I have a new piece up at The UnPopulist covering the vast scope of Trump administration corruption and its culture of corruption.

This is one of the major themes I want to cover as we head toward the midterm election results on Tuesday. (I talk about getting the results on Tuesday, because more than 40 million votes have already been cast.) The four big themes leading into this Election Day are the abuse of presidential power, which has long been my main focus, and I wrote about it again recently. Corruption is second, and I’ll say more about that below.

Next up, I am writing about how the current election reflects our “post-truth” politics, dominated by outright lies and gross fabrications. The last issue I’ll be covering is what I call the eternal recurrence of Trump’s first impeachment, the way in which this administration consistently treats the foreign policy of the United States as an instrument for gaining advantage in domestic politics. Those two overviews are coming up, so stay tuned.

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I am also preparing for the post-election task of trying to talk Democrats into reining in excessive presidential power rather than preserving it so their own guy can use it. That’s going to be a monumental task, which is why I am asking for your support.

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Underwhelming Bananas

This all assumes a “Blue Wave” on Tuesday, in which Democrats make big gains in Congress and acquire the votes necessary to serve as an effective check on Donald Trump. Let’s check in one last time on what the polls are telling us to expect.

The first thing to remember is that the polls are never completely right—nor are they ever completely wrong. They always have a margin of error. Pollsters can only sample a tiny portion of the voters, and they have to weight the results to be representative of who will actually turn up at the polls. But nobody really knows who’s going to turn up at the polls, so they have to make their best estimate.

For poll analysis, I’ve been recommending the Strength In Numbers newsletter run by G. Elliott Morris, and one of the things I like about him is that he is very honest and transparent about these uncertainties in the polling. In one of his recent posts, he describes “every way the polls could be wrong,” and better yet, he estimates how big an impact each of these errors could have.

The New York Times provides a similar analysis.

My favorite error is this. Many of the polls ask people who they voted for in the 2024 election, so they can weight their responses accordingly for this election. But four to five percent of the people who voted for Trump don’t remember (or don’t want to remember) that they voted for him, so they answer that question wrongly. This could cause polls to assume that Republicans are retaining more of their 2024 voters than they really are, which could lead them to under-estimate support for Democrats.

The upshot is that on average, the polls are off by a little over three percentage points. And that’s on average. In some elections, they have been off by five or eight points. And we don’t know what direction they are off until we see the results.

The polls right now strongly favor Democrats, showing them winning or in striking distance of winning in many places where they would not normally be competitive, like Texas and Iowa. But if the polls are off by three points in one direction, we could see an underwhelming night for Democrats—still a victory, but not a ringing mandate. If they are off by three points in the other direction, a night that is already good could turn into a rout. We could see a result that everyone seems by general agreement to be describing as “bananas.” The kind of night where we’re waiting up to see results in places like Mississippi and Louisiana.

So that’s the range, from underwhelming to bananas.

Personally, I’m hoping for something more on the “bananas” end. It’s not because I like all the Democrats, though winning in a bunch of “red states” would have the advantage of bringing more moderate Democrats into Congress, because you pretty much have to be a moderate to run in those places. But I think it would be good for this election to be felt as a shocking rebuke to Republicans—not just a massive public rejection of what they currently stand for, but a rejection that is broad and nationwide, even in the places they regard as their heartland. From that perspective, the more cataclysmic the result, the better.

Beyond the polls, we can see a few more indications that this could be where we’re headed.

Charlie Cook of the respected and usually cautious Cook Political Report describes this as a “unicorn election.”

Next Tuesday will be a unicorn election, certainly unlike any of the 11 midterm and 11 presidential elections I have covered. The dynamics are fundamentally different. The most critical segment is not “pure independents.” Nor is it “soft Democrats” or, for that matter, “soft Republicans.” Furthermore, unlike many elections, it doesn’t hinge on the behavior of swingy suburban voters.

Instead, the critical group in this election consists of normally reliable Republicans.

Another bad sign is that Trump himself is in a bubble of denial, unable to adjust to these changing circumstances and unwilling to allow other Republicans to adjust.

Many GOP candidates in tight races have tried to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s policies, his behavior and the widespread allegations of self-dealing in his administration. Behind the scenes, some political advisers and outside Republican groups have warned the president’s aides that Mr. Trump could do more harm than good by holding rallies in battleground states with uncomfortably close races, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

But the president, under pressure and angry with naysayers, has dismissed polls that reflect his unpopularity, and has raged against unflattering stories that plunge him into a dark mood. Determined to win by turning the midterm season into a referendum on himself, he is set to headline rallies around the country all week.

The biggest sign I see is that some conservative media outlets are beginning to engage in small acts of rebellion against the party line.

See a brilliant little piece at National Review describing “25 Things Democrats Might Do If They Retake Power.” All of them sound really terrible, like “Blowing out the national debt on a party-line vote that bypasses the Senate filibuster,” or “Targeting political enemies with selective and pretextual prosecutions.” But the gag is that if you follow any of these links, you will find a description of what Donald Trump and Republicans have already done.

Rich Lowry, who runs National Review, is a guy who knows how to stick his finger in the air and make sure he blows with the prevailing wind. When conservatives were against Trump, he was against Trump. When they reconciled themselves to nationalism, he reconciled to nationalism. So if he’s publishing stuff like this, that gives us an idea where he thinks the wind is blowing now.

We see a similar warning posted at another conservative outlet, the Washington Examiner, about a “MAGA bubble” in which “loyalty without limits bred arrogance and corruption.” “At the midpoint of Trump’s second term, the MAGA movement has lost all sense of how it is perceived by normal people.” This is still largely couched in terms of “perception” rather than reality, but it’s a start.

Between the polls and the behavior of politicians and commentators on the right, we’re getting a clear indication that the public is about to reject and rebuke the very thing they foolishly voted for two years ago.

If we ask why and what happens next, my article on corruption tries to provide some answers.

The Economics of Authoritarianism

My new article is partly an answer to an article The UnPopulist published a few days earlier. In that article, Gary Winslett notes that Democrats are trying to combine the issue of corruption with their rhetoric about affordability, and he argues this will not be enough. We can’t lower prices just by cracking down on corruption. “The appropriate solution is to increase the supply of housing, energy, and health care. Subpoenas can’t substitute for supply.”

I agree with that and think it’s a valuable point to make. But I wanted to provide a broader perspective on the role of corruption in a society. My main point is that corruption on this scale is no longer just a scandal. It is a fundamental change to our economic system.

Authoritarianism is never just a political system. It is also an economic system, built on corruption. Corruption is both a means and an end for the regime. For a lot of the people who jump on the bandwagon of an authoritarian regime, the whole purpose of grabbing power is to get rich from insider deals. But this also serves a practical purpose for the strongman, who consolidates his regime by feeding his supporters and starving his opponents.

My article was published yesterday afternoon, and this morning, I saw an article at the New York Times on the vast network of Trump administration corruption and the “princelings” who siphon off wealth from it. It’s worth reading, but it describes this as “a new strain of American capitalism.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole history of capitalism.

For much of the 20th Century, people viewed the two alternative economic systems as capitalism versus socialism. They forgot that capitalism first arose in opposition to a different alternative. Here’s how I put it.

The economics of right-wing authoritarianism is not a free market, nor is it socialism. It is a return to what came before capitalism: feudalism and aristocracy, with its network of patronage built around the political power of men from established families.

That’s why I regard the current scope of corruption as important. It is a retrogression to a “neo-feudal economics of patronage.”

Someone will inevitably ask why I didn’t complain about corruption under Democratic presidents, and of course I did. But I’ll give the same answer I give about abuses of presidential power: Everyone has done it, but not at this scale, and there’s a point at which a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. Trump isn’t just doing a little corruption behind the scenes. He’s doing it openly and brazenly at a scope that is making it into our prevailing economic system.

In this article, I could only give a limited number of examples, and I’ve been saving more of them. Here are a few more highlights:

There’s the Russia oligarch and Putin crony who paid for Donald Trump, Jr.’s lavish three-day wedding party on private islands in the Bahamas.

There’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., getting free flights to Fiji and Greece from a political donor.

There’s the leak of a secret list of donors to Trump’s ballroom project, which includes a collection of big companies with business and regulatory interests that depend on the administration’s friendship.

To combine economic corruption with political corruption, we have Trump quashing an FBI investigation into Maine Senator Susan Collins for funneling illegal campaign contributions from a defense contractor in exchange for promises of government contracts.

Finally, there is Trump’s general amnesty for white collar crime, including letting con-men off the hook for as much $1.7 billion owed in restitution to victims of fraud. And he is even dismantling the infrastructure that allows the government to spot and prosecute crimes, illegally deleting a registry of shell-company ownership that is used to track money laundering.

Changing America’s economic system is going to cost us. Check out an article by two scholars who examine the record of authoritarianism and sketch out how it is bad for the economy. Their main conclusion is particularly relevant right now.

Our study found one condition that allows economies to thrive even when democracy is in decline: functioning political parties in independent legislatures.

That leads us back to Tuesday’s election. I argue that the issue of corruption provides something important and substantive that a new Congress can do.

[T]his gives Democrats an opportunity precisely suited to the power they will have if they retake a majority in Congress. A promise of pardons can stop the federal prosecution of corruption, but it cannot keep Congress from investigating and holding hearings to expose one of these schemes after another. This is what [Georgia Senator Jon] Ossoff has been promising: “If you’re involved in any of this, next year, you’ll be raising your right hand and swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God in front of the United States Congress.” A congressional majority battling with a hostile president may not easily be able to pass big legislation—but no one can stop it from holding hearings to expose massive corruption.

I also point out how this is an opportunity to build the political capital for some of the big reforms we’re going to need.

Read the whole thing.

The UnPopulist

A Democratic Congress Should Make It Its Business to Expose Trump’s Patronage Machine

Democratic candidates spent much of the midterm campaign talking themselves into a false choice over whether to focus on “affordability” or on the abuse of executive power. Yet in its final days, the election has come to center on an issue that combines the two: the spectacular corruption of the Trump administration…

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4 days ago · 41 likes · 6 comments · Robert Tracinski

The Inner Light

Almost as a contrast to all of this comes the news of the death of Patrick Stewart, the beloved Shakespearean actor who is probably best known to Americans—or at least to this American—as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek franchise. He had an outsized influence on the culture as a fictional model of a man of thoughtfulness, courage, and integrity—which, to all reports, matched his off-screen reputation as a mentor and benefactor. That’s definitely an example we could use right now.

I can’t view it as a tragedy when a man dies at the ripe old age of 86—or at 90, as with original series Star Trek actor Walter Koenig, who died a few days earlier. Rather, it’s an opportunity to reflect back on the artistic and personal accomplishments of his life.

In Patrick Stewart’s case, he played a role quite specifically in preparing us for how to confront death. I have in mind one of the all-time classic Star Trek episodes, “The Inner Light,” which I wrote about a few years ago.

