THE MULTI-FRONT WAR TO DELEGITIMIZE DEMOCRATS AND BLUNT A BLUE WAVE

It doesn't matter how big the Democratic wave is on Tuesday -- our political culture will never acknowledge that the party deserves power.

We're already being told that a Democratic win won't really be a Democratic win. Here's a Ruy Teixeira op-ed in The Washington Post. Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002 but has increasingly positioned himself as a Democrat-bashing Democrat.

Democrats are on course to have a stunningly good 2026 election....

But, paradoxically, the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.

Celebration is easy; confronting underlying problems is hard. Thus, when Republicans get shellacked on Nov. 3, expect Democrats to see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party rather than a repudiation of the GOP — a far more plausible explanation.

But a Politico story suggests that Democrats, or at least Democratic politicians and operatives, won't see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party. They've already internalized the "Sure, they voted for us, but they still hate us" message.

More than a dozen lawmakers, campaign operatives, strategists and pollsters warned in interviews that national Democrats risk drawing the wrong conclusions if they take back control of at least one chamber of Congress next week.

Those figures from across the party worry that the midterms, which have become a referendum on President Donald Trump, have done little to improve the Democratic Party’s brand. They caution that a favorable political environment has papered over persistent problems for a party still grappling with why it lost the 2024 presidential election. And they admit they are still sharply divided over what its message should be heading into 2028.

“Don’t confuse them losing with us winning,” said Morgan Jackson, the senior adviser to Democrat Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign in North Carolina....

“This is not an affirmation of the Democratic Party in any which way,” said one veteran Democratic pollster working on Senate campaigns, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is very much a rejection of Trump.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times, which sets the agenda for much of the media, is fixating on a fake outrage Republicans are promoting, while overlooking a breaking story that should be deeply damaging to President Trump. Jamison Foser writes:

... the national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored [a] new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate....

At this writing, the New York Times has now run more than a dozen reports on this matter in just three days....

Meanwhile, the New York Times still has not told readers of a new rape allegation against Donald Trump that was made public on Monday in a report the New York Times dishonestly dismissed on grounds that “it largely cites allegations that have already been public.” The word “largely” is doing a awful lot of work in that sentence, given that the report includes a new rape allegation.

We know what the Times is doing, because the Times did this in 2016: It has concluded that the Democrats are likely to win this year, just as it concluded that Hillary Clinton was likely to win ten years ago, and has decided that the days just before Election Day are an excellent time to begin dragging the Democratic Party down, lest it get too uppity. I've said for decades here that the Times doesn't particularly like the far-right Republicans who rise to the top of the GOP, and often promotes Democrats who run against them or propose to clean up their messes, but it loathes Democrats once they've taken power -- and sometimes even when they're merely on the verge of accruing power. (The Times still yearns for a moderate Republican Party that hasn't existed in nearly half a century and will never exist again.)

And if all this isn't enough, we have the spectacle of Haley Stevens, an alleged Democrat who is clearly trying to defeat her party's Senate nominee in her home state because she's a ride-or-die Israel supporter and he's a Muslim and fierce Israel critic. Stevens, presumably under pressure, endorsed Abdul El-Sayed after he defeated her in the primary. But this week she began orchestrating a series of passive-aggressive attacks on El-Sayed, sitting by and insisting she still supports him even as her former campaign chair and her fiancé made headlines by expressing support for El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. The fiancé also showed up at a Rogers rally.

And then it got worse. Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell got Stevens and El-Sayed to agree on a unity rally, scheduled for tomorrow at a Black church in Detroit, along with South Carolina congressman James Clyburn. But Stevens then made two demands: that El-Sayed condemn an ad from an outside group associated with podcaster Cenk Ugyur that had been denounced as anti-Semitic (with some justification), and that El-Sayed take down an ad cheekily placed by his campaign on Fox News and Newsmax broadcasts -- an ad featuring words of praise from right-wing media figures, among them Tucker Carlson (who is an anti-Semite, but says nothing anti-Semitic in the ad).

El-Sayed has now asked Stevens not to appear at tomorrow's rally. I worry that she'll show up and bum-rush the lectern like Kanye bum-rushing Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards.

We can all envision the future of Haley Stevens. The carefully staged announcement that she's quit the Democratic Party. The book deal. The many, many appearances on Fox and CBS. The op-eds for The Free Press -- and, probably, The New York Times.

You can say that she's trying to prevent an electoral victory that will empower anti-Semites even if El-Sayed himself doesn't share their beliefs. But what Stevens is doing puts her in league with people who literally want to make Islam illegal in America.

Read some of what Texas Monthly has reported on Nate Schatzline, a top advisor to Governor Gregg Abbott on election security:

“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.”

... Among his goals for the coming year: preventing mosques from serving as polling places; cracking down on what he claimed is a Muslim practice of casting votes on behalf of long-dead relatives; and working with Abbott and right-wing Texas House members to reclassify Islam as a political ideology—a move that the far right has long sought so that it can legally target Muslims without running afoul of religious-liberty protections.

Emphasis added. And by "religious-liberty protections," we mean "the Bill of Rights."

Schatzline isn't alone, of course:

Bo French, the nominee for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission, has argued that we must “round up” every Muslim.... And in June, at the Texas GOP’s convention, delegates openly celebrated the party’s lurch toward overt Islamophobia, pushing for Muslim Republicans to leave the party and branding Islam a “disease.”

This is the nationwide future of the Republican Party, a party Stevens will probably join soon. For now, she's trying to reduce her current party's power in the Senate, as are a lot of other nominally non-Republican figures, in many different ways.

DEMOCRATS MIGHT SHELLAC THE GOP, BUT WE'LL STILL BE IN "THE TRUMP ERA"

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

I keep seeing pundit musing about the end of the Trump era....

I think it’s highly likely that Democrats gain thirty or forty seats in the House next week, and win enough Senate races to control that chamber by four or five votes.

I think Democrats will make big gains in the House. I'm less sanguine about the Senate. Too many of the races Democrats are counting on are still well within the polling margin of error, at a time when there are signs that Democrats are much more willing to respond to pollsters than Republicans are. If I had to guess, I'd say that Democrats will fall short in at least some of the states where the polls say they're leading. My guess is Democrats will get to 51 or 52 seats, though I agree it's quite possible they'll do better.

But the question is: what then? Donald Trump and his base have no commitment to democracy because, among other reasons, they’re not democrats in even the loosest sense. Trump is a straight-up authoritarian, at the head of a mass anti-democratic political movement that at this point has most if not all of the hallmarks of contemporary neo-fascism.

Trump has already engaged in open flagrant sedition, in an attempt to overturn the results of a national election. He did this at a time when the upper reaches of his administration were not nearly as stacked with unhinged zealots and cultists as they are at present. That crime was also committed at a time when the Republican party was not nearly as all-in on supporting him no matter what he might do as it is now....

