TRUMP REVERTS TO FORM

In the immediate aftermath of the GOP's midterm wipeout, it appeared that President Trump was dissociating:

In the two days since Republicans suffered massive losses in the midterm elections, Trump has spoken twice in public. Both times he focused on rooms and renovations at the White House.

On Thursday, Trump signed a proclamation that designates the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room as a national monument in an effort to block any significant changes to them by future presidents....

The signing ceremony came a day after Trump spoke to reporters at the construction site for the new White House ballroom he’s building. Even though it was his first time addressing the media publicly after the Democrats swept several seats in deep red states to secure control of Congress, he focused his comments on the ballroom.

He also seemed surprisingly conciliatory toward Democrats.

On Tuesday night, as it became clear that Republicans were suffering a historic smackdown, Trump told The New York Times, “We’ll, you know, look forward to working with” Democrats. Eyeing possible bipartisan deals, he said, “We’ll probably work something out.” Around the same time, during a brief interview with CBS News, the president said, “My message is, congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country.”

But now:

... near the week’s end, instead of ceding to the clear evidence of voter displeasure, Mr. Trump pivoted to a familiar move: more MAGA.

On Friday, the president ousted his onetime close adviser, Susie Wiles, from the role of White House chief of staff, replacing her with Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff....

The president’s choice sent a clear signal about the posture he intends to strike in his final two years in office and how little he intends to alter his approach....

Which of these is the real Donald Trump? All of them -- but the one who chose Miller is the one who really matters.

Many very smart people have trouble understanding Trump ideologically. In his first presidential run and the early days of his first term, these people would tell us that Trump had no fixed ideology and might veer to the left if he thought it would make voters love him.

In the brief moment this week when Trump seemed to be reaching out to Democrats, some people who should know better got the wrong impression:

Appearing on Zeteo with editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan, [Senator-Elect Abdul] El-Sayed was asked if he agreed with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who a night earlier pronounced that he wasn’t so sure that if Democratic majorities in the US House and Senate passed a Medicare for All Bill that Trump wouldn’t sign it.

“If he wants to pass Trumpcare-for-All, I’m ok with it. He seems to like to put his name on things,” said El-Sayed.

... “Donald, if you’re watching, we’ll put your name on it. You get to be the American president who finally guaranteed health care for every single American—met the unmet promise of America. You get to be that guy, so let’s talk about it.”

It's correct to say that Trump wasn't always a down-the-line Republican, and he sometimes forgets the party's orthodoxy. But he always, always, always reverts to his own brand of Fox News Republicanism. He's like a heliotropic flower that automatically follows the sun. At the end of the day, he'll always see liberals and Democrats as the enemy, and will always see the belligerent, zero-sum right-wing exteremism of Fox News as simple common sense, the belief system of normal, regular people. In this, he's like millions of other Fox News grandpas all over America.

Trump might not have used this personnel move to reassert his right-wing extremism. Politico tells us that he's been thinking about replacing Wiles for some time -- but he was considering some people who were less hardline.

Some of the names Trump discussed privately over the last month were Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Randy Levine, the president of the New York Yankees. Lee Zeldin and Sergio Gor were also floated, according to two people close to the White House.

Politico notes that Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, lobbied Trump intensely. I'm not sure if this was part of her message, but I bet it's the selling point that persuaded Trump:

One person close to the White House said replacing Wiles with Miller would show his political base that the president remains committed to the MAGA mission.

“It’s a signal to the base that, you know, the White House hears you,” said one of the two people close to the White House.

Trump believes the people in his base are the median, normative, normal voters in America. He doesn't think anyone else matters -- all other Americans are freaks, weirdos, "radical left lunatics." So even if Trump had picked another chief of staff, he would have tacked to the extreme right in other ways, because, to him -- and to everyone who consumes large quantities of right-wing media -- that's tacking to the middle.

Trump has always been a racist. He's always been pro-plutocrat. But in some ways, he might have been a right-centrist if he'd been elected president the first time he launched a campaign, in 2000. Not anymore. He's too Fox-pilled.