The plot involves Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s encounter with an alien probe which puts him into a coma-like state, inducing a long hallucination of his life on another planet among a race of aliens whose sun exploded a thousand years earlier. In this hallucination, Picard has a family and friends and lives an entire life. The climax of the episode—I did give you a spoiler warning, right?—happens when Picard wakes from the hallucination—back on his ship—and discovers its purpose: the effort of a doomed people to leave behind some trace of themselves. As a virtual representative of the long-dead aliens tells him, “If you remember what we were and how we lived, we will have found life again.”

Patrick Stewart helped us meditate on the inner light and also helped spread a lot of light outward into the world. If we remember who he was and how he lived, he will have found life again.

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I’m down to the final big lesson I learned about American politics by running for office.

Politics on the national level is dirty, nasty, and ugly. Politics on TV is dirtier, nastier, and uglier. Politics online is the dirtiest, nastiest, and ugliest. But politics on the “retail” level—politics in person, locally, one-on-one is completely different.

I found local political meetings to be filled with retired schoolteachers and accountants and some of the nicest people you will ever meet. It was far more Norman Rockwell-esque than I was expecting, and it’s what gives me hope.

The Council of Elrond

But first, a reminder that I’m raising money for a new project. As Democrats begin to regain political power in Congress, we need to build the case for why we have to rein in excessive executive power, and build an agenda for how to do it.

Please give your support to help me turn this into a podcast and a book—and a network of advocacy.

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(You can also send a check by mail to The Tracinski Letter at PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, Virginia 22906.)

And of course, you can always support these efforts just by subscribing or renewing.

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This is our real-life Council of Elrond, and I’d like you to be part of it.

Among the Greyhairs

I used the word “retired” above, and one thing that was immediately clear is that running for office means spending a lot of time among the greyhairs. Not that I don’t have a few grey hairs of my own, but at 57, I still often found myself the youngest person in the room.

Young people today tend to complain that politicians don’t listen to them or take them seriously, and I think: Yes, that’s because you don’t show up to the meetings. I did once have a bracing conversation with some very enthusiastic young men (perhaps a little too enthusiastic) from the John Brown Gun Club. I also had a couple of UVA students who worked on my campaign for a while part-time, and when I brought one of them with me to a local Democratic Party event, the ladies there doted over her like she was their granddaughter. It’s an experience I really recommend for young people who want to get involved.

There’s a reason the greyhairs dominate politics. Retired people simply have the time. They’ve put in their work over the years, they’re done raising their kids, and now they can volunteer in the unpaid, unglamorous, and frankly pretty thankless work of local organizing. Some of the people I met were from very impressive backgrounds, with long careers in the State Department and the FBI, and not just in Charlottesville, an urban university center where you would expect more of that. There are many people who grew up in obscure rural counties who went off to the big city and had illustrious careers, then returned back to where they came from, bringing all their skills and talents with them.

At every meeting of local Democrats, it seems there was always at least one retired schoolteacher. At one meeting in a small town in Pittsylvania County a couple of “young” people showed up—two women in their mid-30s, which counts as young at these events—and the retired schoolteacher immediately knew who they were, and they talked about which of her classes they were in, probably 20 years ago. In a small town, she knew everyone, because they all came through her school. And it was just so wholesome.

Back in my Tea Party days, I never thought I would spend a lot of time hanging around with Democrats,

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Since the end of my congressional primary, I’ve been thinking about my next steps, the next big project for this newsletter, and what most urgently needs to be done. I’ve come to a very clear answer.

In my recent article trying to find Democratic candidates who are campaigning against abuses of executive power, I mentioned that there is already a debate going on—for now, mostly in the background—over what to do about executive power. See this piece for the best quick summary of who stands where.

On the one side, there are those who want to keep the expansive, nearly unlimited executive power claimed by Donald Trump, so a future Democratic president can use that power to roll back Trump’s agenda and impose their own favored agenda. On the other side are those who want to restore limits on presidential power, who are urging Democrats to act vigorously to undo the damage created by Trump, but to do so within the limits of the Constitution and with the goal of restoring the Constitution.

You all know where I stand on this, but it is now a debate with a timeline. Democrats are likely to regain control of Congress in next month’s election, and if they do as well as they are projected to, they will be likely to win back the presidency in 2028. Within the next two years, we will all have to decide what we should do with the powers of Trump’s ultra-imperial presidency.

I can sum this up in one phrase, and anyone who knows the works of J.R.R. Tolkien already knows, from my main headline above, where I’m going with this.

We need the Council of Elrond. In fact, we’re already conducting such a debate without really identifying it.

When I first read The Lord of the Rings, about 40 years ago, a Tolkien reference like this would have been considered obscure and very geeky. Since then, Tolkien’s works have been turned into a series of blockbuster films and some television spinoffs, so it’s fair to say that Tolkien lore has entered the mainstream of the culture. For those who still find it a bit obscure, let me explain. And yes, this will all be relevant—surprisingly and insistently relevant—to today’s politics and the future of every one of us.

Here’s the very short version. In Tolkien’s story, the good guys have discovered a magical “ring of power” lost long ago by a sort of evil sorcerer, and they have to decide what to do with it. The Council of Elrond is the name Tolkien gives to this debate. There are two alternatives. A somewhat hot-headed warrior declares that they should use the power of the ring for good, to defeat their enemies. But the wisest at the Council prevail, arguing that the ring is “altogether evil,” that any attempt to use it for good would be twisted toward evil ends, and so it must be destroyed. But destroying the ring is extremely difficult and dangerous, and the rest of the debate is over who is going to do it and how.

You can watch the movie version of that scene here.

The purpose of art and fiction is to help us work through the real issues we encounter in real life—and that’s no less true for stories set in a quasi-medieval fantasy world with wizards, elves, and goblins. The ring of power is a metaphor for power as such, particularly for tyrannical power and the lust for power. The ring is a metaphor for the idea that power corrupts.

I think you can see the relevance of that metaphor today. We are already acting out the Council of Elrond in real life. Instead of debating what to do with a ring of power, we’re debating what to do with excessive executive power. Do we rein it back within its proper constitutional limits, or do we delude ourselves into thinking we can harness authoritarianism for good?

That’s the discussion I’m gearing up for, and not just in a general way. I have a specific idea for implementing this.

The first phase is that I am making plans for a new podcast series called The Council of Elrond, carried out under the banner of my Symposium newsletter. The idea is to interview various experts on the law, the Constitution, and American history about why we should rein in executive power and how to do it. What specific reforms do we need? How does that integrate with vigorous action to roll back the abuses of the Trump era? How do we avoid the passive, Biden-era return to norms of liberal self-restraint that just ended up empowering the authoritarian right? (And is that really what happened?)

I have many ideas of my own on these subjects, but I want to take advantage of the knowledge and ideas of a wide range of experts. I will interview them and share those conversations with my subscribers here and at Symposium.

The second phase is to turn these insights into a series of articles, and then a book, that is a follow-up to my book from last year, Dictator from Day One. The purpose of that book was to raise the alarm about out-of-control executive power. The purpose of this new book will be to chart the course back to a liberal constitutional order. But it will have a broader purpose. My working title is Militant Liberalism, and I will address the broader question of how to create a pro-freedom, pro-democracy political creed that is strong, assertive, and capable of defending itself, while still being liberal. It is about reclaiming a vision for a political system that can be strong without being tyrannical.

This is hardly an impossible combination. We’ve managed it through most of America’s history. We just need to learn the lessons from that history and apply them to today’s conditions.

Now here is where I’m asking for your help.

I need your support to give me the time and resources I will need to conduct these interviews and write these articles—to crowdfund this whole project, as I have often done.

And it will also give me time and resources for the third phrase, which is to use some of the contacts and the skills I gained running for office to try to draw more people into this debate and exert influence on those with actual political power. If you’ve been reading my series about what I learned running for office, you know that I expect most actual officeholders, not to do what is right, but to do what the political forces around them push them to do. Hamiltons and Madisons and Jeffersons are not all that easy to find these days. But I think we can shape some of the forces of public opinion that act on these elected officials and get some of them to do what is best for the republic whether they want to or not.

That’s the goal, the timeline is to start right away with the goal of having the new book early next year and influencing this debate—our national Council of Elrond—in 2027 and early 2028, when these big decisions are being made.

I raised a little more than $50,000 for my political campaign. I’m hoping to raise at least half that for this project. I’m hoping you will give me your support.

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(You can also send a check by mail to The Tracinski Letter at PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, Virginia 22906.)

And of course, you can always support these efforts just by subscribing or renewing.

You might say I’m forming a fellowship for this quest, and I’d like you to be part of it.

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I’m down to the fifth big lesson I learned about American politics by running for office. I wrote last time about how politicians are deeply weird, but I insisted that this is because we made them that way.

That brings me to the electorate who selects these politicians, and why they so often do such a bad job of it.

Put simply, we are a nation of disengaged voters.

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Why There Is So Much Money in Politics

One of the things I heard most often on the campaign trail was the complaint that there is too much money in politics. But I could tell people exactly why it’s there: because a candidate has to beat the voters’ doors down to even let them know he exists.

Seriously. I spent a lot of time at local Democratic Party meetings, where I talked to some very knowledgeable and engaged people, in audiences ranging in size from a dozen to maybe 60—in a district of 800,000 people. To win a primary, you need to reach tens of thousands of voters, and to win a general election, hundreds of thousands. To do that, you need radio and television ads and better yet, direct mail, which is the most expensive option. With my budget, I did one small radio ad, but mostly all I could afford was social media advertising. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t enough.

We do have local newspapers, and one of the pleasures of the campaign was getting to know the journalists in the area, who I got along with very well. They gave me some very good coverage that relayed my message accurately to their readers. If local news coverage were a major factor in the election results, I would have done well—better, at least, than I actually did. The problem is that the local papers just don’t have the mass readership they used to. But no worries, because I also had a website, to which I posted many videos introducing myself and explaining my agenda—which very few people visited.

One of my frustrations with the current era is that never in human history have we had such quick and easy access to information. We all carry supercomputers in our pockets that are connected wirelessly to a vast and constantly updated global network of information. It’s like science fiction—yet somehow, most people make little use of these advantages

That’s what the xkcd cartoon at the top of this article is about.

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I have a new piece up at The UnPopulist looking for an “Article I candidate”—someone who is up for re-election this year who is really addressing the abuse of executive power and how Congress can rein it in.

That is, of course, what I was attempting to do, but since I didn’t make it through the primary, I’ve been casting about to find anyone else who is really addressing these issues. When The UnPopulist asked me to write something about it, I jumped at the opportunity. But I found a curious pattern.

I review a number of actual proposals for limiting presidential power, none of which are quite as big as we really need, but at least they are real, substantive legislation. Yet “there is a pattern you might notice about these proposals.”

