CAN JAMES TALARICO AVOID BEING DUKAKISED?

I'm watching the Republican campaign against James Talarico in Texas and I'm having flashbacks to 1988. That year, a decent, non-macho Democrat named Michael Dukakis, who was the governor of Massachusetts, tried to win a presidential election saying things like this:

... this election is not about ideology. It's about competence.

... It's about American values. Old-fashioned values like accountability and responsibility and respect for the truth.

The 1988 election wasn't about ideology or competence. It was about one thing: Do you believe Michael Dukakis is a dangerous freak? That was the question Republicans had Americans asking themselves, whether they recognized it or not.

Republicans portrayed Dukakis as a freak in part because he wasn't tall or manly and because he didn't look good in the helmet he wore while riding a tank in a campaign photo op. Republicans portrayed him as dangerous because a criminal named Willie Horton who was released on a furlough program on Dukakis's watch committed a violent assault, something that wasn't unique to the furlough programs that had been established at that time by every state and the federal government. Republicans also portrayed Dukakis as dangerous because in 1977 he'd vetoed a bill requiring students to say the Pledge of Allegiance, a mandate that had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court a couple of decades earlier; because he opposed the death penalty; and because he was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The attacks on Talarico feel similar to these attacks on Dukakis because, in both cases, positions that seem reasonable in more liberal and tolerant parts of America are easy to portray as bizarre and civilization-threatening in conservative America.

The first general election ad from Talarico's opponent, Ken Paxton unloads nearly everything Republicans have got on Talarico:



It's all cultural -- there really isn't anything here about policy. What doesn't make the cut in this ad shows up in the messaging of Paxton's surrogates:

What the hell is he eating?

It’s not BBQ—because Talarico is passionately anti-meat.

Is that a tofu log? https://t.co/J9Uvch1RY7

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 27, 2026

(Talarico isn't vegan, though he said during his 2022 state senate bid that he was running a "non-meat campaign.")

It's a huge problem for the Democrat Party that you take one look at the men they run for elected office and just know that they couldn't name a single obscure wide receiver from the early 2000s. https://t.co/fKmt8jhUoL

— Dan Weldon for Congress (FL-14) (@TampaDan) May 27, 2026

(Yes, this is how we decide who runs the most powerful country in the world.)

Watters: Talarico is also 37 and not married. He says he has a girlfriend. He called her his best friend. He’s not revealing her identity because he wants to protect her privacy. Why haven’t we ever seen her before? Does she exist? If he wins, are they going to have a coming out… pic.twitter.com/yFskJ7tcsm

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 27, 2026

It's middle school gay-baiting, but it might work. And Stephen Miller took it a step further, describing Talarico as the Democrats' "first transgender senate candidate." The party, to its credit, responded quickly and vulgarly -- "shut up you ugly fuck" -- but I think Marisa Kabas is right:

as much as i appreciate the democrats responding with vigor for once, the fact that republicans are using "transgender" as a slur for a political candidate is fucking horrifying and dems need to quickly figure out a way to address it head on. calling stephen miller ugly isn't a long-term fix.

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 2:29 PM

Over the course of my lifetime, there's been a significant positive change in how non-gay Americans see gay people, but I don't see any sign that we're approaching a day when the majority of cis Americans will be similarly at ease with trans people, or at least accepting of their rights. Talarico is a trans ally, and he might not be able to win a Texas election for that reason alone.

One big difference between Talarico and Dukakis is that Talarico appears to understand the assignment. Unlike Dukakis (and John Kerry sixteen years later), he's not ignoring the GOP's most vicious attacks and hoping they'll just go away. This is from a new CBS interview:

Pressed on a comment he made that God is nonbinary, Talarico said he was being "intentionally provocative," but added that "what it means is that God can't be defined by human categories." On his comments about gender, Talarico said "I know there are two sexes, men and women. I also know there's a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect."

Asked by O'Keefe about the criticism surrounding his diet, Talarico said he is not a vegan, noting that he's an eighth-generation Texan who's "been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton's first indictment."

(Talarico, as you can see in the Paxton ad above, has said that there are six biological genders.)

