BO FRENCH IS FAR MORE PROBLEMATIC THAN HASAN PIKER. EVERY REPUBLICAN IN AMERICA SHOULD BE ASKED TO DENOUNCE HIM.

In late August, the editorial board of the Washington Examiner argued that every Democrat in America should be held accountable for the words of Hasan Piker, a streamer who has campaigned with the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.

Every Democrat in every swing race should be asked whether el Sayed must permanently cut ties with Piker — and whether they will withdraw their support if he refuses. Candidates should not be permitted to mutter a generic condemnation and pivot to grocery prices.

The Examiner said there's a massive double standard.

Imagine el Sayed were a Republican running in Michigan. Imagine he had elevated an extremist who denied the Holocaust. Democrats would make that association the centerpiece of every competitive race in America. Cable news would demand answers by the hour. Every Republican with any political smarts would denounce both men. Silence would be treated as complicity. And, frankly, Democrats would be right to do it.

Apart from the fact that Piker isn't a Holocaust denier (though he did once say that America "deserved 9/11"), we know what the reaction would be if a Republican in a statewide race "elevated an extremist," because it's happened in two Senate races so far. In Georgia, Republican Mike Collins, the party's Senate candidate, parted ways with a staffer who, as The Washington Post reported, "shared images in June and July on his X account of a swastika and one that depicts himself in Ku Klux Klan robes," while describing himself on social media as a "twink fascist." Outside of Georgia, that was a one-day story. No one on national cable news is demanding "answers by the hour," and Democrats aren't bringing it up in "every competitive race in America."

The same is true of reports that El-Sayed's opponent in Michigan, Mike Rogers, appointed to the “senior leadership team” of “Faith Leaders for Mike Rogers” a man named Lorenzo Sewell who has organized demonstrations with the racist, Holocaust-denying January 6 rioter Jake Lang. No big deal, according to the media. No national outcry.

And now we have a new outburst from Bo French, the Texas GOP's statewide candidate for a seat on the railroad commission, which regulates oil and gas. French was responding to a photo of University of Texas students cheering after a come-from-behind football victory against top-ranked Ohio State:

The photo depicts UT fans of black, Hispanic, and South Asian descent. French despises all of these groups.

It's good that many Texas Republicans have denounced the tweet.

“This is the Republican nominee for statewide office,” Cornyn wrote on X. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also rejected French’s message in a statement shared with POLITICO, saying the picture instead showed Texans united behind their college football team, which had just defeated top-ranked Ohio State.

“That is not my message,” Abbott said. “A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams.”

“The way we win the state is the same way we win football games,” Abbott added. “We unite under the brand of Texas.”

But many Democrats, in Michigan and elsewhere, have condemned Piker. El-Sayed has distanced himself from Piker. Yet the questions keep coming. The same should be true with French, especially because the GOP condemnation is far from universal.

Former Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi accused Cornyn and other Republicans of mortgaging “our children’s future for government handouts and cheap labor,” while state Rep. Andy Hopper called Cornyn a “smug globalist” who had brought the policies at issue to Texas.

And French is getting support outside the state. Here are some tweets from a bigoted city councilor in Palm Beach, Florida:

From one City Councilman to another.

You’re a scum bag, a traitor to my country, and you should be deported.

I don’t care what letter you put next to your name.

America is for Americans. https://t.co/nlBCWUvoK6

— Chandler Langevin (@ChandlerForPB) September 14, 2026

What Bo French is saying is actually scripture.

The weak and lazy members of the modern Church are being steered by evil to protect evil because the alternative takes work.

Modern Christian Knights talk like Bo French and they dive head first into the fight with a courageous… https://t.co/bkNsTbAOhd

— Chandler Langevin (@ChandlerForPB) September 14, 2026

“Let’s finally put our own people first.” pic.twitter.com/SoC0smKVOh

— Chandler Langevin (@ChandlerForPB) September 14, 2026

(That's a real Charlie Kirk tweet, by the way.)

Langevin was censured last fall by his fellow city councillors after a series of anti-Indian tweets, one of which read, “There’s not a single Indian that cares about the United States.” He sued and won a $55,000 settlement. His lawyer is Anthony Sabatini, a county commissioner and former Florida state legislator who proposed naming a highway after Donald Trump less than two weeks after January 6.

This is a national contagion. It could be the future of the GOP. But the national media only cares about Hasan Piker.