[Senators] Murphy and Schiff are not up for reelection this year. Raskin, DelBene, and Beyer—and many others who are backing these proposals—are in safe Democratic districts that are even safer than usual this year. If you want to predict how loud a politician is about proposing bold restraints on executive power, look at who is in the “Solid D” column in the Cook Political Report.

In short, Democrats in competitive races are playing it safe and sticking to the conventional wisdom about affordability and gas prices, while Democrats in safe seats are more likely to talk about big reforms.

I then settle on one semi-exception: Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. He’s running for re-election, not in safe seat, but in a race where he’s clearly ahead. And he’s running partly on curbing executive power.

Ossoff got a lot of attention for a strong debate performance last week in which he laid into his opponent for his ties to white supremacists (which are real). But I pull out a better message he’s been repeating on the campaign trail.

Ossoff has called for a restoration of checks and balances. At a rally this summer, he told voters that the issues in this election are “deeper than the ordinary conflict of policy and ideas between two political parties.” He urged them to “rebuke these presidential abuses so decisively that we don’t just restore checks and balances for the next few years, we send a message so that no president in either party will try anything like this again for centuries, for centuries. That’s the opportunity that we have.”

This is exactly the right message and agenda. This is what we need.

The most interesting thing about Ossoff is that he is considered a moderate senator who was expected to tack to the center in a reelection campaign. Vice President JD Vance even predicted last year that Ossoff would begin praising Trump’s agenda. Instead, Ossoff has employed fiery invective against Trump’s abuses to gain support across the board. It’s a message that can unite and energize Democrats across their internal progressive-versus-moderate divide, while also appealing to independents and disgruntled Republicans. He has demonstrated that a campaign against Trump’s abuse of power has broad appeal.

Most interesting of all is that Ossoff was already being widely talked about as a possible Democratic presidential candidate for 2028, even before his recent debate performance. This shows that campaigning against abuses of executive power can become an established lane for ambitious politicians wanting a shot at being elected to wield executive power.

This raises the question, which I’ve already had a few people ask me, about who looks like the best Democratic candidate for president for 2028—but it’s too early. That’s a good topic to return to next year, after the election and after the new Congress actually takes office.

And I don’t want to get carried away here. Ossoff is making this part of this message, but I would like it to be a more dominant part. And he is, after all, a politician, so I will give him the highest praise I give to any politician: I’m really looking forward to finding out how he will disappoint me.

“Energetic Constitutionalism”

The main point is that we need somebody talking about limiting executive power, partly because there is already a debate going on quietly among Democrats about whether to rein in the excessive powers Trump has claimed—or use them for the Democrats’ own agenda.

Check out a good roundup of the range of opinions on this. On the one side are sensible people like Chris Van Hollen and—er, Ro Khanna? OK, Ro Khanna is not a sensible person, but he is saying the right thing here, describing “the ideal approach to post-Trump executive power as ‘robust action within the Constitution,’ which he calls ‘energetic constitutionalism.’” On the other side is Elizabeth Warren, who complains, “We can’t play the game that Republican presidents get lots of power and Democratic presidents don’t.” This is exactly what I expected of her, and it’s madness. It’s a race to the bottom.

I will, obviously, have a lot more to say on this, but for now, I provide part of the rebuttal in my article.

Democrats should heed the warning from the recent election in Brazil, where Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of a former president convicted of plotting a coup, might well be poised to win the presidency. It is a reminder that even as the voters reject Donald Trump, they might swing back again toward a future strongman leader with the same agenda. Democrats need to think ahead and place firm limits on presidential power while they can, making it harder for successors to do what Trump is doing now—even if that means rejecting the temptation to use these illegitimate powers for their own agenda.

Read the whole thing.

The UnPopulist

Jon Ossoff Is the Article I Candidate

With Democrats seemingly poised to take back control of Congress in next month’s midterm elections, it’s time to start looking at the next question: What will they do with it…

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14 days ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · Robert Tracinski

We need to be talking about this now, because if next month’s elections turn out how I think they will, Democrats might have a unique opportunity. If Republicans begin to realize that the voters have thoroughly rejected Trump and the people associated with him, they will look forward to 2028 and calculate that the next president is very likely to be a Democrat. If they’re remotely smart—which I realize is a big assumption to make—they should suddenly become a lot more interested in limiting executive power. This could give us a brief window in which Democrats have a political interest in restraining executive power to stop Trump, while Republicans also have a political interest in restraining executive power as a preemptive protection against President Newsom.

I hope we can find a few politicians who are interested in using that opportunity.

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Today, I’m going to send you a roundup of stories I’ve been gathering for a few weeks, some of which are follow-ups on stories I’ve covered before, which are being confirmed by new events.

And yes, you’re going to have to read to the end to find out about the “hidden crisis.” And if you’re not already a subscriber, this give you a reason to sign up.

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“Iran, Prices, ICE, and Epstein”

I wrote recently about the collapse in Donald Trump’s poll numbers and how this is dragging down Republicans across the country, even in “red state” strongholds like Texas.

Shortly afterward, we got confirmation from Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, when someone released recordings from a private meetings with donors where he discussed the impact of Trump’s so-called midterm convention.

Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists last week that President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas had hurt Mr. Paxton politically, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.

The recording, which is muffled at times, captures Mr. Paxton being asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not clear from the audio whom the questioner is referring to.

Mr. Paxton responds: “So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

Take this with a grain of salt, because Ken Paxton may just be shifting the blame to avoid admitting how much his campaign is being dragged down by Ken Paxton. The New York Times report adds: “It remains unclear whether the Republican convention was in fact politically harmful to the party’s midterm candidates; the event did not appear to have a significant impact on public surveys of the Texas Senate race.”

That analysis is largely backed up by G. Elliot Morris, who uses an automated sampling of headlines to get an overall idea of what is driving news coverage in this election, and he concludes that it’s “Iran, Prices, ICE, and Epstein.”

According to my analysis, the Dallas gathering [i.e., the midterm convention] accounts for a small number of front-page stories the political press produced since the convention was held, and coverage completely faded within a week. Compared to press attention to past conventions, the first-ever midterm convention was a failure. And it failed to displace other stories that are more problematic for the president and his party….

To put some numbers behind this: With 2,481 front-page stories and 9.9% of everything the political press linked to in 2026, Iran is the story of the year. ICE and immigration are second at 2,113 stories and 8.5%. The Justice Department, the FBI, and Epstein come third at 1,447….

Across June, July and August 2026, cost-of-living headlines accounted for an average of 1.8 stories per day at memeorandum.com. Through Sept. 25 they’re running at 3.4 a day, an 88% jump. September has carried at least one front-page story about prices for 25 of the past 28 days.

In short, it is their objective failure on the big issues of the day that is driving down approval for Trump and Republicans, and no last-minute PR blitz is going to be able to counteract that.

By the way, I also mentioned that you should look not just at federal elections but at local races, including elections for sheriff, which are a peculiar quirk of our Anglo-American legacy. So I was pleased to see Bolts, one of the newsletters I follow that tracks political races below the federal level, provide a guide to local sheriff and prosecutor races in which local law enforcement’s ability to push back against ICE has become a major issue.

“I Am the Code”

If you want to know why things tend to go wrong for Trump, and for the Republicans who enable him, here’s a little vignette about how the architect for Trump’s ballroom reportedly fled the project when Trump started overruling him on basic safety measures.

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I’ve been running down the six big lessons I learned about American politics by running for office. So far, I’ve covered the political time warp, in which today’s politicians tend to be motived by yesterday’s big issues, the corresponding ideological inertia of political parties, and the special inertia of the most enduring issue of all, NIMBYism.

Now to the fourth lesson, which is that politicians are freaks.

We have an ideal in America of the citizen legislator, the ordinary person who goes into politics, the Mr. Smith who goes to Washington. In practice, though, the requirements and incentives of our politics tend to promote people who are not representative of the average voter and in many cases are deeply weird. Ironically, it is the preferences of the average voter that end up selecting for this.

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Dynastic Democracy

The most obvious sense in which politicians tend to be very different from the ordinary person is economic.

When a local news report about my campaign was posted on Facebook, I found it interesting that the first three replies were from people who were confident I only wanted to run to get the congressional salary of about $180,000. These people knew nothing about me, and it was clear this was their default assumption about anyone who runs for office, that they’re just in it for the money. It’s the sort of thing people say when they think they’re being clever and cynical, but it just shows how little they know about how things work.

In reality, most members of Congress end up complaining that when they get into office, they take a significant cut in pay. That’s because most of them are extremely well off. Why? Running for office is an activity that can take a year or more of full-time or nearly full-time work: traveling to events, calling donors, making videos, calling donors, meeting activists at local party conferences, calling donors—you get the idea. The people who have time to do this usually are not also working for living. They have either made or inherited enough money to live comfortably while doing nothing but campaigning.

Some people who run for Congress are self-made, but a disturbingly large number were born with money, and not just with money but with a well-known family name and connections.

Examples are common in both parties. In New Hampshire, there is once again a Sununu running for statewide office. The infamous Matt Gaetz was known as “Baby Gaetz” because he’s the son of former Florida state senate president Don Gaetz. Before that, his grandfather was in the state senate in North Dakota.

This summer, a scandal broke involving Max Miller, a former Trump aide turned Ohio congressman. The details are nasty: Miller is accused of abusing his ex-wife Emily Moreno, the daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, and mistreating their child. But how did a guy with a clearly troubled past get into this position of power?

He was born an heir of two of the most important families and arguably the most important company in the modern history of Cleveland, the grandson of business kingpin and political power broker Sam Miller and Ruth Ratner Miller, the oldest of the two sons of Abe and Barb Miller and a namesake of Max and Leonard Ratner—the original president and chair, respectively, of Forest City Enterprises, the colossal real estate firm and a font of the clan’s riches, privilege and prestige.

It’s not just the bad guys. In Michigan, Peter Meijer served a single term in the House and distinguished himself as one of a small number of Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump—which is why he served only one term. But if you’ve driven through the Midwest, you have probably seen the Meijer name emblazoned on signs for gas stations and supermarkets, a chain started by Peter Meijer’s great-grandfather.

A very large number of politicians are not ordinary citizens. They are local gentry. The advantage they have over ordinary citizens like you and me is not just money, but also name recognition—being a Kennedy, or a Gaetz, or a Sununu, or a Meijer, or a Miller—and the whole constellation of family connections that comes with that. In Part 1 of this series, I said that if you want to run for Congress, the best time to start is 15 to 20 years ago. But if you really want to do it right, the best time to start is before you were born.

For a democracy, our politics seems awfully dynastic.

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I have a new article up at The UnPopulist, continuing my work for them on charting Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power.

This time, I focus on an effort to deprive universities of tax-exempt non-profit status on vague and arbitrary grounds.

