I were in his father’s (Norman Mailer) house that was almost connected to another small dwelling rented every summer by Roy Cohn. A young woman approached us and announced she was making a documentary on Roy Cohn, and once Michael told her I knew him, asked me to take part. I did and then attended the premiere at Lincoln Center. As the pug said, I shoulda stayed in bed.
I was the only one in the documentary who had a good word to say about Roy. People whistled and booed. It was a very lefty, Jewish New York crowd, and my only remark was thank God Roy was Jewish too, or they’d have really had it in for him. The documentary’s name is Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn. Basically Cohn was and is loathed because he was right-wing, no ifs or buts about it. He cut corners alright, but I’d like to have a dollar for every other Noo Yawk lawyer who does. He had an in with high-court New York judges because his old man was one, and he worked that to death. So what? He was never convicted of anything, but the left hates those who should be lefties, more than types like myself, who was born a righty.
Never mind that he’s been dead for 40 years, but still the lefties hate him as if he had betrayed socialism and Uncle Joe Stalin in the process. Recently I had the bad luck to be seated for dinner one away from a ghastly person by the name of Leon Black. He is the multibillionaire who gave hundreds of millions to Jeffrey Epstein supposedly for tax advice—a bit like saying I’m hanging out with Donald Trump in order to learn about humility. There’s a new book out on him called Money to Burn.
The dinner was given by a very close friend, whose wife asked me not to insult her guest. I complied, but it was hard going. What annoys me is that 40 years after his death, lefties continue to insult Cohn on occasion of yet another hatchet job. In the meantime, a bum like Leon Black gives $158 million to Epstein and insults us by insisting it was for tax and estate planning advice. A new name for pimping, something Roy never did for anyone.
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Federal agents raided the Washington, DC, area home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Monday as part of a criminal investigation, the Associated Press reported.
Two people familiar with the search told AP it was conducted by agents of the Department of Homeland Security.
Vice President J.D. Vance said in May that the Trump administration would investigate Omar over allegations of immigration fraud. Omar denies the allegations.
Some Republicans have said that Omar married her brother in 2009 to commit immigration fraud.
A progressive Democrat, Omar was born in Somalia.
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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.
Conservatives don’t have to debate on leftist terms.
“Government,” the late Rep. Barney Frank once said, “is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
This memorable quotation was uttered before socialists made their long march through the Democratic institutions, when government was something of a dirty word that Frank needed to clean up and render innocuous.
Though containing a kernel of truth, it was always a bit nonsensical, even if it helped put a positive spin on the leviathan.
For family, friendship, church, private civic associations, and community are also things we choose to do together. Only one of those involves government at all, and not intrinsically so.
The nation is also a thing we do together—partially by choice, partially by our neighbors’ and ancestors’ choices—and that, too, is at least somewhat distinct from whichever political authorities happen to be in charge.
There are other less positive spins you can put on what government entails, depending on the motivation of those ruling authorities and their allied elites.
One was recently offered by Vice President J.D. Vance in response to a question about socialism: “I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context, is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”
That may not be the technical definition of socialism, but it is a pretty apt description of what the government might do to you if the modern adherents of this ideology ever attain political power.
Naturally, Vance’s online detractors were dismayed. They hurled their dictionaries and economic textbooks in the vice president’s general direction, seeing it as further confirmation that his idea of Infrastructure Week is leading us down the road to serfdom. (No wonder Vance is no fan of the dismal science.)
An internet hatedom and seizing the means of production are just things we can choose to do together, with the former involving more choice for everyone than the latter.
But Vance is raising an interesting question, even if those who insist he be kept away from the 2028 Republican presidential nomination don’t want to hear it: As an alternative to socialism, is it better to offer libertarianism—or rather, the faux-libertarianism of big deficits and repeated Mideast wars long practiced by the GOP establishment—or a defense of the mixed economic system that we actually have?
There are times when the sharper contrast is certainly the way to go, no pale pastels and all that, and libertarians are an indispensable part of any antisocialist coalition. Justin Amash would have been a much more interesting candidate to debate Abdul el-Sayed than Mike Rogers, even if Michigan Republican primary voters were unlikely to see it that way. My own preference is that government be small enough that we—see, another thing we can simply choose to do together!—can drown it in a bathtub.
But the American electorate by and large seems to have other ideas, and socialists appeal to these by retreating to Barney Frank–style repackagings of their underlying ideology. What, you don’t like government? What do you have against roads? Or the fire department? Do you prefer poverty, illiteracy, and meowing cats stuck in trees?
Notice that this list does not include liquidating the kulaks, imprisoning Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, forcing people into breadlines while wearing two left shoes, or invading Taiwan. Just nice little things that we do together.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is very good at trying to rehabilitate Ronald Reagan’s nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” And while the “the warmth of collectivism” might not keep you from freezing in the breadlines, Mamdani is playing on the need for community that others—less radical than he—believe goes unmet by the “frigidity of rugged individualism.”
Among the main vulnerabilities of the new socialists are the government functions they want to do away with: defunding the police, abolishing ICE, forcing the Pentagon to hold a bake sale (what is it with these people and bread?) while Angela Davis Junior High School is fully funded.
To paraphrase the left-wing writer Ryan Grim, socialists will eventually need to abandon police abolition because the means of production won’t seize themselves, nor will the bank and healthcare CEOs put themselves in handcuffs.
But today’s left just isn’t that economically motivated—the DSA’s reemergence notwithstanding—and it certainly isn’t interested in genuine solidarity with the people Vance grew up with.
Vance gets this, even if his critics do not.
That doesn’t mean that the current administration has gotten the size of government right, or that we couldn’t use a more robust answer to the country’s looming fiscal catastrophe than anything the GOP has managed to offer since Calvin Coolidge was president.
But it does convey the madness—to be perfectly Frank about it—of allowing your political opponents to call you whatever names they like, while accepting their own dishonest self-definitions as gospel truth.
The post Vance Is Right About Socialism appeared first on The American Conservative.
Dutch decline holds some lessons for Americans.
For the past week or so, I’ve been in the Netherlands on vacation. And since my wife majored in art history, that has meant a lot of time in museums, soaking in the works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the other masters of the Dutch Golden Age.
Every educated person has at least a passing familiarity with the Dutch Golden Age, of course: The period, essentially coextensive with the 17th century, when a tiny republic on Europe’s northwestern fringe not only blazed with artistic genius, but also invented modern capitalism, dominated the world’s maritime trade, and established a far-flung colonial empire.
But less well-known is the era that followed: the evocatively named “Periwig Period” (Pruikentijd, in Dutch) of the 18th century. Unlike the glorious 1600s, these were years of complacency and stagnation, during which the country lost its commercial dynamism, its naval supremacy, and its geopolitical importance. Dutch painting descended into pastiche, and the intellectual energy with which Amsterdam had crackled departed for other climes. Holland became comfortable, stable—and a backwater. “After 1700,” the great historian J.H. Plumb tells us, “the Dutch contributed little to the civilization of Europe. The startling beauty of their waterborne cities, so modern and so functional in the 17th century, acquired the patina of age,” and their inhabitants, he adds ruefully, “began to live in the past.”
More than three hundred years later, the fear of entering our own version of a Periwig Period increasingly grips American elites. Last Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio extolled the need for civilizational vitality in a speech in Athens, with the majestic ruins of the Acropolis as a backdrop. He lamented that many in the modern West had forgotten the example of their classical forebears, who exemplified “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk, and glory.” Warning against the passive acceptance of weakness and decay, Rubio urged the recovery of an ethos centered on power and action, invoking the ancient Greek notion of θυμός: “the fire of passion, strength, courage, [and] pride.” America’s top diplomat exhorted us all, in other words, to stave off decline by living heroically.
Stirring stuff. But insofar as this ethos has served him as a guide to statecraft, it must be said it leaves something to be desired. Contra the careful attention to consequences and deft realpolitik that has characterized the most successful diplomatic minds of the Western tradition, Rubio’s read of the classics translates into a fundamental bias for action—however crude and destructive—over inaction. On this view, it is always and everywhere better to be in the arena than on the sidelines, even if all one is doing is flailing about and absorbing blows. With this comes an emphasis on force and domination, which leads naturally to an overindexing on military might, and a corresponding sense that the retention of power depends on its frequent exercise.
Yet is not the opposite more often the case? The story of our involvement in the Middle East, for example, is the story of the frittering away of American strength through its clumsy employment in the service of foolish, even impossible, ends. Likewise the tales of other powers that have toppled from the first rank—the embrace by Germans and Japanese of bloodthirsty militarism in the ’30s, Britain’s reckless plunge into the First World War, even France’s glory days under Napoleon. When all is said and done, embracing the libido dominandi tends rather to corrode than to strengthen one’s civilization.
This, at any rate, is what is happening in Iran, where the White House is squandering American lives, money, and munitions to pursue an unattainable goal and eliminate a phantom threat. One fears it may yet happen in Latin America, where we have enthusiastically embraced the notion that might makes right and elected to swing our big stick around with reckless abandon. Even in Europe, where the accomplishment of a truly heroic feat—wresting America free of its military entanglements on the continent—is still alluringly in prospect, we instead spend our time doubling down on ham-fisted efforts to shape the Old World’s domestic politics and compel its denizens to be based (Rubio’s speech, of course, being but the latest example of this).
An aversion to the fate that befell the Dutch is understandable. Gradually sliding into irrelevance—however comfortable—is something from which every red-blooded American should recoil in disgust. But a Periwig Period is only one way for societies to go down; nor is it clear that this is the likeliest trajectory for our own (hypothetical) decline.
And when it comes to the Dutch themselves, one can even argue they played their hand fairly well. A tiny country living in a neighborhood of ferocious, far-larger predators couldn’t sit in the top rank forever, especially given its citizens’ internal divisions and predilection for political liberty. Not that there was a lack of voices urging them on to ruin; these sturdy burghers had their own neocon-types to contend with, fanatical Calvinists who urged war to the death against papist Spain and France. In the end, though, cooler heads prevailed: the Dutch fought when they had to, and made peace when they could. Indeed, their realism even infuriated would-be allies like Cromwell, who sought to form a kind of Protestant International with Holland. (Informed of the latter’s rejection of the project, the Lord Protector thundered that the Dutch had “preferred gain to godliness.”) But had the hawks carried the day, the Netherlands probably would have been dismantled or swallowed whole by its enemies, its national life more or less extinguished.
America’s circumstances are vastly different, to be sure. Our means are gigantic; a gargantuan economy, a peerless—even if not omnipotent—military, and a hegemonic culture together seem proof against external threats for at least a few more decades. No, for the United States, a spectacular flame-out seems more likely than a slow fade. The combustion of our national resources and energies in a succession of avoidable crises is more to be feared, I think, than a long period of managed decline. And the Greek watchword here is not θυμός but ὕβρις—hubris.
The post Keeping a Golden Age Going appeared first on The American Conservative.
The secretary of defense has too much enthusiasm for something most humans would rather avoid—especially on the historical right.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “relish” as “to like or enjoy something” and “to get pleasure from something.”
I was reminded again this week at how much Pete Hegseth seems to relish war.
The Secretary of Defense announced that there will be a new Office of Religious Affairs. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual,” Hegseth said Wednesday.
“God is good. Evil is not,” he added. “And America’s military must understand the difference.”
Despite any leftist or perhaps atheist criticism of this language, there was nothing inherently wrong with what Hegseth said. There is also nothing wrong with invoking God or faith in military or civil affairs; America has a long and proud history of doing so.
But coupling his choice of words with the shameful likely double-tap U.S. bombing of an Iranian girls’ school in February, and his past excited rhetoric like “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” in March (which legal experts worried could have been teasing potential war crimes), there does seem to be a bully-with-a-badge zeal for warmaking for the secretary. Hegseth’s unusual foreign policy passion also seems fueled by his own Crusader version of Christianity, particularly as filtered through the theology of his ultraconservative Reformed evangelical church, which is often at odds with other Christian churches (including the oldest one).
War does not seem like a mere necessary evil to Hegseth. I’m not sure he sees even unjust war as evil at all.
I think he likes it.
Is this conservative?
The late conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet didn’t think so. While mulling over Hegseth’s latest warcries, this passage from a 1979 speech Nisbet delivered, republished recently by Modern Age, jumped out at me: “War is, above any other force in history, the basis of centralization and collectivization of the social and economic orders.”
“No conservative can relish, much less seek, war and its attendant militarization of social and civil spheres of society,” Nisbet added.
Having grown up on Russell Kirk, I was familiar with the more traditional conservative view of war and peace that Nisbet was expressing. Kirk and Nisbet were contemporaries and friends.
For conservatives of old, war undermined civilization. It was never its primary mission or cause, as Hegseth appears to regard his own nation’s. “Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle,” Kirk wrote.
Conservatives’ default aversion to war spans centuries. “War never leaves where it found a nation,” wrote the man Kirk called the father of conservatism, 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke.
In contrast to the radical French Revolution, Burke considered the American one conservative. “Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other…. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” said the American Founding Father James Madison.
Almost two centuries later, the Old Right’s Robert Taft would say, “History shows that when the people have the opportunity to speak, as a rule the people decide for peace. It shows that arbitrary rulers are more inclined to favor war than are the people, at any time.”
The Woodrow Wilson– and FDR-despiser H.L. Mencken wrote in the first half of the 20th century, “Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests.”
“They must be urged to slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them,” Mencken concluded.
Hegseth, his boss, and others have tried to alarm Americans and the world about Iran supposedly soon acquiring a nuclear weapon, only to find an America and a world that doesn’t believe them and hates their war.
They should have listened to conservatives.
My mind flooded with antiwar quotes from these historic figures and others, like GK Chesterton, Richard Weaver, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and the other men (and women) of the right that had all reached a similar conservative consensus on war. It would be impossible for me to include every quote here, although I did enjoy finding some new ones in researching this essay.
Still, Hegseth and the Trump administration are on the contemporary right, and are indeed a certain kind of conservative at least in name, if one adds the “neo” prefix to the moniker.
The neoconservatives Trump once vowed to vanquish now seem to direct and define his administration, which has been as reflexively pro-war as they could have wished—and has been as disastrous as the last thoroughly neoconservative administration was nearly two decades ago.
It should be noted that neoconservatives, who are not conservative in any traditional sense, have long tried to claim President Ronald Reagan, who was a conservative, as their eternal Republican model.
Never mind that the neoconservatives actually hated Reagan’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union, which turned out to be his greatest legacy. The former American Conservative Union head David Keene’s framing of Reagan’s true foreign policy will always be gold:
Reagan resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office…/ After the [1983] assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, it was questioning the wisdom of U.S. involvement that led Reagan to withdraw our troops rather than dig in. He found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets.
Can one imagine one of today’s neoconservative absolutists backing away from any fight anywhere?
The neocon religion is war, and in Pete Hegseth, this notorious ideological band appears to have found a more than willing warrior who savors it much as they do.
But conservatives do not relish war—if any conservatives can still be found.
The post Hegseth’s Love of War Isn’t Conservative appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mores about race have changed since the ’90s, but there is such a thing as overcorrection.
Explaining her vote for Donald Trump in 2024, the New York Times bestselling author and former Democratic strategist Evan Barker memorably if provocatively said, “Instead of thinking about health care, or the social safety net, I decided to vote for the side that I knew didn’t hate my white son.”
Vice President J.D. Vance said in an interview that one of the things he was proudest of was the second Trump administration’s efforts to roll back “institutionalized anti-white, anti-male discrimination in this country.”
