EVEN IF EL-SAYED EMULATED OBAMA, HE WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO PUT PIKER-GHAZI BEHIND HIM

Michelle Goldberg's latest column is a nuanced and well-meaning assessment of Abdul El-Sayed's Hasan Piker problem. She acknowledges that there's a double standard at work here: for instance, Trumpworld insider Laura Loomer is much more bigoted than Piker and much more powerful.

Administration officials she targeted were purged from the National Security Council, and on Friday, she claimed credit for the deportation of the British right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who’d become her enemy. Loomer is also openly bigoted in a way that outstrips the most offensive things Piker has ever said. Over the weekend, she called Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate nominee in Florida, a “ghetto bitch” who speaks “Ebonics.”

But Goldberg sees El-Sayed's need to distance himself from Piker as an acknowledgment of political reality:

We can and should denounce double standards, but successful candidates must also navigate them. And right now, El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, is letting this one trip him up.

She think El-Sayed needs to have a Jeremiah Wright moment.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign faced a crisis when comments from his pastor Jeremiah Wright emerged, including a clip of Wright damning America. Obama turned what could have been a fiasco into one of the best speeches of his career, one in which he tried to explain the anger of disappointed civil rights activists to white voters and the anger of the dispossessed white working class to Black voters. It was a masterpiece of empathy, and at the time it felt that it changed the trajectory of his campaign.

I’m not sure if El-Sayed is capable of something similar, of weaving his visceral grasp of many voters’ fury and despair at Israeli ethnic cleansing with a recognition of the terror American Jews feel in the face of rising antisemitism. But if he was, it might be a turning point in this race.

I strongly suspect that it would not be a turning point in this race.

In 2008, a Republican president in his eighth year in office had completely lost the support of the American people, and it was clear that the next president was likely to be a Democrat. Obama was inspiring and telegenic, and his life story made a lot of white Americans feel good about themselves for supporting him. He was also safe, a left-centrist Democrat who didn't intend to challenge economic neoliberalism. And he had star quality. The Cinderella story of his campaign drew eyeballs to news outlets. (Another advantage he had was that the media hated his opponent in the primaries, Hillary Clinton.)

So our mainstream political culture was eager to allow him a do-over. That political culture will never feel the same way about Abdul El-Sayed. Even if he delivers an Obama race speech of his own, El-Sayed will continue to be treated as a suspect "other." He'll never be fully embraced because he challenges the status quo in a way that Obama never did.

Also, our political culture, even on the "liberal" side, appears to be more "wired for Republicans" than ever, despite the fact that we're experiencing a GOP presidency far worse than George W. Bush's. Also, El-Sayed, unlike Obama, is a Muslim, and the political culture still isn't sure whether anti-Muslim bigotry is a serious problem, even when it's accompanied by (right-wing) anti-Jewish bigotry.

In The Gurdian, Mehdi Hasan writes about this double standard. Hasan notes that a bigoted adviser to Abdul El-Sayed's opponent, Mike Rogers, has gotten a free pass from the media.

His name is Lorenzo Sewell.

And you’ve probably never heard of him.

... He has publicly and proudly described Islam as a “conquering religion” and a “death cult”. He has called El-Sayed an “Islamic jihadist” who wants to impose “Sharia law all over this land”. The United States, he insists, is “not a nation of Muslims. We are a nation of Christians.”

... But Sewell’s vile rhetoric is only part of the story. On 18 August, the pastor co-organized the “Christian Crusader March on Dearborn City Council Meeting” with the far-right anti-Muslim agitator Jake Lang. Lang was charged with assaulting police officers with a deadly weapon over his actions on 6 January 2021, before receiving a pardon from Trump. He also says he doesn’t believe the Holocaust happened “at that level” and has used the N-word and was arrested in Texas in June on a charge of making a terroristic threat.

The Dearborn “Crusader” rally co-organized by Sewell and Lang attracted neo-Nazis waving a swastika flag and wearing Nazi armbands. There were also reports of pro-KKK material being distributed during and after the event. Dearborn police made 22 arrests that day.

The response from the media: crickets.

The media analysis platform Ground News aggregated 242 separate stories mentioning Piker from across the political spectrum over the past three months – almost three stories a day.

... I searched the websites of the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. Not one of them appears to have mentioned Sewell in its coverage in 2026. The Times covered the “Christian Crusader” rally in Dearborn, including Jake Lang’s role in it, but made no mention of Sewell – or of Sewell’s connection to Rogers.

So maybe El-Sayed should give us an Obamaesque speech. But it probably won't do his campaign much good.

TRUMP WANTS TO PROJECT FAKE GREATNESS SO HE CAN TAKE CREDIT FOR A FAKE ELECTORAL VICTORY

As Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post note, presidents who are struggling in the polls as midterm elections approach generally recognize that some voters don't like them and adjust their campaign strategy accordingly.

... recent presidents ... when their popularity sagged, generally gave endangered members of their own party room to run away from them.

In 2006, [George W.] Bush largely confined his late campaigning to places where Republicans believed he could still help, while vulnerable GOP candidates advertised their independence from him and avoided appearances with him. Eight years later, Barack Obama watched endangered Democrats criticize his policies, skip his visits and keep him out of some of the states where they faced the toughest races.

President Joe Biden made that accommodation almost a running joke. During the 2022 midterms, as some vulnerable Democrats kept their distance from an unpopular White House, Biden frequently told candidates: “I’ll come campaign for you or against you — whichever will help the most.”

Not Donald Trump this year.

Next week, as primaries give way to a perilous general election campaign for vulnerable Republicans, Trump will headline two nights of a GOP political convention in Dallas. Over the next two months, his super PAC plans to run advertisements that feature his name and play up his political record. And although he will not appear on any ballot in the midterms, he has told voters they should behave as if he is.

His interpretation of his record is ... well, delusional. “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” he said, at a recent Las Vegas rally. “But this is blowing it away.”

This isn't completely insane, says Tevi Troy, a presidential historian.

“What we’ve seen over the course of the past decade is, when Trump is on the ballot, you get better turnout if you’re a Republican,” Troy said.

But when polls are showing that more voters disapprove of your job performance than approve of it in 47 out of 50 states, efforts to turn out your own base run the risk of turning out the Democratic base in larger numbers.

Beyond inspiring base turnout, there's a second explanation for what Trump is doing: he's the most egomaniacal person who's ever lived, and he's massaging that ego. But I see a third explanation.

We know that Trump sees only two possible outcomes for the midterms. They're the same two outcomes anticipated by Charles Foster Kane's New York Inquirer during Kane's run for governor in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane:



The party of Trump might cheat its way to victory in the midterms if the Supreme Court upholds Trump's restrictions on mail voting. Trump might rig elections by seizing ballots or intimidating voters at the polls. Or he might be helped by Republican election officials who refuse to certify Democratic victories, or congressional Republicans who refuse to seat Democrats.

Or Democrats might trounce Republicans. In response to that outcome, Trump and other Republicans will assert that they were the victims of massive Democratic voter fraud (which they somehow can't prove).

One way or another, Trump anticipates a Republican victory -- or at least anticipates an outcome he'll describe as a Republican victory.

I don't know exactly how delusional Trump is. I don't know if he'll really believe that a blue-wave election is actually a Republican triumph, or if he'll merely believe that he can sell that fiction to his gullible superfans. But he expects to announce a triumph -- and he wants to be the one responsible. Even if the "victory" is a total illusion, he wants to say that he gets the credit for it, not the Republicans who are actually on the ballot.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that would occur only to a very diseased mind. But I'm convinced that that's how Trump's mind is working right now.

GRAMPA CARVILLE STILL FANTASIZES ABOUT DEMOCRATS ACHIEVING POLITICAL DOMINANCE WITHOUT MAKING ANY EFFORT WHATSOEVER

Let me take you back to February 2025, when James Carville offered some idiotic advice to Democrats on Dan Abrams's podcast and in a New York Times op-ed. Carville told Abrams:

What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing.... I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.

