REPUBLICANS DIDN'T FLEE BUSH. WHY WOULD THEY FLEE TRUMP?

In The New Republic, Timothy Noah predicts that Donald Trump won't make it to the end of his term.

Even as some worry that Trump will defy the Constitution and run for a third term, I’ve come to doubt that he can finish his second.

Noah believes that a deus ex machina will spare us a full Trump second term, but it's a different deus ex machina from the one James Carville is counting on. Carville began arguing a while ago that Trump's poll numbers and standing within the Republican Party will decline so rapidly after the midterms that he'll make the rational decision to quit the presidency sometime early in 2017. (I strongly disagree, as I explained here last month.) Noah's deus ex machina is Trump's brain will finally turn to complete mush, an event pundits have been predicting since 2017 or so. It still hasn't happened.

But I don't want to argue again about Trump's mental fitness. The flaw in Noah's argument is his assumption that there will soon be common consent across the political spectrum that we've reached a crisis with Trump. Noah writes:

How long can this go on? Last week Thomas B. Edsall wrote in The New York Times that “no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity.” But does anybody honestly think that day is far off?

Yes, I honestly think that day is far off. If "inescapable necessity" means "a course of action so necessary that even Republicans acknowledge the necessity," then I doubt that day will ever arrive.

Noah writes:

According to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll, belief that Trump already lacks the mental sharpness necessary to be president has risen from 43 percent in May 2023 to 59 percent in April 2026.

Is that evidence that the entire country thinks it's time for Trump to go? Only 24% of respondents in a July 2024 Pew poll believed that President Joe Biden was either "very" (4%) or "fairly" (20%) "mentally sharp"; earlier, in February 2024, 76% of respondents in an NBC News poll expressed concern about the possibility of "Joe Biden not having the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term." Yet there was no sense that removing him from office was "an inescapable necessity."

And in that Post poll, 87% of Republican respondents insisted that Trump does, in fact, have enough mental sharpness to serve as president.

Noah continues:

Trump’s approval rating has been sloping downward since his second inauguration; the decline has been gradual, but consistent, with approval falling from 48 percent to 36 percent. The all-time lowest presidential approval rating in history, according to Gallup, was President Harry Truman’s 23 percent in late 1951 and early 1952. Trump’s approval rating is on track to beat Truman’s humiliating record....

There is a point at which Trump’s approval number will fall so low, and make Trump such a liability to fellow Republican officeholders, that they’ll move to get rid of him. I don’t know what that number is, but I expect he’ll reach it during the first half of 2027.

But Truman finished his term, as did George W. Bush, whose approval rating fell below 30% in thirteen Gallup polls between April and December 2008. (He'd first fallen below 30% in a poll released in July 2007.) If by now Trump's numbers still haven't sunk below the mid- to high 30s, much less into the 20s, it's quite possible that he commands so much cult loyalty that even a dwindling MAGA fan base will keep his numbers well above Bush's or Truman's lows.

What would Trump have to do to make his removal "an inescapable necessity"? Noah suggests that a repeat of Trump's behavior after the 2020 election might do it.

If the midterms are as catastrophic for Republicans as political professionals expect, Trump’s political sway over his party will weaken dramatically, along with his ability to do mischief. Everything we know about Trump tells us he will not take that well. He’ll deny the midterm results as he denied the 2020 election, and will probably attempt some chicanery to keep newly-elected Democratic House and Senate members from being seated. I believe he will fail. But whether he succeeds or fails, anything Trump does to further subvert democracy will drive his approval ratings down further, and drive further upward the public’s conviction that he’s lost his marbles.

But until January 6, 2021, Trump's post-2020-election "chicanery" didn't "drive his approval ratings down further." Here are Trump's numbers for the last six months of his first term:

Only in January, when there was an actual riot, did Trump suffer a serious polling decline -- and as we now know, that was only temporary, because he'd turned 2020 into a Lost Cause and made himself even more appealing to his base.

The moment when all of America appeared to agree that January 6 was bad didn't last -- a month later, in the Senate trial after Trump's second impeachment, only seven out of fifty Republicans voted to convict Trump. Noah predicts another impeachment, and says that "this time I think the necessary 67 Senate votes will be gettable," but there's no reason to believe that.

Impeachment still might be a useful exercise if it leads to a trial that puts Trump's crimes and failings on display for voters who haven't kept up with Trump's record -- and if it forces Republicans to run in the future after having cast votes in Trump's defense.