*****

Do you know just how bigoted Bo French is? Here's an example of his bigotry from July, as reported by Texas Monthly's Robert Downen:

Last week Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Railroad Commission of Texas, sent out a bizarre fundraising email. Framed as a reminder of the 108th anniversary of the Communist overthrow of Russia, the email included an AI-generated image of his Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, smiling in the chambers where the country’s then-ruling Romanov family was executed in 1918. Rosenthal, French’s campaign continued, has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed” the Romanovs, and has plans for his own “infernal revolution” of Texas. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam,” the email continued....

You see, Rosenthal is Jewish. And while French did not explicitly name the Bolshevik revolutionaries who overthrew Russia a century ago, the email appears to be nodding to an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims there is a Jewish Communist cabal intent on controlling the world and stamping out Christianity.

And that wasn't even the only deeply offensive thing French did that week.

This week, in response to a video that purported to show nonwhite people trespassing in a restricted part of Yellowstone National Park, French posted a quote from “The Camp of the Saints”—an obscure French dystopian novel that depicts immigrants as diseased, feces-eating hordes and has enjoyed a recent resurgence among the global white nationalist movement. “Your universe has no meaning to them,” French wrote on X to his 80,000 followers, without revealing the source of the quote. “They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door...”

Here's more about French:

He’s called for 100 million people—nearly a third of the American population—to be deported.... French says Texas needs to “ban Islam” and “round up every Muslim” for deportation. Last week he told his followers it was “time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” McCarthyism and the Christian Crusades, he argues, didn’t go far enough. And this week he referred to America’s “not in labor force” population—an economic term for nonworkers that includes retirees, students, and those with serious handicaps—as “low IQ parasites.”

Still more:

One of French’s favorite phrases is “third world savages”—which he has applied to Afghan asylum seekers, Muslims, and even Native Americans, who he also wants deported. He’s labeled Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett a “hood rat” and called on the Trump administration to “denaturalize and deport” state Representative Salman Bhojani because the moderate, Dallas-area Democrat went to Pakistan to visit a sick family member. (His logic: Pakistan, a country of 255 million, is “the same place Osama bin Laden hid.”) Of Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old Minnesota boy who was detained by ICE for more than a week in Texas, he wrote, “Bye.”

French later deleted the tweet, but on Christmas Day he called for another Texas lawmaker—state Representative Gene Wu of Houston, a U.S. citizen who was born in China—to be denaturalized and deported.

Last fall, when federal agencies were shut down and food assistance benefits were set to lapse, French tweeted: "November 1, 2025 is National Chimp Out Day. It's going to be lit."

And, of course, in 2025 he posted a notorious online poll:

On June 25, French posted a since-deleted poll on X, asking his nearly 29,000 followers, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” Respondents had two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”

It would effectively cost Republicans nothing to cut this guy loose. They could have done it as soon as he won the primary. As Texas Monthly's Robert Downen notes, "Republicans could disavow him, lose his railroad commission seat and still have a supermajority."

But why should they bother? He'll probably win his race, and Republicans will probably continue their stranglehold on Texas politics, even if James Talarico manages to win the Senate seat. And our political culture will never make a national issue of French, even though he's far more appalling than Hasan Piker, because the Republican Party as a whole always gets a free pass, no matter how offensive its members are.

APART FROM HATING CONSERVATIVE POLITICIANS, AMERICA IS REALLY CONSERVATIVE!

Matthew Schmitz is one of those "right-wing, but seems as if he watches tennis on Sunday morings while eating brunch" figures The New York Times opinion section loves to platform.

His most recent piece for Compact was titled -- no, I'm not making this up. "The Revolutionary Significance of Trump’s White House UFC Fight." So you can see why the Times thinks he really has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. (Do I need to add an /s here?)

The headline of his piece in the Times today is "Ella Langley. ‘Landman.’ The Rural Vibe Shift Is Real."

There is a paradox at the heart of American pop culture. The United States, in recent years, has never had a higher share of foreign-born residents, and it has never been more racially and ethnically diverse. Yet forms of entertainment that are associated with an older, whiter, more rural America — notably, country music and TV westerns — are thriving, even dominating.

Let me stop you right there, Matt. These "forms of entertainment that are associated with an older, whiter, more rural America" are thriving, but outside the world of pop music, they're not dominating -- and it's debatable how dominant country music is right now.