He continued:

“It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks,” [Carville] said of opportunities for Democrats. “Just lay back.”

Abrams asked, “You literally think 30 days to six weeks, the Trump administration is effectively going to collapse in terms of public support?

Carville predicted Trump would find it impossible to pass any agenda items and that House Speaker Mike Johnson would be forced to reach across the aisle to ask House Democrats for help.

“We’re in the midst of a collapse,” Carville said. “It’s over.”

As I noted at the time, thirty days after this podcast appearance, Trump was at 47.5% approval and 49.6% disapproval in Nate Silver's polling average, and was at 47.9% approval and 48.8% disapproval in the Real Clear Polling average. His numbers didn't collapse on their own. It took active resistance on the part of Democrats (starting with Senator Chris Van Hollen's defense of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's right to due process, along with resistance by No Kings demonstrators, anti-ICE protesters, and anti-Trump lawyers) in combination with Trump's mismanagement of America to drive his poll numbers down. Just kicking back and doing nothing wasn't enough.

In the meantime, Trump was highly effective, getting his One Big Beautiful Bill through Congress, and imposing other horrors on America -- DOGE cuts, preposterous tariffs, the militarization of American cities, the dismantling of scientific research funding, and finally a ruinous war -- through executive action.

Nevertheless, Grampa Carville is back with a new "just chill and Trumpism will die on its own" fantasy:

James Carville is refusing to back away from his extraordinary prediction that President Donald Trump will quit the White House next year....

The veteran Democratic strategist revisited his prediction Thursday on his Politicon podcast after listeners asked what a President JD Vance might look like if Carville’s forecast actually came true.

Carville went further than merely standing by his earlier claim, predicting Vance “will be president next April” and describing what he believes would be a severely weakened Republican administration.

“... yeah, Trump’s two years are one thing, alright, he was a year ago everybody had to pay attention to him, everybody had to return his phone call,” Carville said.

He argued Trump’s political influence was already diminishing and predicted Republicans would suffer major electoral losses in the midterms, leaving Vance without control of Congress....

“And then the whole Republican Party is going to fall apart when they lose all these seats because they’re going to know that Trump doesn’t protect him.”

Carville concluded: “So JD Vance, in my opinion, will be president next April. He will be the most constrained, ineffective, babbling president in the history of the United States.”

This isn't new. In June, Carville said of Trump, "I genuinely think that he will resign next spring." He subsequently said, “I’m telling you, this guy, by Easter of 2027, is just gonna walk away from this job.”

I hope no one believes this. I hope no Democratic leader or key strategist believes it's going to be this easy to wrest power from Republicans.

First of all, resignation is the last thing we should expect from Trump. He fears prosecution, which becomes more likely if he's out of office. Moreover, there's nothing Trump fears more than appearing weak. I'm not sure his aides and family will acknowledge that he's no longer president even if he dies in office.

Why does Carville want to believe this? I think it's because Carville, like most Boomer Democratic insiders, suffers from 1980s PTSD. He thinks the three presidential trouncings in that decade prove that America hates Democrats, and his solution is for Democrats to "play possum" all the time, minimizing their differences with Republicans in the hope that enough of them will still be elected for the party to stay in the game. Carville really doesn't like it when Democrats who want to do something make demands, as becomes clear in the full version of the first quote above from that February 2025 podcast appearance:

What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing. It doesn’t need Elizabeth Warren and somebody screaming to pacify some progressive advocacy groups in Washington, which, by the way, I wish these people were just useless. They’re actually worse than useless, that they’re detrimental. And they never, ever learn to shut up. And so then this is what I believe. I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.

(Emphasis added.)

Also see this passage from that February 2025 op-ed:

... in the first Trump Administration ... Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics. We voiced outrage on social issue after social issue. We spun ourselves up in a tizzy over an investigation into Russia. We fought Mr. Trump at every corner, on every issue imaginable and muddied up our message in an unwinnable war. We were saved only by his lousy governing and a lot of effort on our side finding good candidates to run for the House and Senate in 2018. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction.

As I wrote then:

No, the Democrats didn't just get lucky. The resistance worked! It fired voters up and flipped the House in 2018. It drove Donald Trump from office and won full congressional control in 2020. It kept Trump's poll ratings under water for the entirety of his first term. It pushed back on efforts to repeal Obamacare, separate immigrant families, and embrace the racist right at Charlottesville and elsewhere.

People like Carville believe -- or at least want to believe -- that power will drop in Democrats' laps if Democrats never draw attention to the fact that they're Democrats. Carville believes this because he thinks normal people hate Democrats, even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections.

And even if Carville's fantasy were to come true, it's absurd to argue that President J.D. Vance would be "the most constrained, ineffective ... president in the history of the United States." He'll still have the Supreme Court on his side. He'll have the veto pen. (Democrats can't possibly win enough seats to override presidential vetoes, and Republicans in Congress will never break ranks with a Republican president in significant numbers.) He'll have a massively funded anti-immigration machine still at his disposal.

And we still don't know whether we'll have fair elections in 2026 It's quite possible that the Supreme Court will end genuine democracy in America by greenlighting Trump's assault on mail voting. And even if this doesn't happen, Republicans are probably plotting to prevent the seating of enough Democratic midterm victors to maintain a Republican majority in the House, as Michael Luttig warns.

Which means Democrats can't just hang out on the porch in a rocking chair, as Grampa Carville's fantasies suggest. They'll have to fight like hell for every victory, and never stop fighting.

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALMOST CLOSE TO GETTING IT

A New York Times story about Jon Ossoff's Senate reelection campaign suggests that Ossoff's success in the polls is baffling and paradoxical:

In Georgia, Ossoff Courts Broad Appeal With an Anti-Trump Script

Senator Jon Ossoff, the youngest sitting senator and the only Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump won in 2024, hasn’t moderated his message in his critical race.

The story's author, Robert Jimison, clearly regards Ossoff's popularity as a head-scratcher:

Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia entered this election cycle with every reason to tack to the political middle.

He is the only Senate Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump carried in 2024, making him one of the most vulnerable incumbents in his party and an obvious Republican target from the start.

But Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South. Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail.

Are you sure you want to do this, Jon? Jimison appears to be saying.

The approach risks alienating some members of the coalition whose backing he needs to win re-election in Georgia, including independents and conservative-leaning voters.

Or ... maybe Ossoff has unearthed a secret about the Georgia electorate known only to a few. Jimison tells us that Ossoff appears to be

taking advantage of ... Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings — a Fox News poll in June found him with net-negative ratings in Georgia, with 56 percent holding an unfavorable view of him....

Trump's favorability in that Fox poll is 42%. So he's at -14 in the state. And among the independents Jamison says Ossoff "needs to win re-election," the Fox poll says that Trump's favorable rating is a mere 26%. Trump's unfavorable rating among Georgia independents is a whopping 70%, including 51% who say their view of Trump is "strongly unfavorable."

So I have this crazy, wacky theory, Robert. I think being opposed to Donald Trump is centrist in Georgia. I think the median Georgian hates the tariffs, the high prices, the war, the corruption, the measles, the diarrhea lettuce, and the obsession with the ballroom. In other words, I don't think Ossoff's decision to campaign as a partisan Democrat is counterintuitive. I think Democratic ideas are what's normal, and Republicans are the out-of-step weirdos.

Jimison notes that Ossoff's opponent, Mike Rogers, is campaigning as a Republican partisan, and doesn't seem to regard that as weird or counterintuitive.

Mr. Collins, the 59-year-old son of former Representative Mac Collins of Georgia, has focused heavily on the issues that animate the Republican base — illegal immigration, transgender athletes, crime and grievances surrounding the 2020 election....

Mr. Collins is working to draw a stark contrast with Mr. Ossoff on issues including law enforcement and border security in a state that remains conservative.