Earlier this month, the Treasury Department and the IRS proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students.” This isn’t just a ban on explicit racial preferences or quotas. It’s a ban on any help offered specifically to minority students, down to minority student clubs and mentoring programs, which the administration apparently considers an offense against that most victimized minority in America: white men.

Aside from the nefarious goal of this rule change, we should be concerned about how the administration is using the IRS to impose it. The politicization of the IRS’s nonprofit rules has implications that go far beyond college admission policies. It is a way to gain direct presidential control over civil society.

A word on the substance of this particular policy. The Trump administration is trying to use the language of civil rights, talking about eliminating special favors, but doing so in a way that is actually designed to roll back the advances of the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow.

Let’s put it this way. I grew up still seeing ads for the United Negro College Fund, with its famous motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” The fund aimed at providing scholarships for talented young black people who otherwise could not afford to go to college. Is this a special favor for black students? Yes, but one that was based on merit, recognizing the disadvantages they faced from poverty and from the lack of educational opportunities and helping them overcome that.

But under Trump’s rules, this would be targeted by the IRS as an illegitimate purpose. Follow the link about how the Trump administration pressured universities into disavowing a mentoring program for black Ph.D. students because this is “discriminatory.” Here’s what that looks like in practice:

MIT, like many of the schools cited in the investigation, had paid The PhD Project “a nominal fee” to participate in the group’s university fairs or conferences, allowing MIT to send representatives to answer questions about attending their school, spokesperson Kimberly Allen said.

MIT informed the government in April 2025 it had ended its participation in such conferences.

I don’t know about you, but telling MIT it can’t even engage in recruitment of black students doesn’t sound like anti-discrimination. It sounds like a return to discrimination. And that’s a lot clearer when you realize that this administration is chock full of explicit racists. (This is something I’ve covered in the past, but I’ve been storing away even more examples, which I’ll be sharing soon.)

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But that’s not the focus of this article. I focus on the arbitrary way the Trump administration is reshaping its rules for tax-exempt nonprofits. While they’re imposing new restrictions on universities, they’re loosening restrictions on churches by allowing religious organizations—but not other tax-exempt nonprofits—to engage in political activity and endorse candidates. I sum up the administration’s policy this way: “Starve the universities, feed the churches. Exploit a politicized IRS to discourage activity you deem politically unwelcome in institutions you regard as hostile, while you open the floodgates of money and influence for institutions you regard as friendly.”

I point out how vague statutes and undefined powers in the law made this possible, but then I point to a more ominous factor.

Today’s authoritarian right has revived and adopted the ideas of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. The central idea of Schmitt’s theory is that no legal doctrine can really be based on universal and neutral liberal principles. Instead, he insisted, the only basic distinction in politics is between friend and enemy. The fundamental political imperative is to reward one’s friends and punish one’s enemies.

Here we see that doctrine put into practice in the nitty-gritty of IRS tax rules.

Read the whole thing.

The UnPopulist

Trump Is Reshaping IRS Rules to Defund Minority Programs and Empower Churches

The Trump administration’s civil rights agenda is becoming clearer. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department and the IRS proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students.” This isn’t just a ban on exp…

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a month ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Robert Tracinski

And please do follow those links, especially Andy Craig’s article, which lists some of the contemporary American right-wing endorsements of Schmitt. It’s one of those things that sounds so cartoonishly evil you can’t believe it’s really happening—but then the vice-president name-drops a Nazi theorist.

But you don’t need a theorist to engage in the age-old political impulse to rig the system in favor of your gang, which is the rule of our politics right now, until we demand something better.

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Yesterday, I gave an overview of the shift in public opinion against Donald Trump and how it is dragging down Republicans running for re-election in Congress. (Nobody is even talking about the Republicans picking up new seats, just defending the ones they have.)

The reason for this turn in public opinion is pretty obvious. Republicans in Congress served as nothing more than rubber stamps for Trump’s agenda—and that agenda has resulted in a very visible disaster.

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The Constitution and the Economy

The most immediate and noticeable disaster is the failure of Trump’s war against Iran, which started as an attempt to weaken the Iranian regime and ended with them controlling or threatening not one but three chokepoints of the global economy: the Strait of Hormuz at the entry to the Persian Gulf, the Bab al-Mandab Strait off of Yemen that controls access to the Suez Canal (and is now under the control of Iran’s Houthi allies), and the East-West Pipeline that bypasses those chokepoints to carry Saudi oil to the Red Sea.

I’ll have more to say soon about the failures of this war, which go far beyond that, but for now let’s just look at the part that matters most to voters. I don’t think the average American has enough strategic understanding to realize how badly the war has gone (and that’s part of the reason why it has gone so badly), but no one can avoid the economic result: Gasoline is hovering above $4.00 a gallon—much more in some parts of the country—while diesel fuel is setting records above $6.50 a gallon.

Notably, this is hitting rural Republican voters harder than anyone else.

The political fallout is landing in deep-red voting districts the hardest. Federal data shows these tend to be the places where diesel makes up the largest proportion of the overall fuel mix. This is especially the case in farming communities, where diesel powers the fuel-thirsty tractors and other machinery that the agriculture industry relies on.

The result:

Staunch conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace shared Wednesday on X that a GOP pollster has warned House candidates there that if they are in a district Republicans previously won by 15 points, they are now within the margin of error. If Republicans won by 10 points, the pollster warned the GOP House candidates, they may already be behind.

As an aside, I should note that things can still get much worse.

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I have a long list of big stories that have happened in the past few months that I want to get caught up on, but what jumped immediately to the top of the list is the run-up to the midterm congressional election. That’s partly because it is so close upon us—about six weeks out, just on the other side of October—but mostly because in the past few weeks the bottom has dropped out for the Republican Party.

We are at what Daniel Drezner calls the “cartoon physics” stage of the election, a reference to what happens when Wile E. Coyote goes over the edge of a cliff, but because of the rules of cartoon physics, he still stays up in the air for a few moments, not dropping to the canyon floor until he realizes he is no longer supported by anything.

Similarly, the Republican Party seems to have charged over the edge of an electoral cliff, and only now is the reality setting in about how far and how hard they’re going to fall.

I’ll go over some of the evidence for this today, then look in more depth at the causes of it tomorrow. But the first thing to note is that this was all completely predictable, and the main question is why Republicans didn’t see it coming a lot sooner.

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Those Who Vote Decide Nothing

Part of the answer is that some of them really did think they had achieved a cultural and political breakthrough, a permanent “vibe shift” in which their policies are so popular they would avoid any kind of electoral backlash—this, after an election in which Donald Trump got just under 50% of the vote. Yet he wasn’t expected to get even that much, and for good reason, so they took it as a major breakthrough.

But most of the evidence indicates that they knew a backlash would be coming, and their plan was to prevent it by rigging the whole system: controlling the press, suppressing funding and donations for the opposition, threatening civil society organizations, launching politically motivated prosecutions of political enemies, and above all, asserting control over the election process itself.

There’s an old adage attributed to Stalin: Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. Trump wanted to make sure his people were the ones counting the votes.

I’ve written extensively about how the Trump administration spent last year on a crash program to concentrate all power in one person. The plan or hope was that if they moved quickly enough, if they overwhelmed the whole system before anyone could mount effective resistance, they wouldn’t have to face the backlash. They would be so entrenched they could not be dislodged.

This is the fantasy of power that lured the Trump administration and its conservative supporters, inspired by models overseas, particularly in Hungary. Of course, Viktor Orbán just got voted out—but he had sixteen years of doing what Trump’s people hoped they could do here. I can tell you from my experience among conservatives that a lot of them really have bought into the idea that liberal democracy is weak and dispirited, and they only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.

I think they were wrong about this all along, and it looks like we’re about to see a large-scale demonstration of that. To begin with, the Trump administration’s most ominous plans to interfere with the election are failing.

The Washington Post reports that state-level election officials fear active intervention from the federal government to bolster false election claims, including sending armed ICE agents to polling places. Then there’s this:

Most worrisome to local leaders is the possibility that federal officials could seize ballots or voting equipment.

They don’t consider the prospect theoretical. In January, Trump told the New York Timeshe regretted not having troops take possession of voting machines after he lost the 2020 election. The FBI later took 2020 ballots in Georgia and obtained electronic images of 2020 ballots in Arizona. And the MAGA-aligned sheriff of Riverside County, California, confiscated ballots from a 2025 redistricting referendum.

Plus, there was a plan to have the US Postal Service decide which mail-in ballots are valid and refuse to deliver the ones it regards as invalid, directly usurping the role of the state governments. Moreover, the system the USPS would use to make these decisions is so flawed it cannot function properly. But that seems to be a selling point, since it would allow them to block a larger number of ballots.

Under the Postal Service plans, election officials would upload lists of voters through an online portal. They would then submit their mail ballots to the post office, sometimes in batches of thousands at a time. If postal clerks found any mismatches—including for voters who moved or got married and changed their names—they would reject the entire batch, according to the whistleblower.

Fortunately, the courts have blocked this particular scheme.

But the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to proceed with compiling a supposed national list of eligible voters, which has been shown to be systematically flawed and would exclude tens of thousands of legitimate voters, possibly more. What the federal government cannot do is force the states to use this list to purge their voters rolls, but the administration is pulling out other coercive tools to do that, including a Department of Justice investigation of Utah’s top election official “for refusing to hand over the state’s entire, unredacted voter database…, an action Henderson argues has no federal legal basis and violates Utah data privacy laws.”

Then there is a campaign of smaller election campaign harassment efforts, such as the FCC pressuring ABC to drop the broadcast of Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.

Kimmel did not specify what that pressure was but said the Federal Communications Commission had “threatened” him, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the ABC network, and ABC’s affiliate and local stations “based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.”

The interview was posted on YouTube, instead.

All of this is far beyond the constitutional authority of the president or the federal executive branch. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the US Constitution states: “The times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.” The state governments have the primary role in administering elections. The Congress has oversight, but only by passing general, universal rules, not in the actual administration of the vote. The courts have a role in adjudicating cases where those rules have been violated. But there is one branch of government that has no constitutional role in administering or managing elections: The executive branch and the president. This is precisely to prevent what Donald Trump is attempting.

As I said, most of these attempts have been blocked. But there is one thing left. The executive branch has maintained several offices devoted to election integrity, providing support and guidance at the states’ request, and Trump has thoroughly corrupted them. Pro Publica published a long report early this year about Trump staffing these offices with conspiracy theorists and election deniers, while dismantling intelligence operations intended to prevent foreign influence on our elections by countries like Russia and Iran.

The main upshot is that all the people in the government who refuted Trump’s “stolen election” claims in 2020 have been replaced by people who will amplify such claims this November, regardless of their merits, giving Trump’s conspiracy theories the imprimatur of federal law enforcement.

And yet, the swing in public opinion against Republicans might simply be so big that, as in Hungary, no attempt to rig the result will be enough.