*****

Replacing women with men is all the rage in Trumpland:

Wiles is the latest high-ranking woman to depart Trump’s administration and be replaced by a man. Trump previously parted ways with women serving as attorney general, Labor secretary and Homeland Security secretary, among others.

What does the new right-wing order consider an appropriate role for a woman? Wife and helpmeet -- but with a podcast:

[Stephen Miller's] wife, Katie, has a podcast where administration officials and Trump allies regularly appear, and one guest said that some feared they couldn’t say no to her requests to be a guest, for fear of getting in Miller’s crosshairs. Katie Miller appeared to confirm reporting in Politico that she lobbied for her husband to get the job, writing on X in response to the article, “If your wife doesn’t do this, find a new one.”

At a time when much of the GOP vanguard is seriously questioning whether women should be allowed to vote or hold jobs outside the home, podcaster -- in support of one's husband, or of the patriarchy in general -- seems to be an acceptable role for women. J.D. Vance's wife, Usha, has also become a podcaster, clearly in order to humanize her husband and help him win a presidential election two years from now. And, of course, every tradwife who preaches the virtues of being a stay-at-home mom is actually working as a podcaster or other form of online influencer. I guess this makes right-wing men feel that they're the only "doers," even the ones whose wives make so much money podcasting that they're the main breadwinners in their households.

WHY ISN'T STEPHEN MILLER UNDER FIRE?

UPDATE: I wrote this before Stephen Miller was named Trump's chief of staff.

President Trump seems to have settled on Pete Hegseth as his midterm scapegoat. But why him? Why not the man who probably lost Texas for the GOP, Stephen Miller?

Hispanics moved right in 2024, largely because they were dissatisfied with the Joe Biden economy. The economy was their main issue in 2026, to Republicans' detriment this time -- but the huge outpouring of Hispanic voters was surely also a response to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on Hispanic immigrants, which focused primarily on arresting honest workers rather than criminals and incarcerated the detainees in horrific facilities, while frequently catching citizens in its dragnet.

The numbers tell the story:

In Texas, every county voted more Democratic than it did two years ago, when Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race. But the more heavily Hispanic the county, generally the heavier the shift....

Roughly 7 in 10 Hispanic voters supported Democrat James Talarico in the U.S. Senate contest, while only about 3 in 10 voted for Republican Ken Paxton. The group was essentially split in the 2024 presidential election, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of voters and nonvoters....

Democrats won every House district that touches the U.S.-Mexico border — which includes seats in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California — for the first time since 2008.

And it wasn't just Texas.

In southwestern Kansas, three Hispanic-majority counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump flipped to backing Adam Hamilton, who became the first Democrat in nearly a century to win a U.S. Senate contest in the state. Turnout also surged 27% over 2022 in the three counties, Finney, Ford and Seward.

So why aren't we hearing that Miller is on thin ice?

And while the White House has no control over the makeup of the Supreme Court unless there's a vacancy, why aren't we hearing that the president and his administration are peeved at the Court for eviscerating what was left of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision that led to many anti-Black gerrymanders -- and infuriated Black voters so much that they voted in large numbers, with remarkable results?

This has contributed not just to a possible — perhaps even likely — Senate victory in Mississippi, but to Democrats doing well across the South. Democrat Annie Andrews beat (appointed) South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham by about 4.5 points, 51.3% to 46.8%, in a state Trump carried by 18 points just two years ago.

Without the surge in Black voter turnout, Andrews would have won by under a point.

Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures was able to hold on to his seat in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District this year, despite GOP lawmakers diluting the Black vote after the Supreme Court gave their blessing to Republicans to gerrymander Black voters and Democrats in Louisiana v. Callais in April.

In 2024, under a court-drawn map, Alabama’s 2nd District was 48.7% Black by voting-age population. Figures won it with 54.6% of the vote. For 2026, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population to 39.9%.

Yet Figures still won 53.8% of the vote. Because of a relative increase in Black participation, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population by nearly 9 points, but Figures’ vote share fell by less than 1 point.

This is the second straight midterm cycle in which an outrageous Supreme Court decision fired up Democratic voters. Four years ago, it was the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Subsequently, an expected red wave turned into a trickle. And now this.