“Again, there’s a lot more work to do, but, like, we’re not discriminating against people, black or white, based on the color of their skin in job applications,” he said. “We’re telling the universities, you’re not allowed to discriminate against white guys, against dudes, against anyone.”
Vance in this interview was speaking to the young men who voted for Trump in 2024 but might stay home in the midterm elections, with narrow Republican congressional majorities on the line. At least some of those young voters saw themselves being left out of the intersectionality sweepstakes in the university and excluded from the protections of civil rights laws in the workplace.
It was in this context that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders found herself at the center of a conservative social media firestorm over what she surely thought was an effective and inoffensive ad touting her welfare-to-work policies.
The ad features a lazy welfare recipient named Brad who sits around all day playing video games and eating cheese balls. “Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession,” Sanders says with a chuckle, noting that the taxpayers footing the bill work hard. It’s lighter than most such TV spots, even finishing with a happy ending as Brad puts on a tie and goes to work. A win for Arkansas!
But the ad was perhaps a little too light for some. Brad, our welfare king, is white.
Fraud in government social welfare programs has been one of the top issues raised by Republicans in what has otherwise been a tough election year. The Minnesota Somali daycare fraud scandal caused Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, to abandon his campaign for a third term and is one reason the race to fill the state’s open Senate seat is unexpectedly close. Vance chairs the White House’s fraud prevention task force.
Getting welfare recipients to work has been a conservative policy goal for decades, though center-right attitudes about mothers receiving public benefits staying home with their children have softened in recent years. But this was a central tenet of the successful bipartisan welfare reform of the 1990s, which, though signed into law by President Bill Clinton—an Arkansan whose ascent to the White House paved the way for Sanders’s father to become governor—was supported by conservative think tanks more than liberal ones.
Sarah Sanders rose to national prominence as the spokeswoman of the White House during part of Trump’s first term. She would surely be on the vice presidential shortlist of the 2028 Republican presidential nominee. Or at least she would have been, before she broke bad with Brad.
Whoever wrote and cast the Brad ad was probably seeking to avoid the normal pitfall of Republican messaging on welfare or crime being treated as a racist dogwhistle. Daycare fraud and weekend prison furloughs for violent criminals are legitimate objects of public concern, but Democrats can always ask whether so many voters would care if the Somalis weren’t the fraudsters or Willie Horton (who actually went by William) wasn’t black.
Brad seemed like a clever way out of this familiar trap. Except many conservatives thought having a white male welfare cheat was itself racist, or at least a bit tone-deaf a few weeks out from trying to turn young white men out for the midterms.
In a DEI world, white men are the last people it is socially acceptable to label as welfare queens. Many also found it improbable that ol’ Brad really was demographically representative of Arkansan welfare caseloads, though that is in dispute.
At the very least, we are living in a different world than the one where top Republican consultants would necessarily be embarrassed by the Willie Horton ad or afraid of being called racist for exposing Somali daycare fraud. (Nick Shirely, you jest!) But not everyone in the GOP has caught up.
Yet the current freakout feels a bit more like practicing identity politics than rejecting it. Did we really strike a blow against wokeness in order to freak out about the race of fake welfare recipients? Are we pursuing a multiracial, working-class political coalition or Woke 2 for white folks? And which is more likely to win elections?
The post In Arkansas, the Good, the Brad, and the Ugly appeared first on The American Conservative.
Voters want fewer wars and more deportations—and always get the opposite.
On a recent New York Times podcast, columnist E.J. Dionne claimed that the “key” to Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory was his promise “to bring order to the southern border,” but instead—for some inexplicable reason—he “launched this massive campaign” to deport illegals.
Great analysis, except Trump never promised to “bring order” to the border. That was Kamala.
Trump’s promises were slightly more grand. In particular, he said—repeatedly—that he would implement “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” His immigration plans were memorialized in panicked Times headlines like these:
[BLOCK]“Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans” (Nov. 11, 2023)
“Trump Says He Would Try Again to Revoke Haitian Immigrants’ Protections” (Oct. 3, 2024)
“What if Trump Deported Millions of Immigrants?” (Oct. 22, 2024)
“Trump’s Deportation Vow Fuels Fear and a Potential Showdown in New York” (Nov. 9, 2024)[/BLOCK]
For proposing an immigration crackdown that appalled the Times’s newsroom, he was rewarded on Election Day with a sweep of all seven battleground states, a majority of the popular vote, and a newly Republican Senate.
No Republicans proposed to bring “order” to the border. Under President Joe Biden, the border had plenty of “order,” in the sense that the 20 million foreigners sneaking into this country did so with a minimum of pushing and shoving.
To avoid the mayhem of throngs of people rushing our border, the Biden administration gave Third-Worlders an app to schedule their illegal crossings, whereupon Border Patrol would dust them off and direct them to the nearest welfare office. True, this was a direct violation of federal law as well as traitorous, but the one thing you couldn’t say was that it lacked order.
It was Democrats who ran on bringing yet more “order” to the border, meaning they wanted illegals to be admitted even faster.
For Dionne to confuse Trump with Kamala on immigration deserves some kind of award. I’d say we’ve found the stupidest mammal in North America, except the other two Times podcasters agreed with Dionne! Columnist Jamelle Bouie redoubled the idiocy, saying “when Trump says that he’s going to bring order, I think what voters hear is that he’s going to make the line work better.”
I mention this not to point out that Dionne and his fellow Times cognoscenti are abject morons, but because they’re about to do it again. Democrats appear to be cruising to victory in the midterms for one reason: the Iran War. Assuming the blue wave comes—in fact, if Democrats flip any seats—we’ll get the same rewriting of history as Dionne gave us.
[BLOCK]2024: Trump wins massive victory by vowing to carry out “mass deportations.”
The media a year later: He said he was only going to bring order to the border!
2026: Democrats run against the Iran War and win.
The media next year: The midterms prove Americans want to abolish ICE![/BLOCK]
No matter how clear voters are about wanting more deportations and fewer wars, we’re always told that what they really want is fewer deportations and more wars. Coincidentally, that is what the big donors of both parties want.
So it’s worth mentioning right now—five weeks before the election—that Trump’s single most popular issue is immigration and his least popular is the Iran War (plus the inextricably linked high gas prices and inflation).
Every Democrat in the U.S. Congress has voted to end the war—except Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and his own party thinks he’s a Republican. Every Democrat running for office this year is vocally opposed to the Iran War. It’s a good issue for them. Polls show that nearly 90 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents oppose military action in Iran. (Dems aren’t great on 80–20 issues like trans rights, but they rule on the 90–10 stuff.)
According to a recent Fox News poll, voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on only one issue: immigration. While Democrats are favored 55–40 on inflation and 53–43 on foreign policy, voters still prefer Republicans on immigration 49–48.
Moreover, respondents rank immigration the third “most important issue facing the country today,” just after inflation and the economy. The Iran War comes in sixth. (Climate change is 614th.)
Just for fun, let’s compare recent New York Post headlines.
“Fox News Poll: Majority says immigration enforcement has crossed the line.” Upon review, the “majority” turns out to be a bare 53 percent. That’s about as good as it gets for Trump these days.
But with overwhelming majorities opposing the Iran War, the Post’s headline was: “Iran back producing ballistic missiles despite U.S. claims after Operation Epic Fury.” The poll showing only 31 percent support the war was slipped in at the end of the article.
That’s New York Times–level deviousness. You’d never know Post publisher Rupert Murdoch supports constant war and open borders.
Perhaps Republicans should pay more attention to voters than a pro-war propaganda sheet. You know what’s even more popular than hating the Iran War? Deporting felons. That’s favored by 94 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats. You couldn’t get that many Americans to agree that Lindsay Clancy should get her tubes tied.
If there’s any hope in an election year dominated by an unpopular war, it lies in the mass deportation of criminals.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES
The post It’s the Iran War, Stupid appeared first on The American Conservative.
It’s not just the political embarrassment.
In 1626, England’s Parliament sought to impeach the Duke of Buckingham, a widely despised advisor to King Charles I. The king moved quickly to shield his favorite; on hearing the news, he said curtly that Parliament would sit “not a minute” more and gave orders for its immediate dissolution.
Exactly four centuries later, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) has taken a page from the Stuart playbook, dismissing our own legislature (or at least, its lower chamber) to protect an unpopular official. Following a mid-September move by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to force a vote on impeaching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Johnson—who had previously cut the House’s schedule short by two weeks, breaking an earlier pledge to “work all the way through September and every day that’s on the calendar”—abruptly cancelled the last day of session.
Although Johnson made noises about giving members more time to campaign in their districts, the reason for the dismissal was obvious: He wanted to avoid that impeachment vote. Massie’s measure had a 48-hour timer baked into it, and it was introduced on a Tuesday. Johnson sent his members home on Wednesday night, thus punting consideration of impeachment until the House gavels back in after the midterms. (In an interview with CNN, Massie dubbed that cancelled Thursday “the Hegseth holiday.”)
The Kentucky congressman has become adept at congressional maneuverings, and his latest move appeared to take GOP leadership by surprise. Had the House remained in session as planned, it would have had to vote for the first time in Trump’s second term on impeaching a cabinet official. And not just any cabinet official: Hegseth has antagonized Republican lawmakers to an unusual degree, including by summarily dismissing senior defense officials and military officers, failing to offer details on how he’ll spend the gargantuan sums for which his department is asking, and generally exhibiting what might charitably be called an indecorous manner. And more than any other administration figure—excepting only the president himself—Hegseth owns the least popular war in American history. Indeed, polling suggests a majority of Americans support Hegseth’s impeachment.
It’s therefore not inconceivable this thing might have passed. And even an unsuccessful impeachment measure would be politically embarrassing, both for Johnson and the White House.
But there may be another reason the GOP establishment went to such lengths to scuttle the vote. Already Democrats are salivating over the prospect of wielding state power against their political enemies, should they regain power. Assuming a blue wave in the midterms, this would start next year with congressional investigations, hearings, and impeachments. If a Democrat were to win the White House in 2028, these efforts would quickly escalate to encompass the full machinery of government.
Hegseth is likely to be among the highest-priority targets. His record reads like it was cooked up in a lab to enrage liberal sensibilities: He is a former Fox News host who has been accused of sexual assault, a brash and crude culture warrior who delights in what progressives call “punching down,” and a combination hype man/executive agent for the president’s various military interventions. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers have openly said he is guilty of war crimes; one liberal outlet published a piece last year that began with a simple assertion—“Pete Hegseth is a murderer.”
And Dems are unlikely to be content with bagging Hegseth; others further down in the Pentagon bureaucracy could be in legal jeopardy as well. Nor is the American justice system the only worry. One increasingly hears speculation that a liberal administration could manifest its enthusiasm for the “rules-based international order” by working with the Hague on this.
Viewed in this light, the significance of Massie’s impeachment move is that it could significantly bolster such a case. For his effort isn’t hastily drawn-up hackwork; it consists of eight separate articles, each of which is specific and serious. The articles accuse Hegseth of illegally using U.S. forces for hostilities not authorized by Congress in Iran, Venezuela, and Yemen; contravening the War Powers Resolution of 1973; ordering extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific; ignoring legislation requiring the minimization of civilian casualties; and using his department to retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) in violation of the latter’s First Amendment rights. And while most of the charges essentially amount to carrying out illegal orders from his commander-in-chief, two of them—ignoring responsibilities for protecting civilians and targeting Kelly—concern things that Hegseth seems to have done on his own.
To have these articles debated, memorialized in the public record, and voted upon—even if ultimately rejected—would be to give substance to prospective future prosecutions, both domestic and international. The whole affair is also likely to spook those currently running the war, especially if the president at some point decides to make good on his perennial threats to “annihilate” Iran. (This is a particularly relevant fear given the UN’s recent finding that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the U.S. military has committed war crimes in Iran.)
It may well be that this was seen as the most dangerous part of Massie’s maneuver. Postponing the vote until after the midterms relieves some of the pressure on Republican congressmen, and it also provides a little breathing space if the White House escalates over the next month or so. Yet impeachment will sooner or later be considered by the House. And these are unlikely to be the last charges lodged against Hegseth.
The post Why a Hegseth Impeachment Terrifies the GOP appeared first on The American Conservative.
On many issues, the Kentucky congressman stuck with the position that ultimately proved more popular.
As President Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to sink to historic lows and his party faces a potential slaughter in the upcoming midterm elections, would Republicans’ prospects be better today if he had acted more like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)?
Would Trump’s own approval numbers be better?
These might sound like strange questions given the current political and seemingly personal chasm between the president and the congressman today, particularly after the former joined with billionaire Zionist donors to oust the latter—a war opponent and Israel critic—in his May GOP Kentucky primary, the most expensive in U.S. history.
Still, it’s a more practical question than some might realize. A brief history:
In 2020, Trump called for Massie to be kicked out of the Republican party, outraged over the Kentucky congressman’s opposition to a $2 trillion coronavirus relief package.
Trump loathing Massie—that’s familiar.
But by 2022, tensions had eased, and Trump endorsed Massie as a “Conservative Warrior” who “fights hard to Protect your Liberties.”
Trump and Massie were on the same page, promoting a shared America First agenda.
In 2024, Massie returned the favor with a late endorsement of Trump (Massie was originally a supporter of Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis in that year’s GOP presidential primary), saying, “Donald Trump will put Americans first by securing our liberties at home and preventing needless wars abroad. He will Make America Great Again by empowering small farmers and taking on special interests.”
Massie had a point at the time. Two years ago, Trump did campaign on putting America first and securing liberties at home, as well as other original MAGA-and-Massie-friendly promises like drastically cutting government, protecting free speech, no new wars, and putting the neocons out to pasture.
Today, it’s a very different picture. The American people no longer seem like a priority. The president and other prominent Republicans tell Americans to endure high gas prices to support their Middle East war, even as Trump-voting truckers are irate over the Iran war and the accompanying spike in diesel costs. Elon Musk’s one-time radical government revamp DOGE is a distant memory. Republicans now regularly assault the First Amendment.
The U.S. is in an open-ended war in Iran, an ongoing failure that not only is likely to define Trump’s legacy but became the fulfillment of most neoconservatives’ lifelong dream.
Trump didn’t defeat the neocons—he gave them the gift of the war they most wanted, and he arguably has become a neocon himself, now regularly sharing on social media the alleged wisdom of Bush-Cheney retreads like Marc Thiessen and Israel-first pundits like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro.
Goodbye, OG antiwar MAGA voices Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Hello, warmongers Laura Loomer and Lindsey Graham.
To be fair, Trump also had promised to secure the border—and on that, he has delivered. But beyond that particular issue, the Make America Great Again coalition that elected Trump has been shattered mostly over a sense of betrayal over the issues listed here and others.
This sad state is what likely prompted the popular X account Being Libertarian to share recently an old photo of Massie and Trump together in friendlier times. The caption read:
In an alternate timeline, Trump takes a liking to Thomas Massie, lobbies for him to replace Mike Johnson, the Epstein criminals are in jail, Bibi is fending for himself, DOGE is codified, the Department of Education doesn’t exist, farmers are happy, and the GOP wins in 2026.
It’s a fair point. What might a more Massiesque timeline have looked like today, according to polls?
The over six-month Iran war is now so unpopular that even many Republican candidates are running away from it. Real Clear’s polling average shows Trump’s handling of Iran is at 32.6 percent approval and 62.5 percent disapproval. That’s a net disapproval rating of almost negative 30 percentage points.
