DEMOCRATS ABASE THEMSELVES TRYING TO APPEAL TO THE CENTER. REPUBLICANS ABASE THEMSELVES TRYING TO APPEAL TO THE EXTREMES.

The Atlantic's Tom Nichols, an ex-Republican and Trump critic who likes to lecture Democrats, has some advice for Abdul El-Sayed:

Start by kicking Piker to the curb - hard

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— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) August 8, 2026 at 2:51 PM

I'd expect a centrist like Nichols to recommend that El-Sayed cut ties with Hasan Piker, who's said some things that are offputting to voters El-Sayed needs. But "kicking Piker to the curb - hard" implies more than just a separation. It seems as if Nichols wants El-Sayed to abase himself and make a great show of renouncing Piker. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but even if I am, we know that it's conventional wisdom that Democrats need to move to the center, or center-right, or even right, in order to win elections outside deep-blue regions, and the usual advice is that Democrats should put flashing neon lights around their renunciations of liberalism or progressivism, just to make sure every voter is aware of the act of submission.

Yet Republicans running in purple states and districts never seem to do this. Ken Paxton, for instance, isn't tacking to the center in order to win a tough race in Texas.

In fact, the only kind of renunciation Republicans ever seem to engage in is renunciation of past moderation. Lindsey Graham and J.D. Vance renounced their previous (justified) attacks on Donald Trump and won elections in red states. And now that's happening even in the swing state of Michigan:

In the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election, as President Trump refused to accept defeat and pumped out false claims about voter fraud, Mike Rogers was a clear and consistent voice of reproach.

Mr. Rogers, a former Republican representative from Michigan, denounced Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the election as “cause for both concern and alarm.” He ripped the president’s pressure on Georgia’s top election official “as more gangster than presidential.” As for Mr. Trump’s role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Rogers declared, “You’re damn right you had responsibility for this.”

But as he aims to return to Washington, in a Senate race considered key to control of that chamber, Mr. Rogers has become an election skeptic. Minutes after the president’s recent speech filled with outlandish accusations about voting fraud — including a debunked claim about Michigan ballots — Mr. Rogers weighed in, suggesting that further scrutiny of the election was warranted.

“I am thankful for President Trump’s commitment to transparency,” Mr. Rogers said on his social media accounts. “The news coming out of the White House tonight is deeply troubling — especially that of a voter fraud scheme right here in Michigan.”

Mr. Rogers has also suggested that voting irregularities sunk his Senate bid two years ago — based on an unproven claim about late-arriving Detroit ballots....

Democrats who follow conventional wisdom tug their forelocks and say their party is "weak and woke," or uses too much "faculty lounge" language. They reject the aspects of their party that are (rightly or wrongly) seen as out of touch with the mainstream.

Republicans are doing the opposite right now. They're attacking Anthony Fauci. They're embracing election denialism. They're scaremongering about communism and sharia law.

And there's this:

Former NBA player Royce White told OutKick/Fox News Digital that he apparently plans to declare for the 2027 WNBA Draft, as he now claims to be transgender.

There are now two former NBA players to announce such a decision, after Enes Kanter Freedom made his announcement earlier on Friday.

"I'm transgender. I'm a woman. I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball, so I'll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well," White said.

To some extent, this is White -- Alex Jones fan, misogynist, and anti-Semite -- trying to win a Republican Senate primary in Minnesota in which he's struggling in the polls. But the fact that he has an accomplice -- along with the fact that the right-wing media is reacting with across-the-board squeals of delight -- tells me that this is a troll intended to motivate GOP base voters nationwide, at a time when they appear much less enthusiastic to vote than Democrats.

Republican voters love "I identify as..." trolling, so much so that there's an entire subreddit based on the idea that this is the right's "one joke" (reddit.com/r/onejoke/). If they were mainstream Democrats, they'd want to abandon this sort of thing less than a hundred days before the election. But they're mainstream Republicans, so they're leaning into obnoxiousness and partisan division.

THIS IS HOW THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL SURVIVE WHEN TRUMP IS GONE

A month ago, I wrote a post titled "The Next Trump Might Just Be a Collection of Grievances." I was making a point that I've made here several times: that the Republican Party will no longer have a charismatic leader when Donald Trump is gone, but it might not need one -- it will probably just reorganize itself around grievances, the way it did during the Barack Obama/Tea Party era, when Republicans made big gains in congressional and state elections, even though the party (and the Tea Party movement) had no charismatic figurehead. Anger was the organizing principle, not personality.