This is certainly noteworthy:

Ella Langley’s song “Choosin’ Texas” has spent 21 weeks atop the Billboard charts....

And:

In the first week of August, for the first time ever, the top five songs on the Hot 100 were country singles. Even Taylor Swift’s latest release, a generically poppy tune tied to the movie “Toy Story 5,” has been marketed as a country song — an apparent acknowledgment that there are advantages to identifying with the genre she left behind in 2014.

But the only album to spend four weeks at #1 on Billboard's album chart this year was by Drake. The only artists to spend three weeks at #1 are BTS and Noah Kahan. Langley and Morgan Wallen have spent two weeks at the top this year, but so has Taylor Swift (with Life of a Showgirl, which is not country), and so have Harry Styles and Olivia Rodrigo.

Schmitz continues:

According to Nielsen’s multi-platform ratings, four of the top 10 TV shows this season are westerns or neo-westerns such as “Landman” and “Dutton Ranch.”

But the most popular show of the year, far surpassing any of these oaters, is Stranger Things, which is in no way a Western or neo-Western. In second place is His & Hers, a Netflix mystery series set partly in rural Georgia, but focused on a biracial couple. That matters because Schmitz wants you to believe this alleged rural boom is all about whiteness:

As diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives accord advantages to everyone except straight white men; as globalization and an urban, knowledge-based economy have impoverished and emptied out rural communities; and as trust in institutions including higher education and the federal government declines, the culture of rural working-class whites can symbolize an unconstrained way of life that stands apart from the stifling, all-encompassing H.R. bureaucracy that everyone else lives in.

Meanwhile, on streaming services, there's no evidence whatsoever of this Western boom.

The real argument of this essay is that Donald Trump might be a miserable failure, but conservative dominance of America is unchecked.

Much discussion of the so-called vibe shift of 2024 centered around Mr. Trump. Today, his sagging poll numbers — dragged down by headlines about Jeffrey Epstein, Iran and the economy — may be read as a sign that the vibe has shifted back. Politically speaking, that appears to be true. But the rural surge suggests that in broad cultural terms, the country continues to trend right.

Is the success of Stranger Things or The Last House right-coded? I don't think so. As for music, country might be thriving because it continues to embrace satisfyingly basic pop song structures, at a time when hip-hop rarely does and there's no energy left in rock apart from eccentric acts like Geese and Angine de Poitrine, or abrasive, laryngitis-inducing metal. Noah Kahan, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo write old-fashioned songs, and they're hugely popular (and all politically left-leaning). Maybe verse-choru-verse songs are what Americans want, not social conservatism.

NO, WE SHOULDN'T STOP TRYING TO DEBUNK TRUMP, ESPECIALLY ON THE $5000 BRIBE CHECKS

Jason Sattler, whose online name is LOLGOP, thinks we shouldn't talk about Donald Trump's promised $5000 bribe checks in a skeptical way -- in fact, we shouldn't talk about them at all.

THE GOLDEN RULE: Trump doesn't lie to be believed. He lies to be repeated. So even if you think you're debunking him on the bribe checks, you're helping him.

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— 🗽LOLGOP🗽 (@lolgop.bsky.social) September 12, 2026 at 9:17 AM

In an essay on the subject, he writes:

Ten years of debunkings, fact-checks, and explainers. Every one of them has been counterproductive at best and, at worst, helped make him more powerful. There’s a reason for that. And once you get it, life makes far more sense.

Trump doesn’t lie to be believed. He lies to be repeated.

Sattler cites Trump's lifelong belief in Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking -- something I've written about many times -- but he says something I wouldn't say, which is that Peale-ism is the reason we shouldn't bother to try to debunk Trump. As an example, Sattler uses Trump's repeated fairytales about how tariffs work.

When Trump says other countries pay his tariffs, he isn’t suppressing a truth he knows. He’s willing his reality into existence.

Repetition is how that works. Every economist debunking the claim, every outraged world leader, every segment on who actually pays: they’re all saying the words. The corrections feed the ritual and center Trump’s narrative. You can’t fight the lie by debunking it. You can only spread it.

So, according to Sattler's post, we shouldn't explain how tariffs actually work and, according to the Bluesky post above, we shouldn't say the bribe checks will never happen and will be inflation-inducing debt-exploders if they did do. We should say nothing.