That’s not good. Americans didn’t vote for an endless war when they elected Trump in 2024. Quite the opposite. But their country seems to be in one now.
Another indicator of how unpopular the war is came earlier this month. Massie moved to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for his handling of Iran. The White House and Republicans rhetorically dismissed the move as meaningless symbolism, yet Speaker Mike Johnson appeared to cut down congressional time to avoid a vote.
An Economist/You Gov poll found that 51 percent of respondents supported Hegseth’s impeachment. So Massie’s effort was not exactly “grandstanding” but giving voice to real public frustration with current foreign policy.
It’s not just the war where Massie seemed to pick the winning horse. The congressman’s calls for greater transparency regarding the Epstein files, which Trump promised he would declassify before dragging his feet and lashing out once in the White House, have not been a good look for the president.
Again, on the U.S.-Israel relationship Massie was ahead of the curve. Newsweek reported earlier this month that, “Only 26 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the investigations into Epstein, compared to 57 percent disapproving, according to a YouGov poll released earlier this year.”
“Sixty-eight percent said they believed the government was covering up evidence it has about Epstein,” the report noted.
Polls show Americans having increasingly negative views toward Israel, and a July Economist/YouGov poll found that half of Americans think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested for war crimes.
Massie has been a critic of what he calls the U.S.-funded “genocide” being carried out by Israel in Gaza. A September Quinnipiac poll showed that now more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians than the Israelis.
While views on Trump’s tariffs might vary here at The American Conservative, Massie has been a staunch opponent. A Cato Institute/Morning Consult poll this month found that “three in four (75%) say tariffs will be important to their vote in this November’s midterm elections” and that 74 percent “say that Trump’s tariffs increased the prices of things they buy at the store, including 66% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats.”
Even so, the Kentucky farmer Massie has been outspoken in opposition to the president’s schemes to import more foreign beef to lower costs ahead of the midterms. Newsweek reported Saturday, “President Donald Trump’s net approval rating has fallen across 10 major beef-producing states in the month since he announced a temporary increase in beef import quotas designed to bring down the cost of beef, according to polling data.”
“Trump’s net approval rating declined between August 21 and September 21 in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas,” Newsweek observed.
Trump’s numbers shouldn’t be dropping by double digits in Oklahoma and Texas. Or in Massie’s home of Kentucky.
On so many issues where candidate Trump once promised to put American voters first, the president now finds himself occupying the unpopular position, while Massie has stuck to the position that has ultimately proved more popular. These are just a few.
Amusingly, some jittery conservatives are now saying that if Republicans do poorly in November it will be the fault of dissidents like Massie and his libertarian supporters who didn’t bother to show up at the polls. Trump made a play for libertarian voters in 2024 with some success, and even made good on his promise to pardon imprisoned Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, a longstanding libertarian goal.
But if Republicans are massacred in a few weeks, it won’t be because libertarians are finicky. That’s laughable.
It’s also deflection. As Massie wrote on X Sunday, “Economic fallout of the Iran War and withholding Epstein Files are dragging down Republicans in the midterms.”
“There’s a month remaining to change these policies, but Republicans are determined to go down with the ship,” he added. “Are they even in charge?”
Good question. Many Republicans and even Trump now seem completely bewildered over how unpopular they’ve become. They shouldn’t be. Their policies are far removed from America-First promises that had energized a once-in-a-lifetime, winning MAGA movement.
Americans aren’t confused. They’re mad. They know exactly what’s happened and who made it happen.
So does Thomas Massie.
The post If Trump Had Been More Like Massie, He Might Be Winning the Midterms appeared first on The American Conservative.
Back then, Republicans aimed to impress DC elites, not conservative voters.
A curious video from 2016 went viral on X last week. It celebrated the freshman class of GOP senators as they completed their first two years in Congress. To the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the fresh-faced lawmakers march in unison around Capitol Hill. The propaganda clip shows the politicians working out, playing with hoverboards, wearing jeans in interviews, and other apparently humanizing moments. The production resembles that of a college football hype video. But rather than getting the audience excited to see their team win on Saturday, it’s designed to get Republican voters pumped to see Thom Tillis and Joni Ernst.
The video is an interesting artifact. This class will mostly be gone from the Senate in a few months. While the video was made after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, it still exhibits the focus and style of the pre-Trump GOP. It’s a style Trump defeated that same year in the Republican primary and went on to bury in the decade that followed.
What the GOP was like before Trump came down the escalator is being quickly forgotten. The video should serve as a good reminder of the direction the GOP wanted to pursue before Trump upended their plans.
While there’s much debate over Trump and his legacy, we can at least be thankful the GOP no longer dedicates itself to college football hype videos for neocons.
A video like this one could only come about in an era when DC was obsessed with itself. The most popular political book of the time was Mark Leibovich’s This Town, a purported exposé of toxic DC culture that is nevertheless entirely about all the fun parties and powerful people a journalist meets in DC. There’s little substance to the book at all, but it was beloved by political journalists because it put more attention on their favorite topic: themselves. House of Cards was a hit show and became must-watch TV in DC. Like This Town, it was billed as a critique of DC but subtly lionized the Washington scene, making it seem much more exciting than it actually is.
Trump ended this fixation with his insurgent campaign, but the mentality initially remained strong among Republican apparatchiks. These types thought Trump would be a flash in the pan and that everything would return to their preferred normal after his term.
The 2016 hype video encapsulates the establishment’s preferred normal. The majority of these marching senators were “Paul Ryanists” who wanted the party to ditch the culture war, give immigrants amnesty, and focus more on the important stuff—like warging war in far-off lands. Most of these senators barely tolerated Trump, with some becoming vocal critics of the president.
One of them is Ben Sasse, whom we see balancing on a hoverboard. Most know him now as the former senator publicly sharing his brutal battle with cancer, but he was once seen as a rising star in the GOP and the antidote to Trump. He insisted he would never vote for Trump in 2016 and refused to endorse the future winner. He claimed Trump was a racist and attacked his hardline views on immigration. “This is the party of Abraham Lincoln,” Sasse said in one of his more melodramatic 2016 moments. “This is not the party of David Duke, Donald Trump.” Instead of mass immigration, Sasse thought the GOP should focus more on Russia and Syria.
Like many Republicans, Sasse would later dial down his criticism while Trump was president. But Never Trumpers still admired him even if he was no longer calling Trump a racist. They knew he represented their values. Sasse would return to his anti-Trumpism after January 6, becoming one of seven Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump over the incident. Bill Cassidy, also highlighted in the 2016 video, was another such Republican senator.
Sasse was of course not alone in embodying Never Trump principles. Thom Tillis and James Lankford also exemplified this mentality. Tillis is seen in the video doing push-ups; Lankford just walks around with an awkward smile. Both went on to become the staunchest advocates for foreign interventions and mass immigration among Senate Republicans. Lankford attacked Trump’s attempts to restrict refugees during the first term. Both he and Tillis looked to find ways to pass amnesty during the Biden years, with the two usually being involved in discussions with Democrats on the matter. This squishiness was also shared by their fellow class-of-2015 member Cory Gardner—who would win an award from a pro-immigration group for his work on trying to liberalize immigration laws—but it didn’t help the Coloradoan keep his seat in 2020.
While Lankford and Tillis take soft lines on immigration, they never waver in their foreign-policy hawkery. Both have been some of the loudest proponents of more funding for Ukraine and Israel in the Senate. Their hawkery may be rivaled only by Tom Cotton, who was also a member of this freshmen Senate class.
The other Republicans featured in the video were similarly uninspiring. None of them connected to the Trump moment or the anger in the base. Only Cotton aligned with MAGA on immigration, but he has stuck to most of the old guard’s positions, especially on foreign policy.
People who forget what trajectory the GOP was on prior to Trump coming down the escalator should watch the video. The future of the party, as I outline in Whitepill, was eager to follow a Paul Ryanist path that would demand Republicans embrace amnesty, appear more inclusive, obsess over fiscal matters, and learn nothing from the debacle in Iraq. It would’ve ditched the culture war in favor of videos of lawmakers doing pull ups in their Senate offices. It would’ve remained completely out of touch with the Republican base while obsessing over what DC elites think. And it wouldn’t have promised to make America great again. Like Hillary Clinton, they would’ve insisted that America is already great.
The priorities of this freshman class had little in common with the agenda Trump ran and won on in 2016. Whatever you may think about Trump, he saved us from the fate of people like Paul Ryan dictating the future of the GOP. It was a vision Americans rejected in 2012 and Republicans repudiated in 2016.
There are still a number of Republicans who subscribe to Paul Ryanism, but they’re fewer in number and far less influential than they were in 2015. It’s a whole new party, and mostly for the better.
The post The GOP Trump Saved Us From: Hype Videos for Neocons appeared first on The American Conservative.
Caught between voters and the White House, vulnerable GOP candidates try to oppose the war without opposing the war.
When J.D. Vance was elected to the Senate from Ohio in 2022, he won his race by a healthy 6-point margin. Four years later, his successor in that seat—Sen. John Husted (R-OH)—is down by between 4 and 8 points, depending on the poll.
Midterms are always hard for the party in power, and GOP candidates this year face a number of headwinds. But let’s be honest: It’s the war, stupid. Voters in Ohio, like voters across the country, are furious at paying more for gas (and everything else) because the president got us into an unwinnable Mideast conflict at the behest of a foreign country. They’re tired of bearing the costs, and they’re tired of being lied to.
So Husted has sought to distance himself from this debacle. “The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices,” he told POLITICO this week. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t want this war to end.”
Of course, Husted is not just “anybody.” He is a sitting United States senator, a member of the body charged by our Constitution with deciding whether or not the country goes to war.
And, as fate would have it, that body had before it yesterday a measure to end the war Husted says he wants to end. Naturally, the junior senator from Ohio was a “yes.” Right?
Alas, no.
Husted joined 48 of his GOP colleagues (plus Democrat John Fetterman) in voting down H.Con.Res.89, a concurrent resolution that would have “direct[ed] the President to remove the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
In other words, he says it is imperative for the war to end, and is resolutely opposed to any measures to effect its conclusion.
Unfortunately, Husted is far from unique. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), who is running for the Senate in Iowa, made headlines this week by calling for an “immediate end” to the Iran War. But she, too, refuses to do anything to bring this about, voting against a war powers resolution in the House as recently as last week.
Mike Rogers, the GOP’s Senate candidate in Michigan, at least has the luxury of not having been in Congress for the launch of our latest Mideast quagmire. So his statement in a video this week that “the war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly” might seem a bit more credible. But it amounted only to the expression of a vague wish; it was no more a call to action than my hoping aloud it won’t rain this weekend and spoil my camping trip. (And anyway, Rogers is a confirmed forever-war fan, even boasting after last year’s Iran strikes that he “was for all this when it wasn’t very cool to be for all this.”)
A few Republicans, for what it’s worth, have had the courage of their convictions on Iran. In last week’s House vote, seven GOP lawmakers actually supported an end to the war: Reps. Thomas Massie (KY) and Warren Davidson (OH), who have been consistent stalwarts for America First, but also Reps. Nancy Mace (SC), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Tom Barrett (MI), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA), and Zach Nunn (IA). (These last four are running in tight reelection campaigns.)
But that is seven out of 218. Barely 3 percent of House Republicans can be bothered to cast even a symbolic vote to reject the executive’s unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s war powers and direct an end to the least popular war in American history.
Instead, the overwhelming approach has been to try to trick voters into thinking vulnerable GOP candidates are somehow “breaking” with the administration on Iran. To vaguely say the war is bad while studiously avoiding even the appearance of action—lest the White House take notice—and hope that voters don’t think too hard about what it is legislators are supposed to do.
The elevation of appearances over reality is an enduring feature of our politics, of course, and it’s not just restricted to war. Capitol Hill is far more of a stage for social media antics than a place to conduct affairs of state, a sad fact which has led at least one especially wise and persuasive columnist to conclude that Congress is fake.
But voters aren’t (always) as dumb as politicians think they are. And come November, I expect most will see through the ruse.
The post On Iran, Republicans Want to Have It Both Ways appeared first on The American Conservative.
If Trump wants the credit, he must also take the blame.
President Donald Trump’s popularity is suffering badly from another seemingly endless Mideast war. Amid rising prices, even some MAGA voters are turning against him, after supporting him due to the “affordability” crisis under the Biden administration. Since returning to the White House, Trump has dismissed the issue, claiming that prices are falling, and offered a $5,000 “dividend”—but only if Republicans retain control of Congress after the midterm elections.
Of course, politicians commonly fault their predecessors. But Trump’s excuses appear increasingly threadbare as he nears the halfway mark of his second term. He has dominated American politics for the last decade and remains firmly in charge of the GOP, which controls the House and Senate and can claim a majority of Supreme Court justices as ideological allies. He emphasizes his own influence in other ways, too, claiming to be the greatest American president and most powerful person who ever lived, while “running” the world.
Power he has in abundance, and he has used it in ways that harm Americans. To start, he, no less than Joe Biden, is responsible for Washington’s ongoing proxy war against Russia. During his first term he reversed Obama administration policy and provided lethal military aid to Kiev. Although last year he dropped Biden’s direct financial and military assistance to Ukraine, he approved the sale of U.S. weapons to European governments for transfer to Kiev. He also continued U.S. intelligence support for the Zelensky government, aiding its drone and missile attacks. He was unconcerned about the destructive impact of those attacks on Russian oil and diesel production until energy prices reached record levels.
Those prices spiked because of the Iran War, yet here too the president has sought to avoid blame, arguing that record diesel prices are somehow a result of Biden’s actions against Russia but not Trump’s surprise attack on Iran. Since March, he has routinely promised they will drop dramatically as soon as Tehran yields, which he has also repeatedly, indeed, almost constantly, predicted. Yet the war continues.
Trump has presented the conflict as one of necessity, citing Tehran’s possession of enriched uranium. There was no evidence that Tehran was pursuing a nuclear weapon when last year Trump ended negotiations and claimed to “obliterate” its nuclear program. And the only reason Tehran possessed the stockpile cited by Trump was because in 2018 he killed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e., the Iran nuclear deal, which had restricted Tehran’s nuclear activities. After withdrawing from the agreement, Trump imposed what he called a “maximum pressure” campaign and essentially demanded Tehran’s surrender. Instead, the Islamic Republic ultimately accelerated its nuclear activities, causing Trump to complain about its failure to accept his terms before the 2020 election.
Despite having claimed to solve the Iranian nuclear problem last year, in February he joined Israel in another military assault on Iran, contending that it was essentially nanoseconds away from developing nuclear weapons and blowing up the world. Which indicates that the 2025 operation was a failure. Or that, if it really was a success, he had no justification for making Israel’s war on Iran into America’s war.
In either case, the ill consequences were his responsibility, not Biden’s. The Pentagon had long war-gamed Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump seems to have dismissed the possibility of such an action. The Pentagon also feared Iranian attacks on its bases throughout the Persian Gulf, which he likewise dismissed. Moreover, the Iranian blockade affected the global supply of other critical products, most notably fertilizer and helium. The recent revival of conflict between the Saudi government and the Ansar Allah or Houthi movement in Yemen has further impeded oil supplies.
Trump repeatedly sought to influence energy markets by predicting a diplomatic settlement and claiming the strait was under U.S. control, while ignoring the predictable consequences of the dramatic drop in energy shipments. Indeed, it was widely recognized by most everyone other than the president that attacking Iran was almost certain to spike oil—and consequently gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel—prices. Although the impact of the war has been cushioned by unexpected mitigating factors, such as China’s reduction in oil imports, the market appears to be coming under increasing pressure.