Talarico, by taking these attacks head-on, might remain competitive in the race, but I wonder if he can really neutralize them. This campaign should be about Ken Paxton's criminality and moral failings, about Donald Trump's incompetence and corruption, and about the Republican Party's failure to make life better for ordinary Americans. But I don't think it will be about that. I fear it will be about whether the Democrat is a big old weirdo. Talarico might win anyway, but he'll have to win on the GOP's turf.

IN TEXAS, DEMOCRATS DIDN'T VOTE FOR THE CRAZIEST S.O.B. (D.O.B.) IN THE RACE

You know about the big headline from Texas last night: Not only did highly corrupt extremist and Donald Trump endorsee Ken Paxton beat incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary runoff, he trounced Cornyn, winning by a 64%-36% margin. Paxton appears to have won all but 2 of Texas's 254 counties.

And that's not the only Texas race in which extremism seems to have prevailed. Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo reports:

The Republican primary runoff ran for the open Texas Railroad Commissioner position was too close to call as of Wednesday morning, with extremist candidate Bo French leading the incumbent by less than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press’ unofficial tally of returns....

French waged an eye-popping campaign for the seat on a platform that had little to do with the actual work of the office, supporting the deportation of 100 million people and railing against what he described as the “Islamification” of Texas.

As Kovensky previously reported, French

largely campaigned on culture war intangibles, like cleansing Texas’ oil sector of Islam, fighting DEI, and deporting 100 million people. While chair of the Tarrant County GOP last year, French earned condemnation from fellow Texas Republicans for posting a poll that asked whether Jews or Muslims posed a greater threat to the United States....

He’s called Muslims “savages” and demanded their deportation; he’s said that Texas mosques are “training centers” for an “ideology” of people who “get to rape your wife and daughter.” ...

When the city of Corpus Christi began to run out of water this year, French pinned the blame on a nearby plastics factory, which is majority-owned by the Saudi government. French played that up. In a recent runoff campaign ad, French attacked Wright, accusing his opponent of selling the city’s water to a “Muslim foreign government” and claiming a Delaware court had caught the plastics company trying to “enact Sharia law in America.”

“Do you really want a commissioner who would sell out his own neighbors to a Muslim government? I don’t,” he concluded.

A couple of days ago, I quoted a 2017 observation by Thomas Massie, the libertarian Kentucky congressman who's now a lame duck because he crossed Trump. Massie talked about voters who backed Trump in 2016 after previously supporting him and fellow libertarians Ron and Rand 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 yesterday's runoff, Texas Republicans voted for the craziest son of a bitch for both U.S. senator and (apparently) railroad commissioner.

You know who didn't vote for the craziest son of a bitch -- or, rather, daughter of a bitch -- in yesterday runoff? Democratic voters in Texas's 35th congressional district.

Progressive sex therapist Maureen Galindo lost the Democratic runoff for Texas’ 35th District after being accused of antisemitism and facing condemnations from within her own party.

Johnny Garcia’s victory over Galindo on Tuesday has national and Texas Democrats breathing a sigh of relief.

They had moved en masse to disavow Galindo after she said in a recent social media post that she would write legislation to turn a local ICE detention center into a “prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.”

The Instagram post on Galindo's campaign site didn't just call for the imprisonment of Zionists. It said they should be castrated.

Galindo lost the runoff 64%-36% after leading Garcia in the primary by 2 points.

Americans think both parties have an extremism problem. A Pew survey from last year found this:

61% say the phrase “too extreme in its positions” describes the Republican Party very or somewhat well; 57% describe the Democratic Party as too extreme.

But only one party is routinely defined as extreme. In a new Washington Post/ABC poll, respondents were asked to express in their own words what they don't like about the two major parties. For Democrats, the top answer (at 12%) was summarized in the poll as "Too liberal/socialism/race/gender/abortion/crime positions." For Republicans, the top answer was (also at 12%) was "Trump/Loyalty to Trump," while there's no all-encompassing ideological characterization of Republicans. "Lack of concern for ordinary people/cruelty" is at 6%, "Authoritarianism/disregard for rule of law/anti-democracy" and "Racist or anti-diversity politics " are at 4%, but extremism is not front of mind for most voters when they think about Republicans, and there seems to be no Republican equivalent of the W word for Democrats, as used by one survey respondent:

Too woke, focus on issues not central to Americans (economy and jobs).
— California woman, 50s, independent

And there's this:

Gone too far to the left, they are more in line with the communist and socialist parties.
— New York woman, 50s, independent

In reality, hardly any viable Democratic candidates are extreme in the way that Bo French and Ken Paxton are, and Democrats aren't accepting of unrepentant hatemongers, while Republicans increasingly embrace them. But the public still doesn't see that.