Donald Trump is underwater by double digits, Ossoff has a solid lead in multiple polls, Georgia's other senator is also a Democrat, and a Democrat leads the governor's race, so how can Jimison call Georgia "a state that remains conservative"? It's clearly a middle-of-the-road state. (Jimison, who's Black, may be arguing that white Georgians are conservatives and the state's large Black population is at least culturally conservative. But that doesn't add up to a conservative state.)

Our entire political culture, including most Democrats and most putatively liberal media outlets such as The New York Times, believes that Republicans are normative and Democrats are outlier freaks suitable only for decadent big cities and college towns. Meanwhile, Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, and in order to maintain the fiction that Republicans are the normal ones, we grade GOP election performance on a curve, treating Trump's victory in 2024 as a 1932-size landslide even though he won the popular vote by a mere one and a half points, against a replacement candidate handicapped by sexism, racism, and a global impulse to toss out all incumbent parties.

And now America hates Donald Trump, and it might hate the entire GOP if Democrats attacked the party as ferociously as Republicans attack Democrats. In any case, Jon Ossoff knows that Republicanism isn't normative in 2026. Robert Jimison and the Times still seem incapable of grasping this reality.

NEW FRONTS IN REPUBLICAN GRIEVANCE POLITICS

Toluse Olorunnipa of The Atlantic reports on the GOP's latest grievance: naturalized citizens are allowed to hold office.

In recent months, an idea once confined to the fringes has gained mainstream traction across the country. Republican legislators in several states have introduced proposals that would restrict naturalized citizens and dual citizens from running for a range of elected positions, including sheriff and governor. In Congress, at least five Republicans have sponsored various proposals to bar naturalized or dual citizens from serving in roles including federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships, and in Congress itself. Florida lawmakers this year enacted a law requiring candidates for several state and federal offices to disclose whether they hold another citizenship in addition to being a citizen of the United States.

Olorunippa tells us, "The movement has been fueled in part by the rise of a new class of foreign-born politicians—most prominently New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani." He doesn't mention Ilhan Omar, a naturalized citizen whom Republicans despise, or, for that matter, Abdul El-Sayed and Rashida Tlaib (both of whom were actually born in Michigan, though most Republicans don't know that). If you pay attention to the right, you know it's hard to tell where the belief that even naturalized immigrants are a menace ends and the belief that Muslims are a menace begins.

The campaign to pass these laws is in its early stages:

When Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen first floated the idea of barring naturalized citizens from serving in elected office, he cited Mamdani’s mayoral run as one impetus. “We want to make sure that no potential foreign influence or foreign meddling could impact our state’s highest elected leaders,” he told AL.com last year....

State lawmakers in Alabama introduced legislation earlier this year that would require natural-born citizenship of those seeking to run for governor, legislator, sheriff, or a handful of other elected positions. Republican legislators introduced similar bills in Kentucky and Tennessee this year. Although the proposals—which face significant constitutional questions—have not yet passed, the effort is nevertheless building momentum. When the law in Florida requiring disclosure for dual citizens takes effect next year, it will mark the first time such a proposal has become state law.

The mood on the right is punitive:

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said that he would bar public schools in his state from hiring H-1B-visa holders. He described the first-of-its-kind proposal as a way to reduce “foreign influence” and “indoctrination in the classroom.”

Even if few of these proposals become law in the immediate future, this fear of contagion will become an effective way for the GOP to maintain party solidarity despite the current Republican president's astonishingly awful mismanagement the country. Just as Republicans relied on the Tea Party to rebrand the GOP after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, and just as the party used crusades against transgender youth and diversity initiatives to rebrand starting around the time of Trump's 2020 defeat, a message of "Vote GOP and Muslims won't gain political power" could sustain the party until the next charismatic leader comes along.

This isn't the only post-Trump assault on citizenship we should expect. Here's Breitbart's John Nolte reporting on a research paper claiming to find a"connection between trans beliefs and violence."

A just-released study from Rutgers University, the Network Contagion Research Institute, and the Manhattan Institute has found something not at all surprising...

“These findings suggest that gender ideology is associated with LWA [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence.”

"Gender ideology" is a right-wing jargon term meaning "belief that trans people are human beings deserving respect and basic civil rights."

Nolte quotes the study:

... broader research on perceived victimhood, moralization, and political violence suggests that identities organized around grievance, perceived victimization, and injustice, when paired with authoritarian or punitive dispositions, can predict support for anti-democratic or violent political action... Taken together, these literatures suggest a common mechanism: ideological content that names an oppressor class, certifies ongoing victimization, and locates remedy in coercive institutional or social action which may supply authoritarian psychology with morally justified targets.

In other words, leftism + trans = all True Patriots being at risk of being murdered in their beds by baristas with blue hair.

It's widely believed on the right that trans people are disproportionately responsible for acts of left-wing violence. This is an attempt to demonstrate this premise using science, or at least pseudoscience. Nolte argues that trans people are dangerous, but it's not really their fault:

You take a group of people who are already mentally fragile, you tell them that whoever does not affirm their delusion is committing a genocide, and then turn them loose into a world that they cannot control.

This is not only a deliberate recipe cooked up by the left and their media allies to activate violent Manchurian Candidates who will always target the people the left and media hate (anyone to the right of Joseph Stalin), but it’s an act of cruelty against transsexuals.

He thinks he's being a nice guy here, while accusing cis lefties, or maybe Democrats, or terrorism via brainwashing. Most on the right just go straight to trans people are sick and twisted, so of course they kill people.

I think it's only a matter of time before some states restrict trans people's right to hold certain jobs, as an intermediate step before depriving them of the legal right to vote, or to be trans at all. And if they never get this far, they can at least brand the GOP as the party that wants to do this. If you can tap into rage this way, why would you even need a charismatic leader?

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you on Friday.

I DON'T THINK TRUMP KNOWS WHETHER HE INTENDS TO STAY IN THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HIS TERM ENDS

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

It remains possible that Trump and the GOP will lose a wave election 75 days from now, and he and his minions won’t have the necessary coherence and organizational discipline to seriously contest that, and he will decide to give up on his current plans to stay in office after 1/20/2029, and King Leer will crawl unburdened towards death. I admit this is possible: I think it’s unlikely.

In short, I think we’re in a disjunctive, paradigm-shifting political and cultural situation, and that Trump does not intend to leave office, or to recognize the results of elections he loses, and that instead he and his inner circle intend to overthrow the current political system with some sort of authoritarian “managed democracy,” that retains the trappings of the old system superficially, but replaces it with a functional one-party state. I don’t know, of course, whether they can manage to succeed in this ambition, but I do believe it is their actual plan, on the basis of their words and deeds, both since 1/20/2025, and most particularly since 1/6/2021....

I don't think we should be talking about "[Trump] and his inner circle" as if they're having the same thoughts about the future. I believe that J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and possibly Pete Hegseth and some other Trump insiders are expecting a normal election cycle in 2028, and their plan is to win the presidency, not to overthrow our constitutional system. Whether any of them intend to overthrow or undermine that system after winning is a different question, of course. But on the subject of 2028, I don't think they want Trump to lead the government for the rest of his life. They want to take over.

You'll argue that other insiders will be afraid of the consequences of elections, and will want the Trump administration to continue forever. I think they know that a Democratic victory probably won't lead to the "Nuremberg trials" so many ordinary liberals and progressives dream of -- Democrats are just too feckless -- and they also know that a Republican really could win an election in 2028 despite the extreme unpopularity of Trump. They assume that electing a Republican successor will ensure their safety from prosecution for at least four years, and permanently quash any momentum an accountability movement might have.

I believe the possible Trump successors might very well move us in the direction of "managed democracy," simply because they don't believe in genuine democracy as long as Democrats can sometimes win elections. They'll do it because they think Republicans should rule forever, not primarily to extend the rule of Trumpism specifically.