The president’s undisciplined and arbitrary trade war against most nations on earth has also had a negative economic impact. While tariffs never would make Americans rich, as he claimed, he could have used carefully targeted levies to raise revenue—the federal government is running a $2 trillion annual deficit—and achieve foreign policy objectives. For instance, a more limited effort, conducted in cooperation with allied states, would offer a possible strategy for constraining Chinese economic influence.
But his blunderbuss campaign created malign consequences that he has consistently denied. Most importantly, American consumers, sellers, and producers pay most of the resulting cost increases. These are substantial, especially for the most basic building blocks of an industrial society. For instance, hiking the price of aluminum and steel increases costs throughout the economy. Indeed, the president has implicitly acknowledged that fact by repeatedly lifting duties on sensitive consumer goods, most recently beef, in response to complaints over rising prices. In practice, when even he could no longer maintain the fiction that taxing imports did not raise their price, Trump reduced the tariff.
Such levies also raise prices indirectly, by reducing or eliminating alternative products. A market economy is based on freedom of entry and rigorous competition. One objective of tariffs is to promote domestic production by blocking cheaper imports. Whatever the wisdom of attempting to promote “infant” American industries or revive enfeebled “sunset” enterprises, doing so depends on pushing up prices. With the federal government banning low-cost alternatives, domestic producers charge more. The president’s endlessly repeated denials do not change what Americans pay for essential goods.
Trump’s core policies—promiscuous warmaking in the Middle East and expansive mercantilist economic practices worldwide—reflect a return to an earlier age. They are mistaken, in my view, but reflect traditional if widely disputed policy paths. Facing rising popular dissatisfaction, however, the president has chosen to run away from the inevitable consequences of his actions rather than defend them. Someone styling himself as history’s most consequential person should do better.
The post The President’s Irresponsible Power appeared first on The American Conservative.
What’s the point of a media smackdown if the cameras aren’t even rolling?
More than a decade ago, it was a fashionable bit of media speculation that Donald Trump was really running for president to start something called Trump TV.
Instead of getting a media-company consolation prize after a loss, Trump was twice elected president and spent more than 10 years at the top of the Republican Party before we saw something actually debut under that name.
It’s an idea whose time has come as a result of Trump’s decision to pull the White House press credentials of three media outlets: POLITICO, CNN, and MSNOW (formerly MSNBC, when it was still under the umbrella of NBC).
The move triggered something approximating a cable news blackout of many of Trump’s official events, as the networks comprising the rotating White House television pool—Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and, of course, CNN—announced they were boycotting coverage in solidarity with their banned brethren.
This in turn led to the bizarre spectacle of Trump appearing at a White House ribbon-cutting event before departing for the United Nations General Assembly in New York and being completely inaudible against the backdrop of an idling Marine One.
It was symbolic of the ways in which this so-called media ban is less than advertised, while still having some downsides for both the White House and the general public—downsides that are as predictable as, say, Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Even if the scope of this move can be overstated, nobody in media of any stripe should want the government penalizing outlets for editorial judgments. Smaller, independent media outlets like the ones to which the Trump team has given unprecedented access have less ability to weather these kinds of restrictions than the larger corporate entities now targeted (as future, differently motivated administrations will surely note). The best way for the media to counteract these practices is for all outlets to stand together.
And the ban won’t do much to stop White House coverage Trump dislikes, or hamper the serious reporting done by POLITICO, CNN or MSNOW. Its main effect will be to impede these outlets’ coverage of White House events that serve to amplify Trump’s messaging. (This isn’t necessarily true of all such rules throughout the government.)
The White House can find other ways to get this content out to the general public (enter Trump TV) in a less filtered manner. But it’s not clear the reach will be as wide. It certainly won’t be exactly the same. The likeliest viewers of Trump TV will be the president’s diehard supporters, as well as a much smaller cohort of anti-Trump opposition researchers.
Trump has used wall-to-wall cable news coverage to his advantage. The same is true of testy exchanges with adversarial reporters (Vice President J.D. Vance has also made use of this). And Trump has been much more available to the press than his immediate predecessor, the former President Joe Biden.
Trump and the media have a weird love-hate symbiotic relationship. He has weaponized and boomeranged negative coverage against the press in a way that would have been unimaginable to Spiro Agnew in the early days of railing against the liberal media. He has been good for ratings and web traffic, even for the legacy media.
Whether that remains true all these years into Trump’s national omnipresence remains to be seen, which is why this might be an inopportune moment to pick this particular fight.
There is a broad public interest in Americans being able to easily see what the president is up to at the White House. Big press outlets might discover they don’t have as compelling an individual institutional interest in devoting so many resources to things that can be read, seen, or heard elsewhere compared to other forms of news-gathering (in which they have a greater competitive advantage).
When all is said and done, and the courts have had their say, this affair is unlikely to end much differently than Trump’s battle with CNN and its former anchor Jim Acosta during his first term.
And while many Americans may have little sympathy for the legacy media, this gambit probably joins the list of things that would play better if Trump didn’t have so many other political problems.
Under current conditions, this looks more like another example of the president having different priorities than the voters.
“I want my MTV!” was a popular marketing slogan for the premiere music video channel of the 1980s when it debuted. Will there be a similar battlecry for Trump TV?
The post I Want My Trump TV appeared first on The American Conservative.
Remembering Vito Marcantonio, before the DSA panic sets in.
Fox World is all a-twitter because a handful of members or fellow travelers of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are about to be elected to the U.S. Congress and various state legislatures. They’re “godless communists,” according to President Trump, and what with inflation, an insane war, and Trump family grift, we’ll be hearing about commies all election season.
Michael “The Other America” Harrington, founder of DSA, was about as threatening as the Mills Brothers. The current DSA candidates seem, at first glance, as off-putting as your typical hectoring grad-school wokester, but I can’t get too worked up over them. After all, New York City once sent a real communist to Congress—and his example complicates the Sean Hannity narrative.
Vito Marcantonio served seven terms in the U.S. House representing the “Little Italy” of his native East Harlem. He was a brash, dukes-up attorney who loved his neighborhood and wore a crucifix draped around his neck. Gilbert Millstein, whose ecstatic New York Times review would later launch Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, said that Marcantonio had “baleful black eyes, hunched shoulders and the face of an erudite ferret.”
Vito was elected to Congress as a protégé of the progressive Republican NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Soon nicknamed “Pink Pachyderm,” he scoffed at the New Deal as far too pinchpenny. He proposed massive public employment and insurance programs, yet he lined up with the libertarians at times, denouncing compulsory ROTC programs on college campuses and advocating independence for the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. Such stands earned him kind words from patriots like North Dakota’s Senator Gerald Nye, scourge of those “merchants of death” who had profited from the First World War, and General Smedley “War Is a Racket” Butler. As Marcantonio told the Old Right stalwart Rep. Hamilton Fish Jr. in 1936, “I shall always respect you as an honest conservative even though we shall be on opposite sides of the fence.”
By 1938 Vito had joined the New York–based American Labor Party and enjoyed the foot-soldier support of the Communist Party. Marcantonio raised funds for the Daily Worker, spoke at the party’s May Day rallies, and called the CPUSA an “American political party operating in what it considered to be the best interests of the American working class and people.” It’s possible he never formally joined the party, but his words and votes hewed to the party line for his entire career. Through the 1940s and into the early Cold War he was mocked as “Moscow’s mouthpiece.”
But even a radical in Congress operates within narrow policy boundaries. Socializing the means of production wasn’t up for a vote, nor was collectivizing agriculture. Marcantonio consistently voted against measures to ban, monitor, or legally cripple the Communist Party and its members, but then these were votes that a midcentury Ron Paul would have cast. Vito also revered Thomas Jefferson, in contrast to those modern DSA-ites who apparently resent anyone whose folks arrived in America before last Tuesday.
Marcantonio was not without political shrewdness. In 1948 he unsuccessfully urged Henry Wallace, candidate of the Communist-infected Progressive Party, to emphasize inflation and housing rather than “generalities and abstractions.” Sound familiar?
So Manhattan produced the closest thing to an actual Communist member of Congress—and it also gave us the only Soviet spy to serve in that august body: Rep. Samuel Dickstein.
Dickstein, who displaced Meyer London, a truly noble Socialist congressman, offered his services to the USSR in 1937, just months before he became a prime sponsor of what evolved into the House Un-American Activities Committee. Assigned the code name “Crook” by his Soviet masters, Dickstein spent three years demanding ever higher fees for passing along intelligence about “fascists,” a commodious term that included everything from Trotskyites to Ukrainian nationalists. The Soviets finally dropped him; one of his last paid services was a speech on the House floor advocating an increased budget for the FBI.
Ain’t American history funny?
Samuel Dickstein ended his long career in government service as a justice of the New York State Supreme Court. His perfidy was finally revealed when in the 1990s historians Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev gained access to KGB files.
While the spy Samuel Dickstein begat the House Un-American Activities Committee, Vito Marcantonio favored its abolition, but, as a sympathetic biographer noted, “he was completely capable of calling for a bit of ‘book-burning’” if those books were anti-communist. Likewise, I don’t expect our DSA congresspeople to wave the First Amendment when the Harris administration tries to shut down Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson.
Look: I wish Americans were electing the Republican likes of Robert Taft, H.R Gross, Mark Hatfield, Ron Paul, and Thomas Massie to Congress, just as I wish the Democratic delegation consisted of peace-and-justice McGovernites and working-class intellectuals of the Pat Moynihan stripe.
Instead we get Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries while the Murdoch media panic over a few lefties from atypical districts. Pardon my non-participation in the panic. Given the example of Vito Marcantonio, I’ll predict that those of us who favor peace, the Bill of Rights, and a minimal state will find the voting records of at least some of the DSA “commies” more palatable than that of Chuck Schumer.
The post You Want a Real Commie? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Federal Reserve approved its first interest rate hike in more than three years on Wednesday, moving the bank’s benchmark target 25 basis points to 3.75–4 percent.
The central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee voted 12–0 to raise its benchmark interest rate for the first time since 2023. Speaking after the decision, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh said “inflation is too high and has been for too long.”
Despite concerns regarding inflation, Warsh said the decision “comes at a time when the American economy appears to be strengthening.”
Markets reacted negatively to the news, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing 631 points lower.
The post Federal Reserve Raises Interest Rates 25 Basis Points appeared first on The American Conservative.
Curt Mills, Andrew Day, and Luke Nicastro discuss growing concerns about AI and whether the regulation cure would be worse than the AI-risk disease. Then, they discuss the Iran War’s impact on inflation and the political implications heading into the midterms. Recorded September 15, 2026.
The post TAC Right Now: The Right’s Fight Over AI appeared first on The American Conservative.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, accusing him of high crimes and misdemeanors over the Trump administration’s continued military operations in Iran without congressional authorization.
The Republican congressman, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, introduced the measure as privileged, meaning he will force the House to take up a resolution that is unlikely to pass in the Trump-controlled House of Representatives. The maneuver will put GOP lawmakers on the record over Hegseth’s handling of the war.
Massie’s measure could pose a difficult political choice for Republicans such as Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Tom Barrett (R-MI), who joined Democrats and Massie in voting for recent measures to curb Trump’s war powers. Both are facing competitive reelection contests in November. Massie lost his Republican primary to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein in May, for whom Hegseth also campaigned.
The post Massie Introduces Articles of Impeachment Against Hegseth appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday to block President Donald Trump’s restrictions on mail-in ballots ahead of November’s midterm elections.
In a 7-2 ruling, the court rejected an emergency application filed by the Trump administration seeking to lift a lower court’s injunction that blocked a new Postal Service rule on mail ballots. The Supreme Court found the administration was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its case, though the underlying legal question of whether the Postal Service has authority to enforce Trump’s restrictions remains unresolved.
Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were the dissenting voices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the majority but wrote separately, suggesting the rule might ultimately fall within the Postal Service’s authority but noted that he felt there wasn’t enough time to implement it before the midterms.
Trump has long claimed that widespread fraud involving mail-in voting contributed to his 2020 defeat by President Joe Biden. No evidence has ever substantiated the claim, and the president himself has voted by mail twice in Florida this year.
Critics of the administration’s push for restrictions say the timing of the changes would disrupt voting procedures close to the election. The administration has defended the restrictions as necessary to protect election integrity.
The post SCOTUS Blocks Trump’s Mail Voting Restrictions Ahead of Midterms appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new proposal shows a politically viable step toward restoring congressional war powers.
Is it politically possible for Congress to reassert its constitutional war powers? What would it take?
Let’s quickly analyze why congressional war powers have become so degraded. The vast expansion of American international commitments following the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War necessarily tended to encourage delegation of war powers to the executive, which could then act quickly and decisively in response to perceived Communist threats; the doctrine of containment is best served by a dynamic, reactive executive rather than a deliberative legislature. The increasing professionalization of the military—that is, the transition from a conscription model to the all-volunteer force, a process that intensified after the Vietnam War—was also necessitated by American international commitments. It had the side-effect of making any individual use of military force much less politically salient. The mass of citizens didn’t have to express their concerns about getting dragged off to fight through their elected representatives; it became something that did not affect them directly very much one way or the other.
This left Congress with little incentive to claw back its constitutional prerogatives, producing an apparent exception to Madison’s theory of interdepartmental competition for power. Better to leave war, which is risky and does not generally involve bringing home bacon to the folks in the district, to the executive, which has its own reasons for preferring to hold onto war powers.
A basic conservative contention is that this has not been a very good arrangement—it has resulted in a lot of rather stupid military adventures with the concomitant expense—and that the quasi-imperial order supported by executive war powers has engendered a variety of undesirable distortions in the American body politic. The Framers had good reason to entrust war powers to the legislature. So, again, what would it take for Congress to exert itself?
The fundamental problem is one of incentives—there is no political incentive for Congress to pick up its war powers—so the obvious solution is to change them. It is unlikely at this late date that there will be much impetus to draw down or disband the (illegal, unconstitutional) standing army, thus returning war to the constituent management column for the politicos. Nor do intensifying fiscal problems seem to be moving the needle much. But, in the Trump era, Congress has been fairly enthusiastic about beating the executive over the head with its oversight powers, most conspicuously with the admittedly somewhat hysterical January 6 joint committee. In the hyperpolarization era, embarrassing one’s enemies is a political desideratum. So Tess Bridgeman and Ryan Goodman’s call for an Iran War commission in Just Security piques one’s interest.
The authors contend that a commission on the model of those formed in response to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan could, with a minimum of fuss, expose details about the origins and conduct of a war that has become broadly unpopular and has been waged with barely a nod toward Congress. Such a commission holds out the political goodies that have been lacking in previous calls for a return to constitutional standards: Democrats (who may well be in a position to call the shots on Capitol Hill in a few months) will be able to clobber their pet horribles in the administration, and Republicans with reservations about the war will be able to put a little retrospective distance between themselves and their conspicuously uncourageous stand at its outbreak.
Such an endeavor isn’t a silver bullet. When the commission inevitably concludes that returning war powers to Congress will help prevent such disasters in the future, Congress will in fact have to follow through. But it at least provides a politically attractive way to reopen the question, and who knows whither the momentum would lead? One can imagine, possibly for the first time in American political history, a return to constitutional government becoming a winner on the stump and at the ballot box.
The post Could an Iran War Commission Revive Constitutional Government? appeared first on The American Conservative.
At the midterm convention, the president offered Americans cash—if Republicans win.
