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

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

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

And this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reliefs are godawful:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This strains credulity, but sure, maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphasis added.)

We're told that Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRANS-AVERSE DEMOCRATS ARE REMEMBERING 2024 ALL WRONG

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

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

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

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

Yesterday, Erin Reed reported this:

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

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

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

Kaptur to camera:

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

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

— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) September 17, 2026

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

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

But does anti-trans messaging really work for Republicans?

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

Here are two of the ads:





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphasis added.)

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

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

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

(Emphasis Reed's.)

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

WE STILL HAVEN'T SEEN HOW FASCIST AMERICA COULD BECOME

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

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

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

More:

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

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

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

Still more:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Politico reports this about Vance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the Vance two-step:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

THE GOP'S OLD WHITE MALE FIREWALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's bad because of this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Examiner said there's a massive double standard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From one City Councilman to another.

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

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

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

— Chandler Langevin (@ChandlerForPB) September 14, 2026

What Bo French is saying is actually scripture.

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

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

— Chandler Langevin (@ChandlerForPB) September 14, 2026

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

— Chandler Langevin (@ChandlerForPB) September 14, 2026

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

Here's more about French:

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

Still more:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APART FROM HATING CONSERVATIVE POLITICIANS, AMERICA IS REALLY CONSERVATIVE!

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

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

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

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

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

This is certainly noteworthy:

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

And:

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

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

Schmitz continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In an essay on the subject, he writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balk writes:

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

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

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

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

Balk's version is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MOST EFFECTIVE ARGUMENT AGAINST TRUMP'S BRIBE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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