Why, given all this, do so many people seem so confident that Trump will in any sense whatsoever accept the results of an unambiguous electoral repudiation of his party and his movement? Because there will be nothing he can do about it? But that assumes a very great deal about how far Trump and his supporters throughout the federal government, the military, the courts, the governments of red states, the mobs in the street, etc. are or are not willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation.

I think we'll avoid the worst outcomes, for a couple of reasons.

First, Donald Trump is an authoritarian, but in one sense, he's not a "straight-up" authoritarian. A straight-up authoritarian would study the battlefield -- American democracy -- and identify and set in motion the most effective ways he could neutralize it. A straight-up authoritarian wouldn't spend hours every day on architectural projects, wouldn't be writing 1,318-word social media rants about a streaming-cable political comedian, wouldn't be entrusting his attempted election steal to government lawyers who struggle to obtain indictments. He'd figure out what works and do more of it.

How far are Trump and his supporters willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation? This seems like a scary answer, but on one level it isn't: they're willing to go far as Trump tells them to go. It's still much, much farther than they would be permitted to go if this were a well-functioning democracy, but they don't seem to be getting the go signal for a true authoritarian crackdown. Trump and Pete Hegseth don't appear to have mobilized the military. Mobs of MAGA thugs aren't launching unprovoked pre-election attacks on Democrats all over the country. Trump is appealing the many, many court rulings that have gone against him, but he isn't defying them.

I continue to believe that Trump isn't prepared to stop a Democratic wave election by any means necessary. What he is prepared to do is empower his administration to put together a dog's breakfast of anti-Democratic acts that don't add up to a comprehensive election-stealing plan but make him feel good.

So at a time when Democrats are likely to win a double-digit margin in the House, he's targeted precisely one specific House candidate, Ilhan Omar. She was elected in 2024 by a margin of nearly 50 points, and she'll probably win by an even bigger margin this year. Maybe he'll obtain an indictment against her. Maybe she'll be in a cell when the new Congress is sworn in. But Democrats are still likely to have a large House majority without her.

Trump's other gambit for saving the House seems to be the Justice Department's effort to block voting in California unless the state agrees not to count ballots from approximately 20,000 people the feds claim are illegally registered voters. Democrats are likely to win 47 of the state's 52 House races; if the Trump regime could take all those seats off the board altogether and convene a California-less House in January, Republicans would likely retain their majority. But the courts have rebuffed this effort so far, noting that there's no reason contested voters' ballots can't be challenged between Election Day and the scheduled election certification in December.

(Keep in mind that approximately 20,000 voters -- many of whom will undoubtedly prove to be citizens or non-voters -- spread out over 52 congressional districts average out to approximately 400 per district. It's likely that no House race in California will be decided by a margin that small.)

In the Senate, Republicans might have struck pay dirt with the story of Democratic operative in Alaska recruiting a candidate with the same name as the GOP incumbent. Alaska's Republican governor has ordered an investigation and says the state might not certify a win by Democrat Mary Peltola, even though there's no evidence that she was personally involved, and even though the state Supreme Court okayed the candidacy of the same-named candidate. This one could get tied up in court for months. But the feds' pursuit of Peltola is a strategy to try to win one seat. It's not an overall strategy to steal the Senate.

Yet I think Trump would be satisfied with this. Like millions of other Fox News grandpas, I think he's content -- in a way a true authoritarian wouldn't be -- with the opportunity to turn on the TV and see a lot of ragebait stories hinting that the evil Democrats are getting away with something. A true authoritarian would have a plan to prevent the opposition from winning; Trump seems content to have Attorney General Todd Blanche as his personal content creator. Alaska was rigged! An immigration fraudster won in Minneapolis! There was massive cheating in California! Trump seems as if he'd be satisfied believing that Republicans should have won.

It might get worse than that -- thugs at the polls, mobs in Washington. But it looks as if lawsuits rather than jackboots are Trump's go-to this year. The key person seems to be Blanche, not Pete Hegseth or Markwayne Mullin or Stephen Miller. That's Trump's lifelong happy place: employing lawyers to make trouble for his enemies in court. Unlike a true authoritarian, I don't think he cares if it works, as long as he's certain he's right, and as long as he keeps on fighting.

This is why we can't talk about "the Trump era" ending on Tuesday. We'll still have to endure this exhausting and extremely Trumpian post-election battle. Peltola and Omar might be targets long after the new Congress is sworn in. Trump will still command attention, even if it's in defeat. We'll probably save democracy from him for the most part, but we won't be able to get rid of him that easily.

THE BOMBING WILL RESUME ON ELECTION NIGHT, WON'T IT?

It sure looks as if Democrats will win the Senate as well as the House next week.

A new CNN poll in Michigan finds Abdul El-Sayed (D) leading Mike Rogers (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 42%....

The same poll in Texas finds James Talarico (D) leading Ken Paxton (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 43%....

The same poll in Maine finds Troy Jackson (D) leading Susan Collins (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 45%....

The same poll in Kansas finds Adam Hamilton (D) leading Roger Marshall (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 49% to 45%.

This is happening as the U.S. prepares to resume bombing in Iran. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. has told several Gulf Arab countries to be prepared for a short, intense military campaign after the U.S. midterm elections, people briefed on the conversations said....

The U.S. military is sending an additional Patriot system to Israel from Texas to beef up its missile defenses in the country, according to flight-tracking data and two officials with knowledge of the movement. The U.S. has also moved troops off bases in the Middle East where they were vulnerable in preparation for an escalation, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

U.S. forces in the region have been restocking their munitions, and bomber aircraft and jet fighters are preparing for strikes, some of the officials said. An additional aircraft-carrier strike group and Marine expeditionary unit are also poised to join an armada of roughly 20 other warships operating in the Middle East next month, although some ships could rotate out....

President Trump hasn’t decided to go ahead but is leaning toward a large postelection attack that could target Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites, people familiar with his thinking said.

I think it's all but inevitable. And when will the attacks resume?

I expect them to start on Election Night.

Trump isn't a 24-hour news cycle guy. He grew up in a world of newspapers and Walter Cronkite. He thinks what's important for public perception on a given day is that day's headline story.

On the day after Election Day, he's planning to declare that positive results for Democrats are a sign that the election was rigged. He'll have Todd Blanche at the Justice Department pursuing legal harassmnent of winning Democrats. He'll have Mike Johnson hitting the fainting couch after a handful of DSA Democrats win. Johnson might echo Florida congressman Randy Fine's assertion that Ilhan Omar should be expelled from the House. If Mary Peltola and Abdul El-Sayed win, there'll be talk that they shouldn't be seated.

But Democratic wins could be so massive that the perception of a massive defeat for the GOP can't be avoided, even by people in the Republican information bubble. And even though I don't expect Trump to do a lot of deep reading next Wednesday, he won't be happy if the big, bold headline in the print The New York Times declares a Democratic rout. He won't be happy if the lede at CNN and even Fox is similar.