THAT CONSENT WON'T MANUFACTURE ITSELF

Paul Krugman struggles to understand the culture of flattery that surrounds President Trump:

On Memorial Day the New York Times published an article with the headline “Trump is the only person who can save America, according to his cabinet.” The article offered a quantitative analysis of senior-official sycophancy. As the article notes, Donald Trump likes to hold long, televised cabinet meetings. In these meetings, according to the Times,

On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

Yeah, you know:

And it continues this morning, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tells us that Trump is the only president who's ever worked the phones on a holiday weekend, and is the only president who can get other world leaders to talk to him over a holiday weekend that actually isn't a holiday weekend in their countries:

Burgum: "It's obviously President Trump two moves ahead of his critics as always. Nothing short of aspiration for peace in the Middle East. I mean, who on a Saturday afternoon over a holiday weekend can pull together all of the world leaders from the gulf state allies, get 'em all on a phone call?"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 26, 2026 at 7:44 AM

Obviously, Trump has an off-the-charts need for praise -- he might be the most emotionally needy person who has ever lived. But as Krugman notes, this exaltation of a Republican president is not unprecedented:

The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?

And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.

Why do Republicans do this? Sure, Democrats sometimes respond to their political heroes as if they're rock stars: Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton in the 1990s. But it's more that we find them cool and like the job they're doing. At most, it's fandom, not worship. We don't exalt them. We don't imagine them as royalty, or as gods and goddesses.

I think two things are happening with the Republicans. First, they like traditional hierarchies: women subordinate to men, people subordinate to God. It feels natural for them to conclude that an especially favored president belongs near the top of the great chain of being, as a monarch or a god.

But it's also a way for them to manufacture consent for their party leaders' policies. When they tell us that one of their presidents is worthy of worship, they're trying to make us believe that everyone, or at least everyone normal, supports their leader and their party. They might never have fully succeeded in persuading the public that everyone loves Trump (except perhaps in red states), but they sustained Bush's popularity for years after his post-9/11 popularity spike, and they've created an aura around Reagan that persists after his death. (Even some liberal pundits recall him as a unifying president who was very different from the current crop of divisive GOP culture warriors. In reality, he was one of those divisive GOP culture warriors.)

As Bush's popularity faded, his handlers largely abandoned efforts to manufacture exaltation propaganda. By 2007 and 2008, you weren't very likely to see him positioned in such a way that his head would be framed by an apparent halo, as in a 2003 AP photo, or placed in front of Mount Rushmore, as in a photo from 2002.

With Trump, they're still doing it, even though most of America hates him now. (And unless he salvages the Iran surrender deal soon, I guess most of America will continue to hate him.) I suppose it keeps the base on board, so it's not an entirely wasted exercise for the GOP. And if Trump dies in office, it's groundwork for posthumous sanctification efforts of the kind we saw in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's death.

If Trump dies soon, I don't think the general public will respond the way Republicans hope. But the base will never stray. Trump will never be Richard Nixon, a president nearly everyone now agrees was justifiably driven from office. We'll never have universal agreement on Trump's awfulness.

DON'T BE SO SURE THAT TRUMP'S IRAN SURRENDER WILL BE A LOSS FOR HIM

In The Atlantic, David Frum declares that President Trump lost his war with Iran, and lists the reasons why. One reason, Frum writes, is this:

Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.

This got me thinking: Did Trump really fail on January 6?

I don't know what Trump's plan was, but at minimum it was to save face. Trump wanted to be perceived as someone who went down fighting (even though he left the fighting to his followers, the way the owner of a resort might ask the help to tidy up the rose bushes). In that sense, he got what he wanted.