I don't believe Trump thinks in those structural terms. He cares only about himself and his family, and he cares about his family only to the extent that he sees the money his family makes as his money.

I believe this, but I also believe Trump might refuse to leave office on January 20, 2029. I don't think he has a plan yet. I think he's keeping his options open.

Trump isn't very good at planning. On some level, I think he knows this. Look at how he's approaching the 2026 midterms: he's trying to subvert them in advance, but in ways that probably won't be effective. Last week we learned that the Trump Justice Department plans to send 1,000 monitors to the polls in the fall. Do you know how many precincts there are in America?

The 2020 survey by the United States Election Assistance Commission found a total of 176,933 precincts or precinct equivalents in the United States, of which 175,441 were in the 50 states plus the District of Columbia and 1,492 were in overseas U.S. territories.

A thousand troops is a wholly inadequate number if you're really planning to subvert democracy. Also:

For Michigan’s primary this month, the Justice Department sent monitors to four Democratic-leaning cities — Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing and East Lansing. Democrats openly worried that the monitors would interfere with the primary, but state officials said they behaved professionally and did not cause problems.

This is half-assed authoritarianism.

Trump is also trying to prevent the Postal Service from processing mail ballots in states that won't provide the administration with lists of eligible voters, but the administration has lost 21 straight court battles in its effort to get those lists. A capable authoritarian would send armed troops or FBI agents into state capitals to seize that information at gunpoint. Trump hasn't done that.

I have a theory about how authoritarian Trump really is. I think he actually believes in the system, and believes he isn't operating in defiance of the system, his evidence being: Well, the system didn't stop me, so I guess I can do that thing I just did. He's used to the way the law works in the business world: you can cheat someone and get away with it if you can afford better lawyers than the people you're cheating, you can file endless appeals to delay the outcome in a case you're likely to lose, you can wheedle and finagle and wear the system down. Sometimes you lose, but you can fight to the bitter end, blow deadlines when you're required to comply with a court order, and then, finally, comply after you've been given a warning.

When I say that Trump is the worst president we've ever had but not the worst president we will ever have, this is what I mean. In his own way, Trump respects the system. A future authoritarian won't -- J.D. Vance, for instance. See this 2025 Politico story by Ian Ward:

In several instances dating back to the start of his Senate campaign in 2022, the vice president has explicitly said that a second-term Trump should defy the courts — even the U.S. Supreme Court — if they stand in the way of him exercising executive authority in ways he deems fit.

Vance’s most comprehensive statement of this radical position came in an interview I conducted with him in January 2023 for a profile in POLITICO Magazine. During the interview, I referred to comments that he had made on a conservative podcast in 2021 suggesting that Trump, if reelected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

I asked Vance if this was still his view.

“Yup,” he responded.

I think Vance, if he were in Trump's position, would declare a massive election-fraud emergency and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- declare that any elections conducted in November will be in defiance of the law, and their outcomes won't be recognized. The courts would declare that he isn't allowed to do this and he'd defy those courts, perhaps even ordering some lower courts disbanded or defunded. Trump won't do that.

What I think he will do is dispute Democratic wins after the fact, citing nonexistent voter fraud, slow ballot counts, and the presence of a trivial number of people on voter rolls who are ineligible as evidence that the midterms were rigged. I think Trumpists in the states will try to help him do this by not certifying elections, and Republicans in Congress will challenge key Democratic wins. I think courts will reject all of this. It will be a mess, and will be horrible for democracy -- once again, the majority of Republican voters will believe they've been cheated rather than outovted.

Even if there's another January 6 -- or multiple January 6 incidents in the states -- Trump will see himself as having operated within the law. In a way, you can't blame him. He'll be able to claim he was acting as a president rather than as a Republican, so, according to the Supreme Court, he won't be subject to criminal prosecution. It won't be possible to get a two-thirds vote to convict him after an impeachment, if there is one. So, he'll think, it was all legal.

That's more or less how I think he'll approach 2028. Trump likes to troll us with "Trump 2028" merchandise, but he also seems to recognize that he can't legally run again -- "the law’s very strong on that," he has said.

I think we'll have a relatively normal 2028 election. I think Trump, fearing consequences after he leaves office but not being a very good planner, will try to tip the scales in the GOP's favor, more or less the way he's doing it now. I doubt that it will be enough to rig the election.

If the Republican nominee wins, Trump will quietly leave office -- any Republican who could win the nomination will be sufficiently pro-Trump to shield him from consequences. But if the Democrat wins, then Trump might decide that his only recourse is to declare fraud and barricade himself in the White House.

That's how I imagine it will go: Trump won't decide on open defiance until a winner is declared, and then he'll create a constitutional crisis only if he thinks he needs to. But who knows?

NATALIE HARP IS A SYMPTOM, NOT THE PROBLEM

Jamelle Bouie thinks the real Natalie Harp scandal isn't the fact that she's a conventionally attractive young blonde who appears to be an aging, doddering president's most trusted aide -- it's the information diet she feeds him.

Bouie quotes a New York Times story by Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman:

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful.

Bouie writes:

... the reason [the Harp story] matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.

He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear....

Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.

But Trump has always rejected information that contradicted his upbeat viewpoint. He's always wallowed in happy talk. If Harp weren't the one telling him what he wants to hear, it would be someone else.

Remember 2019, when he fired pollsters because they told him he was on his way to losing swing states, and thus the 2020 election, to Joe Biden? That was years before Harp became a Trump aide. Trump did go on to lose that election. However, he subsequently leveraged that election loss to create a stolen election myth that is accepted as truthful, or at least possibly true, by an overwhelming majority of Republican voters. This "lost cause" myth probably won him the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and possibly the election.

No matter what happens, Trump believes that things will work out (at least for him). In a New York Times interview in May, Tucker Carlson recalled a conversation he'd had with Trump about the president's decision to go to war with Iran:

... he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is.

In a June Truth Social message about the Iran war's critics, Trump wrote:

But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively “chirping,” at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!

This isn't happening because of the influence of one sinister personal assistant. This is who Trump is. He's a lifelong believer in the Power of Positive Thinking.

And to some extent it's understandable. It all has worked out for Trump, more or less. The reason is that he's operated in arenas where people like him get multiple additional opportunities when they screw up.

Our plutocracy, particularly in the post-Reagan era, allows well-off people who fail to keep going until they're not failures anymore. Even when you're a billion dollars in debt, someone will lend you money or provide you with opportunities to recoup. The system is rigged in favor of people who've attained a certain level of wealth -- it's nearly impossible for them to completely fall through the cracks, the way an ordinary person with $20,000 in medical debt might. It's also nearly impossible to beat the rich in a court of law, no matter how illegal or lawsuit-worthy their actions are.

Now Trump operates in another field where the game is rigged for people like him: Republican politics. If you're a Republican with enough voter appeal to win elections and you're a congenital liar, our political culture will keep you afloat even as you continue to lie. Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media will back up your falsehoods -- about election fraud, about the glories of your failed economic policies and failed war, about how evil your enemies are -- and the rest of the media and the opposition party, cowed by decades of Republican ref-working, will never fully challenge you. A supine GOP Congress and a Supreme Court rigged for the Republican Party will let you get away with things no other president was ever allowed to do.

At long last, Trump may have come up against troubles he can't outrun: a dug-in Iranian regime, a bond market that's tired of his economic nonsense, restive voters in a heretofore solidly red heartland.

But until now, Trump's delusional positivism has made a horrible kind of sense. Things always did work out for him. Maybe only now, at age 80, is his luck running out.

SEE THE MEDIA COVERING VANCE AS IF HE'S A NORMAL POLITICIAN FROM A NORMAL ADMINISTRATION

A few months from now, J.D. Vance will announce that he's running for president, despite the fact that he carries an albatross around his neck named Donald Trump. What will the media do when Vance announces? If this New York Times story is any indication, the media will carefully removed the albatross:

Drawing on His Rust Belt Roots, Vance Campaigns for Republicans

Vice President JD Vance traveled to his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, and spoke at a steel factory where his grandfather once worked.