So I think he'll drop bombs Tuesday night, to ensure that the election isn't the only top headline on Wednesday. He might not do this if the blue wave is just a ripple. But if cable news anchors are reporting a resounding defeat for Trump, watch the bombs fall.

TRUMP IS USING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AS HIS PERSONAL SPA

Donald Trump hasn't been having particularly good luck in court in recent days. There's this, for instance:

A federal grand jury in D.C. rejected an attempt by the Justice Department to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for the account she gave lawmakers of President Donald Trump’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol....

In a brief court appearance Tuesday afternoon, Neville S. Hedley, who introduced himself as the acting senior litigation counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui that the grand jury had not concurred on the proposed indictment. Hedley did not specify the defendant, but the people familiar said he was referring to Hutchinson.

And this:

A federal judge on Tuesday expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s effort to force California to set aside some 20,000 mail ballots that the federal government claimed were sent to noncitizens.

After listening to arguments for several hours in a packed Los Angeles courtroom, the judge, David O. Carter of U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ... suggested that he was unconvinced by the Justice Department’s argument that urgent action was necessary to halt illegal voting ahead of next week’s election. California counties have until Dec. 3 to certify elections, he noted, giving the government enough time to examine ballots and determine if any were cast illegally.

Also:

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a new charge against a pair of former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress, finding the Justice Department took novel — and improper — steps to announce the allegation.

Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said at a hearing that prosecutors created “their own category of charging” with the new complaint they tried to bring against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, who were initially charged last week with making false statements to Congress about their level of knowledge about an investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop....

Flores and Benavides have been targets of withering criticism from allies of President Donald Trump. Both were involved with election security issues around the 2020 contest, which Trump falsely claims was rigged. After they were arrested last week, Trump said, “I heard they were bad people.”

Trump loses in court on a regular basis. Yet his attorney general, Todd Blanche, just keeps throwing cases against the wall, especially as Election Day approaches.

In recent days Mr. Blanche and his team have announced, unsealed or initiated a succession of headline-grabbing actions certain to placate Mr. Trump’s demand for results, many targeting his longtime adversaries or promoting contested claims of election fraud....

On Monday, a federal judge in Washington unsealed new charges against James B. Comey, the third criminal case brought against the former F.B.I. director Mr. Trump openly reviles.

Also, we've had

intensification of an immigration investigation into Representative Ilhan Omar, a sharp critic of the White House; [and] the indictment of L. Louise Lucas, a Virginia state lawmaker, accused of overseeing a criminal conspiracy to sell marijuana....

All of this is why I disagree with something Jamelle Bouie says about Trump's feelings regarding the law:

Donald Trump is not the first president to break the law. He is not the first president to disregard the law. He is not even the first president to insist that his actions cannot, on some deep ontological level, be illegal. But he may be the first president to abandon the pretense that the law matters at all.

... He thinks he is a law unto himself; that he holds sovereign authority over the entire country; that he can rule by decree and punish those who resist. As one would expect, his administration has been an exercise in breaking the law, exceeding its bounds and violating its spirit.

This is true up to a point -- Trump think he's a law unto himself and can rule by decree -- but it's wrong to say that he think the law doesn't matter at all.

He knows that judges can rebuff him. He knows that they do this on a regular basis. Even the bootlickers on the Supreme Court rebuff him occasionally.

But while he'd prefer to win, just fighting these judges is lifefuel for him. He enjoys the combat, and he doesn't feel the least bit chastened or afflicted by self-doubt when he loses.

Trump is corrupt, and he believes everyone else is as corrupt as he is. When he loses in court, he tells himself -- and often tells the entire country -- that the courts are crooked and the system is rigged.

This belief is soothing to him, especially as he's approaching midterm elections his party is likely to lose badly. Believing that the courts are rigged (and that grand juries are corrupt as well) tells him that he's not really losing, or he wouldn't be losing if it weren't for the fact that the judges are enemies and crooks.

Notice that his underlings generally keep their jobs if they file weak cases that get thrown out of court, even if the filings are prepared hastily and riddled with typos.

A letter federal prosecutors sent on Monday to officials in Washington State seeking help in protecting “the integrity” of the midterms referred to “voter roles” — misspelling voter rolls. The Justice Department’s lawsuit in Alaska last week omitted the key verb describing the action it wanted the court to take.

It's fine with Trump even if an indictment isn't really an indictment.

The fact that Comey is charged in an information, and not an indictment, has legal significance. As a reminder, here’s the difference: An indictment is a criminal charge issued by a grand jury that hears the prosecutor’s evidence and makes a finding that there is probable cause to support the charges. An information is a document drafted by prosecutors and signed only by them....

The Fifth Amendment requires the government to go to a grand jury to charge a federal felony. Informations are used when a defendant has cut a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to waive indictment. Comey did not. So this is a “waiverless information.” Prosecutors ... could not proceed with this case without taking it to the grand jury for indictment first.

Trump is using the Justice Department to file weak cases. When their weaknesses are exposed, Trump feels persecuted -- a feeling he deeply enjoys and treats as proof of his rightness. He could theoretically be shutting down courts that rebuff him -- as I assume some future, even more fascist Republican president will -- but he isn't. He's content with this. The fight alone is like a deep-tissue massage for him.

THE ELECTION-STEALING PROBLEM TRUMP HASN'T SOLVED: THE SPECTACLE OF ELECTION DAY

Surprising absolutely no one, the president and his allies have been arguing that the upcoming midterms are rigged. The Washington Post reports:

President Donald Trump and his allies have spent the final weeks before the midterms showering his supporters with a relentless stream of doubt about the legitimacy of the election, priming them to question results if Republicans lose.

In court, the administration is telegraphing its readiness to challenge results based on alleged fraud. In podcasts and social media posts that are delivered nonstop to Trump’s core backers, right-wing influencers are telling supporters to expect cheating.

... That messaging has, in particular, pushed overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud — themes that are twice as prevalent as they were during the 2024 election cycle, The Post’s analysis found.

This has been going on for a decade -- as the Post notes, "Trump has questioned election results ever since 2016, when he won the presidency but lost the popular vote and alleged that more than 3 million people voted illegally." But all it's done, except among Trump's base, is convey the impression that Trump is a whiny little sore loser.

A survey this month by The Post, ABC News and Ipsos found just 28 percent of Americans are confident Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose.

A solid majority of Americans think the election will be fair and honest, according to multiple surveys. From the Post:

The New York Times says:

And from NPR:

Three-quarters of likely voters are confident that their state and local governments will run a fair and accurate election.

That includes solid majorities of Democrats (88%), Republicans (68%) and independents (75%), but Republicans were 20 points less likely than Democrats to think they would be run well. MAGA supporters were almost 30 points less likely.