But Republicans generally choose party loyalty, even at the cost of electoral doom. In the 2008 Republican primaries, it seemed reasonable to expect that at least one mainstream candidate might break from Bush on the widely hated Iraq War. But none did -- only Ron Paul, who'd opposed the war on isolationist grounds from the beginning, denounced it as a presidential candidate. The hawkish John McCain won the nomination and then suffered the worst president defeat in this century -- even though he was running against a Black man whose middle name was Hussein! -- but McCain did what he had to do as a Republican, which was to follow Cleek's Law:

Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.

Democrats hated Bush and the war, so Republicans had to be in favor of both. (It was only after Barack Obama continued the War on Terror in a modified form that Donald Trump could run as a war skeptic.)

Democrats hate Trump now, so Republican voters can't. Republican politicians who want to have ongoing careers can't, at least openly. So no matter how bad things get, they'll die on the Trump hill.

DO WE NEED TO BE GRATEFUL FOR TRUMP'S EGO? (updated)

No officeholder in American history has done more damage to the country than Donald Trump, but imagine how much additional damage Trump could do if he weren't fixated on ego-boosting projects like this:

The president, who is the [Kennedy Center’s] chairman, first announced in February that it would close for two years of renovations. Democratic lawmakers on the board said it was an excuse to avoid the humiliation of plummeting ticket sales and fleeing artists. Since then Mr. Trump has fought to add his name to the memorial to a slain president, drawing multiple court injunctions. When a judge denied him again last week, the president made his priority clear. He decreed that the closing would take place immediately but that the renovation would not begin until courts — potentially the Supreme Court — allow his name on the building front.

And this:

President Donald Trump on Sunday said his proposed 250-foot triumphal arch will now be a “top grade” military complex that will house drones, snipers and ammunition.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that he has agreed to convert the arch “at the strong request” of the U.S. military, and “for National Security purposes.”

The “Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” near Arlington National Cemetery will “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage,” Trump wrote. “There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World.”

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times tells us that 70% of Trump's "mindspace" is on "renovations." And maybe we're lucky that that's true.

Yesterday I said that Trump might not be fully invested in the midterms because, in Jamelle Bouie's words, a loss for congressional Republicans won't result in "ego death" for Trump, who's not on the ballot. But more than that is going on. Trump's fixation on construction projects takes a lot of time out of his day. Look at today's New York Times story on Trump and the Kennedy Center and realize that this is what the Leader of the Free World does with his time when he should be doing the actual job of president:

Workers renovated Mr. Trump’s three theater boxes in the center, installing gold plumbing fixtures and tearing up newly laid tile whose color was not to the liking of the White House. In one email, a Kennedy Center staff member, Lisa Dale, alerted colleagues to Mr. Trump’s demand for a certain type of tree on campus: “Our Chairman loves maple trees and is insisting we plant maple trees from a very specific Grove by a very specific gardener. :) I actually love this about him!”

The president of the United States micromanaged these details. And while the story doesn't tell us anything about Trump's involvement in another aspect of the "renovation," you just know Trump's has spent hours paying very close attention to this:

This summer a series of unsigned, unattributed gold-plated reliefs appeared in the Reach, a newer Kennedy Center annex that is slated to remain open during the main building’s closure. The images depicted include Mr. Trump raising his fist after he survived a 2024 assassination attempt, the billionaire Elon Musk and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The artist is believed to be Trish Duggan, a major Trump donor.

The reliefs are godawful:

The proposal to turn Trump's arch into a military facility is almost certainly an effort to get it approved by the courts -- Trump's lawyers stressed the secure bunker below his proposed ballroom in court filings, and the Supreme Court allowed him to proceed with that project.

A fascist president who wasn't obsessed with projects that scream "ME! ME! ME!" would have spent much of the last year meeting with advisers and laying the groundwork for a successful executive branch takeover of the electoral system. Maybe this hypothetical smart fascist president would have taken away some of Stephen Miller's immigration goons and prepared to deploy them in large numbers to key precincts, or become more involved in Pete Hegseth's overhaul of the military, with the express purpose of ensuring that troops would dop his electoral bidding. Trump and his advisers might have written a SAVE Act that could get through Congress, might have begun implementing an executive order on mail balloting early enough that it wouldn't be shut down by the Supreme Court because it's impossible to implement in the required time. Instead of getting up every morning and thinking to himself, What do I need to do today that will glorify me?, Trump would wake up every day and think, What do I need to do today that will take power from everyone who has power and isn't me? He'd defy court rulings. He'd shut down courts. He grab power, not reach for glory.