This headline is written as if the second Trump presidency isn't happening, as if the Times is prepared to turn the clock back to the days when Vance was seen as a thoughtful memoirist with many important things to tell coastal liberals about Heartland America.

The story isn't much better.

In his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” JD Vance described a community in crisis.

The steel mill where his grandfather worked for nearly 40 years had been neglected and had endured layoffs in the 1980s, turning his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, into “little more than a relic of American industrial glory.”

“There is a lack of agency here,” Mr. Vance wrote. “A feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”

On Friday, Mr. Vance returned to his roots with promises of a better future, and plenty of blame to go around.

There are a lot of ways the author of this story, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, could have approached it. He could have said that Vance arrived as an emissary of an administration that's unpopular: Trump won Ohio three times, scoring a double-digit win in 2024, but his approval in the state is now -16 according to Civiqs and -26 according to YouGov. I think that would have been part of the lede if a Democratic VP turned up in a state that had once supported a Democratic president but had largely turned against that president. The word "embattled" would undoubtedly turn up somewhere, as would the fact that the party's gubernatorial and senatorial candidates are struggling in the polls. (A few paragraphs down, we're told, neutrally, that Republican Jon Husted "is trying to hold onto his seat in a race against Sherrod Brown, a former senator from the state.")

We're told two things instead: Vance is still a figure whose backstory is fascinating, and he has many positive things to say about current Republican policies and many negative things to say about Democratic policies, all of which we should take very seriously.

Surrounded by union workers in the factory where his “Papaw” once welded steel, Mr. Vance said politicians of both parties had for decades embraced pro-immigrant and free trade policies that redirected jobs away from places like Middletown. He said the Democratic Party no longer resembled the one his grandfather once supported.

And with an eye on the November midterm elections and his political future, Mr. Vance drew on his Rust Belt roots to persuade voters that President Trump’s tariff and immigration policies would protect factory jobs and revitalize struggling towns.

“The future of our homes and communities is going to be built right here in Middletown,” Mr. Vance said.

This is not reported as a credulaity-straining prediction, one that's completely at odds with Ohioans' lived experience. We're not even told that Trump/Vance policies have failed to revitalize Rust Belt economies so far. It's just our normal political discourse, our normal pre-Trump political discourse -- GOP economic policies good, Democratic economic policies bad, Democrats elitist, Republicans (or at least Trump Republicans) pro-Volk -- and it's presented as if there's no evidence that the policies are failing.

“Who do these Democrats put first? Everyone else,” said Mr. Vance....

“You know who the Trump administration puts first?” Mr. Vance asked. “Americans.”

In answer to that second question, I wish someone had yelled out "Himself."

Kanno-Youngs acknowledges a few wispy gray clouds.

Mr. Trump also campaigned on resurrecting the U.S. manufacturing industry, although his on-again, off-again tariff policies have contributed to rising consumer prices.

They also haven't increased employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has shed 75,000 jobs in Trump's second term, a fact that goes unmentioned here.

And while Mr. Vance blamed immigration for threatening American jobs in the heartland, Ohio’s Republican governor has called the Trump administration’s plans to deport Haitians in the state a “mistake,” arguing that the move would hurt the local economy.

No explanation is given for why Governor Mike DeWine said this. In fact, immigrants such as the Haitians who revitalized the economy in Springfield, Ohio, before Trump and Vance attacked them as pet-eating parasites have provided labor and served as additional consumers buying U.S. goods and services. But every Republican voter "knows" that immigrants do nothing but take, and Vance's rhetoric reinforcing that falsehood is essentially allowed to stand.

Ultimately, we're told:

Whether Mr. Vance is correct about the Trump administration’s investment improving the quality of life in Middletown will not just be key for local residents and Republican prospects in November, but also his own political future. Widely considered a potential heir of the MAGA movement, Mr. Vance and his origin story will only be scrutinized more if he seeks higher office.

Vance's origin story is not relevant to the question of whether Trump's policies are working! But Kanno-Youngs thinks Vance's autobiography is such a solid news peg that he mentions it even here.

As for that improvement in Ohio's quality of life, Vance is quoted telling his audience that it's already happening:

“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or it’s all going to happen overnight,” the vice president said. “But in just 18 months, we have seen an explosion of rebuilding in the American heartland.”

We're given this quote, which is utter nonsense, and the story ends. This wild assertion is never fact-checked.

Of course it isn't. Republicans care about the Rust Belt and are generally excellent stewards of the economy has been an unchallenged notion in our political culture since long before Trump entered politics.

Vance is being portrayed here as a man with a fascinating life history, and as an heir to other Republicans who were depicted by the media as normal and rooted in the soil -- Ronald Reagan, even the Bushes. Vance should be struggling to shake off Trump's stink, but here, he's portrayed as if he's fresh as a daisy.

DEMOCRATS SHOULD BE LESS CONCERNED WITH TRUMP'S POLLING FLOOR AND MORE CONCERNED WITH THE REST OF THE GOP'S POLLING FLOOR

Here's a headline at Zeteo:

Trump Advisers Worry He Could ‘Sink to the High 20s’

Asawin Suebsaeng writes:

I have seen a lot of you making the same complaint, and it goes something like this: Donald Trump is such a horrendous U.S. president on so many different personal and policy fronts; I know his poll numbers are garbage right now, but how is it even possible that he’s consistently clinging to more than 30% favorability in the polling? What does a doddering fascist have to do to crack the 20s?

...You’re not the only ones wondering that. Some very well-connected consultants and Trump whisperers are thinking about the scary 20s, too – and they’re not pleased about it.

Trump's numbers have been very bad lately:

“Trump approval falls to 33%, lowest of his presidency, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds,” Reuters reported on Monday....

American Research Group (which doesn’t have the reputation other pollsters do) clocked him at an even 30.

And sure, things could get worse for Trump.

Private polls commissioned by different organizations and arms of the Republican elite “aren’t much better,” I’m told by an operative close to the White House who has knowledge of data causing a sustained bedwetting from much of the party that President Trump is going to drag them down hard in the critically important midterms.

Democrats are overwhelming favorites to win the House, and have a decent shot at winning the Senate. Trump really is dragging his party down for the midterms.

But if Trump's floor could sink to the 20s, a couple of his fellow Republicans surprisingly appear to have a much higher floor, according to a new Emerson poll:

In this poll by Emerson, Pete Buttigieg is +5 on either JD Vance or Marco Rubio; Jon Ossoff is +5 on Vance, +3 on Rubio; Gavin Newsom is +5 on Vance, +2 on Rubio; Kamala Harris is +4 on Vance, -5 on Rubio; AOC is -2 on Vance, -5 on Rubio bluevirginia.us/2026/08/thur...

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— Blue Virginia (@bluevirginia.bsky.social) August 20, 2026 at 10:30 AM

In 2028 matchups against the Democratic Party's A-list, Emerson says that the floor for both J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio is 44%.

Maybe that would be understandable for a Republican governor who'd never worked in the Trump White House, but these are two of the most prominent figures in his administration. Why aren't they in disgrace, too? Why do they have a reasonable chance of winning the presidency two years from now?

Democrats attack Trump, and Democratic candidates attack their own opponents, but Democrats don't attack the Republican Party as a whole. This is one of the consequences.

You can't expect voters to intuit that the disaster of Trumpism is partly Vance and Rubio's fault. More than any other presidency in our lifetime -- or in American history -- the second Trump presidency seems like the work of one person. Every bad decision, every failure, every screwup seems like Trump's fault and Trump's fault alone. Maybe Pete Hegseth seems to share a little bit of the blame on foreign policy, or Stephen Miller and (formerly) Kristi Noem on immigration policy, but Americans appear to believe the failures of Trumpism are overwhelmingly Trump's responsibility. Voters don't even seem to see his top subordinates, in the executive branch or in Congress, as enablers who share the blame.