President Donald Trump was in fine form Wednesday night in Dallas—smiling, tanned, full of bounce, ready to rile up the adoring fans at the first-ever midterm convention for either major party. This was Trump in his classic form, discursive, wisecracking, outrageous, but good-humored and not too serious. It was a refreshing performance from a president who in the past year or so has too often seemed tired, angry, and aporetic. He joked about winning the 2020 election, but without the unattractive earnestness that so often mars his exposition of this particular hobbyhorse. He spent several minutes ridiculing the physique, dress, and speech of his own party’s Senate nominee in Texas, which is the sort of devil-may-care, not-quite-nice, not-quite-petty insult comedy that brought him to the biggest stage in the land of Barnum and Billy Sunday.
There are two questions: First, are the American people tired of the routine? It has been a full decade and counting since the Era of Trump began; the iconoclasm and sharp elbows are less striking in a world that has adopted them as its own idiom. There just may not be much alpha left in this index. Second, even if the schtick is fresh as ever, is it enough to overcome the serious material headwinds for the Republicans?
To his credit, Trump played to the Republicans’ advantages: He hit the Democrats for struggling to shed the excess and insanity of the intense identity politics of the early decade. He harped on the stock and labor markets’ near-unbelievable performance. He emphasized the unambiguous success of the administration’s border-enforcement policies. These points aren’t nothing. But it remains to be seen whether he convincingly papered over the GOP’s disadvantages. He insisted on the necessity and justice of the Iran War for preventing the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons, but selling the war after it’s been launched and people are already suffering the economic consequences for it is not strong rhetoric. His ridicule of the Democrats’ appeals to “affordability” seems like a loser when prices are still rising—more slowly than in the Biden era, granted—and credit is getting much tighter. Nor is it clear that appeals to the “communism” of the Democratic left are going to score many swing votes 35 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and 10 years after Bernie Sanders made a very convincing effort toward becoming president.
One suspects the answer, though, is in the element of the speech that everyone will remember for all time: the “Trump dividend” of $5,000 for every American adult, should the Republicans win the midterms. (A student of history can’t help but smile to see American democracy coming into its purest, most advanced form.) The headline hysteria about this proposal, while tiresome—you’d think that after so many years the press would know that Trump only grows stronger from hysteria—does raise a salient point: However it is implemented, such a payout would be stupendously expensive at a time when Treasury yields are wandering into fairly rarefied mountain paths. The only reason you make a promise like this is because you don’t really think you’ll have to deliver. (Although a cynic might note that, if, by some chance you do need to deliver on such a long-shot bet, you can take a cue from that great American engine of social dynamism, bankruptcy law—default on the obligation after you’ve already gotten what you want.)
Trump has acquired a legend. He is treated as an immortal, someone to whom the usual laws of political physics don’t apply. This has always been overstated. His first term was a series of policy frustrations ameliorated by the balm of a booming economy, and his election loss in 2020 seemed to show some very conventional political weaknesses. Yet it is true that he is buoyant, and, even better, that he is lucky. He has been particularly aided by a period of severe debility for the Democratic party, starting with the Hillary–Bernie fight in 2016 and perduring, largely along the same lines, until the present day. The Trump legend, like most legends, has a kernel of truth.
But Wednesday night, Trump himself did not seem to believe it. So why was he smiling? Because the midterms don’t actually matter. May as well do what you love best: wallow in the adulation of a crowd, crack jokes, and remind the country that you are the singular axle on which the life of this great republic turns.
“You know, State of the Union, you have to be very staid. That’s much easier to do than what I do. Believe me, that’s easy to do, ladies and gentlemen. It’s an honor to be your president,” Trump said. “Thank you. And you do that for about an hour, and then everybody’s falling asleep. This is a much harder routine, let me tell you, but we’re also out here to have a little bit of fun.”
It’s good that at least one person is enjoying this.
The post As GOP’s Prospects Dim, Trump Shines in Dallas appeared first on The American Conservative.
President Donald Trump announced his intention of giving a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to every American adult in a Wednesday speech at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas.
“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic tremendous economic success—in history we’ve never had anything like what’s happening—but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said.
The president compared the dividend checks to earlier initiatives like the “Warrior Dividend” military bonus and the “Trump accounts” for children. Critics pointed to cash handouts Trump had previously announced that failed to materialize.
The post Trump Pledges $5,000 ‘Dividend’ Should GOP Win Midterms appeared first on The American Conservative.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) made a surprise video appearance Wednesday night at the Republican National Committee midterm convention in Dallas.
In a prerecorded statement shared during the first night of the event, the Democratic senator introduced his in-state colleague, Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA), whom he called “the kind of senator who gets the job done.”
Speaking in front of the Mon Valley Works U.S. steel mill, Fetterman portrayed himself as a “a common-sense Democrat” who will “always stand with America.” The senior senator from Pennsylvania added that he is “always gonna reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.”
In a statement released late on Wednesday night following his surprise appearance at the RNC, Fetterman rebutted speculation about whether he will change his party affiliation. He stated that he is “a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my own party” and promised to “still be the 51st vote that I ran on.”
The post Fetterman Makes Shock Statement to Midterm RNC appeared first on The American Conservative.
Andrew Day and Luke Nicastro talk to Filip Gaspar, a political advisor and member of the Alternative for Germany, about the party’s recent election victory and the implications for European politics. Recorded September 8, 2026.
The post TAC Right Now: Germany’s Real Right Rocks Europe, w/ Filip Gaspar appeared first on The American Conservative.
Dixie is dead, even if a few stray spirits remain to be exorcised.
Thirty years ago, the New York Times journalist Peter Applebome wrote a book about the South. The title, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, said it all. Applebome surveyed the landscape of the mid-1990s and saw the Southerners Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, and Trent Lott occupying the commanding heights of government; he saw states below the Mason-Dixon line booming economically and demographically; he saw the old liberalism of the Northeast in flight before the conservatism of the Bible Belt; and he saw cultural products like country music and NASCAR breaking containment to go nationwide. He concluded, naturally enough, that the South had conquered America.
I happened to be reading this book last week, when I heard that Virginia had removed three more Confederate statues—the last, apparently, still standing on state-owned land—from Richmond’s Capitol Square. One was Stonewall Jackson; the other two were the lesser-known Hunter Holmes McGuire (a surgeon who advocated for treating wartime doctors as non-combatants) and William “Extra Billy” Smith (a general and governor, whose goofy nickname derived from an obscure antebellum episode involving postal routes).
That Applebome’s decades-old thesis might need revision was suggested by the reason this news caught me by surprise: not because there was anything peculiar about yet another enactment of the damnatio memoriae, but because there remained any graybacks still left to topple.
For the iconoclasm unleashed by 2020’s Great Awokening left no corner of the state untouched, effacing the physical traces of the Confederate States of America wherever it found them: Alexandria and Abingdon, Hampton Roads and Harrisonburg, Waynesboro and Williamsburg. Six years on, I had assumed its progress was basically complete.
There was, moreover, a certain naturalness about the phenomenon; in many ways, it constituted a logical—if unexpectedly sudden and frenetic—culmination of a trend long underway. I grew up in Northern Virginia, which for decades has been the state’s richest, most populous, and most culturally amorphous area. By the time I was old enough to form memories, accents from elsewhere were heard far more frequently than Southern twangs, and, insofar as anyone I knew considered our locality’s past, there was a hazy sense it began at some point between the Second World War and the Reagan administration. Yet if NoVa was an outlier, it was also a leading indicator: The rest of the state was moving inexorably toward the vaguely Mid-Atlantic-feeling, transplant-filled suburbs of Arlington and Fairfax.
But even this most un-Virginian corner of the commonwealth retained a few residual connections to an older history. We drove on Lee Highway and Pickett Road, and attended high schools named for J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. At my public elementary school, all sixth-graders took a field trip to Gettysburg; on reaching that bloody ground, we were each assigned the identity of a specific soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia, and then led in a reenactment of the charge that brought the Confederacy to its high-water mark.
And the further south you went, of course, the stronger and more organic the linkages became: the great battlefields of Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville; Richmond’s stately Monument Avenue; the charming town of Lexington, where both Lee and Jackson were laid to rest.
I asked Jim Bacon, a veteran Virginia journalist who knows the state backwards and forwards, what he made of all this.
He agreed that 2020 wasn’t entirely de novo. “In Virginia, these kinds of conversations have been happening for decades,” he told me. “As far back as the ‘90s, for example, there was a big controversy over whether to put up a statue of Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue.” (Some thought a statue of Ashe, a black tennis legend, would be out of keeping with the Civil War-era focus of the area’s existing statuary; others feared the location would tar Ashe’s memory by associating it with the Confederacy.)
But the tenor of the debate changed markedly in the last 10 to 15 years. “We moved from the relatively benign argument that we should put up new statues,” Bacon said, “to the idea that we needed public reinterpretation. And then that morphed into, ‘we need to take the statues down.’”
According to Bacon, there were two factors at play. The first was an essentially political animus, one which grew from a national progressivism that was supercharged after the killing of George Floyd. But the second was a change in the makeup of the state—the huge influx of new residents from elsewhere in the country (especially the Northeast), not to mention immigrants from further abroad. “They just don’t have the linkages to Virginia’s past,” Bacon said of these more recent arrivals, “they don’t care about the Civil War, the heritage. Half the legislators in the General Assembly were born out of state. So the demography makes this inevitable.”
Which brings me back to Applebome’s book. For these changes are not unique to the Old Dominion; they are observable in virtually every other state below the Mason–Dixon line. And they are, in large measure, a consequence of the South’s very success. Economic dynamism brought massive in-migration, which turned native Southerners into minorities in towns and cities across Dixieland. Plus, the region’s newfound political and cultural ascendance–and the accompanying packaging of its ideologies for export—led to a kind of homogenization, a removal of the particular and a detachment from the past. Not to say this is wholly or even necessarily to be regretted; the influx of new blood and the exchange of backwards-looking insularity for optimism and openness to change helped to excise much of the ugly racism that blighted the South even after the end of Jim Crow.
But the result is what the writer (and regular TAC contributor) Scott Greer terms “Sunbeltism,” which he argues has largely supplanted the old South. “Instead of evoking the Lost Cause and plantations,” he explained in a recent article, “it calls to mind sunshine, suburbs, and strip malls…. Sunbeltism is optimistic, conservative with a small c, and present-oriented. ‘Life is good’ is its defining motto.” And although it seems uniquely suited to the Age of Trump, it is also compatible with political liberalism: Virginia is now solidly blue, and North Carolina and Georgia are moving slowly but surely to the left.
Sunbeltism has become hegemonic over American life. So, inasmuch as it represents a fundamentally Southern phenomenon, Applebome’s thesis may still hold true. But it has produced a reality that would have been unrecognizable to previous generations, and one that confirms the long-held surmises of many a gloomy regionalist.
“The mischief is,” the great journalist Marshall Frady opined as far back as 1975, “that in its transfiguration into What-A-Burger drive-ins and apartment wastelands, the South is being etherized, subtly rendered pastless, memoryless and vague of identity.” Thus, he observed with a tinge of melancholy, “the old pipe-organ range of prodigal possibilities for life there—both gentle and barbarous, good and evil—has contracted to the comfortable, monotone note of middle C.”
The post Why Virginia Is Still Toppling Statues appeared first on The American Conservative.
The congresswoman’s opportunism has led her back to the democratic socialists.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez officially rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America last month. While she’s long been the most famous associate of the left-wing group, her membership lapsed years ago. The congresswoman renewing her membership is a clear sign of the strategy she wishes to pursue ahead of a potential presidential bid.
Socialism has won Democratic primaries nationwide and will play a major role in the 2028 race. AOC is an opportunist. She knows that reaffirming her DSA credentials is a smart play for ‘28 and could give her the edge she needs to win. It also shows how much Democratic politics have moved closer to the DSA’s agenda. No longer do Democrats need to shy away from Israel criticism or calls to abolish ICE. They’re now within the mainstream of the party.
In spite of the close public association between AOC and the DSA, the two have a complicated relationship. The DSA rescinded its endorsement of AOC in 2024 over the congresswoman’s not being sufficiently supportive of the Palestinian cause. The New York lawmaker had participated in a panel that “conflated” antisemitism with anti-Zionism and voted for a House resolution that affirmed Israel’s right to exist. The DSA demanded that AOC, to regain its support, oppose all funding for Israel and support a boycott movement against the Mideast country. She failed to deliver, and thus lost the endorsement.
Although it was only two years ago, 2024 was a very different time. Back then, appearing too anti-Israel was a death sentence in Democratic primaries. Two of AOC’s fellow Squad members lost their primaries to AIPAC-funded opponents. A DSA endorsement didn’t help candidates much, if at all, in that election cycle.
Things changed. A number of AIPAC-backed candidates have lost to Israel critics in this year’s primaries, in spite of massive spending from the Israel lobby. In Michigan, pro-Israel groups spent $30 million on Haley Stevens in her battle with Abdul El-Sayed to become the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate race. Stevens lost. In California, the lobby spent $6 million supporting Melissa Hernandez against an Israel critic in a congressional race. Hernandez lost as well. These are just a few examples of AIPAC’s declining power in Democratic politics. The lobby is no longer guaranteed to squash Israel critics. It’s gotten so bad that even Republican Mike Rogers prefers AIPAC not give him explicit support in his battle against El-Sayed.
The DSA’s fortunes stand in stark contrast to AIPAC’s. An endorsement from the socialists is bound to give a boost to Democratic candidates, at least in primaries. Over a hundred DSA candidates have won their local, state, and federal primary contests nationwide. That includes 20 races for U.S. Congress.
A number of these DSA candidates espouse extreme views and problematic associations. A long list of candidates have been found to hate whites, America, the police, the free market system, and even Thanksgiving. These stances haven’t bothered Democratic primary voters that much. Some candidates lost their races after these comments came to light, but many didn’t.
One of the reasons why Democratic voters are willing to back the DSA is the group’s strong stance on Israel. Eighty percent of Democrats now have a negative view of Israel. The vast majority of primary voters in Michigan believe the Jewish state is committing a genocide in Gaza. Strong support for sanctions against Israel was found among primary voters in six states.
When given a choice between someone like Haley Stevens, who proclaimed that Israel comes to her in dreams, and a vocal Israel critic, it’s not surprising Democratic voters pick the one not fantasizing about Tel Aviv.
The strong shift against Israel among ordinary Democrats has made AOC more comfortable with the DSA’s stance. At an April DSA forum, the congresswoman pledged that she would vote against any military aid to Israel. She had previously supported “defensive” military aid to the country, but her new stance would exclude that as well. At the same event, she also promised to oppose enshrining an expansive definition of antisemitism, which included forms of anti-Zionism, into law. Her pledges won over many skeptical DSA members.
Israel isn’t the only issue on which Democratic voters have moved closer to the DSA agenda. Democrats now have a higher opinion of socialism than they do of capitalism. “Abolish ICE,” a position abandoned by the Democratic establishment in 2024, is now the majority position among rank-and-file Democrats, with 73 percent backing the idea.
These particular views may cause problems for Democrats among independents, but they’re assets in Democratic primaries. A DSA affiliation or endorsement is now a plus for aspiring candidates. That will likely still be the case in the 2028 presidential primary. There aren’t any other obvious DSA-aligned candidates to run in that lane besides AOC. Fully embracing the socialist party makes her stand out and gives her an advantage over her more “moderate” competition.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s membership renewal doesn’t guarantee her the support of the left-wing radicals. There is growing rancor within the DSA over supporting AOC’s possible ’28 bid, with many members still viewing her as a sellout who can’t be trusted. A summer meeting of the organization’s national committee voted for rules that would restrict local chapters from making their own endorsements, a move widely perceived as anti-AOC. The DSA’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Caucus explicitly opposes an AOC endorsement, calling her an “opportunist dilettante.”