Trump, his party, and his media allies have succeeded in making Republican voters much more paranoid about elections than Democrats, but even among Republicans, only a minority believe that elections are crooked and rigged.

Why have the would-be election stealers failed at thoroughly discrediting elections?

I think there's something about Election Day, and the election process in general, that they haven't found a way to discredit and don't quite understand. I know that there's no single "Election Day" anymore, but even across multiple days, the process has the feeling of a good old-fashioned civic ritual, with ordinary people -- people who could be your neighbors -- checking in voters, and ordinary people voting. It doesn't feel corrupt. It feels wholesome.

The vote counting is more of a media spectacle, but it taps into our inclination to enjoy contests -- sporting events, reality TV, entertainment awards. I've said this a few times over the years: the media rituals of vote counting seem straghtforward and focused on fine details. Harry Enten and Steve Kornacki will be on your TV talking about not just the current vote totals, but how many votes are outstanding in which precincts, suggesting a potential for certain outcomes that might or might not happen. It's similar to the way baseball announcers might discuss a pitcher's statistics as he's facing a batter with the potential winning run on second base. The impression conveyed is of a contest that's real and legitimate.

On Election Night, even Fox News covers the results this way, for the most part. This year, I assume CBS will do the same. The results are genuinely in doubt. Reporters and analysts don't talk as if the whole thing is fake and predetermined. We hear about waves of emotion at party headquarters. Some races are called quickly and others are in doubt for hours or days, and no one seemed to know in advance which ones would fall into which categories. It all feels real. And it feels real in part because we participated in it.

I don't think Republican disinformationists understands this. They certainly haven't figured out a way to counter it. I think that partly explains why they haven't even persuaded most of their own electorate that the whole thing is fake.

WHY THE TRUMP REGIME'S ALASKA INTERVENTION MAKES ME ANGRY (BESIDES THE OBVIOUS REASONS)

This isn't the most important story in the world right now, though it could be hugely significant after Election Day.

For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.

Last week, Mr. Trump opened a new front.

Rather than simply push false claims at his rallies or target voters his administration claims should not be on the rolls, Mr. Trump moved to pre-emptively challenge the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses.

... the Justice Department ... asked a federal court to block the certification of the election if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose by a slim margin. The administration argued the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical name on the ballot has skewed the election toward Democrats.

But the Constitution says that elections are supposed to be run by the states, and the state of Alaska has addressed this issue, as Steve Vladeck notes:

For starters, the “voter confusion” issue has already been litigated in Alaska’s state courts. In June, the state disqualified Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher, on the ground that he filed to run for the Senate “with a purpose to confuse or mislead.” But a superior court judge reinstated him, holding that the state’s decision rested on a “previously unstated, ‘good faith’ criteria” found nowhere in Alaska law, and that the state had other tools to address confusion. On June 29, three hours after oral argument, the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed.

Let me just stop here and point out that there was a similar situation in the Massachusetts gubernatorial election of 1978. The Democratic nominee was a conservative known as Ed King -- he'd beaten Michael Dukakis in the primary. (Dukakis won his old job back four years later and was perceived as a successful governor when he ran for president in 1988, but he'd fallen into disfavor in '78.) Ed King was Edward J. King -- but there was another conservative candidate, named Edward F. King, who lost the Republican primary and then made his way onto the November ballot as an independent.

I was in college in New York in 1978, but I still voted back in Boston. I remember my mother getting postcards from the Edward J. King campaign that showed his middle initial in large, bold type and made clear which King was which. If you're in this situation, that's what you need to do -- find ways of clearing up the confusion for the voters. (Can't Elon Musk just pour a few millions or billions into that effort on Sullivan's behalf?)

Edward J. King, the Democrat, won the general election, beating Republican Frank Hatch by more than 100,000 votes. I can't find the other King's vote total -- the website of the Massachusetts secretary doesn't even report it -- but there were fewer than 6,000 votes for "all others."

Massachusetts voters in 1978 probably found it slightly easier to distinguish the two Kings -- ballots listed each party's candidates vertically under the party's name. They would have found Edward J. King under the Democratic header.

Alaska ballots don't look like that -- but the state has made it very clear which one is the incumbent Republican senator, by designating him on the ballot as both a "Republican" and an "Incumbent."

It's his job to tell people: Vote for me, the guy with "Incumbent" after his name.

Are Alaska voters capable of learning a new thing in a Senate election? They were in 2010. Remember, that's the year when a Tea Party extremist named Joe Miller beat incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary. Alaska now has all-party "jungle" primaries and sends the top four vote-getters to the general election, but in 2010, Alaska had a traditional voting system. Once Murkowski lost her party's primary, she couldn't appear on the general election ballot, not even as an independent, the way Edward F. King ran in Massachusetts in 1978.

So she ran as a write-in -- which meant she had to teach voters how to spell her name. As it turned out, the state accepted ballots that misspelled her name but matched it phonetically. It didn't matter. She beat Miller by more than 10,000 votes. Miller challenged the accepted ballots that had slight misspellings of her name, but, as the Anchorage Daily News reported at the time,

Even subtracting all the votes counted for Murkowski but challenged by the Miller campaign, Murkowski would still be ahead by 2,247 votes. That margin appears to make Miller's lawsuit asking the courts to toss out misspelled votes irrelevant. There aren't enough misspelled votes identified for Miller to win.

So Alaska voters are capable of learning. That means they're capable of learning which Dan Sullivan is which.

And as Steve Vladeck notes,

Alaska has ranked-choice voting—meaning someone who is confused can rank the two Sullivans first and second, which, barring some incredibly unlikely scenario, means a vote for the imposter Sullivan will effectively end up as a vote for the incumbent Sullivan.

Right. And we also know that the two Sullivans were on the ballot in the primary -- Alaska has all-party "jungle" primaries now -- and all evidence suggests that the presence of the non-incumbent was not the reason Peltola finished first:

... when this same issue arose in the primary, not only did the imposter receive far fewer votes than the margin separating Sullivan from former Rep. Mary Peltola, but it at least appears that many of the votes the other Sullivan did receive came from heavily Democratic precincts.

Here's how the top three candidates finished:

All of this is moot if Mary Peltola wins more than 50% of the vote in the general election -- though it wouldn't surprise me if the Justice Department sues anyway. A flat-out Peltola majority would mean, to a rational person, that a majority of Alaska voters wanted her to beat the incumbent and nothing else in the electoral process matters. But it wouldn't surprise me if the Justice Department refuses to drop the suit, claiming that an unquantifiable miasma of confusion led to the result, even though Alaska voters have demonstrated that they know how to read and process basic information.

The administration wants newly elected Democrats to come in under a cloud of suspicion. That's why this lawsuit wasn't filed before the Alaska general election ballot was finalized. Republicans know they're going to suffer some serious losses. They want their base to perceive all of those losses as fake.