An earlier crop of Republicans might be telling elite-media reporters right now, perhaps under the semi-anonymous cover of "top administration officials" or some other phrase, that they think the Supremes might have gone a bit too far in Callais. Supreme Court justices aren't supposed to respond to political pressure, but they sometimes do. The right-wing majority on the Court clearly cares about the future of the Republican Party. In the past, Executive Branch might have subtly let them know they'd hurt their side.

As for Stephen Miller, previous Republican administrations might have recognized the toxicity of his approach, the way the George W. Bush administration recognized the toxicity of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approach to the War on Terror in 2006. (Rumsfeld resigned immediately after a Democratic midterm tsunami.)

But in the Trump-era GOP, this isn't allowed. Hegseth can be defenestrated because, despite his macho preening, he's not seen as the embodiment of Trump's aggression against Iran -- Trump is. If he's fired, the message will be "Trump's aggressive war against Iran was a good idea, and it still is a good idea, but it's been mismanaged." (No one actually believes this anywhere on the political spectrum, but it doesn't come off as an unmanly retreat on policy.)

Miller embodies the extremism and cruelty of the immigration crackdown. Defenestrating him would send a signal that Trump will be less cruel to immigrants going forward. Can't have that!

And no administration official can chide the Supreme Court for a crackdown on Black Democratic voters because criticism would suggest that the administration wants to create fewer impediments to Democratic voting. Can't leave that impression!

Of course, the real midterm villain for the GOP ought to be the tariff-imposing, endless-war-fighting, inflation-ignoring, ballroom-building, emolument-siphoning president. In a different America, Republicans might be privately signaling that they'd vote to remove Trump in the Senate if House Democrats impeached him. But they still don't believe they could do that, even though it might improve the general public's impression of their party. Maybe they'll opppose him on a few things in the future. More likely, they'll close ranks around him, because they feel they have no choice.

WHY AREN'T SCOLDY PUNDITS TELLING REPUBLICANS TO MOVE TO THE CENTER?

I want to show you two maps from The New York Times. The first is a (preliminary) map showing where 2026 Democratic Senate candidates improved on Kamala Harris's 2024 margins. (At the link, click "Shift from 2024" to see this.)

Nearly every arrow is blue.

I'm not sure when the map was made. It doesn't show much in Maine, where the vote count has been somewhat slow. But there's a state map of Maine now, and it looks a lot redder:

The reason is obvious: Troy Jackson beat Susan Collins in Maine by a slightly smaller margin (6.6%) than Kamala Harris's defeat of Donald Trump in 2024 (~6.9%). Nearly everywhere else in the country, 2026 Democrats massively outperformed Harris in 2024. But not in Maine.

So here's my question: Why aren't pundits wagging their fingers at Democrats and saying that in order to be a truly competitive national party, Republicans will need to forgo MAGA/Fox News/Heritage Foundation/Stephen Miller extremism and become a party of Eisenhower Republicans, or at least Susan Collins Republicans?

I know that Collins wasn't effectively a moderate. She didn't stand up to her party when it counted. But many Maine voters thought she did, even this year. That's the reason she didn't lose in a landslide.

So whey aren't the Matthew Yglesiases and Ezra Kleins saying that Republicans need to field candidates who are moderates on abortion and immigration and taxes and healthcare? Why aren't they saying that Republicans are too in thrall to their most zealous, most extreme voters and groups and now need to reach out to the middle? Why aren't the pundits telling us that Republicans are in an elitist bubble and have lost touch with real Americans, the ones who hate AI and data centers and Flock cameras?

I say this because it sure looks as if Republicans have learned nothing from Tuesday's drubbing. The big story of the day is the fate of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Oh, sure, the possibility that he might be impeached in the lame-duck session by a Republican-controlled House, or fired by Trump, suggests that the GOP has learned something. But consider what might happen after that, or instead. The New York Post reports:

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Wednesday ruled out voluntarily leaving his job to take a Senate appointment....

The former Fox News personality’s cleanest offramp, ironically, is joining the Senate by gaining Tennessee Gov.-elect Martha Blackburn’s support to appoint him to her vacated seat....