So while the Trump presidency is shockingly awful, its authoritarianism is limited by Trump's narcissism. Let's hope America isn't run someday by a fascist who lacks this weakness.

*****

UPDATE: The photo above doesn't include the relief of Elon Musk. Here's the Musk relief:

It's supposed to be an arts center, they have been removing actual artwork and replacing it with this propaganda kitsch. 2/2

[image or embed]

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) September 20, 2026 at 4:06 PM

IS TRUMP'S EGO REALLY NOT INVESTED IN THE MIDTERMS?

On Wednesday, Jamelle Bouie posted a video in which he argued that President Trump might not try very hard to interfere with the midterms. Bouie argued that Trump doesn't really care about the midterms because they're not all about him.

... I do think that we will be pleasantly surprised at how ordinary the midterm elections will be in terms of their conduct. And that's because Trump, the guy who is directing so much of this, ultimately doesn't care that much about the fate of Republicans. We saw this in 2018 during the last midterms. He's not literally on the ballot, and so losing doesn't constitute ego death. He sees it as a political challenge that he would like to avoid. He doesn't want to be impeached again. But as far as the kind of ego death that led him to do January 6th, for example, it doesn't apply here because he's not on the ballot. He's a simple man. And whether or not he is going to suffer ego death really does structure his response to things. It's why, as I've said a bunch, I'm actually much more worried about 2028 and January 2029 when the prospect of ego death emerges for him, and who knows what he'll do?

A Washington Post story today suggests that Bouie might be right, and that Trump, shockingly, might be accepting reality when he thinks about the midterms:

Trump in recent weeks has become sober about the gravity of the political situation, listening intently as he is presented with often discouraging polling, according to four people with knowledge of his recent comments, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations....

Trump has long dismissed unfavorable polls, fastening his attention on surveys that present him in an artificially positive light. He often says that negative surveys are fake and not to be believed. Increasingly, however, he has accepted his team’s polling that shows his and his party’s poor standing with voters, his advisers say.

Several of Trump’s advisers said they had become “increasingly blunt” with him, as one put it, and that in recent weeks he was listening to them about the electoral reality the GOP faces. It didn’t always translate to a good mood for Trump.

In other words, they show him bad polls and he has a temper tantrum, but he eventually accepts the numbers, according to these sources.

“He definitely feels like some of his decisions have led to the dynamics where he’s unpopular and things aren’t looking great for the midterms,” one of the people said.

A second person who confirmed Trump has subtly acknowledged some degree of responsibility for the situation noted that he has made similar remarks in public.

This strains credulity, but sure, maybe.

Another person in frequent communication with Trump about the midterms, however, pushed back on the notion that he has accepted any blame, saying he feels strongly that his not being on the ballot this year is the biggest problem the GOP faces.

Okay, that sounds like the Trump we all know. Bouie correctly points out that Trump didn't try to overturn the results of the 2018 midterms, in which Democrats won back the House but not the Senate, and his excuse for the GOP's poor showing was precisely this:

Despite frenetically campaigning, rallying and tweeting support for Republican candidates in the lead-up to the midterms, President Trump didn't take any responsibility for the GOP's losses in those elections in an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace that aired Sunday.

"I have people that won't vote unless I'm on the ballot, OK?" Trump said, later noting, "My name wasn't on the ballot."

This year, he'll have other excuses as well: Congress wouldn't pass the SAVE Act, the Supreme Court wouldn't let him control mail balloting, and so on.

Trump has finally agreed to spend some of his MAGA Inc. PAC's money on Republicans running in midterm races, and he's doing some campaigning, but he's not "frenetically campaigning" the way he was in 2018. A passage in the Post story suggests that Trump's heart isn't in it, or that age is taking its toll:

And after months of his advisers saying that Trump was on the verge of incorporating weekly domestic travel into his 2026 schedule, Trump has now pledged to make personal appearances to campaign in 35 competitive races in key swing states. Trump and his team have said midterm campaign travel will pick up in frequency in October, though his advisers have acknowledged that they aren’t sure how many trips he actually will make, despite having drafted a travel schedule for him.

(Emphasis added.)

We're told that Trump

is unlikely to make a campaign stop next week, as he is scheduled to travel to New York on Monday and Tuesday for the United Nations General Assembly and then host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington for a state visit on Wednesday and Thursday.