I get what Sattler is trying to say here: that our debunkings help spread Trump's assertions to Trump's true believers. But our debunking aren't meant for Trump's true believers. They're meant for non-MAGA voters -- true swing voters, voters who chose Trump in the past but are now disillusioned, voters who lean Democratic but live in neighborhoods and news environments strongly influenced by right-wing messaging.

If we don't repeat Trump's messages in order to debunk them, it's not as if they won't be repeated. These persuadable voters will hear Trump's messages repeated in the right-wing media, in the mainstream media, on social media, and in conversations with friends and neighbors. They'll also hear Trump's messaging from Republican candidates and officeholders. So we have a choice: they can hear Trump's messaging five hundred times, always with a positive spin, or they can hear it discussed negatively and skeptically an additional five hundred times (if we're persistent and keep on debunking until we break through). I choose the latter.

We have an advantage now that we didn't have a year ago or two years ago: the majority of Americans now understand that Trump is a liar. They know he lied about affordability and lied about keeping us out of war. They know he's lying, or at least ignorant, about how tariffs work. They know he's doing nothing to make their lives better.

So it's fine if the 38% who are still in the cult believe that our debunkings prove Trump is right. We're not talking to them. We're talking to everyone else.

*****

One particular subset of voters will probably be exposed to a great deal of repetitive pro-bribe messaging. I'm talking about elderly Republicans.

Remember that Adam Bonica story a few weeks ago about Democratic email messaging that appears to be aimed at older, easily scared voters? His argument was that a few Democratic firms get their hooks into the elderly with fundraising pleas that convey a false sense of urgency. Some recipients drain their bank accounts responding to these messages.

Whether or not those who operate this fundraising model recognize or intend it, fundraising spam runs on similar psychological levers to those that federal law enforcement and consumer-protection groups identify as hallmarks of elder financial exploitation: manufactured urgency, emotional appeals engineered to trigger guilt or fear, false exclusivity, fabricated account or profile statuses that look like official notices, and relentless pressure to give before there’s time to think. Why stamp “FINAL ATTEMPT” on a message and warn that “the deadline is just hours away” if not to manufacture urgency? Why claim that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries have emailed you, then demand an answer to their “desperate pleas” if not to trigger guilt? Why warn that Social Security checks will be “SLASHED by $500/month?!” — up from the $460 in the email sent two days earlier — if not to stoke fear? Why tell someone they are “the only Democrat in your city who hasn’t responded” if not to single them out? Why announce a recipient’s “appointment to the Social Security Advisory Board” above a picture of a Social Security card if not to dress a solicitation as official business? Why the midnight deadlines, the countdown timers, the “400% MATCH” that applies only if you give right now, if not to force a decision before reflection can intervene?

Well, according to a story from the Washington Sun (formerly NOTUS), Republicans are fundraising with similar urgent messages -- but these messages involve the $5000 bribe checks:

Groups affiliated with Reps. Wesley Hunt of Texas and Jimmy Patronis of Florida sent fundraising emails based on the check on Thursday and Friday, featuring messages like: “Trump just promised $5,000 back in your pocket if Republicans hold Congress this midterm. ... This is your FINAL CHANCE.”

Challengers across the country are deploying a similar tactic. A campaign text promoting Eric Flores — a Texas Republican running in what the Cook Political Report has deemed a “toss up” race against Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez — also touted Trump’s proposal in a message to potential voters.

“Attachment: $5,000 check for Mr./Mrs. [BLANK]. Pres. Trump just authorized it. Access portal & support approval ASAP,” the text reads before linking to Flores’ WinRed fundraising page.

In New Hampshire, House candidate Anthony DiLorenzo’s campaign in a lean-Democrat district sent an email stating “IF YOU” help Republicans win the midterm elections, “THEN TRUMP will send you a $5,000 Trump dividend check! Deal or no deal?”

There will undoubtedly be GOP voters who donate more than $5000 to Republican candidates because they feel it's the only way to ensure that they'll receive their $5000 bribe checks -- which, of course, will never come.

These are people we can't reach. But maybe we can reach millions of others.

#2 GUY IN WORST PRESIDENCY EVER STILL GETS NO BLAME FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

You and I know that J.D. Vance is second-in-command to the worst president in American history -- possibly the worst human being in American history -- and thus should be held partly accountable for that presidency's many, many failures. The notion that Vance could successfully run for president in 2028 should be as unthinkable now as the notion that Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney could run to succeed George W. Bush would have been in Bush's last couple of years in office, when an understanding of his failures had become widespread across the political spectrum.