A ... person close to Trump said that if he were in Hegseth’s shoes, he would be begging Blackburn for the Senate appointment.

Hegseth has mismanaged the war. He's mistreated the military. Even Republicans know he's unqualified. And he's very, very far right. In a mirror-image situation, if Democrats were in power and just lost a midterm shellacking, then announced that they wanted to reward one of the unpopular president's most criticized and most ideological subordinates with a Senate seat, there'd by so many denunciations of the "tone-deaf" Democrats that the New York Times opinion section and The Atlantic might have to publish special issues to print them all. The decision wouldn't be seen as merely a red-state governor tossing a disgraced right-winger a bone. It would be described as symptomatic of a party-wide crisis in the Democratic Party, a sign that Democrats were in deep denial, their radical-left fever still unbroken.

Or imagine a different parallel. There's a Democratic senator who, like Blackburn, has just been elected governor and will need to be replaced: Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota. Imagine if Klobuchar appointed Ilhan Omar to her Senate seat. The cries of pundit horror would be audible from space.

Klobuchar is a left-centrist -- she certainly won't appoint Omar. I assume she'll appoint Angie Craig, the moderate congresswoman who lost the primary to the progressive lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, who's now a senator-elect. But even if Craig isn't appointed, the appointee will be someone who's not a lefty ideologue.

In this situation, most Democrats would make a safe, "respectable," down-the-middle pick. Republicans don't bother with that. They just go far right whenever they have a chance. And our political culture thinks that's just fine.

FOR THE RIGHT, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, UNEXPECTEDLY

I don't have to tell you how big a win this was for the Democrats -- a flip of seven and potentially nine seats in the Senate, the possibility of the largest House majority either party has had in this century, a sweep in Texas statewide races -- senator, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general (and the demise of the most overtly bigoted candidate in America, Bo French, in the race for Texas railroad commissioner, as well as wife-beater Max Miller in his Ohio House race and Brandon "AK Guy" Herrera, a gun-fetishizing content creator fond of Nazi jokes and misogyny, in a House race in Texas). Lauren Boebert is losing! Virginia Foxx trails her Democratic opponent by 99 votes! It was an amazing day.

What happened was something that seemed impossible for most of recent U.S. history: the Republican Party and the American right were held accountable for their actions.

Here's how American politics has tended to work in recent decades: Republicans gain power and make the rich richer while forcing the non-rich to run twice as fast just to stay in place. Republicans start endless wars that accomplish nothing for the American people. Republicans (with the help of the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party) empower large businesses even at their most reckless, sometimes with devastating consequences for ordinary Americans. Republican jurists restrict the voting rights of non-whites, seize reproductive rights from women, and allow the super-rich to spend unlimited money in order to buy elections.

And even when voters get fed up with Republicans, the response of voters often seems muted, especially in the past decade. After four years of Donald Trump, Joe Biden won a decent-size popular-vote victory, but he needed to eke out wins by an eyelash in several swing states in order to secure the win. In 2022, Democrats were able to prevent a Republican wave election after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, but Trump, who appointed three of the justices responsible for the Dobbs decision, came roaring back two years later.

It's quite possible that yesterday's shellacking of the GOP will be reversed in two or four years' time, but for now it feels good. It feels good because we can draw a straight line from the actions of America's worst supervillains to so many of the Democratic wins.

Trump's brutal immigration crackdown largely targets hard-working Hispanics rather than criminals. The people who chose this approach -- Trump himself along with Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, and the worst of them all, Stephen Miller -- outraged Hispanic voters so much that they turned the red state of Texas purple, and for the moment more blue than red, in one election cycle.

Republicans on the Supreme Court overturned the final provision of the Voting Rights Act that protected Black voting power. In response, Black voters in the South turned out in large numbers, leading to big victories in Georgia, the Carolinas, and possibly even the Mississippi Senate race.

Trump himself gets the blame for the pointless and inflationary war and the pointless and inflationary tariffs. The strikingly unpopular Elon Musk stands in for the entire arrogant tech oligarchy; James Talarico singled Musk out as a villain and won by double digits.