Obviously, Democrats will try to hang Trump's failures around the necks of Vance and Rubio starting next year, when they announce that they're running. I hope it works. I hope voters don't conclude that they were just helpless observers of a one-man presidency. What's unlikely, this year and in 2028, is a widescale 1932-level rejection of the Republican Party. That leaves the door open for someone in the GOP -- maybe a congressional or gubernatorial Trump loyalist -- to win in 2028 if Vance and Rubio become too toxic. And they clearly aren't too toxic yet.

IN 2028, COULD THE CRAZIEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL RACE BE ... PETE HEGSETH?

Most people were paying attention to other stories early this week and missed this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday is traveling to Iowa in his “personal capacity,” the Pentagon said in a statement, further fueling speculation that the former Fox News personality is mulling a run for president at some point.

The visit ... comes five months after Hegseth was scheduled to appear at a political rally and fundraising event with Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), who is running for reelection this year. That trip was postponed after several U.S. troops from Iowa were killed early in the war with Iran.

(Emphasis added.)

Monday's appearance was on behalf of Congressman Nunn, who won in 2022 by just four points and is in a competitive race now. So even though Hegseth has a -22 net approval rating according to recent polls from both Quinnipiac and Marquette, he's popular enough among bubble-dwelling Republicans that Nunn apparently said, "Sure, Pete, come campaign for me. That would be awesome." (Among Republicans, Hegseth's job approval is 79%, according to Quinnipiac.) Previously, in May, Hegseth campaigned for Ed Gallrein, who went on to defeat Thomas Massie in a House primary.

We know that millions of Republicans still think Donald Trump is doing a great job and apparently feel the same way about Hegseth, but is that enough to win him the Republican presidential nomination two years from now? Matt Gertz of Media Matters thinks it's possible:

Hegseth, a bombastic former Fox News weekend host ... may be uniquely attuned to the right's attention economy. He could become the presidential candidate of the right-wing media’s id, running a furious culture war campaign fixated on domestic political enemies that checks all the boxes for authoritarian-minded pundits indifferent to traditional policy issues.

Anti-Muslim. Hegseth ... has decried the “Muslims’ birth rates” in multiple states and fearmongered about the success of Muslim political candidates, warning that “Islamists” are trying “to seed the West with as many Muslims as possible.” ...

Anti-DEI. At Fox, Hegseth was at the forefront of the right’s assault on policy initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.... He’s now put that into practice at the Pentagon....

Anti-press. ... He’s smeared news outlets as unpatriotic for not running headlines like “Iran increasingly desperate,” and mocked and derided individual reporters, even denouncing his former Fox colleague Jennifer Griffin as “the one who misrepresents the most intentionally.” ...

Anti-immigrant. ... “When you import the Third World, you get Third World hierarchy, values, and chaos,” he said in a November 2024 Fox segment.... As defense secretary, he used a speech in France marking the anniversary of D-Day to attack the “invasion” of migrants hitting European beaches, asking, “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

Pro-war crimes. ... At the Pentagon, Hegseth [has] carried out operations in the Middle East, Indian Ocean, eastern Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean Sea that experts say could include war crimes....

Pro-Christian nationalism. ... He invited Pastor Doug Wilson, “a self-described Christian nationalist who wants to repeal a woman's right to vote, has defended slavery and believes homosexuality should be a crime,” to give a sermon at the Pentagon earlier this year.

In his Iowa appearance on Monday, Hegseth very calculatedly used a transphobic slur: “At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a transphobic slur while speaking at the Iowa State Fair Monday, where he appeared in support of Republican Rep. Zach Nunn, who is running for a third term in Congress.

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— CNN (@cnn.com) August 19, 2026 at 7:22 PM

Would Hegseth actually win the nomination? After Trump won three times, I don't want to argue that any Republican is too extreme to win. But GOP voters thought Trump was a winner, even after he lost the 2020 election (which, of course, they think he won). Given the Iran debacle, Hegseth will have a hard time making the case for himself as a winner.

But Republicans have a history of nearly nominating failed politicians who toss out a lot of red meat. In 2012, they embraced two such candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, before finally settling on Mitt Romney. Hegseth could be the Gingrich or Santorum of 2028.

If he did win the nomination, I think Hegseth would be easier to beat than Vance or Rubio, because he seems more distasteful, with his hair gel, his tattoos, and his Pentagon's open racism and sexism. If he makes a serious run for president, his history of domestic abuse might finally get the spotlight it deserves, as might the weirdness of his church and its repellent pastor, Doug Wilson:

In one famous passage from his book on marriage, Wilson suggests that sexual violence is women's fault for not being submissive enough. "[T]he sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party," he writes. "A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts." The alleged failure of women to submit, he continues, leads men to "dream of being rapists," deprived of the "erotic necessity" found in women's submission....

During the election season, he argued that women's suffrage was a mistake and part of "a long, sustained war on the family."

Post-Trump, I'm not ruling out the possibility that Hegseth could win the nomination. I keep returning to something said in 2017 by Thomas Massie, who's a libertarian, and who saw voters supporting Donald Trump after previously supporting Massie and fellow libertarian Ron Paul:

"All this time," Massie explained, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."

In 2028, especially when measured against J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, Hegseth might come off as the craziest son of a bitch in the Republican primary race.

THE LIMITS OF NATALIE

I've been thinking about the Natalie Harp story and the possibility that it's not doing as much damage to Donald Trump as we're all hoping it is.

The main problem with the story is that it suggests two possible realities, which point to two very different views of Trump. One is that Trump is having an affair with a young blonde who's less than half his age. The other is that he's a weak, doddering old man who demands constant reassurances that he's brilliant, at a time when America has real problems and we want the president to be focused on those problems, not on his own delicate ego and waning powers.

One problem with the latter narrative is that, for some reason, Americans have never found it odd that the president is addicted to praise. Many times during his two terms, the president has arranged live broadcasts of meetings in which cabinet secretaries compete to offer Trump the most obsequious compliments. In a more rational country, such orgies of praise would shock the public and drastically lower the president's approval ratings. But while Trump's approval numbers are very low, we know what causes them to decline: high prices, an unwinnable war, a brutal and incompetent crackdown on immigrants and their defenders. Not the praise-orgies. When they happen, they're a one-day story at most. Trump haters notice them, but the rest of the country mostly ignores them.

I think that's because we live in a culture of fandom. We think it's normal to feel tremendous attachment to celebrities (or even fictional universes -- here in Manhattan this week, fans lined up days in advance to get tickets to the new Dune movie in 70mm IMAX). I'm not sure we think this is particularly weird:

Natalie Harp wouldn’t take no for an answer.

It was October 2023, and Donald Trump was due at a New York City courthouse to fight his latest set of legal troubles. But as the motorcade idled outside his Trump Tower residence, staffers confronted a more immediate problem: There wasn’t room for Harp, the hyper-loyal aide whose devotion to Trump had quickly entrenched her within his orbit.

A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, served as an encapsulation of the role Harp has carved out in recent years as a constant and intensely dedicated presence at Trump’s side.

If we think it's weird, it's because we'd never express that kind of devotion to Trump -- but many of us might to some other politician or celebrity (or comic universe) we admire more. The stories of Harp's obsessiveness suggest that Trump still has the power to inspire that sort of loyalty, whether or not two of them are romantically involved.

We still think it's embarrassing for a politician to cheat on a spouse -- or, to be precise, to be caught cheating (or, in this case, possibly cheating). That's the reason Jon Ossoff's campaign speech broke through.

But we need to do a lot more work to get the country to understand Ossoff's real point: that the president is indulging himself in golf, corruption, redecorating plans, and the adoring presence of a young aide when he should be doing his job.