A vigorous Trump would campaign over the weekend. I guess that's not happening.

Bouie talks about Trump's efforts to stave off "ego death," and we see what he's doing along those lines: threatening the destruction of the Kennedy Center if his name isn't put on the facade, building the ballroom and the arch, reaching an agreement with Greenland so he can tell himself he won a huge foreign policy victory even though nothing much changed.

Trump's efforts to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico journalists from the White House are also intended to protect his precious ego. Yesterday he essentially told reporters that these news outlets were banned because they won't proclaim his greatness. Trump said:

I think that somebody has a right to keep them away, if they’re going to write false stories all the time. I don’t think I’ve had — look, I won the presidency. I won all seven swing states. I won the popular vote. I won 87% of the counties. That’s why the maps are all red when you look, except for two little blue lines on each side on each coast. I won a landslide, and I get no — I get I don’t get fair press. I get it from Breitbart. I get it from a little bit from Fox. Fox is the worst. I think Fox has, frankly, the worst polls in the whole business. I think they should have gotten rid of their pollsters years ago. They’ve been calling me wrong for ten years, but my polls have been very good. You know, I get good polls. I get good everything. But what I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MS NOW is fake news. They’re fake news. They know it. They’re put there for a reason. Politico was bailed out by our government from going out of business. I don’t know if it was $8 million or something, but they were given this massive subsidy prior to my coming into office, because they write only negative, you know, only negative. Now, we’ve done something that nobody’s ever done politically. I’ve had a political career like nobody else in history. On occasion, it would be nice if we had some fairness. It’s all fake news.

By now I expected Trump and the Republicans to be laying the groundwork for a reversal of the midterm results. I'm shocked that Republicans and the right-wing media aren't talking about reports in July that approximately 6600 non-citizens were erroneously registered to vote in New Jersey and 400 actually voted in 2023 and 2024. I would have expected that to get the kind of attention that right-wingers are giving to trans athletes, Hasan Piker, and the Lindsay Clancy case. Sure, the GOP says that Democrats will rig the election, but they're not saying it more than they've said it at any time in the Trump era (or the George W. Bush era, for that matter).

It's possible that this is because Trump is too immature to plan anything, and that after the election there might be a massive GOP effort to overturn election results. Ballots might be seized. Local officials who are loyal to Trump might refuse to certify Democratic victories. House Speaker Mike Johnson might fire the House's current non-partisan clerk during the lame-duck session and replace him with a GOP hack who'll agree not to seat multiple Democrats on January 3, 2027, as Republican lawyer Michael Luttig predicted in a recent New Republic article.

Jamelle Bouie's video is a response to thie Luttig article. Bouie points out, correctly, that it will be much harder for Republicans to do this if Democrats win a big House majority in November.

But maybe none of this will happen, or not enough of it to overturn the results, because everyone in the GOP is waiting to see what Trump will do and Trump isn't seriously preparing to challenge the results -- or try to prevent the midterms from taking place using self-proclaimed emergency powers. That might really be because his ego isn't directly involved.

TRANS-AVERSE DEMOCRATS ARE REMEMBERING 2024 ALL WRONG

Democrats are in a strong position going into the midterms, but they're still trying to calibrate their messaging as Americans are about to vote. Last week, Punchbowl News reported this after an appearance on a Punchbowl podcast by Mike Smith, president of the House Majority PAC:

... here’s something that stuck out to us the most: the House Democratic super PAC won’t spend a dime to elect Democrats who aren’t speaking about the economy or rising costs. This comes as HMP and other political organizations are beginning to make “cold-blooded decisions about when and where [they] actually spend.”

“We’ve been very clear to our candidates,” Smith said. “Anyone that’s not hyper-focused on cost of living and the economy as their No. 1 issue, don’t expect to see any support from House Majority PAC.”

On one hand, this PAC, which is linked to Democratic leaders in the House, says it won't fund a candidate unless the candidate is monomaniacally focused on the economy. On the other hand, parts of the Democratic establishment have clearly sent out the word that candidates in tough races should proactively distance themselves from trans people.