While the DSA may face internal divides over an AOC presidential bid, the public will perceive her as the DSA candidate. It’s doubtful there will be any other Democratic presidential candidate who is more supportive of socialism, abolishing ICE, and the Palestinian cause. Those voters who’ve helped DSA candidates win primaries nationwide will most likely see AOC as their choice in the ’28 primary.
The Maoists are right that Ocasio-Cortez has shown a consistent pattern of opportunism. But that’s true of most politicians, especially the successful ones. What’s notable is that her opportunism has now led her back to the DSA. Now that the group’s agenda is popular with the Democratic base, AOC knows it’s to her benefit to openly proclaim herself a member.
In an extremely competitive and crowded field with few DSA-aligned candidates, that association may be the ticket for an AOC primary victory in 2028.
The post AOC Rejoining DSA Is a Smart Move For ’28 appeared first on The American Conservative.
The current Republican president got elected repudiating the last one. Now, he’s melding Bush-Cheney with his own legacy.
There are a number of things one could observe about the Trump-endorsed Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC) winning her primary last week as she seeks to keep her late brother Lindsey Graham’s seat: her status as a novice, President Donald Trump’s staying power, hereditary succession.
Here’s another.
I was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1974. For half my life, my state has been considered “Bush Country.”
“South Carolina is Bush Country,” declared Texas Governor George W. Bush himself in 2000 during a hotly contested Republican presidential primary contest against Senator John McCain. (His father, the late former President George H.W. Bush, said the same during his 1988 presidential campaign).
In 2004, Dubya’s challenger, the Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, would have no luck in Bush Country. In 2008, eventual Republican presidential nominee McCain knew his old rival’s stronghold state was key to any victory and courted South Carolina Bush loyalists. The McCain supporter Lindsey Graham said, “Nobody’s going to get to the right of John on the war or spending.”
“The war” Graham spoke of was of course the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, partisan support for which would almost wholly consume Republican identity in the years that followed. Though in 2000 Bush ran on “compassionate conservatism” and a more “humble” foreign policy, the 9/11 attacks and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had changed all that.
To Graham’s comment, what being on “the right” meant for most conservatives was defending the Iraq war and the Global War on Terror narrative (WMDs, the Patriot Act , waterboarding, Gitmo, and then some). The cofounder of this magazine, Pat Buchanan, in 2004 wrote a book about where the right went wrong and how neoconservatives hijacked the Bush presidency. Conservatives were expected to reflexively defend Bush-Cheney, no matter how bad the administration failed or unpopular it became.
In Bush Country, it was no different. Even as late as 2016.
Or so many thought.
“Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” Trump thundered on a Republican debate stage in Greenville, South Carolina in February 2016. “George Bush made a mistake, we can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”
It was jarring. No Republican presidential candidate since Buchanan or Ron Paul had so vehemently denounced his party’s foreign policy. And Trump was saying these words to Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and Dubya’s brother.
“They lied,” Trump added, with force. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction—there were none. And they knew there were none.”
The boos (there are typically more donors and operatives at debates than regular voters) were loud. Many prognosticators in the GOP and media thought Trump had really stepped in it, potentially diminishing his strong lead in the polls.
“I am sick and tired of him going after my family,” Jeb Bush lamented.
Two days after that debate, Jeb Bush brought in family reinforcements. The Guardian reported, “George W. Bush remains one of the most popular Republicans in the staunch conservative state of South Carolina…. The two Bush brothers appeared accompanied by Laura Bush and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.”
“They took their seats as Graham hailed George W. Bush as a ‘decent and honorable man’ and proclaimed: ‘This is Bush country, Mr. President,’” the report noted.
But was it? Graham’s grand declaration aside, Jeb himself didn’t seem so sure. “South Carolina isn’t Bush Country anymore. He’s hijacked my party,” Jeb said of Trump in a CBS interview.
“Someone has to take a stand,” Bush insisted, implying he was the man for the job.
Three days later, Trump won the South Carolina primary, one of the most important on the calendar, with 33 percent of the vote. By confronting and demolishing the Bush-Cheney legacy in a state where Republicans had defended it for over a decade.
Second place went to Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, the neoconservative favorite in that race (the neocons didn’t necessarily need the tainted Bush name to get the same Bush foreign policy), at 22 percent. The political chameleon Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas also received 22 percent.
Jeb got 8 percent. He dropped out the next day.
It turned out, South Carolina really wasn’t Bush Country anymore and Trump really had hijacked the GOP. He became president in 2017 and would again use antiwar rhetoric throughout his 2020 and 2024 campaigns.
Eventually something changed.
Today, President Trump has plunged America into a war in Iran that has no end in sight, has repudiated much of the original “America First” extended team of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and others who were once his most vocal champions, and has traded their influence for that of neoconservative fossils like Mark Levin and the now-deceased Lindsey Graham, who seemed to know what he was doing all along.
Lindsey’s play bore fruit.
When it was reported last week that his former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had warned Trump about many of the negative consequences of a war with Iran, the unrepentant neoconservative Marc Thiessen had this praise for the president and his decision to go to war: “This was the most courageous decision an American president made in my lifetime, and it is all the more courageous for the fact he made it while so many around him were discouraging him.”
“He did it anyway,” Thiessen added. “That’s true greatness in action.”
That’s something. What Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, was really doing was thanking Trump for ditching the Bush-bashing and instead coming around to his former boss’s way of thinking.
Not surprisingly, Jeb Bush has praised Trump for attacking Iran too. “A noble cause,” ol’ Jeb said.
But it was Graham who arguably helped flip Trump the most. As the Dispatch’s Michael Warren wrote of the senator’s “tenacious pursuit of influence:”
[BLOCK]As a hawk in a party that, under Trump’s influence, was already skewing dovish by 2017, Graham was a counterweight to another erstwhile intraparty Trump opponent, Sen. Rand Paul, on matters of national security and foreign policy. If Paul and other noninterventionists saw in Trump a compatriot against dumb foreign wars, Graham saw a willing convert to his interventionist cause—Trump didn’t want to look weak like Obama or Joe Biden, did he? Graham learned how to sell Trump on tough talk and even action in the Middle East, and then publicly praised him for it.
All of this culminated in Graham’s cheerleading of Trump with respect to Iran…
Graham was not the only one to encourage Trump to invade Iran weeks later…but the war is, in many ways, a reflection of his muddled legacy.[/BLOCK]
The Iran war will be part of Graham’s legacy, and Trump’s, and also effectively a continuation of George W. Bush’s.
Darline Graham will also now be part of this same legacy—or at least that’s what her supporters appear to hope.
Appointed senator not even two months ago, Graham is still relatively a blank slate. She is not her brother, and time will tell how differently or not she’ll vote. Republican senators almost always beat Democrats in my state, so after November we will probably have six more years to find out.
But the War Party that carried Lindsey across the finish line clearly wanted a stand-in for her brother, or as much of one as they could get. In a recent debate, Darline admitted not being “informed” on national security—yet she will still be expected to vote on it.
She will likely be “informed” by then.
Lindsey Graham never left Bush Country. Donald Trump blew it up. It was the only country I was ever glad to see him blow up.
Then he went and put it back together again.
The post Trump Does Nation-Building in ‘Bush Country’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
On Thursday, Vice President J.D. Vance led the first White House press briefing since Karoline Leavitt’s departure as press secretary. He fielded questions on an array of subjects, including the economy, foreign policy, and the state of the GOP ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Asked whether the Iran War would end before the midterms, Vance conceded he “d[idn’t] know the answer to that question,” adding that “you would have to ask the Iranians.” He also contested the characterization of the conflict as a war. “I wouldn’t call it a war,” he said, because “right now there is no active shooting.”
In response to a question about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, the vice president affirmed that he counted the popular conservative commentator as a friend. “Yeah, Tucker is a friend of mine,” Vance said, “Tucker is a friend despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things. And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go.”
Vance also defended the administration’s record on the economy and affordability, saying the White House was doing everything in its power to bring down prices. He noted that “because America’s inflation problem wasn’t created in a day,” it would take “a little bit of time to rebuild the foundation of America’s middle class economy.”
The post Vance Declines to Denounce Carlson at White House 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.
Andrew Day and Luke Nicastro talk to Connor Echols of Responsible Statecraft about Dan Driscoll’s resignation as Army secretary, Vice President J.D. Vance’s controversial speech to an Israel lobby group, whether the Iran War is becoming a Forever War, and Israel’s sponsoring ads on the podcast of Sen. Ted Cruz. Recorded September 2, 2026.
The post TAC Right Now: J.D. Vance’s Perplexing Moves, w/ Connor Echols appeared first on The American Conservative.
President Trump announced Tuesday that he is formally nominating Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao to be the Secretary of the Navy, following the ouster of former Secretary John Phelan four months ago.
In a post shared on his Truth Social account, Trump hailed Cao as a “true WARRIOR” and asked the Senate to “confirm this Warfighter, ASAP.”
Cao is a decorated combat veteran who has been acting Secretary of the Navy since April. Born in what was then Saigon, South Vietnam in 1971, he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, deploying to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia before retiring as a captain in October 2021. Following his retirement, he made unsuccessful bids for House and Senate seats in 2022 and 2024. He was nominated for and confirmed as, Under Secretary of the Navy last spring.
A date for his confirmation hearing has yet to be set.
The post Hung Cao Nominated to Lead Navy appeared first on The American Conservative.
The president’s combative style is poorly suited to calming the nation amid an unpopular war.
In The Godfather, Michael Corleone informs Tom Hagen he is being reassigned ahead of a particularly violent stretch for the family.
“You’re not a wartime consigliere, Tom,” he said. “Things may get rough with the move we’re trying.”
The scene comes to mind as the Iran war hits the six-month mark and President Donald Trump continues to drive the national conversation but to no obvious benefit for himself or his party ahead of the midterm elections.
It would seem self-evident, even tautological, that Trump would be better off in a period of peace and prosperity rather than unpopular war. Wouldn’t any president or political leader?
But Trump’s political skills are especially unsuited to calming the nation in a period of crisis or urging Americans to stay the course during difficult times. This was his undoing in his first term and it could waste his second. He’s much better hyping good things happening under his watch and tearing down bad things being done by his opponents, often in an over-the-top fashion.
Presidents cannot always pick what will matter most during their time in office. But Trump’s crises—the Iran war and an unstable, erratic tariffs regime, both worsening the affordability crisis—are largely of his own choosing.
It is easy to imagine some of his most recent moves playing much differently if the public were happier with the state of the economy and satisfied with Trump’s handling of this top issue.
If this were the first-term Trump economy before the pandemic, with both low unemployment and low inflation, perhaps the Democrats would look like humorless scolds in response to his executive order renaming Lake Ontario. Lake America, hell yeah!
Instead, that order has become a symbol of a trade war with Canada that Trump has never fully explained and which looks like a grudge match with a Liberal prime minister he dislikes, within the broader context of public dissatisfaction with the cost of living.
During an economic boom, Trump’s recently published presidential rankings—seemingly cribbed from Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and his liberal historian buddies in 1948, with Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter thrown in for good measure—would seem like a fun afternoon internet distraction rather than a delusional exercise.
Of course, neither of these examples will be a major vote-mover, and the rankings remain closer to the ragebait they would be in the best of times. But trolling looks a lot better from a position of electoral strength.
Similarly, all of Trump’s legacy and DC beautification projects, including the White House ballroom, would be more politically defensible if voters weren’t worried about high gas prices.
On the economy, he is failing to do two things that Clinton—an average president, according to Trump’s own rankings—mastered long before the 1990s internet boom really took off: focus like a laser beam and feel the voters’ pain.
The latter is not really how Trump is wired while in charge, but he was at his best politically when selling his first-term economy and then diagnosing the ills of Biden’s.
Trump cannot help that much of the recent inflation occurred between his two terms and that prices were never going back down to 2019 levels barring an even worse economic catastrophe.
But Trump chose the Iran war and the tariffs. And while the tariffs in some form were always inevitable, the war was not. Whatever desire Trump had to get tougher with Iran than Obama, he did not have to create a global energy supply shock as inflation was coming down.
Even the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s own sister, a political amateur, ran a campaign focused on affordability, not Iran or international affairs. But that is not the national political climate Trump has created for Republicans as Labor Day and, critically, Election Day near.
It’s true that some of Trump’s biggest accomplishments have been achieved through brute force: securing the border, routing the terrorist group ISIS, cleaning up parts of DC. But not everything can be done this way, and all of them were more focused than Trump’s haphazard approach to Iran and trade.
Trump has chosen to be a wartime president, without a vote of Congress. But in the Tom Hagen sense, he is not one. Both he and the country would be much better off if he realized that fact.
The post MAGA Can Thank Trump for the Tough Election Year appeared first on The American Conservative.
The British right-wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos was deported to the UK on Friday, according to a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Yiannopoulos was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after being arrested Thursday at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. According to a DHS spokesperson, he had entered the U.S. legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.” An immigration judge issued a final order of removal against him on July 22 of this year.
The British commentator became prominent writing for Breitbart between 2014 and 2017, but he resigned his position after a video began circulating where he appeared to endorse sexual relationships between men and underage boys. Yiannopoulos later interned for then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and worked on Kanye West’s brief candidacy for president in 2024. He was a strong proponent of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign, writing in a post on X in June 2025 that unless millions were deported “nothing else matters.”
The post Milo Yiannopoulos Deported to the UK appeared first on The American Conservative.
Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll resigned Monday, leaving the Pentagon after a long-simmering conflict with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Driscoll spoke with President Donald Trump on Monday about the state of the Army and submitted his resignation, the Financial Times reports. The White House praised Driscoll’s leadership but did not give a reason for his departure.
An Iraq War veteran, former venture capitalist, and friend of Vice President J.D. Vance, Driscoll was confirmed as Army secretary in February 2025. He was a major proponent of increasing the military’s use of drones and other next-generation military technologies.
Driscoll and Hegseth reportedly clashed over personnel decisions and plans for modernizing the military, a major priority for Driscoll. Their sharpest dispute followed Hegseth’s April dismissal of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who had worked closely with Driscoll.
The post Army Secretary Dan Driscoll Resigns appeared first on The American Conservative.
The 46th president paid an enormous political price—the beginning of the end of his presidency—to do the right thing by leaving Afghanistan.
At 4:53 PM, Kabul time, on August 29, 2021—while Americans were enduring a putrid summer hunkered down at home amid Covid’s “Delta wave”—a U.S. unmanned drone (then a relatively unheard-of technology) bombarded a 1996 white Toyota Corolla. United States Central Command (CENTCOM) killed 10 people, including seven children.
It was a mistake.
That September, CENTCOM’s jefe de jefes Frank McKenzie told reporters in Washington, “We now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with [Islamic State – Khorasan Province] or were a direct threat to U.S. forces.”
McKenzie continued, “I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed. This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at [Hamid Karzai International Airport].”
He did not equivocate: “But it was a mistake and I offer my sincere apology. As the combatant commander, I am fully responsible for this strike and its tragic outcome.”
While perhaps mundane and riddled with military-speak, it was big of any authority figure in those years, a time when we now know a vast array of Washington officials were lying—not only about the “Global War on Terror” and the American “mission” in Afghanistan, but also the Covid “crisis”—to tell the truth and to apologize.