But this time is different. Our political culture doesn't blame Vance for Donald Trump's failures. You can see that in The New York Times, which is ready to tell us that a Vance presidency will be a fresh start.

How do we know that the Times sees Vance in a positive light, or at least not a negative light? Take a look at one word in the headline to this story, by Tim Balk, about Vance's speech at the "Trumpapalooza" convention in Dallas:

Vance Assails Democrats in Fiery Speech at G.O.P. Convention

In the media, "fiery" is a positive word. It implies that your rhetoric is self-righteously angry, and that your targets might really deserve your attacks.

This is one of two stories in the Times about Vance's speech. The other story, by Tyler Pager, bears this headline:

Vance, Eying 2028, Relishes the Spotlight at Trump’s Convention

The vice president, widely seen as a potential White House candidate, sought to use his speech in Dallas to show a more personal side to the MAGA faithful.

In both of these stories, Vance is portrayed not as part of an executive branch that's failing in everything it's doing, but as a non-superstar politician trying to escape the shadow of a superstar politician. Pager writes:

Republicans say Mr. Vance, a onetime outspoken critic of Mr. Trump who later turned into a staunch supporter, remains the undisputed front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination — at one point, the crowd started chanting “48,” a reference to the 48th president. But they acknowledge he has work to do to consolidate support from Mr. Trump’s base, especially those who do not regularly vote or tune into politics.

“He has those relationships with the podcast hosts — Theo Von, Joe Rogan — who those guys listen to,” said Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator and supporter of Mr. Vance. “The work that he’s going to have to do is convince them to come back in for 2028.”

Balk writes:

It was one of Mr. Vance’s most high-profile public appearances before the midterms and a potential run to succeed Mr. Trump in the White House. Mr. Vance was elevated to the vice presidency by Mr. Trump after just two years in the Senate, and is still seeking to define his own image.

The record of the Trump/Vance administration isn't something we should necessarily judge Vance on, Balk and Pager tell us. He can just wave it away. Pager writes:

In his remarks, Mr. Vance sidestepped most of the thorniest issues dragging down his party. He only obliquely referenced the Iran war. He made no mention of tariffs that have exacerbated voters’ economic concerns, and he did not address Mr. Trump’s gambit to give voters $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress.

Instead, Mr. Vance placed a heavy emphasis on his own personal story, speaking more about his wife than any candidate running for office. The vice president drew on the recent birth of his fourth child and the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death. And he appeared to relish playing the role of attack dog, at times lobbing provocative barbs against Democrats and gleefully dismissing a protester who interrupted his speech.

Balk's version is this:

With Mr. Trump’s approval ratings sagging because of the war with Iran and rising prices, Mr. Vance avoided directly talking about the war but urged voters not to abandon the administration over policy disagreements. The vice president has cautiously defended the military campaign in public while privately questioning it.

Ahh, yes, the private questioning. This is a reference to a "Times exclusive" story that Vance strategically planted in the paper just before the convention:

Behind the Scenes, Vance Gathered Unvarnished Views of the Iran War

Vice President JD Vance took the unusual step over the spring and summer of calling U.S. military commanders in the Middle East, Europe and Asia directly, seeking their unvarnished assessments of the Iran war, according to current and former officials.

Mr. Vance, who opposed the war from the outset and was charged by President Trump with helping to end the conflict, wanted the commanders’ individual judgments, in their own words, before they were consolidated into a Pentagon view....

Mr. Vance came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy and the prospects for success, according to people who spoke to him....

The vice president incorporated these lessons into his private talks with Mr. Trump and their inner circle.

As I said in the spring, the media is portraying Vance as a sort of Schrödinger's cat, "someone who's both on the Trump train and off it." On the war, he's a cheerleader but also a skeptic. He defends Trump but forms his judgments based on solid information rather than rah-rah AI-slop posts culled by Natalie Harp.

The key figures in the failed Bush administration couldn't run for president in 2008 because everyone knew the Bush presidency was a collaborative effort -- Bush never tried to conceal how heavily he relied on his advisers, even if he called himself "the decider." At this moment, in a presidency that's failing even more spectacularly than the Bush presidency, it's still plausible that Vance (or Marco Rubio) could be the nominee because all decisions are believed to be made by the president himself.