Yesterday, Erin Reed reported this:

Some [Democratic candidates] have tried to use weak and wishy-washy language toward transgender people, like James Talarico in Texas, who said he opposes transgender girls competing in girls' sports "if it endangers safety or fairness." Others have taken harder-line stances, like Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Iowa, who announced that he does not believe "biological males" should play women's sports and whose campaign said he opposes "taxpayer-funded sex changes." Today, however, brought what may be the most extreme anti-trans statement by a Democrat running for Congress in recent memory. Marcy Kaptur has released an ad announcing her support for anti-trans sports and school policies and casting transgender existence as an "ideology."

"My opponent won't talk about all that. He'd rather lie about my record. Here's the truth. I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools, because parents know what's best for their kids. And boys should not play in girls' sports. Don't let them change the subject. I'm Marcy Kaptur, and I approve this message because I'm focused on making your life more affordable," says the ad, released today.

#OH09: Incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D) is up on TV with this response spot --

Kaptur to camera:

"We're stuck in another unnecessary war and inflation is making everything worse. But, my opponent won't talk about all that. He'd rather lie about my record"

"Well, here's the… pic.twitter.com/SncdXUndq4

— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) September 17, 2026

Kaptur's boast about voting against trans athletes is wedged between references to the Iran war and affordability, so the focus is, arguably, on pocketbook issues. But why make this ad at all?

I'll acknowledge that Kaptur is in a tough race. A Bluesky poster who calls her an "incumbent with a 5 point polling lead" misstates her vulnerability -- she won her race in 2024 by less than a percentage point, and Ohio's mid-decade redistricting subsequently made her district more Republican, which initially led the Cook Political Report to describe the district as "Lean R." (The race, according to Cook, is now a "Toss-up.") Kaptur is in a real fight.

But does anti-trans messaging really work for Republicans?

It's widely believed that it worked in the 2024 presidential race. Say it with me now, everyone: Kamala is for they/them. But we're not remembering those anti-Harris ads correctly if that's all we rememnber, because the ads included specifics that don't apply to Democrats running this year.

Here are two of the ads:





These ads don't say that Harris is generally pro-trans. They emphasize her support (during the 2020 campaign, but that's never mentioned), for taxpayer-funded gender-confirmation surgery for prisoners. In the interview clip that's used, she's emphatic about this.

The candidates who are running scared from trans rights need to realize that Harris was unusually easy to attack on the issue because of the specifics of this clip. If you're a Democratic candidate and there isn't a clip of you advocating this policy, you're much less vulnerable than Harris was.

(The first ad also asserts that she supported taxpayer-funded surgery "for illegal aliens.")

And don't forget the tag line from these ads -- and I mean the entire tag line:

Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.

Apart from the 38% of Trump dead-enders, no one can seriously believe that Trump -- or any Republican -- "is for you." Not now. Republicans are for an unwinnable war, inflationary tariffs, gas approaching $5 a gallon and diesel over $6. It's not 2024, when voters were still responding to the inflation spike in the middle of Joe Biden's term and had vague memories of a decent economy in the first three years of Trump's first term.

It was obvious even last year that other Democrats weren't as vulnerable on this issue as Harris had been in 2024. Reed writes today:

Even before the current potential wave election took shape, recent elections indicated that the anti-trans panic is no longer effective. In Virginia's election last year, Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears blanketed the airwaves with anti-trans ads, with 57% of all of her ads targeting transgender people. In a race that was supposed to be close, Earle-Sears lost by 15 points. Likewise, similar ads went up in New Jersey against Mikie Sherrill, who won by 13 points in a race that was similarly expected to be neck and neck. Anti-trans ads also failed to flip Wisconsin Supreme Court seats in three consecutive races.

I agree with Evan Urquhart, who has looked at the polling on this issue and recently told The New Republic's Perry Bacon:

We’ve seen a clear shift to the right, as the right has made attacks on transgender people central to their policy, central to their platforms. And when we’re thinking about this polling, it’s absolutely true that the right has succeeded in convincing people that there’s some sort of problem going on with trans people in sports.

They have not succeeded in convincing people that this matters. It ranks consistently the absolute bottom of people’s issue priorities.

(Emphasis added.)

As Reed notes, even Republicans are beginning to realize that this issue isn't the magic bullet they thought it was after 2024.

... there is one group that stands out among the rest for its long history in this arena: the American Principles Project. The organization could be considered the progenitor of the phenomenon of Republican politicians targeting transgender people in political ads to win elections.... Now, the organization has released a new memo to candidates in 2026, announcing that while it still believes these ads are important for Republicans to run, they "may not be sufficient" for Republicans to win in 2026....