I think we're beginning to see a post-Trump Republican Party take shape, even though Trump is still in office. In the midterm elections, Republicans know they can't run on their record, and they certainly know they can't run on Donald Trump's record. So they're running on hate, particularly hatred for Muslims. This has been happening in the battleground state of Texas for months -- last September, Governor Greg Abbott

signed into law House Bill 4211, which took aim at sharia compounds—fantastical concoctions. This was in response to a ferocious conservative campaign against EPIC City, [a] proposed master-planned community near Dallas.... Created by the East Plano Islamic Center, a prominent Collin County mosque, and rebranded late last year as the Meadow, the residential development would reportedly include more than a thousand homes, a faith-based K–12 school, a community college, and a place of worship. The issue exploded in early 2025, after [online right-wing commentator Amy] Mek labeled the development a “402-acre sharia city.”

All this year, Texas GOP candidates have denounced any manifestation of Islam in Texas as part of a scheme to impose sharia law on the rest of us. Now this Islamophobia is going national, largely in response to Abdul El-Sayed's victory in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. Below, I've cued up some of the responses to El-Sayed's win from prominent figures in the national GOP. Please note that Trump is among them, but it's other Republicans -- the likes of J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, and Tommy Tuberville -- who are leading the charge.

TRUMP: Abdul El-Sayed, can you believe this? He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates 'em.

TUBERVILLE: Hey, we might build a 30-foot wall around our state, because I know what's coming. I can see it coming, I can hear it coming, I can -- you know, you can just smell it.

CRUZ: They want to cancel Thanksgiving. They want to cancel Christmas. El-Sayed is also an Islamist, as is Mandami [sic]. And look, you see the green-red convergence where the communists and the Islamists, they want sharia law.

VANCE: The modern Democratic coalition, which is self-hating white liberals united to people who just came to the country for the first time and don't actually have the sense of appreciation for it that they should.

Cruz and Vance wrap a couple of grievances up in a neat package: the fear of communism and Islamicism, allegedly embodied in El-Sayed, who's neither a communist nor an Islamist. (At this moment, every Republican rank-and-file voter appears to believe that all Muslims are Islamists and all Islamists are communists.) And, of course, it's Francesca Hong, the DSA-affiliated candidate for governor of Wisconsin who's likely to win the Democratic primary on Tuesday, who formerly expressed skepticism about Thanksgiving, not El-Sayed. But Republicans want to keep those distinctions muddy.

Maybe this is just a stopgap plan for motivating base voters this year, when many of them have soured on Trump. Maybe it won't be the party's message after November. But Trump will still be a terrible president for two years after the midterms. I think the party will be running against Muslims and commies (and Anthony Fauci and trans people and a long list of others) two years from now.

This might fail. El-Sayed might win comfortably. And in all likelihood, only a tiny audience will pay attention to the Daily Wire's latest foray into moviemaking, which is tapping into the same bigotry and rage:

When radical Islamic terrorists hijack a liberal college's pro-Palestine encampment to enforce barbaric Sharia law on students and execute infidels in a makeshift caliphate, a ragtag band of red-blooded students, a security guard tired of 'Uncle Tom' smears, and a Delta Force vet must arm up to save their clueless peers and keep America from surrendering to the enemy on its own soil. Coming exclusively to The Daily Wire, September 16.

But all this will keep the base loyal as Trump declines. In some surveys, Trump's approval is in the low 30s, but I fear that anti-Muslim bigotry might poll higher -- as might anti-trans bigotry. The GOP knows how many voters live in small towns and rural communities, monocultures where difference is always perceived as dangerous. If Trump's numbers sink into the 20s, Republicans will just define Republicanism as a collection of bigotries and never look back.

OFF FOR A FEW DAYS

I'm going to be traveling again -- I'll be back at the end of the week (probably Saturday). See you then.

WHY ISN'T DAVID HEARN THE MAIN CHARACTER IN THE REFLECTING POOL STORY?

At some point in our post-Columbine era of mass shootings, advocates began accusing the news media of paying too much attention to perpetrators and not enough to victims. Some argued that the press shouldn't name the perpetrators of mass shootings at all. The press hasn't gone that far, but most well-meaning news outlets try to report on the victims and the lives they've lost.

No one was shot in the Trump administration's war on imaginary Reflecting Pool vandalism, but I'd like to see a little more attention paid to David Hearn, whose life was upended because he put his hand in the pool's water.

This is the story:

donald trump can just sit in mar-a-lago and make up a lie on someone and then have the entire weight of the federal government come down on that person.

That should scare you.

— Covie (@covie_93) August 1, 2026

But this is how the story is being presented:

This is a story about the President and several of his hand-picked appointees all committing crimes and blatantly lying to the public while stealing public funds and abusing the criminal justice system, but the NYTimes describes the situation like they're recapping a soap opera.

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— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 8:24 AM

The story cited here, by Glenn Thrush of the Times, isn't just about Trump's feelings -- it's about the feelings of the three people Thrush regards as the main characters. The innocent man who was indicted isn't one of them.