Though McKenzie has gone on to enjoy the post-military career of a craven hawk (that all-too-comfortable web of nebulous associations and think-tank perches for the retired brass), his political management of the situation matched the assessment of the man given by my late mentor, the military historian and Middle East advisor Mark Perry.
“McKenzie is viewed by his colleagues as one of the most politically astute officers to ever head up the US Central Command—a notable change from his sometimes controversial predecessor Army Gen. Joseph Votel,” Perry wrote in 2019. “Votel was outspoken and opinionated, and he bickered…. That won’t happen under McKenzie.… At the Pentagon, McKenzie worked to dampen the growing competition between combatant commanders.” (Perry died, maddeningly, a week before the fall of Kabul.)
McKenzie disagreed with the decision by the Americans to leave. That long-reported fact is now blared out again in a new agitprop documentary by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, on then-President Joe Biden’s decision to exit Afghanistan that summer. But McKenzie conducted himself, in the fog of war, as a professional, executing a strategy that was not his.
After the U.S. made the opposite decision in 2026—to enter into a new war in a neighboring Greater Middle Eastern country—the Pentagon under Secretary Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM (helmed by Adm. Brad Cooper, who was described to me by one senior administration official as a “made man” in the “CENTCOM mafia”) has seemed notably more spiritually dishonest, and far more messianic.
While the exodus from Afghanistan was imperfect, the conduct of the boring Biden Pentagon deserves more credit.
President Biden got the strategy in Afghanistan right. He was right. He was right for years—going back over a decade, to his time as vice president, when he reportedly considered resigning over then-President Barack Obama’s gargantuan troop surge there.
“Tomorrow [President Obama] is going to make a fateful decision regarding Afghanistan—as I sat looking out the window at the sea—thinking I should resign in protest over what will bring his administration down,” Biden wrote in an “Af/Pak” pad he put to use during National Security Council meetings in 2009, as divulged by former Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Though “nostalgia” is not the right word for 2021 (that year was not a particularly great vintage) or the Biden presidency (ditto), this episode—the choice to leave Afghanistan for real—deserves commendation from someone, anyone. And since Biden has been abandoned by his own party and remains a joke on the right, I guess the defense of his Afghanistan policy (along with a few other aspects of his presidency) is going to fall to the executive director of The American Conservative.
Biden will always be fascinating to me. He is an excellent example of someone who probably made the fullest use he could of his mental and physical gifts. Biden was and is not brilliant. But he’s smart. He works hard. He reads, in his way.
Biden was and is not a beautiful man. He is not Jack Kennedy, on whom he modeled his life and family (with a hauntingly similar mix of true triumph and vicious tragedy). But he is physically striking, dapper, arguably the best-dressed and most well-styled president of my lifetime.
Biden was and is a bullshitter and a blowhard. But that tendency had receded somewhat by the time he became vice president and president. That’s why I don’t necessarily buy the common argument that he would have been a better president younger. There is a classic vitality vs. wisdom tradeoff here. (Though it’s much more likely the end of his reign would have been avoided.)
I’m not sure he always was—“Biden disappoints everyone,” as a comment famously attributed to Ted Kaufman (arguably Biden’s best friend) has it—but by the time he became president, I think Biden was a fundamentally good man.
Biden was overmatched by Ukraine, where he was an orthodox liberal and not dextrous enough to develop original views or exert independent command. He was done in, eventually, by his own physical limitations. Biden was arrogant about the latter, but presidents are unavoidably a little arrogant, and he got unlucky. (What if he had never agreed to that early debate? Would he be president today?)
His record on Gaza is ghastly, and his relative trust in Benjamin Netanyahu and the unambiguous virtue of the Israeli project—“I’m a Zionist,” Biden often declared, famously and sometimes oddly—blots his record with the biggest sin in Washington: being a sucker. He contributed to the evils of Covid and “Woke 1,” as I guess we’re calling it. (It was indeed “crazy.”)
But Biden was very plausibly the best possible Democrat to lead the country at the time. If conservatives are honest, Trump’s reelection in 2020 would have been an unfathomably dark and grinding affair. Even Trump and his aides know he is more powerful than ever by virtue of his unprecedented comeback.
Biden got inflation wrong. But so did a lot of people, and most of “the smart set” at the turn of the decade.
But Biden worked with, or at least didn’t massively interfere with, the Federal Reserve’s efforts to land the plane without triggering an economic recession. (We shall see if we’re about to be so fortunate this presidential term.) That is still a wild triumph.
I’m a borderline Paulite “end/audit the Fed” guy, but honesty compels one to concede that Jerome Powell is an actual, living American statesman. I struggle to think of another one. (Perhaps James Baker?)
Still, the failure of the Biden zeal for spending was and is disquieting—no one truly authoritative really, in his heart of hearts, knows with high conviction how to handle the economy after the Covid-era spending bonanza and its consensus failure (a somewhat but not entirely fair judgment). But that’s not really Biden’s fault. It is the new, frightening human reality.
If Biden had won, and his cancer had progressed at the same pace (an assumption—the mind’s power over the body is a mysterious thing), one wonders whether he would have resigned in office. I tend to think he would have. But it’s unknowable.
Biden’s Treaty Room address announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan and his defenses of the fundamental policy amid the chaos in August 2021 are still, I believe, the bravest, best things a president has done in my lifetime.
That is a sad commentary on American leadership in the 21st century, but there you have it. Biden was not great, but he was commanding and interesting, and perpetually underrated, which is inherently sympathetic.
And, although it pains me to say it, one can no longer make an intellectually credible argument that Trump (who negotiated the original deal with the Taliban) wouldn’t have gotten rolled by the generals if reelected in 2020. This is, of course, also unknowable. But he was rolled by the generals on Afghanistan when he was elected the first time in 2016. And our present war in Iran is a mighty big counterpoint to the theory that, when push comes to shove, Trump’s true convictions matter.
Biden got it done. So: thank you, Mr. President.
The post Five Years On From Biden’s Finest Hour appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why do the Brits imitate the worst in American culture?
Assuming the ridiculous gushing over a Cambridge conman was not a national Monty Python sketch arranged for tourists, the Jason Arday affair reminded me of one of the most peculiar things about Britain: It’s more woke than the U.S. Which is weird, because the Mother Country still has a monarchy that rules over tens of millions of white subjects. The closest we have to that in America is the NAACP.
According to the 2021 census, the UK is 2.5 percent black, but around half of all its TV advertisements feature black people. (That’s even more lopsided than their representation in the country’s homicide statistics, where black Britons make up around 20 percent of all convicted killers.)
You’d never know Britain was among the first nations in the world to abolish slavery, and that it then proceeded to use the most powerful navy in the world to end the global slave trade. Black lives mattered to them way before Michael Brown got himself killed in Ferguson, Missouri.
At a cost of perhaps thousands of sailors’ lives and billions of dollars relative to GDP at the time, British ships patrolled the African coast for 50 years, intercepting more than 1,000 slave ships, and freeing 150,000 humans. British taxpayers finally finished paying off the emancipation bill in 2015.
So obviously, Britain has a lot to atone for.
The study of TV ads, undertaken by the UK’s left-wing Channel 4 last year, also found that “multi-ethnic families with young multi-ethnic children continue to be the go-to for family representation,” constituting 47 percent of all ads with families. Interracial couples in the UK are like gay-wedding planners in the U.S. Nobody has ever met one, but they seem to be everywhere.
For extra “diversity,” Asians (mostly Indians and Pakistanis), who make up 9.3 percent of the population, seem to be featured in 28 percent of ads. To be fair, Pakistanis are also wildly over-represented among leaders of white slavery rape gangs.
The census numbers don’t quite add up, but 81.7 percent of Britons identified their ethnic group as “white.” Yet perhaps as low as 12 percent of TV ads show only white people. On the bright side, gay people in ads were more likely to be white than nonwhite.
London is gorgeous, has more shops than New York City, and fewer muggers, homeless people, and pot-smokers than in many American cities. But in some ways, it’s insane.
Plastic is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. More than half a century ago, the civilized world dispensed with rotting fruit and carcinogen-laden paper containers, and embraced the bright new future of plastic bags, cups, and straws that were lighter, stronger, and a whole lot more sanitary. Life was better.
But since this is Britain, and Britain is insane, plastic is virtually banned. You have to drink your Starbucks quickly or start eating cardboard. Useless paper straws dissolve in about two minutes. Grocery store paper bags are capable of holding roughly 8 ounces without breaking. I assume dry cleaning is returned to you wrapped in corn husks.
California isn’t this ridiculous, and their state symbol is a passed-out homeless guy in buttless chaps.
Continuing the kookiness: After the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (completely justified according to both the grand jury and the Obama administration’s Department of Justice), idiot British protesters marched through London, chanting, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”
London bobbies don’t carry guns. In fact, this is a chronic plot hole in British television dramas: You see an officer chasing a suspect and wonder, what’s he going to do when he catches him? Ask about his tweets?
The country is so gun-phobic that a few years back a farmer was sentenced to life in prison for shooting criminals breaking into his home. But wokeness struck back! His sentence was reduced to three years based on his lawyers’ claim that he was neurodivergent: “paranoid personality disorder.” Yes, he paranoidly thought burglars were burgling him.
As the Arday episode demonstrates, the British aren’t sold on free speech either. To hide their embarrassment over the Cambridge fraud, an army of DEI mediocrities exploded in a murderous rage at the academic Nathan Cofnas for his Substack post pointing out Arday’s plagiarism.
Liberals in the U.S. aren’t this demented. A number of black professors have been fired for academic scams far less egregious than Arday’s—and the liberal newspaper of record, the New York Times, didn’t run interference for them. The paper mostly reported those cases honestly, as it did with Arday’s. (The Times’ approach to censorship is simply not to report news that would confuse its readers.)
Meanwhile, the BBC belched out 11 radio shows, four news articles, and two TV interviews fawning over Arday and lustily repeated his preposterous lies—until the truth emerged (thanks to Cofnas).
It’s amazing that Americans got both our First and Second Amendment rights from the British. Their 1689 Bill of Rights gave the king’s subjects the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” and his Protestant subjects the right to “have arms for their defense.” Now, you can’t even defend your home or speak the truth in Britain if it could hurt someone’s feelings.
These are the same Britons who get snippy about the U.S.—our patriotism, our guns, our directness, and (at least when a Reagan, Bush, or Trump is in the White House) our supposed Nazi-ness.
Okay, fine. You have more beautiful buildings, accents, traditions, and castles, etc. We’re vulgar arrivistes who eat Texas chili out of a Frito bag. Then why, Britain, do you slavishly imitate the worst woke nonsense America has to offer?
My rewrite of John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech from Richard II:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for her self
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES
The post We Happy Few, We Band Of Wokesters appeared first on The American Conservative.
Darline Graham won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat of her late brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, in South Carolina’s Tuesday primary.
Graham, whom South Carolina’s Gov. Henry McMaster appointed in July to serve the remainder of her brother’s term, defeated Rep. Ralph Norman 52 percent to 48 percent. President Donald Trump encouraged Graham, who had no prior political experience, to run for a full term and actively campaigned for her.
Lindsey Graham was a strong hawkish influence on the foreign policy of the GOP and the Trump administration. Darline has had little time to show policy priorities, but has voted in favor of immigration enforcement and election integrity measures. In a debate with Norman, she said “national security is not my thing, not my area of expertise.”
Graham will face the Democratic candidate Annie Andrews in November.
The post Darline Graham Wins SC GOP Senate Primary appeared first on The American Conservative.
Name confusion and the Last Frontier’s ranked-choice system may spell trouble for Republicans.
As the prognosticators and planners inside the Acela corridor were rolling out of bed last Wednesday morning, the votes in Alaska’s open Senate primary were still being counted. The former Democratic congresswoman Mary Peltola had opened a commanding lead over the Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, notching 48.1 percent to Sullivan’s 42.7 percent (a margin that, with most of the votes now counted, has continued to hold).
Last week’s race doesn’t determine who gets Alaska’s Senate seat; rather, the nonpartisan primary simply narrows a crowded field to the top four vote-getters, who will then advance to a November general election that will be decided by ranked-choice voting. Both the GOP and Democratic nominees have cleared that bar comfortably. But the incumbent Republican will not be the only Dan Sullivan on the ballot in November. Dan Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher and registered Republican, recently won a legal fight to stay in the race despite accusations of sabotage by the Alaska Republican Party.
With the midterm congressional elections less than three months away, Republicans currently hold a 53–47 majority in the Senate. Democrats must pick up four seats to win the majority, a prospect that seemed unthinkable when President Donald Trump took back the White House in November 2024. But as the American economy struggles under the weight of the Iran War, and Trump’s approval numbers crater to historic lows, Democrats are surging nationally. And Alaska is one of the places where the shift is showing up.
Peltola’s strong performance wasn’t entirely surprising, even in a state Trump carried twice. The first Alaska Native and first woman to represent Alaska in Congress, Peltola made a name for herself as an independent operator in Washington, DC. Though a registered Democrat, Peltola has defended the oil industry vital to the Alaskan economy, supported gun rights in a state that lives for hunting, and shown a willingness to work with Trump when it could benefit her constituents, regardless of how it might look to other congressional Democrats. Running on the slogan of “Fish, Family, and Freedom,” Peltola highlighted her independent streak with a timely ad released on social media early Wednesday morning as the results were being finalized.
In Alaska, where ranked-choice voting has become the standard method of deciding elections, Sullivan Jr.’s inclusion has drawn the attention of Republican strategists bracing for a race that could come down to a fraction of a point. His candidacy is the kind of long-shot, trend-defying entry that regularly turns up in Alaska. In a state where voters and candidates often buck the simple logic of the two-party system, Sullivan Jr. is a unique feature, not a bug.
“I don’t think the Republican Party needs to be the MAGA party,” Sullivan Jr. told the New York Times reporter Kellen Browning. “My dad and my grandfather were Republicans who taught me my work skills, my skills to be a good father and a husband and how to be a kind human being.” In response to Sullivan Jr.’s candidacy, Trump’s Department of Justice issued two subpoenas on Wednesday to probe whether he had entered the race with the intent to confuse voters.
Another wrinkle is the progressive Democrat David Leslie, clinging to fourth place by a mere 17 votes as of this writing. Though Peltola’s centrist stance on guns and the oil industry has frustrated Alaska’s small but potentially critical progressive base, she could benefit from Leslie’s potential inclusion on the general election ballot. If Leslie holds his fourth-place position and reaches the general, his supporters could play an outsized role in a ranked-choice election in which second-choice votes could be decisive.
How much the presence of Sullivan Jr. and Leslie will determine the eventual outcome is tough to discern. If no candidate receives a majority on the first round, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and those ballots are then redistributed according to the voters’ next choice. If Leslie makes the ballot and finishes in fourth, as he did in the primary, it’s reasonable to expect a decent share of those votes will end up with Peltola. It might be just enough to push the former congresswoman across the finish line.
But if Leslie’s votes aren’t enough, Sullivan Jr., the man Republicans have cast as a spoiler, could become the decisive figure. With 2.4 percent of the primary vote (more than 3,000 votes), Sullivan Jr. would remain on the ballot after Leslie’s elimination and could force another round of counting. If he is eventually eliminated, where his supporters’ second choices go could determine whether the incumbent Dan Sullivan holds his seat. If critics of Dan Sullivan Jr.’s campaign are correct, perhaps that vote breaks in Peltola’s favor, earning him the spoiler label.