And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job; he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

Right now, Democrats should have some message discipline. There should be many Democrats out there reinforcing -- and elaborating on -- Ossoff's message. Since Ossoff is being accused of sexism, maybe some Democratic women could give Ossoff some backup. (Republicans know enough to deploy black party members when one of their number is accused of racism, and women when the charge is sexism.)

It's going to take more than one speech to put across Ossoff's real message: that Trump is extraordinarily bad at his job, and that he isn't even trying to do it well because he sees the job -- and the flattery that goes with it -- primarily as self-care. So lend Jon Ossoff a hand.

HAS JON OSSOFF FOUND THE SWEET SPOT WHERE MALADMINISTRATION MEETS GOSSIP?

Running for reelection in Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff drew blood with this:

Ossoff says that Trump doesn’t want to do his job but wants to “travel with Natalie”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 16, 2026 at 6:23 PM

“While the sailors on the [USS Abraham Lincoln] fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” the senator told a crowd at a campaign rally. “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie [Harp] on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

A hit dog will holler:

“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the ever-cantankerous White House communications director, posted on X. “Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat.”

“Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said on X, launching a homophobic insult at Ossoff.

This is great. Just think: a Democrat is going viral for attacking Republicans, not fellow Democrats. That never happens!

As I said earlier today on Bluesky:

I've often tried to imagine strong anti-Trump, anti-GOP messaging. Whenever I suggest a strong message, someone inevitably responds, "Yeah, but if a Democrat said that, the media wouldn't cover it." The virality of Jon Ossoff's Natalie Harp attack proves that Dems can break through if they try.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) August 18, 2026 at 6:32 AM

But a couple of things concern me.

First, Ossoff isn't just gossiping -- he's stirring some gossip into a critique of Trump's mismanagement of ... well, everything he's in charge of. Ossoff is talking about sailors who aren't getting the resources they need in a war that every informed person knew should never be started. He's talking about Trump's fixation on monuments and interior decoration (Maggie Haberman has said, "If you looked at a chart of his mindshare ... 70 percent of it would be on his renovations") and the president's professed uninterest in Americans' real problems. He's talking about Trump's corruption and gullibility, as embodied in his acceptance of a plane from Qatar that lacks proper security. And he's talking about Trump's preference for surrounding himself with flatterers, which is where Natalie Harp comes in.

But this risks being reduced to smutty gossip about the possibility that there's something sexual going on between Harp and Trump. Don't get me wrong: that's good. To normal people (by which I mean non-Republicans), this looks like an amour fou, a doddering old man feeling besotted with a young, overly worshipful admirer, whether or not they're actually doing the deed. ("You are all that matters to me," Harp has written to Trump, according to Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their book Regime Change. We're also told that Trump has said, "All of you will go off and make money. She'll never leave me.")

I hope Ossoff's attack on Trump's failure to act like even a minimally competent president sticks, not just the gossip. I hope America is coming for the gossip and staying for the argument that Trump is extraordinarily bad at his job and isn't even trying to do it right. I'll take the sexual ridicule, but I want more.

I also don't want this moment to be exclusively about Ossoff -- his skills, his looks (Ossoff features prominently in an Axios story headlined "Democrats Enter Their Thirst Trap Era"), his potential 2028 presidential camapign. We already have Politico quoting an unnamed Democratic strategist who says that Ossoff looks like presidential timber, but if he's perceived as presidential timber, he might lose his Senate race.

“The moment the national political organization gets a whiff that Jon Ossoff is thinking about running for president is the moment that [the] Senate campaign falls from under him,” said a longtime Democratic strategist.

However: “That doesn’t take away from the fact that ... national leaders, national supporters are paying close attention to a guy who should be ahead by, you know, by one point at the most in a state like Georgia.”

This appears under the headline "Ossoff Just Went Viral Again. That Was Probably the Point: Behind the Viral Moments Is a Candidate Who Is Closely Involved with All Aspects of His Reelection Campaign." NEWSFLASH! Jon Ossoff carefully reads and edits his speeches before delivering them! Must credit Politico!

What we need now is for every Democrat to attack Trump and the Republican Party with the fierceness and wit of Jon Ossoff, or as much of it as they can muster. Ossoff is over the target, but he needs backup. Don't strand him out there.

CENTRIST DEMOCRATS STILL HATE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS MORE THAN REPUBLICANS, GOOD COP EDITION

A new Axios story suggests that mainstream Democrats are starting to understand why so many of the party's voters are choosing progessives and democratic socialists rather than centrists:

The Democratic establishment's ideas deficit

The centrist Democratic group Third Way recently declared "war" on democratic socialists to head off what they fear could be a far-left hijacking of the party ahead of 2028.

But establishment Democrats have made clear what they're against without making much of a case for what they're for.

Why it matters: It's hard to beat something with nothing.

Democratic socialism, whatever you think of it, is easy to grasp: Tax billionaires and redistribute wealth. Provide government-funded health care and child care for everyone. Rely less on markets for housing and education. Empower workers with stronger unions.

The establishment vision is murky. Raise taxes, but not too high; use government to make health care and child care more affordable, rather than taking them over; rein in the excesses of capitalism without upending capitalism itself.

That's a tougher vision to sum up, let alone rally behind.

"Without question, we agree with the left that we have failed to convince working-class voters that their lives will be better if they put us in charge," Third Way co-founder Matt Bennett told Axios. "You'd have to be insane to disagree."

So with fewer than ninety days to go before Election Day, it's finally dawned on these schmucks that they could have spent this year giving voters a reason to vote for them. They didn't, and now they're paying the price.

But the point of the story isn't to try to rectify that act of political malpractice. It's to put a nicer face on the centrists' war with their real enemy (DSA, not the GOP).

Third Way recently announced a $15 million campaign to take on the progressive left.

Bennett said Third Way has 100-plus people working on a policy menu — a "new kind of offer for working-class voters who have abandoned Democrats" — that he hopes 2028 Democrats will draw from.

The story reporting on Third Way's declaration of "war" appeared in The New York Times and revealed Third Way's "bad cop" side:

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.

Third Way apparently realized that this was offputting, so it planted the new Axios story, which depicts the group's "good cop" side: Hey, this isn't really an attempt to beat the democratic socialists into submission -- we're actually planning to compete with them in the marketplace of ideas! It's a healthy rivalry! May the best ideas win!

But the ideas seem a tad ... weak:

There are already clear examples of centrists drawing a bright line with democratic socialists, [Bennett] added. "Where we strongly differ with them is around the particulars. They're for Medicare for all, and we're for ... a health care bill of rights that would improve the existing system, not throw it out and replace it with a $30 trillion socialization of the health care space."

(Did he really say "health care space"? Centrists say that Democrats alienate ordinary Americans by using what they call "faculty lounge language," then they turn around and use corporate boardroom language.)

Why didn't the centrists start developing an agenda two years ago, so they could have had it ready for the midterms? Why don't centrist Democrats simply have an agenda ready to go at all times, because, y'know, they're in politics and politicians are supposed to have ideas?

And even if this is the "good cop" side of the war on democratic socialists, why is this more important, at this moment, than a war on Republicans?

Even Axios seems to know that centrist ideas aren't very exciting:

Some liberals have tried to chart a fresh direction for the party. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argued in a 2025 book that Democrats should become the party of "abundance" — building more housing, infrastructure and clean energy — by cutting red tape and making government work better.

But it hasn't caught fire.

The Axios story quotes Rahm Emanuel apparently conceding that democratic socialists are winning the ideas war:

"Give progressives credit for bringing ideas to the table. Pragmatists haven't been as good as we need to be about offering our own ideas and agenda," potential Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel wrote on X.

But when you read his entire tweet, which he posted just after David Crowley's victory over Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, you can see that his message appears to be: We outnumber you commies! We don't really need ideas!

Another Election Day, another result the pollsters and the conventional wisdom misread. The DSA and the far left get the press while the pragmatists notch key wins: WI, MO, HI, VA.