Jeanine Pirro faced the cameras on July 2 with characteristic self-assurance to announce the indictment of the 67-year-old ex-Olympian David Hearn for trashing “sacred” government property, President Trump’s highly prized but shoddily renovated Reflecting Pool.

There's something off about the final clause in that sentence. I understand what Thrush is trying to say -- that Trump seems to prize the Reflecting Pool but did a shoddy job of renovating it -- but the pool isn't "President Trump’s highly prized ... Reflecting Pool." It isn't Trump's pool at all. It's our pool.

“This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” said Ms. Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, disclosing felony vandalism charges against Mr. Hearn for touching the lining of the pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

But Hearn wasn't charged with a felony "for touching the lining of the pool" -- the U.S. attorney's office said at the time of his indictment that on June 19 "Hearn allegedly ripped a piece of the recently installed blue pool sealant on the bottom of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial."

Every reasonable person knew at the time that this was a lie, and Pirro is admitting that now. But Hearn was repeatedly slandered by the president and other Republicans.

We could've made this montage of liars an hour long but you get the point

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) July 31, 2026 at 7:02 PM

Fox News told us:

Records show former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who was charged in the weekend vandalism of the Reflecting Pool, has ties to a major left-wing fundraising network as protesters descended on the National Mall and racked up multiple criminal charges.

Hearn, 67, donated to Democratic fundraising apparatus ActBlue 10 times while also contributing to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns five times, an administration official told Fox News Digital.

Fox also tried to portray Hearn as a repeat offender because in 1996, when the Potomac River flooded, the former Olympic canoeist was arrested for venturing into the floodwaters in his whitewater canoe. (The charges were dismissed.)

But Hearn is all but invisible after the first couple of paragraphs of the Times story, which is all about Trump, Pirro, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum:

Ms. Pirro’s office dramatically reversed course on Friday, not only withdrawing the charge against Mr. Hearn but blasting the Interior Department for the rushed and “botched” renovation....

Ms. Pirro’s 20-page filing did not refer to, much less rebuke, Mr. Trump for claiming the damage was caused by left-wing vandals rather than his administration’s missteps. But it raised innate doubts about his assertion that criminals had slashed the pool’s lining with a “knife or blade.”

That Ms. Pirro ... was aiming much of her criticism not at Mr. Trump, but his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversaw the issuance of a no-bid contract to renovate the pool, did not appear to matter much.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump dashed off a post on Truth Social that made clear he was unhappy with Ms. Pirro, a friend and ally since the 1980s....

“I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote, adding, “There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

In the second Trump term, the media has been able to focus on some ordinary citizens brutalized by ICE, but only in a sustained way when the victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were murdered and were white. Earlier, Senator Chris Van Hollen forced the media to pay attention to Kilmar Abrego Garcia when he was sent to rot in a Salvadoran torture prison.

But it's hard to get the media to care when there a story doesn't include Beltway boldface names. The press is paying very little attention to Texas defendants who were sentenced to decades in prison in connection with a shooting that wounded a cop at an anti-ICE demonstration in Texas. Not only was the shooter sentenced to 100 years in prison, but others who attended the demonstration yet had no connection to the shooting received sentences of 50 years, and one defendant who wasn't even present for the shooting was sentenced to 30 years. The East Coast press doesn't care.

Even if these aren't the most sympathetic defendants, the extreme sentences are appalling. But no top official is holding news conferences about this case in D.C., and Trump hasn't made the story a Truth Social fixation. So the defendants aren't of interest to the national media. They should be, just as every victim of Trumpian authoritarianism should be.

THE PARTY OF TRADITIONAL VALUES HAS NO VALUES EXCEPT WINNING

This poll was mostly overlooked a couple of days ago:

The POLITICO Poll finds President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.

Two-thirds of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say they would continue supporting a GOP candidate accused of sexual assault — 13 percentage points higher than the share of Trump 2024 voters writ large, which include those who do not identify as MAGA. By comparison, 40 percent of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would continue backing a Democratic candidate accused of sexual assault.

This is framed as evidence that MAGA voters are especially amoral, but note that 53% of Trump voters overall -- a majority -- would continue supporting a Republican candidate accused of sexual assault. (It's disturbing that even 40% of Harris voters would continue to support a Democrat accused of sexual assault, but at least 40% isn't a majority.)

Seventy-two percent of MAGA Trump voters say they would stick with a GOP candidate accused of domestic violence, more than 10 ercentage points higher than the overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back a GOP candidate (61 percent). Thirty-nine percent of Harris voters say they’d stick with a Democrat accused of domestic violence.