“There is no question that Republicans face significant headwinds in the upcoming midterms. Past political trends alone dictate that the party of the sitting president typically loses congressional seats, regardless of the environment. The current conventional wisdom seems to favor a similar outcome this November. But even at this late hour, the past need not be prologue. While Democrats may be on the offensive, recent message testing we have conducted in several key swing states suggest that they remain vulnerable on culture-war issues, particularly in their support for transgender ideology and so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) policies. Still, pressing the advantage on these issues alone, while important, may not be sufficient. Republicans must also make the case to families on what they plan to do to help improve their economic standing,” reads the memo from the American Principles Project.

(Emphasis Reed's.)

The country has moved to the right. Democrats have some vulnerability on this issue. But watch the anti-Harris ads. The circumstances that made her vulnerable don't apply to this year's candidates. I wonder if Democratic consultants think the issue is more salient now than Republicans believe it is.

WE STILL HAVEN'T SEEN HOW FASCIST AMERICA COULD BECOME

There's a Substack post about the fascist future of the right that I'd like to recommend, but I know you won't read it. It warns about the influence of a wealthy extremist named Charles Haywood, who doesn't believe in democracy or the freedom to live a life he doesn't like.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

That is not my characterization of his politics. Those are his words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.

More:

Haywood himself has repeatedly used a slur for Indians on social media, has argued that the Allies, not the Nazis, were the genuinely barbaric power in World War II, has insisted the war was not much motivated by the horrors of Nazi aggression, and gushed that Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper “boil down all my political plans.” Cooper argues that Churchill, not Hitler, was the villain of World War II.

Haywood isn't just a random online edgelord -- he has money, and he uses it to steer influential right-wing institutions.

Jason Hart has documented that Haywood’s personal foundation has given the Claremont Institute $390,500 since 2022.... Haywood sits on the publication committee of Claremont’s American Mind, one of four men who do. Claremont let Haywood’s fraternal order get itself incorporated under Claremont’s own nonprofit status. That order is the Society for American Civic Renewal, and Claremont’s president Ryan Williams confirmed he serves on that group’s board.... Hart reports that the president of Claremont, the chief executive of New Founding, and the chief marketing officer of the Blaze are all members.

Still more:

Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, [Haywood] wrote that his already favorable impression of the Spanish dictator had become positively glowing. He is not alone in that fixation. MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, which Vice President JD Vance blurbed and which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, has written that America is going to need a Protestant Franco.

But you won't read this post because I'm about to identify the author: Erick Erickson, who's been a noxious figure on the right for a generation. If you know anything about Erickson, you know he has a nerve writing this without ever acknowledging his own part in pushing the right ever rightward. (He's had kind words for Pinochet himself in the past.) Nevertheless, I still think his essay is worth reading.

Until now, most of the right has tried to turn America into a country where conservatives control the culture and win every election, but their opponents are (mostly) allowed to live their lives. It's still legal to be gay, or heterosexual and childless. You're not banned from certain professions if, say, you're a Democrat or a Muslim.

Haywood is one of many influential figures in the emerging post-Trump right who aren't satisfied with that. They want to control private behavior. They don't believe that anyone can be an American, or that members of certain groups should be Americans. There's quite a bit of overlap between Haywood's thinking and the unabashed bigotry of groyperism, as embodied in the career of Nick Fuentes. Erickson writes:

Running alongside all of this, from a different direction and with different money, is Nick Fuentes. He has never been coy about his ambitions. “There’s groypers everywhere,” he told his audience. “There’s groypers in the administration. There’s groypers at Turning Point USA. There’s groypers at Fox News, at Daily Wire.” He has instructed his followers to infiltrate the Republican Party and Turning Point and change them from the inside, and he has boasted that his people are working their way into the highest ranks of that leadership. In 2023 he wrote that his “White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist” views, once radioactive, were now pounding on the door of the mainstream.

Erickson links all this to the possible next president of the United States, J.D. Vance:

Vice President Vance has refused to distance himself from the groyper movement and will not forcefully denounce the antisemites. Rod Dreher, who had been his friend and an early champion of his memoir, went to him last fall and urged him to draw that line. Dreher says Vance cut him off and the friendship is over. Unfortunately, the Vice President keeps all of it within arm’s reach. Haywood’s foundation is a recurring funder of American Moment, the staffing pipeline founded in 2021 with Vance’s support, which exists to place young conservatives in administration jobs.