But I think it can be argued that January 6 was a success for Trump -- just not right away. During the "stop the steal" period after the 2020 election, Trump turned an electoral defeat into a Lost Cause. He persuaded millions of Americans that he was the legitimate winner. Then he dodged accountability -- he wasn't arrested, he wasn't convicted after impeachment, and he wasn't successfully prosecuted. Many of his followers went to prison, but he succeeded in making them martyrs -- martyrs whom ordinary Trump admirers found relatable. In the primaries, it's quite possible that he beat Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and other challengers precisely because of January 6 and "stop the steal." What Republican base voters want most of all is to own the libs. Even a vote for DeSantis, a tireless culture warrior, didn't seem as lib-owning as a vote for Trump, who had persuaded the base that the libs stole the presidency from him.

In the way that historians such as Heather Cox Richardson argue that the South ultimately won the Civil War, I think we can argue that Trump won January 6, even if it took four years for him to collect his winnings.

If fall arrives and Trump's Iran surrender has lowered gas prices to an approximation of where they were before the war, while he's persuading gullible rubes that he saved America from an imminent Iranian nuclear attack, then he might ultimately win this time, too. Maybe the outcome would change if Democrats were willing to compare and contrast Trump's deal with the nuclear deal negotiated during Barack Obama's presidency, which cost America nothing in blood and treasure -- but apart from Obama himself, Democrats have never been willing to defend that deal, much less boast about it.

So at the very least, I think Trump will emerge from this debacle in better shape than he's been for the past three months.

TRUMP'S PLAN TO SALVAGE THE MIDTERMS: SURRENDER

In the latest New York Times roundtable, Michelle Cottle says that President Trump doesn't seem to be doing anything to improve his party's standing ahead of the midterms:

... as best I can see, Trump doesn’t even really seem motivated to focus on things that could turn it around. I mean, he’s doing his ballroom and his arch and the Reflecting Pool and his war, and maybe he’s going to invade Cuba, and he’s making statements about how he doesn’t care about Americans’ affordability crisis

What am I missing? What do you guys see that he is aggressively investing in, that suggests he gives two figs about turning this around? Besides rigging the game, of course....

Jamelle Bouie replies:

I don’t think there’s any evidence that this even crosses his mind.

Bouie cites Trump's belief in the Power of Positive Thinking, as well as information flow in the White House, which is designed to feed Trump only good news.

But as the midterms approach, it's clear that Trump does care about the opinions of people who don't like him. So he has a plan to make Republicans' more popular by November:

Surrender in Iran.

On Thursday, Robert Kagan wrote this in The Atlantic:

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis....

In 30 days ... the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.

Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin.... By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat.

And now...

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— George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 (@gtconway.bsky.social) May 23, 2026 at 8:37 PM

Iran was supposed to be scared into submission by Trump's bombing threats. Instead, Trump was scared into submission by this:

Jeff Currie, executive co-chairman at Abaxx Commodity Exchange, said that physical shortages [of oil] could hit Europe “any day now,” and the severity of the ongoing supply crunch is not yet reflected in oil prices....

Speaking with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” ... Currie said that oil supply concerns will intensify as inventories are depleted, adding that once the shortages hit, prices will go “non-linear.”

Currie said the oil market is currently in the midst of its “shoulder months” — traditionally the weakest part of the commodity demand cycle throughout the year, coming out of the heating season and heading into the driving season.

But, with the U.S. Memorial Day and U.K.’s spring bank holidays approaching, demand for diesel, gasoline and oil will rise sharply. “That’s when you’re going to begin to feel it,” Currie said.

Trump is trying to avoid an imminent spike in the global price of oil, and thus for a tank of gas in the U.S. And he appears to have grasped the fact that he needs to act now in order to rein in gas prices before voting starts in the midterms:

SocGen analysts said that even if the Strait [of Hormuz] were to reopen by early June, the complex physical supply chain sequence of getting more oil online — involving tanker transit, discharge, refining and distribution — still means a delay of at least 52 days....

A late June reopening, meanwhile, would bring “deeper and more prolonged stress”, with physical relief pushed back into late August and meaningful normalization not expected until September, according to SocGen.

But an even lengthier delay to reopening could see oil prices pushed toward $150 per barrel and staying elevated for the rest of the year.

So Trump will surrender, and Trump will declare victory, adding this to the absurd list of wars he claims he's ended as president. (He'll say he ended a 47-year war.) At least 30% of Americans will believe whatever he says.