Alaska isn’t necessarily the most likely Democratic pickup, but it’s a seat that looked a lot more secure for Republicans six months ago than it does today. If Peltola can win Alaska, the prospect of Democrats capturing the Senate becomes far more plausible (Democrats would still need to win three more states to get to 51).
Peltola was always going to be a tough out in Alaska. She is a well-liked professional who has shown the capacity to operate in a bipartisan manner when it benefits her constituents. That’s a rare combination in Washington these days, and her pragmatism has helped make this a race Republicans can’t afford to take for granted. In a year when control of the Senate is an open question, the peculiarities of Alaska could make every vote count.
The post Alaska: The Sleeper Race That Could Decide Control of the Senate appeared first on The American Conservative.
Who remembers the Texan’s skepticism of foreign adventurism?
Today, loudly and proudly, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is a staunch supporter of the Iran War, the state of Israel, and U.S.-led regime change in other countries; he is outspoken against what he sees as rising antisemitism in America, particularly on the right.
When he opposed a potential U.S.–Iran peace deal in June, the Washington Examiner reported that “Cruz, considered a possible 2028 presidential candidate” was “positioning himself as more hawkish than the White House.”
Other top 2028 Republican presidential prospects include Vice President J.D. Vance, who is considered less hawkish than other White House officials, and also Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who in the 2016 presidential election was the neoconservative choice.
Cruz is now clearly aiming to be the most pro-war, pro-Israel, and thoroughly neoconservative Republican presidential candidate.
A decade ago, he was aiming to be something else.
Cruz told Iowans in 2015 that their foreign policy choice shouldn’t be between “retreat from the world and be isolationist and leave everyone alone, or we’ve got to be these crazy neocon-invade-every-country-on-Earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East.”
Gearing up to run for president, Cruz criticized neoconservatism frequently back then.
Some “crazy neocons” didn’t like it.
“I’m not sure where the neocons wish us to invade (left my decoder ring at the last Elders of Zion meeting), but what exactly does this would-be Commander in Chief wish us to do?” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Vice President Danielle Pletka.
Pletka’s “Elders of Zion” quip implied that perhaps Cruz was leaning into antisemitism.
Labeling Cruz an “isolationist,” Pletka would also say, “Good for Ted Cruz for being honest. He doesn’t want to be anywhere in the world, doesn’t want America to lead, and harkening back to the likes of Pat Buchanan and Charles Lindbergh is truth in advertising for him.”
She wasn’t the only one upset with Cruz, nor was Pletka the only hawk to equate Cruz’s criticism of neoconservatism with Jew hatred.
“He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” said the former President George W. Bush National Security Council official Elliot Abrams.
The columnist Jonah Goldberg would add, “Abrams is right — and Cruz surely knows — that for many people ‘neocon’ has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk.”
The Bush State Department alumnus Eliot Cohen said of Cruz’s naughty word, “It’s an epithet. It’s always used pejoratively.”
If Cruz’s use of the term was jarring to neoconservatives accustomed to being gatekeepers of what foreign policy positions were acceptable on the right, including what rhetoric might be permitted, for non-interventionist conservatives it was not surprising.
Cruz was elected to the Senate in 2012 as part of a Tea Party wave of Republicans, which at the time meant cuddling up to the popular libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who was attracting large audiences while running for president in 2012. It also meant cultivating ties with his senator son, Rand Paul, whose 2010 Kentucky primary race was in part a Republican intra-party war between the rising son of Ron and the neocon old guard. Dick Cheney would endorse Paul’s GOP primary opponent, but the Tea Party darling Sarah Palin gave the libertarian a major assist with her endorsement.
Cruz was definitely in, and actively wanting to be in, the Paul-Palin conservative camp and not the Dick Cheney one.
Both Pauls endorsed Cruz for senate. Though Cruz would eventually try to say he was somewhere between Rand Paul and the much more hawkish Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on foreign policy, the popular spot in the GOP base at the time was the Tea Party and the Pauls and so, again, there was Cruz. (The future neocon star Nikki Haley also once embraced the Tea Party.)
When the former senator and hawkish GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum was asked in 2015 about Cruz’s use of the word “neocon,” he replied, “You don’t accuse someone of being a neocon if you see yourself as a Reagan conservative on national security. And he’s not.”
He added, “The Republican party, thanks to Ron and Rand Paul, have brought in different elements into the party, and I think Ted’s comfortable in those elements.”
Santorum did not mean this as a compliment, but he was right about Cruz seeming comfortable—or at least pretending to be—in “those elements.”
Which at the time also included praising the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for his 2013 revelations about mass surveillance by the U.S. government.
“If it is the case that the federal government is seizing millions of personal records about law-abiding citizens, and if it is the case that there are minimal restrictions on accessing or reviewing those records, then I think Mr. Snowden has done a considerable public service by bringing it to light,” Cruz said at a 2013 event hosted by The Blaze.
Cruz said, while running for president three years later, that Snowden was a “traitor” who should be “tried for treason.”
As a 2016 Republican primary candidate, Rubio would say of his fellow competitor, “I never believed Edward Snowden was a good public servant the way that Ted Cruz once said that he had done a public service for America.”
Working for the Paul family in various capacities and coming from the libertarian right, this is my memory of Cruz’s chameleon politics; while I can only speak for myself, I don’t believe I’m the only libertarian embarrassed to have ever considered the man an ally.
We should all expect deception from politicians. But Cruz certainly went deep.
Cruz’s shapeshifting certainly didn’t stop here. As The American Conservative’s Curt Mills’ recently opined, “Could say a lot about Cruz, but have to almost admire his consistent shamelessness. At the dawn of his national career, he tried to destroy Obamacare, when that was impossible, Obama had just been convincingly re-elected, etc, just for attention.”
“Remember he spoke at Nat Con II, and in contrast to Rubio, he didn’t even try to placate the audience—just an open bog standard, old guard Republican speech. It was sort of impressive,” Mills added of Cruz’s speech at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. “Now, he’s just going to run for president in 2028 on an open, Damned Proud demi foreign agent platform. It won’t win, but think it will have more legs than a lot of quisling Machiavels’ attempts will.”
Mills’s words were accompanied by a Cruz post with the senator gloating about Israel’s major investments in Texas.
Which is definitely Ted Cruz of the 2026 vintage: a full-fledged, neocon Zionist hellbent on painting others who question American wars or U.S.-Israel relations as being antisemitic. It’s hard to imagine the cast of neoconservatives quoted here having anything harsh to say about Cruz today.
It’s amusing to imagine what a 2013 or even 2015 Cruz would think of the “crazy” neoconservatism he’s so fully embraced today. Or even whatever he might end up becoming in the future as political winds shift with his ambitions. Cruz went through more changes and nuances than even this, but this column can only be so long.
So who is the real Ted Cruz? It’s a good question, but probably one that no one can truly answer.
Not even Cruz.
The post Ted Cruz Is an Opportunistic Chameleon appeared first on The American Conservative.
The president provokes passions that unite other nations against him.
Perhaps no political figure of the modern era has done more to promote nationalism than President Donald Trump. Often he’s done so with remarkable candor. “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, O.K.? I’m a nationalist,” Trump declared at a rally in 2018. “Use that word. Use that word.”
Trump’s promotion of nationalism strikes me as being, on the whole, a salutary development for the American right. A potent form of group cohesion, nationalism anchors genuine political consciousness and helps distinguish between the essential and accidental qualities of a people (to borrow a philosophical distinction). America is a particular people with a special history, united by bonds of culture and kinship, not by commercial relations, government documents, or shared devotion to LGBTQIA+ rights.
Thanks to Trump, many American right-wingers now think in terms of “the national question,” rather than obsessing over marginal tax rates and other wonky fixations, as the political commentator Scott Greer documents in a recently published book (which I reviewed).
But, it turns out, other nations have nationalism too. And Trump hasn’t just promoted nationalism in America, he’s also provoked nationalism abroad, including among adversaries of the United States. Clearly, he’s done so unwittingly and in ways that undermine his own objectives. That other nations hold latent nationalist sentiments which can activate in opposition to Trump’s America is a curious blindspot for our nationalist-in-chief.
Consider a couple of Trump’s recent failures: 1) his attempt to get a trade deal with Canada, and 2) his efforts to force Iran’s capitulation.
Last week, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. and Canada were on the verge of striking a trade agreement. But now, the two countries are instead on the verge of a trade war. So, what happened?
Long story short: Those Canadians, normally a gentle people, are feeling awfully nationalistic and united against America. Canada’s new groove owes entirely to Trump’s aggressive actions and rhetoric, including unseemly insults like referring to the Canadian prime minister as “governor” of America’s 51st state. These days, only a third of Canadians have a favorable opinion of America, down from 54 percent in 2024. “I’ve never seen Canadians—politically left, right, and center—so angry with the United States as right now,” observed Ian Bremmer, a geopolitical consultant.
Of course, Canadians have long harbored certain resentments toward their larger, less-than-couth neighbor, but those have recently taken on a decidedly harsher edge.
“Before all the 51st state rhetoric, anti-Americanness was expressed in an all-in-good-fun way, but this has turned into anger since Trump was re-inaugurated,” Theodore Shouse, a Montreal-based writer, told The American Conservative. “Canada is a divided country, but people are looking past their differences in the face of Trump’s aggression.” Just a few years ago, flying the Canadian flag was associated with working-class right-wingers, but no longer. “When visiting Toronto earlier this summer I noticed a striking number of Canadian flags in a heavily Liberal upper-middle-class area,” Shouse said.
In July, when Trump threatened massive tariffs if Canada didn’t agree to a deal within 30 days, he aimed to heighten pressure on Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney to make concessions. Instead, Carney came under domestic political pressure not to kowtow to a country that most Canadians have come to see as the greatest threat to their nation.
On Saturday, Carney gave an address explaining why he’d decided to slap reciprocal tariffs on America rather than make a deal. In Carney’s telling, the agreement Trump demands would infringe on Canadian sovereignty, restricting Ottawa’s ability to trade with other nations and undermining efforts to preserve French-Canadian culture through subsidies and other measures. Toward the end of his speech, Carney praised Canadians for their small, repeated acts of solidarity since Trump returned to the White House.
So, did Trump learn his lesson? Not quite. “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!!” he wrote on social media following Carney’s speech.
Trump may think America, thanks to its larger population and economy, will easily prevail in a trade war with Canada. I’m not so sure. Economic anxieties will grow on both sides of the border, but America’s resolve may give way first. Seventy-six percent of Canadians support Carney’s decision, according to an online poll. By contrast, Trump is polling in the low 30s, and most Americans oppose his harsh treatment of Canada, a longtime ally.
Trump’s nationalism blindspot is even more concerning when it comes to a longtime adversary: Iran.
The Iran War has entered a new phase in recent weeks amid a pause in major military hostilities. Now that America has expended most of its best weapons, the Trump administration seeks to break Tehran’s will through economic warfare. Trump has called the strategy “economic D-Day,” and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent elaborated the approach in an op-ed for the Financial Times.
The Iran War has become a pain-tolerance game. As with Canada, Trump seems confident that the U.S. will prevail, perhaps because the contest will prove much more painful for Iran. And as with Canada, I have my doubts.
This January, the Islamic Republic faced a political crisis when protests over economic conditions morphed into mass riots and civil unrest. Trump, sensing an opportunity, ordered a military buildup in the Middle East and, in late February, launched an attack that killed Iran’s leaders. As the war progressed, he threatened to annihilate Iranian civilization and maligned Tehran’s new leaders as “scum.”
The results speak for themselves: The Islamic Republic grew only more hardline, and the people rallied around the regime as their only defense against military aggression. A multiday funeral for the slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei drew tens of millions of Iranians. “Iran is an extremely nationalistic state,” observed Rosemary Kelanic of Defense Priorities during a recent podcast. Many if not most Iranians dislike the regime, Kelanic said, “but they understand that you go to war with the regime you have, not the regime you wish you had.”
It’s often said of Trump that he lacks “strategic empathy”—the ability to understand the perspectives and incentives of adversaries—but his nationalism blindspot seems like a failure of good old-fashioned emotional empathy. Trump struggles to intuit the sentiments of collective pride and parochial attachment that motivate other nations. Until that changes, he’ll struggle to secure the geopolitical interests of his own nation, whose nationalism he understands so well.
The post Canada and Iran Reveal Trump’s Nationalism Blindspot appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Pentagon on Friday fired the publisher, the editor-in-chief, and a Middle East correspondent from Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper that receives funding from the Defense Department but maintains editorial independence.
The firings have raised concerns about infringements on the publication’s First Amendment rights. In recent weeks, Stars and Stripes has reported on the mental health struggles of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, whose deployment was extended by months to support war efforts against Iran.
A statement by Erik Slavin, the dismissed editor-in-chief, shed light on his termination notice. “I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line,” Slavin said. “I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies.”
This January, the Defense Department rescinded a regulation that had prevented censorship of Stars and Stripes, with a Pentagon spokesman saying the publication should “refocus its content away from woke distractions.” And in March, the Pentagon released a memo saying its coverage “must be consistent with good order and discipline of the military.”
In 2025, the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth imposed new rules on Pentagon correspondents requiring his approval for reporting information. After journalists turned in their access badges rather than consenting to the new rules, the Pentagon invited The American Conservative to be further integrated into its press operations. TAC declined.
The post Pentagon Fires Journalists at Military Newspaper, Raising Alarms appeared first on The American Conservative.
Daniel P. Driscoll, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Army, is poised to leave the administration by the end of 2026, several outlets report.
Driscoll is a former Yale Law School student and longtime friend of Vice President J.D. Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance. At the nadir of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s perceived stock in Washington, Driscoll was widely tipped as a possible — if not likely — successor.
The Hill claimed Driscoll had been in a “months-long turf war” with Hegseth. But if anything, the palace politics at the Pentagon had seemingly cooled for much of 2026.
Hegseth’s position has been largely bolstered by frontline television appearances during the administration’s crusade against what it deems narcoterrorists in the Atlantic and Pacific, the tactically successful rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and Rumsfeldesque appearances during the Iran War. Indeed, chatter that Hegseth might run for president has recently become headlines, with the secretary visiting Iowa this week.
Meanwhile, Stephen Feinberg, Hegseth’s principal deputy, has been ensnared in the “CIA gold bars” imbroglio that captured viral headlines. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of policy, continues to attract scorn from Capitol Hill hawks, while at the same time disappointing hardline realists and restrainers with his putative support for the Iran War. In other words: The well has seemingly run dry of possible Hegseth replacements, at least over in Arlington.
That was, simply, not the political state of play in 2025.
In addition, Driscoll’s looming exit comes in parallel with off-ramps for other close allies of the vice president. Jacob Reses (Vance’s longtime chief of staff), Andy Baker (his longtime national security advisor), and James Braid (the White House’s director of legislative affairs and a former policy aide to then-Sen. Vance) have all left or are leaving in 2026.
Whether this turnover is part of an embryonic Vance presidential campaign, or a purge of Vance allies internally — or some combination thereof — was not immediately clear.
The post Driscoll, Army Secretary and Staunch Vance Ally, to Depart Admin appeared first on The American Conservative.
Curt Mills and Jude Russo talk to Jacob Heilbrunn of The National Interest about the backlash to Trump from left and right, the looming midterms, the Iran War, the Ukraine war, and the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 2028. Recorded August 19, 2026.
The post TAC Right Now: Why Trump’s Chaos Might Only Escalate, w/ Jacob Heilbrunn appeared first on The American Conservative.
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