But why does that take Vance and Rubio off the hook? They're in the room with the president. If they disagree with him, they don't push back and they don't quit. If they agree with him, their judgment is as godawful as his.

They should be unelectable, not within shouting distance of likely Democratic nominees in pre-2028 polling. They're not pariahs largely because the mainstream media agrees that they aren't, and because they're stylistically different from Trump. That shouldn't allow them to escape judgment.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE ARGUMENT AGAINST TRUMP'S BRIBE

This is an empty promise, but I worry that it might sway some voters:

President Donald Trump pledged Wednesday to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, an extraordinary gambit to reverse his party’s sagging fortunes in November....

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.”

That's from AP, which calls the plan "dubious" in its headline, as does The New York Times. Politico calls it "a hot mess of a half-baked midterm promise." The Daily Beast seems to be the only mainstream news outlet that included the word "bribe" in its headline. ("Desperate Trump Offers Brazen Cash Bribe in Bonkers Speech").

Raw Story notes that this promise appears to violate a number of federal laws:

“The primary legal threat is 18 U.S.C. § 600, which criminalizes promising government benefits made possible by Congress as a reward for supporting a political party,” wrote Thomas Logan, a U.S.-Asia relations specialist and strategist, in a social media post on X.

“Tying the money to GOP control fits § 600 far more closely than a standard tax-cut pledge. Vote-buying statutes like 18 U.S.C. § 597 and 52 U.S.C. § 10307(c) also apply. While defenders would argue this is a policy platform rather than a bribe, the explicit transaction creates real legal risk.”

Political writer Mona Burns called Trump’s promise an outright “bribe,” noting that violation of 18 U.S. Code § 597 is “punishable by fine or imprisonment of not more than one year,” and political scientist Danny Krikorian argued that the president’s pledge opened a “legitimate” legal question.

“Trump explicitly tied a massive cash benefit to Republican electoral victory. That creates a legitimate §600 question,” Krikorian wrote Thursday in a social media post on X.

But experts cited by the Times say that it's all legal.

Jessica Levinson, who teaches election law at Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said that Mr. Trump’s statement did not seem too far afield from a promise to lower taxes.

And Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Mr. Trump’s promise was protected speech under the First Amendment, pointing to Brown v. Hartlage, a unanimous Supreme Court decision from 1982 that struck down the application of a Kentucky law preventing candidates from making monetary promises in return for votes. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in the court’s opinion that “so long as the hoped-for personal benefit is to be achieved through the normal processes of government, and not through some private arrangement, it has always been, and remains, a reputable basis upon which to cast one’s ballot.”

Of course, this will never happen, even if the GOP succeeds in holding both houses of Congress. Trump loves to promise big payouts that never materialize.

Since becoming president again, Trump has promised: -$5000 stimulus checks via "DOGE dividend" -$2000 stimulus checks via "tariff dividend" -$1000+ checks via "savings" from expiring ACA subsidies -$5000 "dividend" if Rs win midterms No checks have been issued www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-magi...

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) September 9, 2026 at 10:33 PM

Every news outlet reports that this would require congressional approval, and that's true under the law. But we live in a post-rule-of-law America. If Trump wants to do something that requires congressional approval under the law, he just does it. The Republican-controlled Congress sits on its hands and lets him do it. But he doesn't want to do this. He just wants to make the empty promise.

This would be a massive budget-buster, as Bloomberg notes:

There are approximately 240 million adult citizens in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau, meaning that the payments could cost about $1.2 trillion.

If the president followed through on such a plan, it would likely worsen inflation by further boosting consumer spending and supporting higher prices, which are already elevated due to the war in Iran. The dividend, if not paired with revenue-raising measures, would also exacerbate a rise in longer-term borrowing costs for the U.S. government, which have been rising partially on fears that the federal debt is growing unsustainably.

I think a small but significant number of voters might be swayed by this -- and in a moment when Democrats appear to lead many key races by one- or two-point margins, that could be enough to give Republicans several wins. So I think Democrats need to take this seriously.

They should call it a bribe, whether or not it legally is -- common sense tells us that's exactly what it is. You can already see Democrats carefully avoiding the b-word.

DNC Rapid Response director Kendall Witmer called out Trump’s latest election stunt.