The Big Blue Wave

All of the polls are indicating a “blue wave” in November, in which Democrats expect to gain dozens of House seats and almost certainly regain control of the Senate, possibly by a big margin. And the polls for Trump and for Republicans in Congress continue to hit new lows.

Here’s G. Elliot Morris from Strength In Numbers:

Forty-two days before Election Day, and as tens of thousands of early voters have already cast their ballots, our new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds President Donald Trump and the Republican Party at their lowest point in the last 18 months.

In our new poll, 33% of Americans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president and 63% disapprove, a net rating of −30 (using unrounded approval figures) and the worst reading in the 16 waves of this poll since May 2025. The previous floor was −26 in April.

While our past surveys documented that the president has lost significant ground with non-college-educated white voters, independents, non-voters, Hispanics, and young people, this month’s survey reveals Trump slipping significantly with his own party. The president’s net approval rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents fell from +54 in August to +43 this month, with 71% approval to 27% disapproval. That’s an 11-point drop and the lowest we have recorded.

And here’s a Reuters poll.

In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump’s approval rating was sitting at 32 percent, the lowest of his second term and, according to Reuters, a record low for his entire political life. The fresh approval rating marks a 15-point slide from the 47 percent approval rating he had at the beginning of his second term in the same poll.

A recent New York Times/Siena University poll also found Republicans trailing Democrats on the issues of immigration, healthcare, and the economy.

Add to that strong turnout in most Democratic primaries, which indicates a much higher level of enthusiasm among Democratic voters than among Republicans, which magnifies their lead in the polls.

The main findings are that Trump has reversed the advances he made with key groups of voters who helped him eke out a victory in 2024.

The New York Times provides an overview of his completely predictable collapse among Hispanic voters.

In an average of high-quality national polls over the last month, Democrats led Republicans among Hispanic likely voters by 35 percentage points, 64-29, on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they will support for Congress.

That would mark an extraordinary reversal since 2024, when the same pollsters found Kamala Harris leading Mr. Trump by an average of only seven points among Hispanic voters in their final surveys….

If one applied the demographic trends from recent Times/Siena national polls to districts across the country, Democratic gains among Hispanic voters would imperil Republicans in more than a dozen districts that Mr. Trump won by double digits but where Republicans depend on support from Hispanic voters. Texas and Florida would become ground zero for a possible Democratic tsunami, with the party’s chance at a large congressional majority potentially hinging on whether it could break through Republican gerrymanders in those states.

This was predictable because Trump’s immigration agenda was always driven by a racial and ethnic animus against Hispanic people. Trump gained Hispanic voters because they believed he would be good for the economy, and because they were credulous enough to think he would only deport criminals and gang members. Yet it was clear that the core members of Trump’s coalition want to deport virtually all Hispanic people in a mass ethnic purge of nearly a third of the US population. As Trump’s actual policies have made this clear, Hispanic voters began to realize the truth that should have been obvious before.

For similar reasons, Trump is losing young men.

President Donald Trump narrowly carried young men in 2024, according to exit polls, a big swing toward the GOP from past elections. But Democrats’ generic ballot lead among men ages 18-30 who say they are the most determined to vote now sits at 57%-40%, according to the poll….

The young men sampled are overwhelmingly concerned about cost-of-living issues—the same reason that many swung toward the GOP two years ago.

Trump also has a history of mobilizing low-turnout voters, bringing people to the polls who don’t normally show up. But now they have turned against him harder than high-turnout voters.

But wait, it gets worse. The Mormon church just officially came out against “Christian nationalism.” See a piece by Jonathan Rauch sketching out the history and significance of this.

Consider it official: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has exited the culture war, repudiated Christian nationalism, and embraced a wiser alternative: Christian constitutionalism.

In a speech on Sept. 16, Dallin H. Oaks, the president of the church, placed the church squarely at odds with the trend among other conservative Christians toward partisanship and cultural confrontation. Instead, he said, Christians, and Americans, should pursue conciliation.

At least one analyst argues that “The Blue Wave Is Poised to Crest in the Bible Belt.” I’m not sure I’m convinced by his explanation for why this is happening, that Democrats are “de-emphasizing culture war issues in favor of an economic pitch,” because I don’t think Trump is all that popular on the culture war issues, either. But I do think it’s true we will see a bigger swing toward Democrats in the rural South than elsewhere, simply because this is where Democrats have more gains to make, where there are more swing voters who can swing their way.

We’re definitely seeing reports of Republican politicians desperately trying to disentangle themselves from Donald Trump. Here’s just one telling example.

Republicans close to Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO she would need to start distancing herself from Trump in subtle ways to win her critical Senate race. They’re worried that the president’s tariff agenda and the ongoing Iran war are undercutting her chances.

Hinson herself was caught admitting the Iran war would become a “political liability” if it extended much longer back in June….

“These candidates know how to read a poll,” said a GOP strategist working for Republicans in races around the country who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Referring to Trump, they added: “They know he is kryptonite.”…

“He’s putting Iowa in play,” one House Republican who’d spoken to Hinson said of Trump.

That’s the biggest sign that the blue wave is going to be big: the fact that Republicans are worried about losing in places like Iowa and Texas, which have long been conservative strongholds. That’s the real significance of the FCC forcing ABC to drop an interview with James Talarico. Yes, this is an abuse of power for political purposes—but in a race where Republicans should not feel they remotely need to resort to such tactics. It is at once an assertion of illegitimate power and a confession of weakness.

The Death Spiral

If Republican members of Congress want to separate their political fate from that of Donald Trump—well, it’s about ten years too late. Some of them tried back in 2016 and failed, and the only Republicans left are those who passed the test of total loyalty. So when Trump goes down in the polls, he drags all of them with him. This is the cost of having a political party that is loyal to a man and not to ideas, principles, or an agenda.

For about a year now, I’ve been watching this turn into a death spiral: a party that is more and more loyal to a man who is less and less popular.

The reason for Trump’s declining public support is somewhat obvious: a war in Iran that has both failed to achieve its objectives and hit the public directly in the wallet. Tomorrow, I’ll look at that cause in more detail and draw a deeper and more interesting lesson from it—and then look at what comes next.

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I haven’t posted in a little while, because I’ve been sweeping away the last of my post-campaign work and finishing up some commitments elsewhere. But there is a lot of stuff that will be coming out of the logjam soon.

The last of those outside commitments is a live-stream tonight for The Atlas Society on the rising campaign against data centers. That seems like a great tie-in to Part 3 of my observations on what I learned while campaigning for office, because my campaign coincided exactly with the period in which Americans suddenly decided they hate data centers.

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The NIMBYs Strike Back

At the beginning of the campaign, way back in December, I heard a little grumbling about data centers, but it was very much in the background. By the end of the campaign, in early August, it had become the number one issue in my district. And that had an impact.

At the beginning of the campaign, all of the candidates took a fairly reasonable, moderate approach to the issue. I was opposed to bans and moratoriums on data centers but said they should pay their own way with regard to power and water usage and be required to mitigate any harms or inconvenience, such as noise. Since I think those problems are exaggerated to begin with, these would not be onerous restrictions. The other candidates took a pretty similar stand.

After a while, my main rival started straddling the fence, and by the end of the campaign, it seemed like opposing data centers was his only message, and he was also going to rallies protesting against an electric power transmission line planned for our area. (See the sign in the photo above.) And that’s who won.

I think he would have won, anyway, but I can’t say his political calculation was wrong. Opposing data centers became a very popular message and one that has bipartisan support, which is why he has carried it into the general election. Ironically, he is now using this issue to criticize the Republican incumbent for the one good thing he’s done: support for federal permitting reform.

Until recently, permitting reform was gaining bipartisan support as part of a general surge of “YIMBY” politics, a “Yes In My Back Yard” agenda that advocates reducing restrictions on building and development. The YIMBYs had succeeded by hitting the NIMBYs on two especially vulnerable issues: housing and green energy. They made people feel sheepish about opposing new housing by showing how this prices low-income people, especially young people, out of the market. And they made a good case that regulations intended to protect the environment are blocking all sorts of “green” projects that are supposed to be good for the environment, such as wind farms and solar farms and the transmission lines need to bring that electricity where it’s needed.

Then data centers came along, and it seemed like the only people who benefit from them are a bunch of tech CEOS in Silicon Valley. If the old anti-housing NIMBYism has become disreputable, data centers are still a reputable target—and all that repressed NIMBY energy came roaring back.

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I’ve been recounting the lessons I learned from (unsuccessfully) running for Congress. The first lesson was that politics is a time warp. With a few exceptions, it is dominated by people who started running for office, or started their preparation for running for office, decades ago—and this explains why our political system can be so slow to react to quickly changing events.

I came across a figure that confirms part of this: a calculation that in this year’s primaries (as of late June), the number of congressional incumbents who were running for office and won their primaries dropped dramatically: from 98.2% to, er, 97.1%. That article notes that an unusually large number of incumbents decided not to run for re-election this year. (This is mostly on the Republican side—people who aren’t sufficiently aligned with Trump, or people who realize he’s going to drag them down to defeat in the general election.) But the point still stands. In my case, I didn’t know if my main opponent’s one term in Congress sixteen years ago would confer most of the advantages of incumbency, and yep, it did.

The second big lesson I learned is that this applies to the voters, too—and especially a party’s core voters, the ones who tend to decide the primaries and determine what alternatives you see on your ballot in November. The composition of these voters also tends to reflect the reasons people got involved in politics decades ago, whether they’re local organizers and activists or just the politically engaged rank-and-file—rather than their response to recent events.

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The Laws of Ideologial Inertia

This was driven home to me pretty early on when I met a very nice local Democratic Party organizer in Nelson County (between Charlottesville and Lynchburg) who is a Navy veteran, who has worked on veterans’ issues for years, and who will grill you on those issues at every available opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes; every issue needs its single-minded advocates or it will be forgotten in favor of something else. But this set a pattern, and the problem is that the priorities created by these prior political commitments can be a little too unyielding to the requirements of current events.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

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I spent most of 2025 working on a catalogue of abuses of executive power under the Trump administration, which got me revved up to try to do something about it. I’m making plans for how to return to that, so first let me mention, as part of a roundup of news items, one particularly egregious example.

Pete Hegseth is using the Pentagon budget, your tax dollars, to build his own personal troll army.

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Everything Else Is Public Relations

The news just broke recently that a coterie of online military “influencers” has quietly been put on the Pentagon’s civilian payroll, which seems like a way to pay them to put an administration-friendly spin on military news.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material….

Those involved include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, people familiar with the matter said. Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a “.civ” suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors….

In an article published last month by the conservative Daily Caller, Maness argues that Hegseth’s team needs to root out “disloyal” career employees in the department.

You may not recognize most of these names, but I remember Kurt Schlichter, who is pretty much a straight-up fascist who fantasizes about using “the law to ensure blue [state] submission” and “imprison dissenters.”