NOTHING TODAY

Busy day today. See you tomorrow.

REPUBLICANS ARE TRYING TO ROY COHN THE MIDTERMS

The Department of Justice is brazenly intervening in the Alaska Senate election, on the president's orders.

Donald Trump says he ordered the Department of Justice to sue the state of Alaska in an effort to block the results of a U.S. Senate election from being certified, unless the incumbent Republican wins.

Government attorneys filed a lawsuit Friday arguing that the presence of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot would confuse voters who support the sitting senator, Daniel S. Sullivan, in the unusual matchup of two candidates with the same name up against a Democratic candidate.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday. “They have two Dan Sullivans.”

As The New York Times notes, this has already been litigated at the state level. (Keep in mind that the Constitution says that states run elections, though they're constrained by laws Congress passes. The Executive Branch has no role to play.)

Carol Beecher, the director of the state’s Division of Elections, initially rejected the other Mr. Sullivan’s application to run for the Senate seat, finding that he was not a good-faith candidate and was trying to confuse or mislead voters. But Mr. Sullivan sued, and a trial court held in June that he could be on the ballot. The Alaska Supreme Court affirmed that ruling.

The Trump administration appears to have no case.

“It is one of the weakest election lawsuits I’ve ever seen,” said Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor who specializes in election issues. “It should have no realistic chance of success in the courts.”

While the administration is doing this, it's also threatening election officials in California.

The Department of Justice sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots.

The letter — sent to every county in the state, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles — also said local officials would “risk significant federal scrutiny” if they failed to comply with the Justice Department’s demands.

Some of what the Justice Department has sent to California counties is already demonstrably wrong:

In rural Inyo County, along the Nevada border, the registrar of voters said the list she was sent included just two people, and neither of them had been issued ballots. Danielle Sexton, the registrar, said her records showed they had never voted anywhere in California.

And in Mendocino County, a rugged stretch on the north coast, the registrar said the list she received was completely wrong.

“It’s not our voters that were listed,” said Katrina Bartolomie, the Mendocino clerk-recorder. “It’s from another county.”

Meanwhile, the administration's efforts to obtain unredacted voter rolls have been rebuffed in court in 27 out of 27 cases. The intimidation efforts in Alaska and California are likely to suffer a similar fate.

But apart from the Trumpers' apparent belief that they might as well try everything in case something works for them, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill, I see something else going on here.

This is an effort to create a vibe. I'm sure "vibe" is not the word the president would use, but it's a concept he's familiar with.

Trump learned how to manipulate public opinion from his early mentor, Roy Cohn. The mob lawyer's advice was simple: Never apologize. Never admit error. Never admit defeat. Always stay on offense.

Cohn wouldn't have used the word "vibe" either, but a major reason for this strategy is that if it works, it creates what we'd now call a vibe. The vibe is: We're fighting. We're the aggressors. And we're going to win.

I think that alone is intended to motivate the portion of past Republican base voters who up to this point seemed likely to sit out the midterms or vote Democratic. Up till now, the vibe has been: Democrats are winning. Democrats are winning in places where they shouldn't be winning. Trump is weak. The MAGA era is over. This White House aggression is meant to create a new narrative and a new vibe, even if none of the aggressive acts succeed.

They think their voters will turn out if they see their party fighting. I think that's also a major reason Vivek Ramaswamy is all in on that ad featuring a denunciation of his opponent, Amy Acton, by Acton's pedophile-enabling, fugitive-harboring mother: In Ramaswamy's view, it doesn't matter that the ad is morally repugnant and dishonest, nor does it matter that even some Republicans have denounced it. Ramaswamy may not care whether voters believe it -- he just wants them to believe that he fights.

This is what Trump's supporters have always said about him: he fights. Until the price of gas crossed $4 a gallon, it didn't seem to matter to them whether he fought wisely, or fought for the right things. He could fight people who have no impact on their lives -- Rosie O'Donnell, Kaitlan Collins -- and they'd cheer.

For weeks we've been talking about terrible Republican candidates (Ken Paxton, Roger Marshall), and Democrats who are clearly punching above their weight (James Talarico, Jon Ossoff). If we start talking about GOP aggression -- it's already happening in the Ohio governor's race -- the vibe might shift. And somewhere in hell, Roy Cohn will be smiling.

DON'T BLAME TRUMPISM FOR THE RAMASWAMY AD

I appreciate Michelle Goldberg's outraged response to the Vivek Ramaswamy ad featuring Amy Acton's pedophile-enabling mother.

It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political advertisement so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it.

But her column describes the ad as Trumpist. It isn't. Its sheer depravity is Trumpian, but it could easily have been a GOP attack from the pre-Trump era.

Goldberg says that Ramaswamy has

opened a kind of proxy debate on the right about whether a post-Trump conservatism should try to reclaim some base-line morality or continue along its current smashmouth course.

But what was the "base-line morality" of the pre-Trump Republican Party? In 1988, the outgoing president, Ronald Reagan, suggested that Mike Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee, had undisclosed mental health issues. ("Look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid," Reagan said.) Dukakis was compelled to release years of medical records, and to deny that he had any such problems. This was shortly before a Republican senator alleged that there were photographs showing Dukakis's wife, Kitty, burning an American flag as a student. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the Republican nominee, George H.W. Bush, later said that his running mate, Dan Quayle, “damn sure never burned the American flag.”

In 1992, Bill Clinton was accused of spying for the Russians during a trip he took to Moscow in his twenties. He and his wife were subsequently accused of dozens of murders, and of running drugs out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas.

There weren't well-funded ad campaigns based on these falsehoods, but in 2004 there was a massive ad campaign dishonestly accusing John Kerry of earning his three Vietnam Purple Hearts under false pretenses. There was also a bestselling book and a viral moment when the extent of Kerry's wounds was mocked by Republican convention attendees wearing Purple Heart Band-Aids.

Donald Trump had nothing to do with any of this. This was the Party of Reagan. (I could also wind the clock back to the time of Richard Nixon.)

During the Barack Obama era, Trump might have tried to rush to the front of the birtherism parade, but he wasn't the first to allege that Obama's birth took place in Kenya rather than Hawaii. Trump wasn't primarily responsible for rumors that Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, a homosexual, a crack user, and a fake Columbia student. He's not the one who first said that Obama's bestselling memoir Dreams from My Father was actually written by Bill Ayers, a radical ex-felon, or that Obama's real father was a communist named Frank Marshall Davis. Trump spread many of those rumors, but none originated with him.

"Denouncing the Ramaswamy ad gives conservatives a chance to try to drag their movement out of the Trumpist gutter," Goldberg writes. But in all likelihood, no one who wants to win office as a Republican in the future will denounce it. Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has condemned it, but he's in his last year in office and is 79 years old. Goldberg cites criticism from National Review and Erick Erickson, but these are media figures, not politicians.