And then it's on to Cuba. Americans oppose the upcoming Cuba war by a 64%-15% margin, but it will undoubtedly be less of a clusterfuck than the Iran war. It's quite possible that it will look like a victory. It won't improve ordinary Americans' lives, but it may serve as a moderately successful distraction if it doesn't make their lives worse.

If all this works, Trump will at least have stopped the bleeding for the GOP. But there's still time for the deal to come apart, and there's a great likelihood that Trump will do something else that's wildly unpopular between now and the fall.

THE FUTURE LEADER OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS KEN PAXTON, OR AT LEAST SOMEONE LIKE HIM

Yesterday I tried to answer a question raised by Jamelle Bouie in a video essay:

And so what does the Republican Party do when Trump is gone, when there is now a vacuum? I don't really have an answer to that. I'm mostly curious to see. But that, I think, is the dilemma the Republican Party will face. It doesn't have an identity outside of Trump, and it won't be in a position to even find one until Trump is gone.

I said that the party will organize itself around cultural (specifically, culture war) issues. But who'll lead the party?

For all we know, it could be Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general who's likely to become the GOP's Senate nominee now that he's secured Donald Trump's endorsement. It's likely to be someone who's very much like Paxton, though probably less enmeshed in scandal.

I've just read Elaine Godfrey's new story about Paxton in The Atlantic. Godfrey finds it baffling that Paxton has survived as long as he has in Texas politics, and finds it baffling that Trump would endorse him over the quite conservative incumbent, John Cornyn. Paxton has a closet full of skeletons -- mortgage fraud, securities fraud, multiple infidelities. He was impeached and nearly convicted in a Republican-dominated Texas legislature.

And surely he'll be much easier for the Democratic Senate candidate, James Talarico, to beat, right? All the smart people seem to think so, Godfrey tells us.

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988.

Godfrey thinks Paxton's supporters are delusional.

At least for now, [Paxton supporters] seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns.... “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me ... when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity.... [Supporters] don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

There's just one problem with this: the polls tell us that these "alternate reality" voters are right. Paxton's past doesn't seem to be a handicap in Texas -- in fact, his numbers and Cornyn's are nearly identical in head-to-head matchups with Talarico.

Why wouldn't years of scandals be hurting Paxton in Texas? Because he never stops trying to own the libs. Godfrey writes:

As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms....

Culture war. Always culture war.

Godfrey doesn't really seem to understand this. She writes:

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me.

But the "dynamics of his party" aren't changing -- owning the libs is always in favor. Paxton hasn't "ignored electability as a concern." Boastfully attacking the libs is the source of electability.

This seems like a good place to bring up a 2017 quote from Thomas Massie, the GOP congressman from Kentucky who just lost his primary after challenging Trump on a few issues. Massie regards himself as a libertarian in the mold of Ron and Rand Paul, and recognizes that Trump is not a libertarian. In 2017, after Trump had been sworn in as president, Massie said this to the Washington Examiner:

"I went to Iowa twice and came back with [Ron Paul]. I was with him at every event for the last three days in Iowa," Massie said. "From what I observed, not just in Iowa but also in Kentucky, up close with individuals, was that the people that voted for me in Kentucky, and the people who had voted for [Ron] Paul in Iowa several years before, were now voting for Trump. In fact, the people that voted for Rand in a primary in Kentucky were preferring Trump."

"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."

Ken Paxton survives scandals because he's always the craziest son of a bitch in the race. "Craziest," in his case, means least self-examining and most lib-owning.

I don't believe every Republican voter prefers the craziest son of a bitch in every instance -- Cornyn did, after all, poll slightly ahead of Paxton in the March 3 primary, though not decisively enough to avoid a runoff. And we know from national politics that many pollsters divide GOP voters into "MAGA" and "non-MAGA." Trump's support among non-MAGA voters is eroding.

But in a typical red-state election, zealots pick the craziest son of a bitch in the race and then less extreme Republican voters rally around that candidate because, gosh, you can't expect them to vote for a Democrat, can you? In red states -- including Texas until maybe, just maybe, this year -- that's all a Republican candidate has needed in recent years: supporters of the crazy SOB plus anyone-but-the-Democrat voters. In purple states, and also nationally, you need more, which is why Trump had to add a few non-white men and young bros to his coalition in 2024.