Voters chose Democrats because they hate data centers and hate Flock cameras. They chose Democrats because they hate the way Trump, his sons, his son-in-law, and all their friends have enriched themselves in the past two years. Jon Ossoff and other Democrats made that a major issue and won big.

What's gratifying is that this doesn't seem like just a "thermostatic" win for Democrats -- the normal adjustment to a win by the other party two years earlier. It's much bigger than that, and it's for obvious reasons.

The Trump administration thought it could get away with assaulting rural hospitals, making health insurance more expensive, allowing infectious diseases to spread, cheerleading an AI boom that's threatening jobs. The Republican Party thought it could shout "Sharia law!" and "Men in women's sports!" and voters would ignore Trump's obsession with the ballroom and the arch and the Reflecting Pool, along with his proud indifference to ordinary people's pain, economic and otherwise. Republicans thought their usual playbook -- portraying themselves as the only true Americans while demonizing their opponents -- could get them through anything. It didn't work. That's deeply satisfying.

NO, TRUMP WON'T QUIT OR FLEE TO RUSSIA, AND OTHER FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE MIDTERMS

I hope no one believes this:

Jamie Rowen, an international law expert and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned on a Saturday episode of All Rise News that President Donald Trump and his strongman allies appear to be laying plans to flee to friendly dictatorships if they lose power and face prosecution at home.

"You can imagine that if he loses an election that he thinks was rigged, even if it very clearly wasn't, and he loses by a sizable margin...that he too might face some type of criminal investigation for all of the crimes that he is currently committing," Rowen told journalist Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News.

She suggested Trump, too, would seek refuge in Russia, saying he "will have colluded with, say, Putin to figure out a way to escape to that country."

"That's all I can keep thinking," Rowen said. "They are laying a plan for all of them, no matter what the consequence in their countries are, to flee to other dictatorships that support them."

Nahhh. Like James Carville's repeated assertion that Trump will quit after the midterms, this doesn't jibe with anything we know about Trump, and it ignores the safeguards that will continue to protect Trump even if his party faces the largest imaginable drubbing: (1) A half-cetury-old Justice Department opinion says that a president can't be prosecuted while in office. (2) It will still be impossible to convict him in the Senate if the House (by a simple majority) impeaches him, because Democrats will need at least a dozen votes from Republican senators to reach a two-thirds majority, and Republicans still won't be ready to defy him. (3) The Supreme Court has protected virtually everything he does as president from legal scrutiny. (4) Even after the midterms, Democrats will still be Democrats, and therefore they'll be afraid to take bold action against Trump, especially because the mainstream media will be urging them not to.

And Trump hates travel. We've known this since the 2016 campaign. Politico reported this just before Election Day that year:

... for Trump, near-nightly returns to Manhattan — from as far west as Reno, Nevada — mean a chance to sleep in his marble-and-gold hued 66th floor penthouse in Trump Tower....

Even when Trump doesn’t return to Manhattan, he almost always overnights in one of his many other properties: the sumptuous Mar-a-Lago in Florida, the exclusive, private Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, or his Trump-branded hotels in Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas. Through Saturday, only four nights in October had Trump not slept in a bed that he or one of his companies owned.

If Trump has ever traveled to a non-Trump property just for the pleasure of being in a new place, I'm not aware of it. His sons and son-in-law might flee if faced with serious legal peril, but Trump won't.

Carville's belief -- that the job will be too frustrating for him after a Democratic Congress is sworn in -- is belied by this:

It was the day before the election, and the president had decided to come [to the Reflecting Pool], a place that excites him, to talk about many of the topics that make him happiest. Trouble is, almost none of those topics have anything to do with the issues that are driving this election.

At a time when voters have made clear they’re most concerned with the high prices of gas and groceries and a new war in the Middle East, Mr. Trump used his final in-person appearance before Americans head to the polls to talk about drain pipes, top soil, limestone, fountains and his favorite kind of columns.

“The pipes now are totally renovated,” Mr. Trump said. Propped up next to him was a poster board showing an aerial view of the pool, with this caption: “Back, and more beautiful than ever!”