Again, it's not just MAGA. A majority -- in this case, a solid majority -- of Republicans overall would continue supporting a Republican candidate accused of domestic violence. Approximately four in ten Democrats -- not a majority -- would support a Democrat who was similarly accused.

Here are the MAGA numbers for other scandals:

Some of this might reflect Republicans' belief that any accusation of scandal against a Republican they like is a lie, however well documented. And some Republicans might not believe that domestic violence, say, or wearing blackface is a bad thing.

I think the discrepancies here come down to two differences between conservatives and the rest of us. First, conservatives generally decide who is a good person -- someone who agrees with them politically -- and conclude that whatever is done by a person they like must be moral. That's why they've shrugged off Donald Trump's sexual improprieties for years. That's why MAGA Republicans, at least, continue to believe Trump isn't corrupt. They like Trump, therefore he's a moral man.

Democrats try to give people they like the benefit of the doubt, but only up to a point. In just the past few months, we've cut Graham Platner and Eric Swalwell loose. Over the years, here in New York State alone, we dumped Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and Andrew Cuomo. (Cuomo almost made a comeback, but not quite.)

The second difference between Republicans and Democrats is that more Republicans than Democrats see politics as an existential battle between their party and the opposition. To some extent, this is because Rupert Murdoch figured out how to tabloidize politics, turning every story into a drama about good (them) vs. evil (us). Fewer Democrats see politics that way.

Beyond that, Republicans relentlessly promote (and defend) their own while attacking Democrats. Democrats attack one another even when there's no scandal involved (see: DSA vs. the establishment), regularly berate themselves (calling their own party "weak and woke"), and brag about bipartisanship while wishing for "a strong Republican Party." Republicans never admit error and close ranks around party members who are under attack nearly every time. (They also close ranks around candidates whom they don't consider ideologically ideal.)

I don't really want Democratic voters to defend immoral candidates, but I wish we had a higher level of party loyalty -- or maybe Republicans should have a much lower level.

THE WAR ON FAUCI, BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE KOCH NETWORK

If you watched Anthony Fauci's appearance before a Senate committee this week and are wondering why Republican base voters still despise him years after his retirement, and years after COVID peaked, let me remind you that the war on mainstream COVID science was funded by right-wing billionaires, particularly the Koch network -- the same people who finance and weaponize all the other propaganda that makes your Fox-watching grandparents crazy. When these folks implant an idea in GOP voters' brains, it stays implanted.

In 2021, the Center for Media and Democracy reported on the Koch network's involvement in COVID propaganda:

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute....

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution....

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

Bhattacharya is now the director of the National Institutes of Health and the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

... the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) ... which hosted and filmed the [Great Barrington] conference ... is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute.

And as HuffPost reported in July 2020:

A seemingly obscure Capitol Hill press conference by a fringe group of self-proclaimed medical experts quickly became on Monday the most widely seen propaganda video about the coronavirus after Breitbart News livestreamed it on Facebook. The post racked up tens of millions of views across social media in a matter of hours....

The video featured a string of right-wing talking points that criticized lockdown measures, demonized public health officials, called for schools to reopen and urged Americans not to wear face masks. The speakers, who were all portrayed as doctors, often declared hydroxychloroquine a “cure” for COVID-19....

But in fact, a conservative dark-money group was behind the press event that created this viral propaganda moment. The group featured in the video, “America’s Frontline Doctors,” sprang from nowhere only days ago and appears connected to groups involved in the Save Our Country Coalition, which was a driving force behind the “reopen” protests in April that lobbied for America’s rapid reopening, even as death tolls spike in hot spots across the country....

Monday’s livestreamed event featuring the America’s Frontline Doctors group was organized by Tea Party Patriots, a wealthy Republican donor-backed nonprofit that, in partnership with FreedomWorks and other right-wing dark money groups, launched the Save Our Country Coalition in April to push for America’s rapid reopening. Jenny Beth Martin, TPP’s co-founder, spoke at the conference alongside the self-proclaimed frontline doctors, urging people to call their elected officials to demand access to hydroxychloroquine....

The coalition’s groups have largely been funded by prominent billionaires, including oil and gas mogul Charles Koch ― who has donated to SOC group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ― and Richard Uihlein, a major donor to Tea Party Patriots.

Many people think the country, or at least the Republican Party, began to go crazy in the summer of 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. Many people think Republican lunacy all stems from him.

Some of it does. But quite a bit of it should be blamed on the Kochs and others who began professionalizing culture-war politics long before Trump stepped onto that escalator. Crackpots like Robert Kennedy Jr. fanned the COVID-denialist flames, but he found a receptive audience for his quackery only because right-wing billionaires had made GOP voters as crazy on the subject of public health as they were on the subject of Barack Obama's presidency. Trump just followed their lead.

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you tomorrow.