The ad won't be widely denounced by party members, because it's in keeping with what the GOP has been for many decades. This isn't a "Trumpist gutter." It's a Republican gutter.

IMPEACH MUSK?

David French has written a good column encouraging Democrats to pursue the impeachment of prominent figures in the Trump administration if they regain control of Congress. French reminds readers that officers other than presidents can be impeached:

The impeachment power is also broad. It extends to the president, vice president and all “civil officers” of the United States. While the term “civil officer” isn’t defined by the Constitution, it almost certainly extends to cabinet heads, ambassadors, other senior executive branch officials and federal judges.

And, as French reminds us,

it has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

Which brings me to Paul Krugman's latest Substack post, "It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk."

Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is quoted as saying that the administration was blind-sided: “There was no foreknowledge.”

... No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. Slowing down Starlink was, in effect, a U.S. intervention in a foreign conflict....

In modern warfare, where communication and real-time information are as important as rockets and artillery, Starlink is ... central to national security.... Decisions about which countries have full access to Starlink’s capacity are as much a matter of foreign policy and national security as decisions about which countries will be allowed to buy and operate U.S. high-tech weapons.

Such decisions cannot, must not, be left up to private individuals.

... Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy....

Krugman is right -- which is why, if we lived in a country that was functioning well under the U.S. Constitution, majority Democrats would impeach Musk next January, and a bipartisan supermajority would lock him out of government for life.

Is Musk eligible for impeachment? Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution says:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

French says that list certainly includes top government officials. But the plain text of this section says nothing about the prominence of the officials.

On September 30, Musk was named the co-leader of Project Meridian, a group advising the Defense Department on the future of warfare. His partners are Newt Gingrich and Palmer Luckey. This is a 120-day appointment, which means it will continue past the swearing-in of the new Congress.

Does that make Musk one of the "civil Officers of the United States"? Congress's Constitution Annotated page for this section says:

Aside from the President and Vice President, who are plainly identified in the Constitution’s text as impeachable officials, historical practice indicates that federal judges clearly qualify as officers subject to impeachment and removal, as the majority of proceedings have applied to those positions. Congress has also impeached the head of a cabinet-level Executive department. While this indicates a congressional understanding that high-level Executive officers may be subject to impeachment, it is unclear how far down the ranks of the federal bureaucracy this principle travels.

I suspect that if the parties were reversed and Republicans wanted to impeach a similar appointee chosen by a Democrat, they'd simply proceed.

Could Musk avoid impeachment by resigning from Project Meridian? Constitution Annotated says:

The second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump centered on the question of whether former officials remain subject to trial by the Senate after leaving office. There is historical evidence to support an original understanding that former officials remain subject to conviction and punishment by the Senate for actions taken while in office. The constitutional text, however, does not directly address the question.

The purpose of a Musk impeachment would be "disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States," as Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 puts it. Would the Framers have understood this as the termination of Musk's government contracts? Again, I suspect that if the parties were reversed, the GOP would simply proceed as if that were the case.

But this is a pipe dream. Democrats who are dependent on tech money wouldn't go along. The "liberal" media would be split on the constitutionality of the move (and would respond sympathetically to the howls of outrage from their tech and non-tech billionaire pals). Republicans would rally around Musk and say the impeachment was the real national security threat, not Musk's pro-Moscow behavior (or his open support for Eurofascism). And there'd be a serious risk that Musk himself would go nuclear -- not literally (I hope), but I'm sure he could threaten dire consequences for the entire country if challenged in this way.

Nevertheless, he should be removed from the government -- for his geopolitcal interventions, for the abuses of DOGE, for his child porn. I don't think that will happen even if Democrats win a trifecta in 2028. But a guy can dream.

*****

OH, AND: Here's a reminder that Americans don't like Musk:

WHY VIVEK RAMASWAMY DOESN'T CARE THAT AMY ACTON'S UNFIT MOTHER IS ATTACKING HER WITH LIES

This was a horrible story, and then it got worse.

First, we learned that someone close to the campaign of the struggling Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee, Vivek Ramaswamy, made an ad featuring the estranged mother of the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton. In the ad, Acton's mother, Donna Arthur, calls her a liar, insisting that the story Acton tells about her difficult upbringing and the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother's most recent husband is false. Early reports noted that the ad had been leaked and hadn't actually run, and it wasn't clear who made it and whether it was ever intended to be released.

Then a couple of things happened. The media -- including the conservative National Review -- confirmed that Amy Acton is telling the truth and her mother isn't:

Acton has long maintained — even before becoming a political candidate — that she grew up in an unstable home when she lived with her mother following her parents’ divorce, even spending a winter in a tent in a campground outside of Youngstown and enduring sexual abuse by one of her mother’s male partners. Court records confirm many key parts of Acton’s account of her life.

“She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life,” Acton’s mother says in the ad.

While Donna Arthur was married to Cledith Arthur in 1978 when Acton was 12 years old, Cledith Arthur was charged with having sexual contact with her, documents show. Evidence against him included a sworn statement from Acton’s biological father, and Acton herself was called to testify as a witness. Following his indictment by a grand jury, Cledith Arthur skipped town.

Donna Arthur also has her own criminal history, including pleading guilty to theft by deception while living in Pennsylvania in the 1990s and being accused of animal abuse as recently as 2021....

Following the ad’s release Acton, who is locked in a tight race with Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, put out a statement from her brother confirming the candidates’s side of the story.

“After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died,” Philip Stearns, the brother, said in a press release from the campaign.

The Washington Post reported:

... Acton’s campaign provided extensive documentation, from court records and contemporary reports in local media, that corroborated her account that she and her brother were removed from their mother’s home after her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and indicted in 1978 and charged with rape of “Amy Stearns being less than thirteen (13) years of age.”

The arrest came after Acton’s biological father, Gerald Stearns, made a report to police.

Then the Arthurs left Ohio.

Law enforcement lost track of Cledith Arthur after he moved, though there were multiple warrants issued to bring him in.

So it appears that Acton's mother also harbored a fugitive from justice.

Is this ad now too toxic to air? Oh, no, my friends. This is the Republican Party of Gingrich, Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, Musk, and Trump. Ramaswamy isn't running away from the ad. He's owning it, and spreading it far and wide.

Late Tuesday, the campaign of Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy confirmed it produced a controversial commercial featuring the estranged birth mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton.

Despite drawing widespread condemnation from both parties for dragging Acton's traumatic upbringing into Ohio’s gubernatorial race, the campaign stated it intends to spend $4 million promoting the ad.

Why? Why run an ad that's been debunked and discredited, and that's based on the words of a horrible human being who was an enabler of child rape for years? Won't this infuriate and alienate many voters, in a state that already appears to be wary of Ramaswamy? (He trails Acton by nearly 4 points in the Real Clear Polling average, in a state Donald Trump won by double digits, despite multiple attacks on Acton's character that have been challenged by media fact-checkers.)