If the Democratic Party has a future, it will come from persuading some of the moderate-ish voters who don't prefer the crazy SOB that the Republican Party is bad and they should at least consider the Democrat once in a while. But I fear that Democrats will never grasp the need to do this, so the GOP will continue to be the party of crazy SOBs, who'll fire up the base and win the less-crazy GOP leaners, and maybe flip just enough swing voters to win nationwide.

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE NASCAR

At the end of his most recent video, which is about Donald Trump's dwindling popularity and cult of personality, Jamelle Bouie says:

What makes a Republican now is whether or not you align with Donald Trump, whether you support his efforts to make himself something like king of America. If you do, then you're a Republican. If you don't, then you're not. And so what does the Republican Party do when Trump is gone, when there is now a vacuum? I don't really have an answer to that. I'm mostly curious to see. But that, I think, is the dilemma the Republican Party will face. It doesn't have an identity outside of Trump, and it won't be in a position to even find one until Trump is gone. Until then, it is his party as long as he wants it.

Bouie is right about Trump's status as the undisputed leader of the GOP -- a status he probably won't relinquish as long as he lives. But I don't agree that the party has no identity independent of Trump. It has a cultural identity -- or, perhaps, a culture-war identity. That predates Trump, and will persist once he's gone.

I screenshotted the front page of FoxNews.com late this morning. It hinted at a severe case of Trump fatigue in Murdochistan. The front page barely focused on politics. Here's the top of the page:

Lead story: A NASCAR driver who recently died at the age of 41. Lower right: A hero bystander prevents a crazed criminal from attacking a helpless woman. To the left of that: A celebrity exposes some flesh in a photo; readers are invited to gawk, and decide whether the celebrity is too thin. Next to this apolitical supermarket-checkout gossip is the lone story about Trump at the top of the page, and the clickbait headline conceals the fact that the "yearly vice" our manly hero is fighting is daylight saving time.

Further down the page, there's surprisingly little political ragebait, or even pro-GOP propaganda. Some is just booga-booga crime news: A town in New Jersey deploys law enforcement against "teen takeovers." Some is cultural: The founder of the "anti-woke" Black Rifle Coffee company drops a country music video in honor of veterans; a pro wrestler declares victory after a fight; a hero cop catches a baby dropped from the window of a building that's on fire.

And, of course, there's fraud in blue America and there are trans people who want to play sports. The mayor of New York exists and must be the subject of negative coverage.

But it's the cultural coverage that hints at the GOP's future when Trump is gone.

This coverage is all about aspects of American life that Republican base voters believe are their property: NASCAR, pro wrestling, the military, crimefighting. It envisions a world where cops are always good and crime is always lurking. Democrats are socialist, trans, and generally weird. Republicans are the guarantors of good old-fashioned normality.

As I said last month, Republicans in the post-Trump era could be like Republicans in 1988: a party trying to carry on in the absence of a twice-elected leader who is worshipped by the base. Before the George H.W. Bush campaign found the secret to defeating Mike Dukakis (racist scare ads about Black criminals), Bush played the GOP culture card. He talked about enjoying pork rinds. He campaigned with country music legend Loretta Lynn (who said of Dukakis, "Why, I can't even pronounce his name!"). He toured a flag factory (at a time when his campaign was floating rumors that Dukakis's wife, in her youth, had burned an American flag).

Republicans don't really care about the needs of NASCAR fans who eat pork rinds. But it's effective branding, and it will keep the GOP going once Trump is gone.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A PLATONIC HONEY TRAP? ASKING FOR A PENNSYLVANIA SENATOR.

A New York magazine story published this morning tells us about David "Dovi" Safier, a Long Island-born resident of East Jersusalem who has become a near-constant companion to Senator John Fetterman, despite the fact that he has no official position that would explain his close access to the senator.

Safier, a writer of Jewish history and fundraiser for Orthodox causes, has no public background in government or counseling politicians on Capitol Hill. He is not an official staffer or paid outside adviser. A few years ago, he “just kind of appeared” in the senator’s orbit, one former Fetterman staffer remembers. And then, suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere. Staffers would walk into Fetterman’s office, only to find Safier sitting in the room. When the senator went to Israel in 2025, Safier joined him on the trip; when Fetterman filmed Real Time With Bill Maher, Safier met up with him in Los Angeles. The two are constantly texting and talking, according to multiple former Fetterman staffers, and Safier has unofficially operated as a top campaign fundraiser and senior adviser. He has even set up and attended sensitive meetings with foreign officials; in some cases, he is the only person staffing those meetings, I’ve been told.