Meanwhile, Politico reports this about Vance:

Vice President JD Vance will hit a key hurdle in his fence-mending effort with Jewish Republicans on Thursday when he hosts a popular conservative radio host at the White House.

77 WABC host Sid Rosenberg, a longtime friend and ardent ally of President Donald Trump, has publicly attacked Vance for maintaining a friendship with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality accused of invoking antisemitic tropes in criticizing Israel....

In an interview Wednesday with POLITICO, Rosenberg said he plans to grill Vance in person about both Carlson and U.S. aid for Israel....

“If he really wants to win in ‘28, he has no choice but to, at the very least, distance himself from [Carlson] if not completely disavow him,” Rosenberg said, adding that he believes the vice president “has pissed off the Jews and many Trump supporters.”

I guarantee that Vance won't distance himself from Tucker Carlson and will, if he wins the nomination, have the full support of Rosenberg (who now prefers Marco Rubio), because Rosenberg is a Democrat-hater and an Islamophobe:

In March, Rosenberg called Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor, an “America hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach” ... After drawing intense pushback from voices across the aisle, Rosenberg apologized to Mamdani for the harsh remark....

Rosenberg also came under intense fire earlier this year for calling Mamdani “a terrorist” — and apologized for that remark too. But he later retracted that apology, saying he was “exactly right” to use the term.

I believe Vance is an old-school blood-and-soil neo-Confederate, but I also think that while he's trying to maintain credibility among the groyper/neo-fascist edgelords, he's also determined to reassure establishmentarians and advocates of Israel that he's on their side. Vance reminds me of an earlier racist striver, Richard Nixon, who carefully built bridges both to the establishment and to Goldwater/John Birch extremists in his long march to a presidential victory in 1968.

Here's the Vance two-step:

... Vance extended an olive branch earlier this month at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s leadership summit in Las Vegas, where he voiced concern about antisemitic hate crimes and said working with Israel is “in the best interest of the United States.” Vance touched on Carlson at that summit as well, acknowledging that “people in this room may disagree” with things he’s said, but the vice president avoided discussing his relationship with him.

Just days after that appearance, however, Vance ignited criticism from pro-Israel Republicans again by saying in a speech that the U.S. cannot allow its Middle East policy approach to be “subservient to the State of Israel.”

I don't believe Vance is an Israel skeptic for the right reasons -- he seems bigoted to the core, and also seems extremely eager to keep young neo-Nazis on his side. As for Erick Erickson, I don't think he wants a world I'd like to live in, but he's saying some things that need saying about his tribe. I suppose the best outcome in all this would be a conservative crack-up, but that never seems to happen. It remains to be seen whether the future of the right is bad ... or worse.

COME FOR THE CONSPIRATORIALISM, STAY FOR THE TRUMPIAN SELF-SOOTHING

I'm sure you're aware of this Truth Social message from President Trump:

As John Light of Talking Points memo notes, even Trump's fellow Republicans don't think there's anything pointing to a conspiracy in the newly revealed information about Thomas Crooks, the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024:

The New York Post reported yesterday that “a trove of documents” [was] provided by law enforcement to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as part of his investigation into the assassination attempt. But the documents sound like they simply add details to what we already knew: Crooks was really into guns, and didn’t talk to people much.

Grassley himself seemed to tell NBC yesterday that there wasn’t new information about a plot. “We don’t know anything about the motivation [of] why [Crooks] wanted to kill Trump,” he said.

FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday also seemed to throw cold water on the idea of any plot. “We found no evidence that [Crooks] was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents who he resided with,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And in July of last year, Trump sounded as if he was satisifed with the information on Crooks that he'd received from the FBI:

TRUMP BLASTS "BIGGEST SCANDAL IN U.S. HISTORY"

“Obama was seditious… trying to lead a coup… biggest scandal in the history of our country” — @POTUS responds to @brianglenntv on Thomas Crooks & Biden’s auto pen. pic.twitter.com/a2FmlADR7p

— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) July 22, 2025

Well, they've reported to me and they've told me things, and they really say they haven't found anything that was abnormal.... They went into him in great detail. They gave me the whole thing. And what can I do? They say that it was just a nut job that was looking to do this. And I spoke with the FBI, the new FBI. I spoke to the FBI. If it was the old FBI, I wouldn't have believed a thing they said because the old FBI under Comey was crooked as hell.

But now Trump says the news information points to a Democratic conspiracy.