These writers have not just been providing an administration-friendly spin. They’re giving their readers or listeners a Pete Hegseth-friendly spin, including echoing his beefs with other people in the administration.

Pounds’s secret work for the Pentagon calls into question the motivations of several of her posts, such as when she took a jab at then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a Hegseth nemesis. It also raises serious questions about Secretary Pete Hegseth’s cozy relationship with outspoken conservative social media influencers, and whether it breaches serious ethical norms.

Hegseth has gone to great lengths to limit and muzzle many members of the traditional Pentagon press corps. But secretly employing a shadowy, rabidly online personality for the apparent purpose of going after your enemies is a remarkable illustration of the kind of steps Hegseth appears willing to take to fight internecine political wars.

This follows Hegseth’s attempt to rein in the Pentagon press corps by requiring them to sign a pledge not to “report on information—classified or otherwise—that had not been approved by Hegseth for release”—in other words, a pledge not to engage in journalism. In the words of a famous saying (falsely attributed to George Orwell), “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

Hegseth then replaced independent reporters with a group of conservative flunkies. More recently, he fired the editors of Stars and Stripes in an effort to end the military newspaper’s editorial independence.

Oh, and he’s merely following in the footsteps of his boss. Donald Trump is out waving around FCC threats against the press again, complaining about reporting on polls that show him sinking in popularity and an NBC anchor fact-checking him. It’s another good case for reining in the FCC or maybe just ending it.

The upshot is that this administration is attempting to control every source of the flow of information to the public, particularly about military affairs.

I wonder why they might want to do that?

The War of the Monkey’s Paw

Oh, here’s why.

Pete Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway, the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said, as he tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war in Iran….

Dan Lamothe, the Post reporter who broke the story, wrote on X that “independent journalism is not a crime” and that such reporting was necessary when officials withhold details about a war funded by taxpayers….

Still, Donald Trump on Monday morning in effect said the war was won.

“Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD!” the president wrote on Truth Social. “They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country.” He accused Iran’s government of killing more than 100,000 protesters and said its leaders “must be tried for war crimes against humanity.”

Neither Trump nor Parnell explained how that squares with what four of the Pentagon’s own commanders had put in writing: that they can’t sustain the war effort as ordered.

The generals were right to issue these warnings. The problem with assuming you can win a war just by dropping the most bombs is what happens if you’ve dropped all your bombs, and you haven’t won the war, so you have to drop more of them until you start to run out. That’s where we are now.

The massive expenditure of US munitions in the Middle East is increasingly worrying Asian allies and frustrating Pentagon officials overseeing the Indo-Pacific, who fear that the prolonged war with Iran could undermine US readiness for a conflict with China as it continues to step up military pressure across the region….

South Korea and other US partners in Asia, including Japan and Taiwan, rely on Washington as the dominant supplier of major conventional weapons and are reckoning with years-long backlogs….

In December, Beijing staged its largest-ever military drill around Taiwan, encircling the democratically governed island with ships and aircraft. Nearly $30 billion in US arms approved for sale to Taiwan have yet to be delivered, including $882 million worth of Patriot missiles, according to Taiwan Security Monitor.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been loath to admit the extent of the damage Iran has managed to do to our bases in the Middle East, which apparently were not prepared for this.

The more we learn about the attacks on the US Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged.

Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus….

The idea that the US could not prevent and defend against a predictable attack on a Fleet Headquarters—and our sailors stationed there—is quite startling. It likely is just as alarming to our allies.

The depth of NSA Bahrain’s impact became clear as the stories of scarcities of parts, food, mail and supplies to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln hit the news. Before long, pieces of the puzzle began falling into place as to the connection between ship supplies and the lack of a familiar resupply source.

We’ve had the Pig War and the War of Jenkins’ Ear, so let’s call this one the “War of the Monkey’s Paw.” We Iran hawks finally got what we said we wanted, but the monkey’s paw twitched, and we got it in the stupidest and most incompetent way.

But why bother getting the ammunition and supplies to actually bomb and defeat the enemy, when you can just fantasize about it with AI slop?

The video, posted to the president’s Truth Social account, appears to show oil storage tanks and refineries erupting in flames from the perspective of someone filming from inside a helicopter above the carnage, with an accompanying message describing the scene as “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens” and signed as “President DJT.”

But a US official said no such attack had taken place, with Kharg Island not being among the locations targeted overnight in what has been the first exchange of fire between American and Iranian forces in weeks.

Fantasizing seems to be President Trump’s main coping method. You can see that in how he’s trying to claim victory in the absurdly self-defeating new trade war he just started—for no reason and with no warning or provocation—against Canada.

This is going to hurt American companies, badly, but Trump will claim victory because he renamed a lake.

President Donald Trump ordered Lake Ontario to be renamed Lake America, the latest broadside in his escalating feud with Canada….

While Trump can change the lake’s name for US government purposes, states and private companies—including those responsible for consumer maps—can decide whether to follow suit.

Placing symbolism over reality is an eternal temptation, particularly in politics and especially in this administration.

Surviving in a Pit of Vipers

In describing the Trump administration’s machination against the press, it might seem like the pro-Trump “MAGA” media world would be thriving. But it’s not. That’s partly because it’s a pit of vipers, as you can see in the news about conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (about whom I have reluctantly commented once or twice) being deported to the UK—after he lustily cheered on Trump’s deportations of everyone else.

See Will Sommer on why the MAGA media, rather than rallying to Milo’s defense, is cheering on his deportation, and conservative bottom-feeder Laura Loomer is claiming credit for it. Sommer argues “it’s because Yiannopoulos was clear-eyed about the circus that much of right-wing media has become.” Milo knew it was all a con and gleefully exposed the hypocrisy of other conservative provocateurs—one who was having an affair, one who Yiannopoulos claims is secretly gay, one who was skating out on child support.

They’re happy to see him go, and I’ll admit to a bit of schadenfreude myself—leavened by the realization that this is how authoritarian movements always work. It’s always a pit of vipers, with vicious jockeying for power between the opposing factions.

Moreover, this is just one part of a much bigger story: the wide-scale destruction of the right-leaning media and its intellectual infrastructure, such as it was, including some of the places I used to write for.

See, for example, an overview of declining audiences for some top conservative figures.

Experts point to a number of reasons for the changes, including the difficulty in stoking political outrage while Republicans control Washington, along with a quieter midterm season. All content creators are also subject to the whims of algorithms, like on X, which can change without explanation and impact their reach. A fresh generation of influencers, such as Clavicular and the YouTube creator Asmongold, have also siphoned away viewers by speaking about politics alongside other topics like gaming and relationships.

Mr. Fuentes, for instance, saw notable gains in 2025 and early 2026 but is now trending down. “It seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop-off in views from 2025,” Mr. Fuentes wrote in an email. “Seems as though 2025 was the anomaly either due to organic interest or potentially artificial boosting,” he added….

Views for mainstream news websites are also down, the group found. But many right-wing websites have seen larger declines, including The Blaze and The Federalist.

Note that line about artificial boosting. There has been some quiet speculation (and a little reporting) about how the demise of the Orbán regime in Hungary may have choked off funds used to prop up sympathetic nationalist conservatives back in the US.

This highlights something I’ve been warning about for a while, which is that Trumpism is bad for the right-of-center media in general, because Donald Trump doesn’t need intellectuals, all he needs is sycophants. Many of the conservatives who boosted MAGA have found that it is fickle. Having lifted them up, it can just as quickly push them back down. Only the lowest of the low have prospered relative to their previous, well-deserved obscurity. (I remember when Loomer was dismissed as a pathetic tryhard, and now she has the ear of the president.)

That has left a lot of us, unfortunately, in a kind of Uncanny Valley where we’re not firmly on “the left” ideologically, so we don’t fit into their institutions, but we’re not MAGA, so we have no prospects on the right. I can think of only three writers in this category who have really been lifted up to a higher level professionally in the last ten years: Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic, and David French at the New York Times. For the rest of us, it’s a constant struggle.

That’s something I’m finding after my campaign as I go to restart my writing work—that even some of the opportunities I was working on last year have since reduced in scope. And this is happening just as we really need people who will be both alert to the authoritarian assault from the right and clear-eyed about the “democratic socialists” and their own ecosystem of crazy provocateurs.

So one quick request before the last item in this update. I’m doing a short burst of fundraising to get this newsletter back on track and give me time to retool and launch some new projects. I’m working on a master plan for how to revive and ampify a voice for sanity in insane time. So please offer your support.

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The Sea of Slopulism

Speaking of seeing the insanity on all sides, I recommend a good piece from Catherine Rampell on a disturbing surge in bipartisan support for price controls.

A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans would like the government to pass price controls, defined as “laws that limit the amount that companies can raise prices, or charge for products and services.” Even a majority of Republicans (54 percent) favor the idea….

Indeed, both Republicans like President Donald Trump and Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have championed government-established limits on prices as a magic bullet for making Americans’ lives better.

There is zero historical or economic analysis to support their contention that this would make things better. But who needs evidence when you have public opinion?

In fact, I have heard directly from political strategists who believe that radical or heterodox things like price controls should be incorporated into candidates’ economic pitches precisely because they poll well.

The problem is, they’re not quite as popular once people actually experience them.

I really hope I don’t have to remind you why this is such an awful idea.

She goes on to survey a sea of “slopulism” and concludes:

Right now I fear we’re in a sort of economic policymaking race to the bottom. The experts have been ejected by both parties, often replaced with political operatives masquerading as scholars. Their job seems to be to reverse-engineer fake scholarship “proving” the wisdom of whatever policy already polls well. Nobody wants to be the one who tells voters a favorite quick-fix policy won’t work or has tradeoffs.

And brother, I can now tell you all about that from first-hand experience, which I will do in the next installment of my series about what I learned running for office.

For now, suffice to say that we don’t have a political problem or even a moral problem in this country, so much as we have an epistemological problem.

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I’ve been promising to share some of the things I learned by running for office. I’ve distilled it into six lessons, and I’ll share them in six installments over the next month or so.

But first, here’s a tantalizing little news story I came across.

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100% Human

Someone did a study recently to see how much of the internet is now written by artificial intelligence chatbots. The result, about 10%, seemed alarmingly high to me until I read the piece and realized it’s even more alarming than that. The 10% figure includes web pages created before the release of ChatGPT. In a sample of sites created after ChatGPT, about a third showed signs of being written by AI.

But there’s a big caveat. How do they take a sample of half a million web pages and sort through them to see what was created by AI? By using AI, of course! This study used a service called Pangram, which sends a thief to catch a thief, so to speak. It uses AI to search for telltale signs of AI in the grammar and diction of written text. How does it do this? Nobody knows. “Much like the chatbots people use to generate text with AI, the detection software is a black box.”

That said, one of the places where Pangram is showing up now is on the back end of Substack. Before I send out one of these newsletters, I can ask Pangram to scan for signs of AI, and I am unreasonably pleased when it always comes back “100% human.”