The “brand-new pipes,” Mr. Trump said, are “very important in terms of the algae and other things. And it’s a complete job, and we’re very proud of it.”

Also:

The Trump administration has submitted its proposed overhaul of East Potomac Golf Links for federal review, calling for a new championship golf course and a $304.5 million seawall around the Hains Point peninsula....

The 55-page concept proposal, obtained by The Washington Post, was submitted Friday to the National Capital Planning Commission....

Building makes Trump happy. If a Democratic Congress makes trouble for him elsewhere, he'll still have this. And if the Democrats try to block his projects, he'll get to engage in one of his other favorite activities -- siccing lawyers on people, either to get what he wants or to prevent them from getting what they want from him. For Trump, it's all lifefuel.

Remember that Trump first gained fame as a builder -- he was probably the most famous builder in the world in the 1980s -- but after that, he wasn't really building anything. He'd buy up buildings, refurbish them a little, and slap his name on them, to no great media fanfare. He'd make deals to brand other people's buildings, which he mostly didn't own. He was a TV star and a brand name, not a builder.

But now, using your tax dollars and bribes from rich people, he gets to be a builder again. It's like going back to the bloom of his youth. He's reliving his glory days. Why would he give that up?

*****

And will today's results be the Democratic rout we're all hoping for?

In the House, absolutely. In the Senate, I think Democrats will prevail, but there are still some worrisome polls in Maine, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, and Alaska, and the huge overestimation of Abdul El-Sayed's lead in the Michigan primary has me concerned that the polls could be wrong again. So I wouldn't bet the rent money on a Senate flip. (I would bet the rent money on a House flip.)

I think Democrats will win enough of the worrisome states to get to 52 (which is necessary to preclude a possible post-election John Fetterman ratfuck) -- and possibly beyond. I feel surprisingly confident about Kansas, and Iowa might work out also. But the extreme "reach" states -- Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi -- probably aren't happening. (I think Florida is the least likely of those three, because the combination of old white Fox addicts and Cubans makes the red wall insurmountable.) I'll be delighted if I'm wrong, though.

TOP DONOR TO HALEY STEVENS'S NEW BFF IS AN ANTI-SEMITE AND MUSLIM ELIMINATIONIST

A couple of days ago, when Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan was escalating her fight with her party's Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, I wrote a post in which I made a leap from her attacks on El-Sayed to the unabashed Islam-bashing we're seeing from the Republican Party in Texas. I said:

You can say that [Stevens is] trying to prevent an electoral victory that will empower anti-Semites.... But what Stevens is doing puts her in league with people who literally want to make Islam illegal in America.

I cited a Texas Monthly story about Nate Schatzline, a top adviser to Governor Greg Abbott, who doesn't believe there's any such thing as non-radical Islam.

“The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas,” Schatzline told the members of Texas First Conservative Alliance, a grassroots GOP group based in Lampasas County. “And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn’t say ‘radical Islam.’ I said ‘Islam,’ because all Islam is radical.”

I also quoted Bo French, the GOP's candidate this year for a seat on the state's Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry: French says that Texas should "round up" every Muslim.

A commenter said I was irresponsible for connecting Stevens to these Texans:

Linking the behavior of Stevens these past few days to two weird Texans who want to deprive Muslims of their freedom of religion is a stretch, Steve.

But there is a link between the rise of Islam-bashing in Texas and the candidate Stevens has now officially endorsed in the Michigan Senate race, Republican Mike Rogers. One of the biggest donors to the Rogers campaign in Michigan is a rich Texas Islamophobe -- and anti-Semite -- who has been instrumental in pushing the Texas Republican Party in the direction of Muslim-bashing.

I'm talking about Tim Dunn. Along with fellow far-right oil billionaire Farris Wilks, Dunn has been pushing the Texas GOP farther and farther to the right in recent years. They were the major funders of Bo French's successful primary campaign this year.

A political action committee funded by Texas’ most prolific hardline conservative donors was the main benefactor to Bo French’s campaign for the Texas Railroad Commission in the March Republican primary, spending $375,000 to bolster his bid.

The Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice, formerly known as Defend Texas Liberty, gave French $225,000 and spent another $150,000 on an ad promoting his candidacy in a widely circulated conservative newsletter. The two PACs have been predominantly financed by West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have deployed tens of millions of dollars to pull the Texas GOP and Legislature toward their hardline, anti-LGBTQ+ and immigration stances.

Dunn and Wilks provided this support before French's notorious tweet lamenting the fact that people of South Asian descent were rooting for the Texas Longhorns, but they gave the money well after French posted an online poll asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?”

Respondents had two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”

French's bigotry is constant -- and that appears to be just fine with Tim Dunn. Dunn and Wilks also bankrolled Nate Schatzline's successful run for the state legislature in 2022. Earlier this year, their True Texas Project funded a conference that

promises to educate attendees about the “threats of sharia law, totalitarianism and communism” that they say threaten their Christian faith....

Conference speakers include Texas Sen. Bob Hall of Rockwall, who compared Islam to Nazism at a state education hearing in June; State Rep. Andy Hopper of Wise County, who suggested banning Islam as a religion at a political event in March; [and] State Rep. Brent Money of Greenville, who formed an anti-sharia legislative caucus this year....

This year, Dunn reached beyond Texas to give millions of dollars to Mike Rogers in Michigan:

A Texas oil billionaire with deep ties to the Christian Nationalist movement and a rising presence in the national GOP scene, has contributed $5 million to a super PAC backing Republican Mike Rogers’ U.S. Senate campaign in Michigan, marking a foray into Midwest politics.

Tim Dunn’s contributions to the Great Lakes Conservative Fund, or GLCF, were made in two installments of $2.5 million each in April and June and accounted for more than 98% of the PAC’s total fundraising during the first half of 2025....

Dunn isn't just an Islamophobe -- he's a Christian nationalist who doesn't believe Jews should hold leadership positions in politics.

Former Republican Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, told the Texas Tribune that Dunn felt he was unqualified to hold that position, telling him in 2010 that “only Christians should hold leadership positions” in that state’s lower chamber.

Yesterday, on X, we heard from Ray Wert, a journalist who was a senior staffer to former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. Wert is married to Mallory McMorrow, who ran in this year's Michigan Democratic Senate primary along with Stevens and El-Sayed. Long before Stevens endorsed Mike Rogers, Wert -- who's Jewish -- encouraged Stevens to put her name on an op-ed denouncing the bigotry surrounding the Mike Rogers campaign. Wert says she refused.

The op-ed mentioned the large contribution from Tim Dunn and Dunn's belief that Jews shouldn't hold positions of power in politics. It also said this about Rogers:

Now let's look at the people working to elect him. On February 25, someone on X asked what should be done about Jews. A college student named Cameron Dundas replied: "Send them to North Korea?" Weeks later, Mike Rogers named him as his campus lead at a Michigan university.

He isn't the only one. Alexander Richmond, the Rogers for Senate campus lead at the University of Michigan, defended participants in the leaked Young Republicans group chat. You may remember that chat. "I love Hitler." Black Americans called "monkeys." Musings about sending political opponents to the gas chambers. Rape described as "epic."
་
So what did Mike Rogers' campaign say when asked about all of it? "There are a lot of people across the state, with varying viewpoints."

... did Rogers cut ties with Richmond? Nope! In fact, there's pictures of the two of them tailgating at the Michigan football game two weeks ago.

... when people who hold the Jewish people in contempt attached themselves to his campaign and his money, Mike Rogers made a calculation. He kept the check. He kept the coalition. And he has never answered for it.

The post-Trump Republican Party is emerging. It will be very Islamophobic. It might not fully embrace anti-Semitism, but it will keep the door open open to unabashed anti-Semites. Haley Stevens has chosen the Republican in this race. That's what she's siding with. He took millions from a hatemonger.

And while we're on this subject, let's start asking elite media gatekeepers why they don't think the bigotry of billionaires like Dunn, Wilks, and Elon Musk warrants the wall-to-wall, day-after-day coverage that Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur received in this Michigan Senate race this year.