“Donald Trump and Republicans are once again offering empty promises to Americans,” Witmer said in a statement. “The only people reaping the benefits of Trump’s economy are himself, his family, and his ultra-rich elite donors. Meanwhile, working families get nothing except sky-high receipts at the grocery store and the pump, unaffordable healthcare premiums, and wages that aren’t keeping up with inflation.”

Call it a bribe, and also use the argument that will hit home the most with ordinary Americans, given the fact that this will cost more than a trillion dollars: This money isn't coming from Donald Trump and the Republicans. It's coming from your children. It's money the government doesn't have. Trump will have to borrow the money, and your children and grandchildren will be paying interest on the trillion-dollar debt for the rest of their lives.

That's the message: Donald Trump ruins everything he touches, and his only response to his failures is to bribe you to forget all about them, using money that isn't his. It's your children's and grandchildren's money he's bribing you with. Say it. Say it every day.

IF TRUMP IS HATED, WHY AREN'T THE POLLS PREDICTING MORE DEMOCRATIC BLOWOUTS?

I saw this chart at Reddit. The numbers appear to be accurate.

In many states, Democratic Senate candidates are running more than ten points better than Kamala Harris did in 2024. Some or all of these candidates could win in states that have been widely regarded as red.

But if red-state Democrats are running a dozen or so points better than Harris, why aren't purple-state Democrats doing the same thing? In addition to the less-than-spectacular numbers being put up by the Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan, Maine, and Minnesota, why does Democrat Chris Pappas have only a two-point lead in the New Hampshire Senate race, according to the Real Clear Polling average? Harris beat Trump in New Hampshire by 2.78%. Why isn't New Hampshire's Democratic Senate candidate trouncing the Republican in what seems like a very Democratic year?

You could argue that this comes down to "candidate quality." Pappas is running against John E. Sununu, whose father and brother were both popular New Hampshire governors. In Maine, Troy Jackson is an unpolished speaker who was a replacement for primary voters' overwhelming favorite, Graham Platner. In Minnesota, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan needs to outrun the corruption scandal that brought down Governor Tim Walz. And in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed has been demonized by both the GOP and members of his own party.

But shouldn't there be some Democrat who's about to win a landslide in a purple state? Maybe it will be Jon Ossoff in Georgia or Roy Cooper in North Carolina, but so far, I see only one huge win developing for Democrats in purple America: Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro currently has a lead of more than twenty points in his reelection bid.

I keep thinking about the late-June New York Times poll of Maine, in which respondents said they preferred a Democratic Senate to a Republican Senate by a double-digit margin (54%-42%), but also gave Graham Platner, who was still running at the time, a lead of only two points over Susan Collins. Sure, Platner was a special case -- but it's as if voters in some states don't see that the way you get a Democratic Senate is by electing Democrats.

I think a major problem is that Democrats don't tout the Democratic Party -- progressives attack it from the left, while moderates brag about bipartisanship and wear their Democratic affiliation almost apologetically.

And Democrats don't attack the Republican Party.

This seems absurdly simple, but: Republicans talk *all the time* about how Democrats are bad. Not this or that individual Democrat, but the party, the ideology, the very idea of Democrats. Democrats almost never do this about Republicans. Not in a coordinated, concerted way.

— David Roberts (@volts.wtf) September 5, 2026 at 3:17 PM

This was the ideal year for Republican-bashing: not only is the Republican president wildly unpopular, but every Republican is his enabler, apart from a few who are hounded out of the party if they don't enable him.

You might not like Hasan Piker, or agree with him about the appeal of leftist policies, but I nod in agreement when I hear him attack Democrats' calls for "a strong Republican Party":

No, I want no Republican Party. I'm going to be very honest with you. I want an ineffective, feckless, weak -- kind of like the Democratic Party is currently. I want the Republican Party to be like that. I want a Republican Party that is utterly dominated and humiliated in broad daylight that people are embarrassed to say that they're voting for a Republican. That is the reality that I want.

Whatever you think of this, it's true that in large swaths of the country, the Democratic Party "is utterly dominated and humiliated in broad daylight" and "people are embarrassed to say that they're voting for a" Democrat. This could have been a year when Democrats expanded the much smaller area of the country in which the same is true for Republicans. We should have given more people in the heartland a new narrative to consider: not "Republicans are the go-to party, but this particular Republican president is so uncharacteristically bad that I'm considering a totally counterintuitive vote for a Democrat, which I'm sure I'll never repeat," but "Actually, Republicans suck in so many ways that I can't understand why everyone around here likes them." I think there are a lot of soft supporters of the GOP who would be receptive to that message.