Ramaswamy doesn't care. He clearly believes that the main problem he needs to solve is motivating the hardcore Republican base to vote for him. He knows that a Republican can trot out any critic of a Democrat, however depraved or discredited, and the hardcore Republican base will believe that critic, and will treat any efforts to discredit that critic as lies and "fake news." He knows that hardcore Republican base voters live in an information bubble, a self-imposed North Korea of news where nothing that contradicts their prior beliefs is ever taken as a credible.

Oh, sure, it's the algorithms. But it's more than that. Republican voters outside the still-rabid base are slowly beginning to process the failings and shortcomings of the GOP officeholders they've supported in the past. Even the algorithms aren't preventing these people from rethinking their past loyalties. But the hardcore base believes only messaging that paints its heroes as pure good and Democrats as pure evil.

Ramaswamy thinks there are rabid GOP voters who still aren't sure about turning out for him. He wants them to vote. And he knows they'll believe anything that paints a Democrat as depraved and unfit, even if the rest of the state knows the assertions are a pack of lies. So of course he's all in on this ad. Next month, we'll know if he was right.

*****

Here's the ad, if you feel you need to see it and haven't watched it.

BOMBSHELL: Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s own mother urges voters not to vote for her daughter. “My name is Donna Arthur and I’m Amy Acton’s mother. I worked at Children and Family Service Association, building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America. I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent—and it’s not easy for a mother to say this—but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself. People can change, but first they have to tell the truth, and my daughter still isn’t doing that. Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse.” That’s one hell of an October surprise.

— Walter Curt (@wcdispatch) October 20, 2026

THEY'RE LOOKING FOR DNA IN ILHAN OMAR'S GARBAGE AND GETTING TIPS FROM AN AGING WINGNUT BLOGGER

I sometimes turn to the Murdoch media, particularly the New York Post, when I want to know what Republicans are doing, or at least what they want us to believe they're doing. Right now, according to the Post, they want us to believe that they have Ilhan Omar dead to rights on a charge right-wingers have leveled for years: that she once married her brother as a form of immigration fraud.

People familiar with the years-long criminal probe said the feds have made use of whistleblowers, government records and now obtained DNA in an effort to substantiate decade-old allegations that Omar — and possibly members of her family like her father — defrauded immigration authorities.

One source said the DNA evidence was critical to proving an allegation that Omar married her brother when she wed Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 because she was trying to help him get a green card — which never came to fruition.

NewsNation suggests that some of the evidence against her was obtained by agents picking through her garbage.

Federal agents collected garbage in hopes of obtaining the DNA of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and her family before this week’s raid at the Minnesota Democrat’s home in Washington, D.C., sources tell NewsNation.

It appears that someone in the Trump regime recognizes that this is a bad look, because the Post story says:

Another source pushed back on initial reports that investigators had gone “dumpster diving” in order to get DNA swabs of Omar, Elmi, who is currently residing in the UK, or family members.

But a Breitbart story treats the NewsNation report as credible. Breitbart's headline is "Report: Feds Collected Garbage from Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Home, Searching for Her DNA." That Breitbart story cites another NewsNation story, from which we learn that the feds are garnering tips from an aging right-wing blogger:

Scott Johnson, a retired Minnesota attorney and co-founder of Powerline Blog, first began looking into Omar in 2016, when she first ran for local office.

Johnson tells NewsNation he received an unexpected call earlier this year to meet with two federal agents in Minnesota, eight months before the October raid on Omar’s Washington, D.C. home.

“In January of this year, I was contacted by two ICE agents who asked me to meet with them, and this was in the middle of Operation Metro Surge,” Johnson said.

“They asked me questions that related to issues of (Omar’s) immigration and naturalization and also questions related to her father, which would bear on the same issue,” he said. “So I inferred at the end of that hour, and from other help that they asked me for, that they were looking at a possible civil proceeding that might lead to her denaturalization.”

... Johnson said they asked him for documents and files related to Omar and came back to meet with him a second time to discuss some of his early sources in Minnesota’s Somali community.

Johnson, incidentally, has close ties to the Federalist Society.

*****

This is where the Republican Party is headed, as Donald Trump circles the drain and Democrats seem poised for big wins in the midterms.

Last summer, I wrote a post titled "The Next Trump Might Just Be a Collection of Grievances." In it, I argued that the GOP won't necessarily need a charismatic leader to get through the post-Trump period -- it might just rally the faithful around grievances, the way it did after the self-immolation of the George W. Bush presidency, when the GOP underwent a Tea Party rebranding. In a follow-up post, I argued that anti-Muslim (and anti-trans) hate might be the glue that keeps the GOP together when Trump no longer can.

I've been thinking that the Justice Department is fixating on Omar because Donald Trump has a particular hatred of Black women, Africans, Muslims who aren't Trump family business partners, women who aren't deferential, and progressives -- all boxes checked by Omar. But the lawfare war on Omar also points to a GOP future.

After the election, Republican message generators want the Democrats' efforts to battle Trump in Congress to compete in the headlines with a long legal fight against Omar. They want her in the news every day, wearing her hijab, angrily denying the charges against her.

I don't think this will be of much interest to anyone outside the base, but it will keep the base loyal. Republicans will settle for that and hope that they get a few lucky breaks that will make their message more "salient," as the consultants say, to voters outside the base.

What are they hoping for? Maybe a terrorist attack on America -- or maybe some unrest like what's taking place in France and other European countries right now.

Here's a scare headline at FoxNews.com right now:

Global 'Chaos Inc' grows to 101 groups with plans for new rounds of demonstrations

Fox News Digital investigation identifies 101 organizations in 'red-green' protest ecosystem stretching across 9 countries

From the story:

Two days after an estimated 500,000 demonstrators poured into streets across France and clashes left parts of Paris and other cities burning, French activists are calling supporters back into the streets Saturday, Oct. 24, for a new protest billed as "Acte II," with 212 "mobilizations" currently planned, according to a digital map of the plans.

And a growing number of communist, socialist and hard-leftist organizations are answering another call for a coordinated European youth strike on Friday, Nov. 20.

A Fox News Digital investigation has now identified 101 organizations across 9 countries – including the U.S. – that are coordinating, organizing or amplifying protests in Europe in an expanding protest ecosystem, up from 54 organizations identified on Monday.

(Emphasis added.)

... They represent a nexus of the "red-green" alliance, merging Islamist organizations that are symbolized by the color green, and far-left, communist and socialist groups represented by the color red.

At Thanksgiving, you can expect your right-wing uncle to rattle off the phrase "red-green alliance" as if he's a lifelong expert in geopolitics.

Oh, and:

The network also include groups that proudly use the "Antifa" moniker, like "Action AntiFa16," an organization that describes itself in the Angoulême, France, Acte II announcement.