And of course he would want to believe that, for an obvious reason: If Democrats wanted him "out of the Election," that means they thought he was a uniquely popular candidate, the candidate they'd have the hardest time beating.

But he wasn't. The runner-up in the 2024 primaries, Nikki Haley, would have been harder for Democrats to beat than Trump, as Politico noted in December 2023:

Polls clearly suggest Haley is a stronger general-election candidate than Trump, with Haley leading Biden by 4 points in the latest RealClearPolitics averages while Trump leads the president by 2 points and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leads by 1 point. Some polls even show Haley with gaudy, double-digit leads over Biden — including a Wall Street Journal poll released hours before this column published that showed her a stunning 17 points ahead of Biden (Trump led the president by 4).

It's not clear who would have been the Republican nominee if Trump had died that day. Two days after the shooting, Trump announced that J.D. Vance would be his running mate, a choice he'd presumably made before the Butler rally. (On July 11, 2024, Axios reported that Donald Trump Jr., who's close to Vance, was scheduled to speak before the VP nominee at the upcoming Republican convention, leading to speculation that Vance was his father's pick.) In any case, the GOP nominee would have entered the race with a fair amount of goodwill after a Trump assassination, and with none of Trump's baggage. Whether it was Haley, Vance, or someone else, I think the Republican nominee would have been tough to beat under those circumstances.

If you think Vance would have been too uncharismatic to win, remember that the uncharismatic Lyndon Johnson won the Democrats' last genuine landslide in 1964 as the man who rose to the presidency in the wake of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

But Trump needs to believe he was uniquely electable among Republicans, so of course he says the shooting was a Democratic plot.


(Note: I'm choosing not to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole regarding what happened in Butler. Crooks shot three people, one of them fatally. If this was a fake assassination attempt, it was a fake using real bullets.)

THE GOP'S OLD WHITE MALE FIREWALL

We've just seen a new survey from the most respected polling operation in America, the New York Times/Siena poll. At first glance, the results seem tremendous for the Democrats:

Likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by close to 9 percentage points in their congressional district....

Mr. Trump’s approval rating continued to languish at 38 percent among likely voters.... A majority of voters disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of every major issue included in the poll: the economy, immigration, tariffs, the war and, especially, the cost of living.

And voters said they trusted Democrats more than Republicans on not just health care and foreign wars but also on the two issues that powered Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory: immigration and the economy.

So: Democrats will have a pretty great midterm cycle? Yes, especially now that the Supreme Court has refused to allow President Trump to subvert the election process by imposing chokeholds on mail ballots.

But will this be a blue tsunami? I'm not so sure.

Let me stop here and say that a blue wave would be very nice. A CBS poll released on Sunday predicted a 228-207 Democratic House. What's not to like? And who imagined last year that a Democratic Senate was within reach?

But if Democrats not only fail to achieve the pipe-dream victories that are now being discussed -- the Kansas Senate race! a blue wave in Florida! -- it'll be because the three most obvious groups are still in the Republicans' corner: old people, white people, and men.

Take a look at some of the crosstabs in the Times poll. Start with this:

Sure, the Democrats have a big lead -- which the Times says rounds up to 9 -- but it's all from women. Men still prefer the GOP.

That's bad because of this:

Men are 6 points more likely than women to say they're "almost certain" to vote.

And there's a massive gap in party preference between under-45s and older people. If only older people could vote, this would be a 50-50 election. If only younger people could vote, it would be a 1932-size Democratic landslide.

Sadly, the youngest voters are, as usual, the least likely to vote, although 30-to-44s seem ready to turn out.

(An obvious explanation for the age gap in prerence for the GOP is that younger people have had much greater difficulties in establishing themselves economically -- getting good jobs, obtaining good housing. But I have another theory: older people learn about politics from traditional news sources, where Republican messaging dominates and Democrats appear tepid and weak, while younger people learn about politics from social media, where influencers unconnected to the Democratic Party do a much better job of explaining how much Trump and Republicans suck.)

And, of course, it all comes down to race. Even now, the GOP is the party of white people -- if only white people could vote, the GOP would flat-out win the midterms.

And -- again sadly -- white people are much more likely to be "almost certain" they'll vote.

Maybe this poll is wrong. Maybe the rage out there is greater than what's reflected here. Maybe old white men won't really show up to vote in much bigger numbers than the rest of America. But the usual demographic groups really might ensure that the midterms are merely a shellacking for the GOP and not a total wipeout.