I'D LIKE A DEEP DIVE ON HOW HALEY STEVENS DECIDED TO SHIV ABDUL EL-SAYED (updated)

The most curious thing about Haley Stevens's decision to shiv Abdul El-Sayed in the last week of the Michigan Senate campaign has nothing to do with Muslims, Jews, or Israel. It's this:

[In September,] Stevens appeared on TMZ Live and [fiancé Jason] Turkish tagged along. Stevens was visibly excited during the segment, at one point turning to hosts Harvey Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere and saying,

“Isn’t he cute,” she shared.

“His name is Jason and he loves me to pieces,” she added.

Haley Stevens ran unsuccessfully for Senate this year, giving up her House seat in order to do so. She's 43 years old, and it's perfectly understandable that she's trying to set up a second act for herself. But she a local pol. She didn't have much of a national profile in September, when this appearance took place. Why was she being interviewed on TMZ Live, which is mostly an entertainment gossip show but also dabbles in politics?

I assume someone at TMZ wanted to help her do a soft launch of her post-congressional career. It's odd to me that the boyfriend was there -- he had no public profile at the time -- but there he was.

And there he was again this week, on multiple platforms, including TMZ again.

Turkish, who announced his engagement to Stevens less than three months ago, has spent the past several days loudly condemning El-Sayed on every platform available to him, while announcing that he plans to vote for Rogers due to El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel.

Turkish, a Democratic donor living in Michigan who has also given to GOP candidates, attended a campaign event for Rogers Wednesday night. While there, he called El-Sayed antisemitic. Then, as Stevens sat for an interview with the New York Times on Friday, Turkish went on TMZ and, on his fiancée’s behalf, said “I don’t think she’s going to be supporting Abdul El-Sayed very much longer.”

Stevens, however, has repeatedly insisted she is still supporting El-Sayed.

Thiks is from a Mother Jones story with the headline "Haley Stevens’ Fiancé Seems Dedicated to Ruining Her Career" -- but I strongly doubt that he's going rogue in defiance of Stevens's wishes.

After Abdul El-Sayed beat her in the primary, I think Stevens agreed to endorse him under intense pressure from the party, and she's been chafing ever since. I think she feels locked into the commitment she made to the party when she endorsed El-Sayed, and Turkish's endorsement of Rogers is her way of stabbing El-Sayed in the back without actually withdrawing her endorsement.

This has the earmarks of an operation cooked up in cooperation with the Republican Party and its media wing. You'll never guess where else Turkish appeared in recent days:

The fiancé of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) joined Fox News on Saturday to trash Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as antisemitic just days before the midterm elections.

Jason Turkish joined Griff Jenkins on Fox & Friends Weekend to discuss his headline-grabbing endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race....

Turkish ... described himself as a “lifelong Democrat” ...

There's the tell. This is a GOP op. There's very little that the Republican Party and the right-wing media love more than a person who can spew GOP talking points while saying, I'm a lifelong Democrat.

I don't think this is fake outrage on the part of Stevens and Turkish. But I think the specifics of the rollout are being coordinated with the GOP and the Rogers campaign. It seems obvious to me that Stevens has decided that her future is as a Democratic apostate. And I guess you can't blame her. There always a place in the right-wing media-sphere for anyone who decides to go this route.

*****

UPDATE: OMG.

Rep. Haley Stevens ... attended church services Sunday morning with Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers — a highly unusual move for a sitting Democrat in the waning days of a marquee race for a seat her party is fighting to hold.

Stevens and Rogers were seen separately entering Perfecting Church, a prominent Black church in the city.

Just admit it: You support Rogers. You voted for Rogers. You want El-Sayed to lose. Have the moral integrity to tell the truth.

*****

UPDATE: So she's officially endorsed Mike Rogers.

Haley Stevens says she is endorsing Mike Rogers for the U.S. Senate

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— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) November 1, 2026 at 12:35 PM

Note that she still describes herself as "a proud Democrat." So now we know: She clearly intends to continue bullshitting us that way, probably for years to come, while parroting GOP talking points. I bet she'll even call herself "a proud Democrat" in her inevitable 2028 Republican convention speech.