Fetterman, of course, is now the Democratic senator who is most uncompromisingly pro-Israel.

Safier met Fetterman in 2023 and "worked his way into the senator’s inner circle." He befriended Fetterman and later arranged a four-day trip to Israel, during which he traveled with Fetterman. He regularly appears in Fetterman's office.

When he is on Capitol Hill, Safier will “hang out and sit in Fetterman’s office all day or walk with him to the floor,” a former staffer says. After their conversations, Fetterman would appear “far more radicalized,” the former staffer remembers. The chatter around the office is usually: “Oh God, Safier is here, and now John’s not gonna go to any of his meetings.”

We're told that Safier has become Fetterman's best bud at a time when he otherwise seems socially withdrawn:

The senator has isolated himself from many of his Senate colleagues and members of his own party. There are few who Fetterman seems to trust beyond his dad and brother, who are conservative; Bobby Maggio, his 2022 campaign manager; and now Safier, who has become arguably the senator’s closest confidant.

But a recent Politico story about a possible Fetterman party switch tells us that Fetterman has some friends in the Senate -- two Republican senators and their spouses -- although he seems isolated otherwise:

If Fetterman does flip, according to officials who were given anonymity to talk about sensitive matters, it will be thanks in large part to his deepening friendship with a pair of senators and their high-profile spouses: Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and his wife Dina, and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), and her husband, Wesley....

As he’s drifted from the party line, Fetterman has become increasingly isolated ... those who previously worked for him say he spends much of his time on social media....

The former aides and Pennsylvania Democrats say he rarely participates in the unglamorous work of a senator: showing up for ribbon-cuttings around his home state or racing between committee hearings in Washington.... He has a cool relationship with Gov. Josh Shapiro and barely interacts with the state’s Democratic congressional delegation.

He does, though, spend considerable time with Republicans, particularly the affable Britts and McCormicks, who’ve all but adopted Fetterman and his wife, Gisele.

These sound as if they might be genuine friendships. On the other hand, President Trump and Senator Majority Leader John Thune would love to flip Fetterman. We're told that Thune has good relations with Fetterman, but he "has largely let Britt and McCormick handle the Keystone account."

Safier and the McCormicks and Britts might be true friends, but they're also manipulating Fetterman for political reasons. And it seems easy for them to do that because Fetterman is not in a healthy state of mind.

It's not just the stroke Fetterman suffered while campaigning in 2022. As a 2025 New York magazine story noted, in early 2023, shortly after he was sworn in as a senator, Fetterman had six weeks of inpatient care for clinical depression. Subsequently, he appeared to stop following his treatment plan.

... by mid-March [2024], his aides were again worried that he hadn’t been getting regular checkups. No one I spoke to for this article could be sure about whether Fetterman stayed on his medication during this period, but five different people said they heard comments from the senator that suggested he was not.... Two aides told me they frequently heard him talk about how he felt so great that he didn’t “need” medication. One person told me Fetterman said he “didn’t like the way” his medication “made” him feel — made, past tense.

He alienates people:

One staffer told me there would be entire days when they couldn’t let anyone outside the office be around him because he was in “some sort of state” and might say “really fucked-up shit to constituents.” Sometimes he would just “shut down,” according to one former staffer. He was saying “unhinged shit,” according to one text, and spending more time on social media. [Eric] Stern [a Fetterman consultant] wrote to the group that it seemed to him like Fetterman was “spiraling” and that his constant “doomscrolling” — “I think he’s on essentially all day now?” — would only make things worse.

Many men are in a very bad place right now. They have trouble maintaining personal relationships and lose themselves on the internet. Some of this is the culture; some is their own damn fault. I think Fetterman is an unhappy, unwell man -- if there's a male loneliness epidemic, he has a bad case. It's compounded by his medical history, his discomfort with his treatment plan, and possibly the fact that he's in a commuter marriage, and doing a job he seems to hate. It also seems to be compounded by the fact that he likes alienating people.