Is this verdict accurate and definitive? Definitely not. But it’s still nice to know the robots don’t think I’m one of them.

The point of all of this is that we may not know for sure if a third of all new websites are being created with AI, but you’ve probably noticed that a lot of unoriginal dreck and “AI slop” is being pushed out there. (I find it particularly bad on Facebook, which seems to be a deliberate choice by Mark Zuckerberg.)

By contrast, my promise to my readers is that this newsletter will always be fully human-written. Everything here is a thought from a human brain, free of AI sycophancy and hallucination. I’m giving it to you straight, based on knowledge I’ve checked out and verified based on a lifetime of experience.

It looks like that’s going to start being a luxury on the Internet.

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It’s So Bad Even the Introverts Are Here

Starting last December, I made the jump from being a writer and commenter to being an actual participant in politics by running for the Democratic nomination for Congress in my Central Virginia district.

I did not succeed, losing to a candidate with much better name recognition.

This is not that unusual. A lot of people who try to go from pundit to candidate don’t succeed. Part of the reason more people don’t try is economic. If you write about politics for a living, the first thing you have to do when you run for office is to stop writing about politics for a living. Part of it is geographical. Most people in this business live near the big media centers of New York and Washington, where there are already well-entrenched incumbents. The only reason I thought I could attempt it is because I’m well outside the Beltway, in a district that had no clear front-runner (at first).

And yet, the pundit-to-candidate transition seems like a natural one, because we have a lot of the skills needed for the job: a deep knowledge of politics and of the issues—often much deeper than you’ll find from the average politician—and skills at writing and speaking. And I can tell you the temptation is enormous. It’s not so much about personal ambition as it is the frustration of spending decades on the sidelines watching the idiots in office make glaringly obvious mistakes and thinking: I could do so much better.

Yet few pundits make it. George Conway, a lawyer who used to work for Trump and then became a NeverTrump commentator and a mainstay at The Bulwark, got about the same percentage of the vote in his New York City primary as I did in mine. Kat Abughazaleh, who reached a huge online audience and raised far more money, got a bigger share of the vote but still barely topped 25%.

Part of the reason is that politics does in fact call for a different set of skills—a lot more networking and glad-handing among the rich and influential, and a lot more fundraising. I joked on the campaign trail that my inspiration was a sign I saw at a No Kings rally that said, “It’s so bad even the introverts are here.” To be a good writer, you have to look forward to spending hours at a time in a dark room alone just trying to understand an issue clearly. The sort of people we see on LinkedIn who have a monomaniacal focus on “networking” seem like a different species to us. But those are some of the skills you have to learn for politics.

Running for office also takes a lot of practice and preparation. I often felt like I was a theoretical physicist who was suddenly asked to build a nuclear reactor: You know all the theory, you know generally how things work, but you quickly find out everything you don’t know about the nuts and bolts of the process.

Politics Is a Time Warp

Above all that, politics takes time—not just time on the campaign trail, but time invested years beforehand. Winning usually takes a long and deep history of political connections in your district or community, and even if you haven’t entirely neglected that, you’re going to be up against people who have a really big head start.

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I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the things that happened while I was campaigning, and I decided to jot down a short commentary on the handful of primary victories for candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America. My thoughts expanded a bit, and it turned into a longish commentary, so please bear with me.

But first, a few comments on some other recent news items.

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The Most Powerful Woman in the World

We’re getting a big lesson these days in what it’s like to live in a “personalist” regime, where the entire government is synonymous with one man and his personality and his particular quirks and preferences. This results in a kind of Imperial Court gathered around the one man where court favorites and flatterers gain outsized and undeserved influence.

Consider, for example, the case of Congressman Max Miller, who has been in the news recently because of credible accusations that he abused his ex-wife and daughter (who also happen to be the daughter and granddaughter of US Senator Bernie Moreno, leading to a little family drama within Congress).

How did a creep like this rise to the position of being in the US Congress? A profile of Miller describes him as a spoiled rich kid from a wealthy and well-connected family in Ohio. But what really launched his career was that he got a job as an aide to Donald Trump. And here was the specific skill he brought to that job.

Trump…acquired Miller in a package deal in 2016 when he poached Marco Rubio’s deputy finance director Eli Miller, who had recommended his cousin [Max] for a job driving the Florida senator around Chicago the previous year. But Trump quickly came to see Miller almost as a surrogate son, in large part due to his innate talent for knowing just what nostalgic show tune at what precise moment—“Memory” from Cats, for example—would succeed at talking Trump off the ledge of an incipient meltdown. In those days, senior White House staffers would summon Trump’s “Music Man” when the president became grouchy, “so [Miller] could check on the order of the songs.”

Impunity catapulted the Music Man to public office. When a handful of GOP congressmen voted to impeach Trump over January 6th, Miller was the first primary challenger he recruited to launch his 2022 vengeance tour, to challenge one of those impeachment voters, former Ohio State wide receiver Anthony Gonzalez, who represented a northeast Ohio district just east of where Miller had grown up.

I am not making this up, nor is the writer of this profile. Miller’s “Music Man” role has been reported at several other places. And it’s—well, it’s a weird way to run a serious job like being the president of the United States, isn’t it? It’s a very alarming way to do it.

That brings us to the latest court favorite, Natalie Harp. Who is Harp? If you follow politics very closely, you have probably heard of her before. She is a youngish woman—by the standard of politics, which is an old man’s game, 35 is considered young—who wormed her way into Trump’s inner circle by heaping ridiculously over-the-top adulation on him, which is just the sort of thing he likes and desperately needs. Just as Miller become known as the “Music Man,” Harp became known as the “human printer.”

The New York Times describes her as “the utmost gatekeeper to President Trump, a one-woman conduit of information operating entirely outside the usual chain of command.”

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.

This has also made her into a highly influential gatekeeper of presidential influence.

She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. She has learned his cadence—and unorthodox capitalizations—well enough to draft social-media posts for him to approve. She trawls social media for material that the president can use in his feeds, including posts that have led to trouble, such as one depicting the Obamas as apes. Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.

Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does. Haberman now says that Harp is Trump’s “human binkie.” Tales of Harp’s commitment to Trump are legion: She rode in the trunk of an SUV to accompany him to court. She sprinted across a golf course in Scotland so he wouldn’t be out of her sight. She left notes for the president that documented her intense devotion. And so on.

In effect, she is a professional flatterer.

You will notice that these reports contain leaks about Harp from other people in the administration. The current wave of press attention comes after a Democratic senator made an offhand reference to her and the Trump administration responded with exaggerated outrage that functioned to elevate questions about Harp rather than to suppress them—an excellent example of the Streisand Effect.

But don’t be fooled by that immediate trigger. Note that several wildly sycophantic letters from Harp to Trump—letters that go beyond sycophancy and read like the ranting of a demented stalker—were leaked to the press by people in Trump’s staff.

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In news links here and in commentary from my campaign, I have already lightly covered the ongoing debacle of Donald Trump’s war again Iran. As I said early on, what makes me even angrier about this story is that I am a longtime Iran “hawk,” as my regular readers know well. I have been advocating for a leader who would finally do something bold and effective against the Iranian regime.

And then Donald Trump loudly claimed to do that, and—well, the monkey’s paw did its work.

I don’t normally do a hard-sell on subscriptions, but I’m rebuilding this newsletter after my brief adventure in electoral politics. Signing up will keep you informed about the often hidden stories behind big and important events—as you will see if you keep reading below—and it will also help provide a base for my advocacy of a rational alternative.

If you’re not already subscribed, please mash that button and sign up.

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At my campaign site, I posted a thorough overview of how Trump’s war against Iran has failed. I’ll just give the bullet points.

I listed each of America’s stated or possible military objectives in the conflict.

• Change the regime, or:

• Install a friendly dictator.

• End Iran’s support for terrorist proxies.

• Destroy Iran’s missile and drone programs.

• End Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

• Keep the Strait of Hormuz open.

On each of these goals, we failed to achieve succss and on most of them, we are significantly worse off than we were before the war.

That was in June, and nothing has changed since then. All we’ve done since the first weeks of the war, really, is to go through a by-now familiar cycle in which Donald Trump issues dire threats against Iran, sometime follows them with a few airstrikes, then backs down and claims the Iranians have agreed to a new round of negotiations in which they will give in to our demands (see the image at the top of this newsletter, which is one of many such announcments). Nothing ever comes from these supposed negotiations, and the cycle begins again. Often, the whole thing begins and ends during a single weekend so it can be wrapped up before the markets open on Monday.

This is all just floundering. It is not an attempt to win the war or change its direction but an attempt to pretend the conflict is still ongoing so Trump doesn’t have to admit that it’s over and we lost.

The latest updates are that Iran is currently negotiating with Oman, the country on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, to effectively set up a toll system that institutionalizes Iranian control. The Trump administration seems poised to accept this, which would be a de facto surrender, as Trump now says, “We are low-keying it” in the conflict with Iran.

I could go over many of the details of the administration’s bad decisions in this war, and I’ve tried to keep you abreast of them in my news link round-ups. But the root of the problem is the same as in every one of this administration’s prominent failures, the same one that led to the debacle of the reflecting pool.

Trump went with his gut, and nobody around him had the nerve to contradict him.

I suggest reading a long and in-depth report in the New York Times on the decision-making that led to the war. The upshot is that Trump was repeatedly warned that the plan was unrealistic, and he was repeatedly briefed on its risks. But he decided to do it anyway, and everyone in the administration acted in the way they were chosen and groomed to react.

Everyone deferred to the president’s instincts. They had seen him make bold decisions, take on unfathomable risks and somehow come out on top. No one would impede him now.

Keep that in mind because this report was built on leaks from insiders, who were clearly trying to disavow responsibility for the results, which had already turned out badly. That’s especially true for J.D. Vance. But the fact is that not a single one of them stuck his neck out to try to stop Trump from making this mistake. Consider this passage about Marco Rubio.

Mr. Rubio indicated to colleagues that he was much more ambivalent. He did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal, but his preference was to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war. Mr. Rubio, however, did not try to talk Mr. Trump out of the operation, and after the war began he delivered the administration’s justification with full conviction.

Who cares what he may have thought in private? What matters is what he actually did in public.

Remember this, because a lot of these people are going to try to rewrite that reality in the future.

The Venezuela Model

The more interesting aspect of Trump’s war in Iran is not its failure. Beneath that, there is the problem that a success, as he defined it, would arguable have been worse. The reason is that what Trump is trying to do in his foreign policy is fundamentally different from what the US has usually tried to do. I think it’s somewhat different from what we have ever tried to do, and it’s certainly different from what we have tried to do for at least a century.