Even if Democrats are highly successful this year, two years from now they'll wish they discredited the GOP more, because Donald Trump won't be on the ballot. Meanwhile, they're doing fine now, but they could be doing better.

COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM, BUT FOR BELIEF SYSTEMS

The tone of this Fox story is objective, but the report is meant to delight Fox's audience:

The Texas Board of Education gave final approval to changes to the state's high school social studies curriculum, a controversial move that will impact how students are taught about Islam and Christianity....

The board approved language asserting that "radical Islam" motivated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks rather than taking a more narrow focus on the terrorist groups involved in the attack.

The material also requires students to study early Islam through Prophet Muhammad's "brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes," the "normalization of slavery" and the taking of female captives as "harem slaves."

An earlier Texas Tribune story notes:

The GOP [board] members voted against eliminating the word “brutal,” as suggested by their colleague, Will Hickman.

They did not revive a previously deleted expectation that schools teach about Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy.

The Tribune story adds this:

Students testified earlier in the week that the decision to instead portray Islam as violent will cause significant harm to them and their classmates.

“I feel attacked, as if my religion doesn’t belong,” Habiiba Quresh, 15, told board members. “I shouldn’t have to defend my religion in the middle of history class because of one sentence someone on this board wrote.”

These changes have been in the works for years. It doesn't surprise me that the GOP-majority board (currently 11-4) approved them this year, at a moment when the state Republican Party's main message appears to be "Booga-booga! There are Muslims under your bed!" The anti-Muslim bigotry in the state is so flagrant that even The New York Times took notice last month.

I've had doomer thoughts about where this is leading, in Texas and eventually in a future GOP-led America: first to Nuremberg laws that exclude Muslims from professions and neighborhoods, and then eventually to camps and genocide, or at least ethnic cleansing. Bo French, the GOP candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, certainly talks that way -- the Times story I've linked quotes a tweet in which he wrote, “I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.”

That nightmare future is certainly possible (and certainly possible for other groups: trans people and eventually everyone in the LGBTQ community, non-whites, socialists, Jews, eventually Democrats). But there's another possibility that seems more likely.

Most Texas Republicans seem not to want to drive Muslims out of the state, exclude them from professions, or take away their right to vote. Instead, they seem to want to declare as official policy that Muslims are second-class citizens by definition. Texas doesn't seem to want to prevent Muslims from running for office -- it just wants non-Muslim children to grow up believing that Muslims should never hold office (and to believe, presumably, that no politician who embraces Muslims as full citizens should hold office either).

The difference between what the Nazis did to Jews and what Texas Republicans are doing to Muslims seems analogous to the difference between pure authoritarianism and what Professor Steven Levitsky calls "competitive authoritarianism."

In competitive authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held regularly and are hard-fought affairs. However, the “playing field” is uneven: control of the media, abuse of state resources, coercion, and/or limited fraud give incumbents an unfair advantage over the opposition. Because elections are not free and fair, these regimes are not democratic. Yet neither are they fully authoritarian.

In Texas, you still have freedom of religion, but if you're a Muslim, the government has mandated that the education system defines your religion as dangerous and "brutal." You can run for office in Texas, but Texas wants to mold citizens who will never vote for you.

This isn't exactly Frank Wilhoit's portrayal of conservatism as the belief that "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." If you're a Texan who's a Muslim (or a member of some other suspect group), the law won't force you out of a profession or off a ballot. Instead, it will work to ensure that you're always seen by the majority culture as "less than."

I think the future of Republicanism is competitive cultural authoritarianism in many areas. The New York Times reported this over the weekend:

The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents....

The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families.

To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department fund that was created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school.

Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money.

The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country.

This is pure Orbanism -- favoring married couples over non-married couples and single parents, favoring couples with stay-at-home mothers over single parents.

This is the future that Republicans want: a government thumb on the scale on their behalf and against any group they don't like. With that unlevel playing field, they'll probably allow the unfavored to live here as nominal full citizens, just as long as they can use the unfavored as political punching bags and keep them and their advocates out of power forever.