The turnout surge across the South has been driven by the party's most reliable voters, not its loudest online voices. Each wing of the party knows the game's rigged for insiders at the expense of those trying to stretch every paycheck; we just disagree on the fix.

Give progressives credit for bringing ideas to the table. Pragmatists haven't been as good as we need to be about offering our own ideas and agenda. You can't beat something with nothing, and too often we're prisoners of the moment. But what these elections are showing is that the pragmatic wing isn't a faction of this party. It's the majority, it's awake now, and it's exerting itself.

Yesterday we had Hakeem Jeffries on Meet the Press offering elements of a centrist agenda (basically progressivism, but diluted)...

Jeffries stop short of committing to holding a vote to abolish ICE is he's House Speaker next January, but says he's "committed to dramatically reforming ICE ... the masks should come off, body cameras should come on, judicial warrants should be required."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 16, 2026 at 10:35 AM

... while also playing bad cop, smearing democratic socialist candidates by linking them to ideas most don't espouse, even if the DSA itself does:

WELKER: Do democratic socialists belong in the Dem Party? JEFFRIES: What I can say is I do not support defunding the police, I do not support open borders, I do not support abolishing the Senate. We're focused on actually solving the problems hard-working American taxpayer want us to solve ...

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 16, 2026 at 10:32 AM

The fighting rages. The fight against Republicans seems, if anything, like a second front. The battle against DSA is the main war.

YOU SAY "TEA PARTY MOMENT" AS IF THAT'S A BAD THING

In The New York Times, Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck have a dark warning for Democrats:

Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment?

A movement of young, progressive outsiders has stormed Democratic politics this year, sparking a wave of contentious primary contests across the country and fueling a fraught debate over whether these new, left-wing candidates are remaking the party in their image.

But as primary season winds to a close, the results reveal not only the strength but also the potential limitations of this insurgent movement.

In Minnesota last week, Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, won a Senate primary by a double-digit margin, pressing a fiercely progressive message to defeat a more moderate opponent. Just a week earlier, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-leaning Democrat, won a Senate primary in Michigan despite being vastly outspent. And Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, came close to winning a primary for governor in Wisconsin, falling short by less than one percentage point.

As I told you on Wednesday, the mainstream political world expected Hong to win her primary, which would have confirmed the preferred narrative of mainstream journalists: that radical barbarian outsiders are taking over the Democratic Party, and hurting the party as a result. When Hong lost, Flanagan -- who's not an outsider (she's been the state's lieutenant governor for nearly eight years and was in the state legislature for four years before that) -- was simply swapped in. A few paragraphs later, Lerer and Glueck write:

The next major tests for the left will come this fall in a smattering of battleground House districts, and as Dr. El-Sayed and Troy Jackson, a progressive former state senator in Maine, fight to win seats that Democrats need to capture control of the Senate.

Jackson is also not an outsider -- he served in the Maine House of Representatives for six years and in the Senate for fourteen years; he was the Senate president for six of those years. A party committee chose him to replace Graham Platner (an actual outsider) on the ballot. But the narrative is more important than the facts.

According to the narrative, progressive Democrats want to build a Tea Party of the left, but this will probably cause the party to lose winnable races, which means the movement is doomed. Lerer and Glueck write:

As left-wing candidates have notched victories in primary after primary, many progressives hope they will be able to move the Democratic Party further to the left — mirroring, in some ways, how the rise of the Tea Party movement nearly two decades ago pushed the Republican Party much further to the right. But the results raise questions about whether these candidates can piece together a broad enough coalition of Democrats, independents and moderates to win general elections in swing states that could determine whether Democrats are able to regain power in Congress and, eventually, the White House.

But Tea Party Republicans lost their share of winnable races, too. Here's a Politico story from October 2010:

Tea-party-backed outsider candidates became the superstars of the midterm elections, drawing national attention after big Republican Senate primary wins — and leading tea partiers to pour millions into those campaigns, seeking credibility. But on Nov. 2, the tea party itself could get a mixed return on those investments.

With about a week to go until Election Day, several candidates stamped with the tea party seal of approval are either locked in statistical ties with their Democratic opponents or sinking in the polls....

Examples included several Senate candidates -- Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Joe Miller in Alaska, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware.

Angle, Buck, and O'Donnell lost to Democrats. Miller lost to incumbent Lisa Murkowski, who won as a write-in canddiate after losing her party's primary. (This was before the days of ranked-choice elections in Alaska.) Rand Paul won, of course. Democrats held the Senate and maintained their hold in 2012.

But you can't call the Tea Party a failure because some of its candidates lost races the party could have won. On balance, the Tea Party made the GOP a lot stronger than it was after the 2008 Democratic blowout. Here were the numbers at the end of Barack Obama's final term in office:

... the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower....

President Obama entered the White House with his party touting a 60 seat majority in the Senate and 257 seat majority in the House. Democrats now hold a 48 seat minority in the Senate and 194 seat minority in the House — a net loss of 12 and 64 seats respectively....

The midterm elections delivered significant blows to Congressional Democrats. In 2010, Democrats lost 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, costing them the chamber. In 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.

So it's okay -- or at least it can be okay -- if an insurgent movement produces a few candidates who prove to be unelectable, as long as the infusion of energy makes the party more competitive overall.

(It helps not to attack your own candidates. Mainstream Republicans did a lot less of that establishment Democrats are doing now.)

Elsewhere in the Times, data guy Nate Cohn asks:

Could El-Sayed Cost Democrats Michigan?

Cohn begins his analysis with a factual error:

When the midterm election campaign began, Michigan seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted in their pursuit of the Senate. Yes, it’s a presidential battleground state, but that makes it the kind of state that Democrats would ordinarily win easily in what seems like a strongly Democratic midterm cycle.

No, Michigan never "seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted." It's a state Donald Trump had won twice. In 2020, the only year Trump lost the state, the incumbent Democratic senator, Gary Peters, won reelection by less than two points. The state's other Democratic senator, Elissa Slotkin, won the state by less than half a point in 2024.

And as of the end of January, two of the three top Democratic candidates for the Senate seat -- El-Sayed and Mallory McMorrow -- were trailing Republican Mike Rogers in the Real Clear Polling averages. Only Haley Stevens was leading Rogers, and that was by a margin of just 1.3 points.

Cohn continues:

It’s not a state Democrats can take for granted anymore. There are clear signs that the newly minted Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, could underperform a typical Democratic candidate’s vote share by enough to endanger the party’s chances.

According to Cohn, "ordinary" progressive Democrats like Senators Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker "do only about a point worse than other Democrats," but candidates "of the activist progressive left" do noticeably worse. How does he define the latter group?

They might ally themselves with the democratic socialists, define themselves in terms of their support for activist causes like Gaza or the climate, run against the Democratic Party, engage in righteous fights with Republicans, post clap-backs on social media, or champion activist slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police.”

This is how far we've fallen: In a year of massive heat waves and wildfires, "climate" is deemed one of the "activist causes" that can get a candidate branded as a radical. Also radical: being a candidate who "engage[s] in righteous fights with Republicans." Fighting your opponent makes you an extremist outlier in the Democratic Party -- as does posting "clap-backs on social media." (Apparently, it's extremist to be better at online messaging than Chuck Schumer.)

I suspect that past support for defunding the police can be a drag on a candidate's popular support. Criticism of Israel? Maybe that too, if only because it worries some Jewish Democrats and leads other voters to believe you're one of those crazy radicals.

But I also have to wonder how Abdul El-Sayed would be doing in the polls if he were running the identical campaign under the name Al E. Sanders. Michigan might be no more ready for a Muslim senator than America was for a Catholic president when Al Smith got trounced in 1928. The national Republican Party is certainly running against Islam nationwide. But neither of these Times pieces mentions El-Sayed's religion as a reason why he might be underperforming other Democrats trying to win Senate races in purple states. The narrative -- radicalism bad! -- can't be challenged.