With the exception of perhaps a few decades at the end of the 19th Century, American foreign policy has not been overtly imperialist. Certainly, from World War I through the Cold War, and beyond, we have justified our actions as a way of defending, supporting, and spreading “liberal democracy.” Leftists liked to complain about our policy of supporting “friendly dictators” as an alternative to Soviet-backed tyrants, but in the 1980s we put the skids under a bunch of them. We withdrew support from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Augusto Pinochet in Chile and encouraged democratic reforms from El Salvador to South Korea—and with excellent results. The pro-democracy idealism of the George W. Bush era was not his invention. It was the product, in many ways, of these previous successes.

The general idea is that America’s best interests and future security are best served by promoting liberal democracy and free trade—while ensuring that we serve as the military and diplomatic leader of the democracies and the economic center of the network of trade. This approach was not always well-implemented, but the idea is essentially correct.

Donald Trump has taken a fundamentally different approach. His policy is openly imperialistic, with himself as the emperor.

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Now that I’m back to providing regular commentary here, I’m eager to catch up on a couple of big news stories that popped up in the past few months.

The first of these is something I wasn’t exactly prevented from commenting on in this newsletter, but—well, discretion is the better part of valor. Given the possibility I could end up in a general election in a fairly conservative district, there were some issues I didn’t necessarily want to emphasize. So on one really important long-term story, I had to settle for a link in a news round-up, but without jumping up and down as much as I would have liked about it.

Now it’s time for the jumping up and down.

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I’ve written many times before about one of the big and largely unrecognized stories of the past three decades: the accelerating decline of formal religious belief in America. This is actually an older story. The modern conservative movement was founded by William F. Buckley decrying the collapse of religious belief among intellectuals in the Ivy League. But in the last few decades, this is something that has spread to the general public and become a truly popular, grassroots phenomenon.

I drew attention to this trend a few years back after we got the news from a Pew poll in 2021 in which those who identify their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular” were 30% of the US population. That’s larger than evangelical Christians, larger than Catholics, and larger than any other category or denomination. “Nothing in particular” does not mean that these are all atheists. Committed unbelievers are a larger percentage of the population than they used to be, but we’ve gone from being a tiny minority to a small minority. But while many of the “nothing in particulars” are open to a vaguely “spiritual” dimension of life, they do not have any definite theological commitments and the do not attend any church.

The next big piece of information was about the rate of change, the rate of “religious switching”: the number of religious people who lose their faith, versus the number of unbelievers who find God. These rates are pretty lopsided. The believers are falling away in much higher numbers, and by some projections Christians may no longer be a majority in this country in a few decades.

In the last few months, we’ve gotten another piece of information that is even more surprising: The fading of religious belief is coming to the heartland, too. Even the Bible Belt is giving up on the Bible.

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I’m returning to covering news links, but in a format a little more expansive than the link roundups I’ve been sending out for the past eight months, now that I’m free to add a little more commentary. But for now, it’s only a little more, because I’ve got a lot of stuff to catch up on.

Here’s a first pass at clearing out some of the 85 open tabs on my browser and sending along the most interesting news items to my readers.

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Bay of Pigs, Iran

We have a little new information about what went wrong with Donald Trump’s Iran war, in this case about the failure of Israel’s somewhat far-fetched plan to topple the Iranian regime.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a plan like this, but a shakeup within Israel’s Mossad points to one thing in particular.

Current Mossad Director Roman Gofman has removed the two officials most closely associated with the agency’s plan to topple the Iranian regime. One had run the Mossad’s intelligence directorate since December; the other headed the Iran division. This follows the ouster of the deputy director last month, who was similarly linked to the operation.

Their plan centered on Iran’s minority populations, built on the theory that armed pressure at the periphery would revive the mass protest movement at the center and finish the job. Removing the architects of this strategy amounts to acknowledging the obvious: the plan failed.

It appeared to start successfully. Israel conducted strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps positions along Iran’s border with Iraq, timed to open a corridor for Kurdish fighters to cross into Iranian Kurdistan and push toward northwestern cities. Thousands of young Kurds were expected to join them. They were slated to advance eastward while armed militias from other minority groups struck Iranian territory from all directions, pushing toward Tehran. The US had armed these proxy forces, but the plan unraveled when Fox News reported the attack was imminent. Turkish President Erdogan phoned Trump and, in a furious call, talked him out of US backing for the operation.

This sounds like a replay of the Bay of Pigs, where a plan to overthrow the Cuban regime—also a risky, longshot attempt—failed when the US withdrew crucial support at the last minute because the president wasn’t politically prepared to back the scheme all the way.

I found out about this story by way of Claire Berlinski, who explains why the Turks were so adamant: It “validat[ed] the suspicions of everyone in the region—but especially Turks and Iranians—that Israel seeks to dismember their countries and touch off civil wars in every country with a Kurdish minority, making Syria look like a little warmup.”

I wouldn’t mind if there’s a Kurdish state someday, but I also understand that if you’re going to open that can of worms, you’re going to lose support from many countries in the region, and you have to know ahead of time whether you’re willing to take that heat.

Donald Trump is obviously not the kind of guy to game this stuff out carefully, know where he stands ahead of time, and follow a consistent course of action—and the Israelis were foolish to act as if he is.

What Did the President Think, and Did He Ever Think It?

Speaking of not planning things out ahead of time, Donald Trump is now complaining that he was never warned about something I am certain his advisors warned him about dozens of times:

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In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the “death of the humanities,” translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language, and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London—where students still study The Odyssey as a first year “foundational text”—is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

This is the gracious ending of Emily Wilson’s review of star director Christopher Nolan’s new film version of Homer’s Odyssey. (The rest was not so gracious, especially considering that Nolan has made Wilson a rich woman. More on that review in a moment.)

One of the compensations of this year is that amid some less edifying debates, everyone has been taking a little time this summer to debate the proper interpretation of a three-thousand-year-old Ancient Greek poem. I regret I haven’t had the time to participate before now, particularly because this new adaptation has a lot of relevance today.

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For those who know their Ancient Greek history, I can describe the film in one sentence: Nolan set out to film The Odyssey and ended up filming the Melian Dialogue. For those who don’t know what that means, read on for an explanation.

But first, let’s deal with the earliest wave of controversy, a freakout among reactionary conservatives—there does not seem to be any other kind these days—over the film’s multiracial casting. Helen of Troy is played by the Mexican-born Kenyan-American actress Lupita Nyong’o. Athena is portrayed by Zendaya, whose father is a black American of Nigerian descent. Eurylochus, right-hand man to Odysseus, is portrayed by Himesh Patel, a British actor of Indian descent by way of Africa. Transgender actor Elliot Paige (formerly Ellen Paige) plays Achilles—no, scratch that. That was the rumor spreading around before the film launched, but Paige actually plays a young Greek warrior named Sinon (a character plucked from The Aeneid but never mentioned by Homer).

Even worse, they cast some pallid Northern European guy as the Greek hero Odysseus.

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Readers of this newsletter have probably seen the news that I did not win the Democratic primary for Congress in the Fifth District.

Voters went with the known, comfortable, established guy. I coaxed a couple of thousand people, in a fairly low-turnout primary, to vote for a more constitutionally focused agenda, but I was afraid from the beginning that local Democrats really, really just wanted to go with their guy. You can see this in a lot of other Virginia races (such as in the First District, just to my east) where voters went with the established choice.

I suppose that’s natural. One of the things that struck me about running for office is that if you want to run for Congress, the best time to start is fifteen years ago: enough time to build up name-recognition, contacts in your political party, influential local leaders who owe you favors, and a fundraising network. (The guy who won in my district is from a prominent local family, so he had all of that from the get-go.)

In normal circumstances, this lends a certain stability and even conservatism to our political system, but it also means that the system is very slow to react to new events. So if someone gets into high office and starts tearing apart the whole American political system, people are reluctant to change their ideas about what their top political priorities are and what sort of person they need to represent them.

People liked my message, mind you. They agreed with it. As I was speaking to Democratic Party groups, I saw a lot of people nodding along. But they did not find it compelling enough to choose me over the familiar guy. Or perhaps they assumed he would do all of the same things, which—well, I hope so.

So what next? Fortunately, running for office is not the only way I have of influencing the future of our country.

I ran for Congress and stayed in the race because I was not fully confident that the guy who eventually won the nomination would stand up for the constitutional reforms we need. But I am 100% confident he will do so if it is clearly popular and polls well. That’s the case across the country. It would be nice if we had political leaders with clear principles, foresight, courage, and the ability to think in constitutional terms. To the extent we can’t rely on that, we have to do our best to marshal the pressure of public opinion.

In short, it’s back to pamphleteering for me. I’ve been writing recently about the influence of ideological pamphlets on the American Revolution, and that’s the model I’ll be following.

In immediate practical terms, that means rebuilding my business as a writer. You will see my free-lance articles appearing again soon at some of the old places and a few new ones. Most of all, I’ll be reinvigorating this newsletter.

The hardest thing about running for office is having to do it while still working for a living. (This is why most congressional candidates have either already made a fortune or inherited one.) It’s harder still when the work you used to do for a living included a lot of writing about politics, and now you can’t do that without running afoul of campaign finance laws. I took a hit for doing that, losing a small but significant portion of my subscribers who fell off the list presumably because I was no longer providing a steady stream of political commentary, at least not here.

If you’re one of the people who lapsed as a paying subscriber, now is the time to come back on.

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Here’s what I have coming up:

• I’ve been thinking that whether I win or lose, I have a hell of an article to write on what I’ve learned about politics by actually engaging in it rather than observing it from the outside. It will be eye-opening—and offered at first exclusively for paying subscribers.

• I’ll be going over some stories I’ve missed during my campaign, or ones where I’ve linked to interesting news reports but haven’t had the opportunity to draw out their full meaning.

• This will include the rise of “democratic socialism” in the Democratic Party. It’s not that I was avoiding the issue. “Democratic socialism” just isn’t much of an issue, one way or another, in the Fifth District. But I’ll try to put the national phenomenon into some kind of perspective.

• In the next day or so, I’ll put up my review of the recent film version of The Odyssey. For those who know their Ancient Greek history, I can say that Christopher Nolan set out to film The Odyssey and ended up filming the Melian Dialogue. If you have no idea what that means, stay tuned, I’ll explain it all.

• I’ll offer a defense of data centers against the latest reborn NIMBY crusade—something I got a look at up close on the campaign trail. But I’ll also go into more detail about my warnings that artificial intelligence, which is the main impetus behind the giant investment bubble in data centers, is overhyped.

• And as promised above, I’ll have a lot more to say on the issue that animated my campaign: the reforms we need to restore the American system for the next 250 years—as well as new commentary on the history, philosophy, and political theory of democracy.

Stay tuned.

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Running for Congress very much took me outside of my comfort zone, which is sitting in front of a laptop writing, and the one positive thing about losing the primary is that I will have a lot more time to spend in a quiet room alone with my words. They have missed me, and I have missed them. And readers of this newsletter will be the beneficiaries.

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