CHECKMATE, LIBS!

To the extent that there's an alliance in Europe between leftists and Muslims, it's with Muslims who support Palestinian rights, as well as the economic and social goals of the non-Muslim demonstrators. It's not because they want to "Islamicize" Europe and force everyone into burqas, with the eager assent of white lefties. But that's what your right-wing uncle believes.

"islamo-communism" is basically a latter-day gloss on "judeo-bolshevism" for the modern conservative, and it has about as little connection with reality

— Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com) October 18, 2026 at 11:29 AM

As I noted yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance is fanning these racist flames.

It won't surprise me at all if at least some Americans protest in solidarity with the French. Some of these actions might lead to violence or property damage. I'm sure the GOP fervently hopes that happens, and happens before Election Day, although I think the cake is already baked and the election will turn on high prices and Trump's indifference to ordinary Americans. A few dumpster fires in Portland won't change the electoral outcome.

But one of the prime directives of the GOP is "Always Be Messaging." This will be a prominent part of their messaging in the near future, until they can rally around a new leader, just the way rallying around "critical race theory" and the trans panic sustained them in the period after January 6 and Joe Biden's inauguration. Did it work? It won them the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election.

Omar is someone they hate. She's also a living embodiment of their largely imaginary red-green alliance. They can say she wants to impose communism and Sharia law, even though she doesn't want either of those things. I don't think this is enough to keep the party thriving in the immediate post-November period or in the next couple of years, but it will help keep a third of the country loyal to the GOP.

ON THE FRENCH PROTESTS, TRUMP, VANCE, PUTIN, AND THEIR FAR-RIGHT EURO ALLIES SPEAK WITH ONE RACIST VOICE

My response to this tweet probably isn't the same as yours.

The most common response is mockery of Vance for ignoring French history, in previous centuries and recently. A few examples from Bluesky:

Chuckling at the notion that unassimilated third-worlders inported the practice of rioting and burning shit down TO FRANCE

****

France riots and the historical illiterates Trump and Vance immediately blame "third world" immigrants. Because, um, the French themselves have no history of violent urban unrest... Yellow Vest protests, 1968, 1871 Paris Commune, 1830 revolts, 1792 great terror, 1789 revolution, etc etc.

****

“The French never rioted or burned things down before!”

(I mean, if anything, this shows that immigrants have assimilated to French history and culture).

But I'm more alarmed at Vance's language. It's not a dog whistle -- it's undiluted "scientific" racism. We expect this from President Trump, who posted this on Truth Social yesterday:



Trump followed up this morning with this:



Vance avoids all caps and exclamation points. His tone is measured and emotionless. I worry that our political culture won't recognize that he's as bigoted as Trump -- possibly more so -- and might divide America even more than Trump has if he has a shot at winning the president.

You might he can't possibly win in 2028. Even if he can't, it's easy to imagine a backlash against a victorious Democrat by 2032, when Vance will be only in his late forties. (If you're sure that American voters will still remember the horrors of the second Trump presidency four years later, you're forgetting their amnesia after the first Trump presidency.)

I worry about Vance because I watched quite a bit of the CBS News town hall Vance did over the weekend.



Was it impressive? No. Did Vance demonstrate charisma? No -- but I've lived through seventeen presidential elections (I was born in 1959) and five of them were won by very uncharismatic Republicans (Richard Nixon twice, the Bushes three times). You don't necessarily need charisma if you can successfully sell yourself to white heartlanders as a bulwark against dangerous leftists, liberals, and non-whites.

Vance wasn't charismatic, but he was soft-spoken, and his tone carried an undercurrent of "I feel your pain" and a willingness to admit at least some error that's absent from Trump's bloviations. Watch the first four minutes in the clip above, and try to ignore the fact that it's unconscionable that the administration mismanaged the Iran war in a way that led to the death of the questioner's servicemember wife. Watch Vance perform empathy:

So Joey, first of all, look, I owe and the whole country owes your family a debt of gratitude that is quite literally impossible to repay. I won't pretend that anything that I say is going to make it better or easier, but I hope it helps a little bit to know that your wife was a precious human being who served her country honorably, and I'm never going to forget about her.

He's better at this than you think. America might fall for it -- especially America's political culture, which clearly dislikes some of the leading 2028 Democrats.

That's why Vance's bigotry is so disturbing -- America's opinion-shapers might treat him as a reasonable man, even though he's an obvious hater. On the subject of the unrest in France, he and Trump sound exactly like Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia, and like quite a few European far-rightists. Le Monde notes the similarities in a story headlined "Trump and Putin Claim French Protests Are Evidence of 'Migrant Chaos' and 'Europe's Decline'" (the story is free to read here):

Rarely have reactions from Washington and Moscow so closely aligned, both in substance and in tone. The US president feigned alarm on his Truth Social platform on Sunday: "France is burning!" Ignoring the demands raised by high school and university students for more resources for education, and showing disregard for the distress of the middle class, whose cost of living has been partly raised by the war in Iran that he himself launched, Trump analyzed the anger of the French as coming solely from "people from an entirely different world," he wrote....

"Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn't listen," Vice President JD Vance had already pontificated the day before on X.... Laura Loomer, an influencer from the Make America Great Again sphere, openly embraced racist rhetoric: "The most destructive species on planet earth is the African Muslim. Don't believe me, just look at Paris," she posted on X on Sunday.

... on X, Kirill Dmitriev, [Putin's] special representative for relations with the US, appeared to echo Washington's words, seeing in France "Western civilization's suicide through migrant chaos."

... "The West has fallen because of an inability to discuss and correct consequential mistakes on migration, energy, and warmongering," wrote Dmitriev on X.

On Sunday, several representatives of the European far right openly adopted the rhetoric of the Trump administration and the Kremlin. "If we don't wake up, the carnage in France is our future. We need to return to law, order, and borders," declared Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, on X....

In Germany, Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), was quoted Sunday by the daily Rheinische Post as seeing the clashes in Paris as an "attack on Western civilization by migrant mobs and far-left agitators," arguing that "open borders and mass immigration" were responsible for the violence. "This is what awaits Europe with Islamo-leftism. Barbarians ravaging all that remains of beauty and civilization," said Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's far-right Vox party, on X. "The axis of evil that unites left-wing extremists and Islamic fanatics is the number one danger to confront and defeat," wrote Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-migrant League and Italy's deputy prime minister, on the same platform, sharing footage of Limoges city hall in flames.

These are clearly the allies of the front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. If there's France-syle unrest in America, if there are terrorist attacks or an increase in crime, or if the media simply takes against the next Democratic nominee, Vance has a shot at the presidency. He also will become president if Trump dies in office. People who hate bigotry -- a group that ought to include everyone, and realistically ought to include all non-Republicans, including those in the media -- should be more alarmed about these possibilities than they are.