We all know about "honey trapping" -- "the use of romantic or sexual relationships for interpersonal, political (including state espionage), or monetary purpose." David Safier's friendship with Fetterman seems like a platonic honey trap -- Safier became Fetterman's friend in order to encourage him to be more and more pro-Israel. The McCormicks and Britts also seem as if they're honey trapping Fetterman on behalf of the GOP. I'm sorry Fetterman is a senator. Because of his difficulties with people, he seems extremely vulnerable to this, and thus far too easy to influence.

DOES TRUMP WANT TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS OR THROW THEM? OR BOTH?

What is President Trump doing in anticipation of the midterms? On the one hand, he and his fellow Republicans on the bench are obviously trying to steal them for the GOP. The Supreme Court opened the door to eleventh-hour gerrymandering in the South, while right-leaning appointees on the Virginia Supreme Court blocked a gerrymander that would have aided Democrats. Meanwhile, Trump has pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, strong-armed Democratic governor Jared Polis of Colorado until he offered clemency to electoral criminal Tina Peters, and now is dangling a slush fund before anyone who might want to riot in response to Democratic wins in November.

But on the other hand, he seems to be doing everything he can to handicap his party's chances in the midterms. Punchbowl tells us:

With less than 24 weeks until Election Day, President Donald Trump seems almost maniacally focused on doing and saying things that could harm Republicans’ chances of keeping their House and Senate majorities in November.

With voters saying they’re frightened by high prices and disappearing healthcare coverage, Trump is building a new billion-dollar White House ballroom and asking for taxpayer money to secure it. His administration announced Monday that it was setting up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of “weaponization and lawfare” under the Democrats, a move that shocked even Republicans.

As gas prices skyrocket due to the unpopular war in Iran, Trump says it’s a “very small price to pay” as long as he believes the conflict is proceeding to his liking.

He's alienating Senate Republicans -- and possibly putting a key seat at risk -- with his decision to endorse Ken Paxton rather than John Cornyn in the Texas Senate race, as The New York Times notes:

Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican whose independent streak has often angered the president, said that she was “supremely disappointed” by Mr. Trump’s decision.

Then she went a step further, saying that the president’s endorsement of Mr. Paxton, a scandal-plagued conservative firebrand, could cost Republicans what had been considered a safe Senate seat.

“I think that this puts that seat in jeopardy,” she told reporters.

Punchbowl points out that this also about campaign cash:

... GOP senators privately griped about Trump forcing out one of their most prolific fundraisers; Cornyn has raised more than $400 million for Republican candidates and incumbents over his long Senate career. Many saw the episode as Trump once again using Senate races to advance his personal goals at the expense of the GOP majority....

So on the one hand, Trump seems ready to cheat or strong-arm his way to victory in the midterms. He might even send troops to polling places to make that happen. But he doesn't seem to want to win the midterms through legitimate means: advancing popular policies, maintaining party unity, and so on.

Does this make sense? I think it does to Trump.

I think Trump wants to win, but he wants to win his way: brutally. He always wants to project "strength," which, to him, means breaking the rules and getting away with it. He's happy when he gets away with violating (or doing an end run around) the law, and he's also happy when he breaks the laws of politics and wins. (That pretty much describes his own political career since he announced his candidacy in 2015.)

And even though he'll happily engage in felonious conduct or instigate mob violence in order to win the midterms, I'm not sure winning is as important to him as fighting -- specifically, fighting dirty -- and surviving after acting recklessly. At that point, even if he loses, he can blame other people who were "very unfair" to him, while enjoying the thrill of surviving his own recklessness.

I'm haunted by something Tucker Carlson said in his recent New York Times interview. Carlson says he tried to dissuade Trump from invading Iran, and Trump waved him off:

He felt he had no choice and 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.

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. That's Trump's belief in the Power of Positive Thinking. It's also his accurate assessment of the course of his life. When he said this to Carlson, he'd done so many ill-conceived things, from the bad deals that led to his first bankruptcies to the incompetence that led 81 million Americans to vote for his not particularly inspiring opponent in 2020, and then to January 6 and his theft of presidential papers and a host of other actions that would have sunk anyone else. And he was still standing. He was president again. You can't blame the guy for thinking he has life's cheat codes.

On some level, I think he knows he's a colossal fuck-up -- but he also knows that he's gotten away with being a colossal fuck-up all his life. I think he gets off on that idea: that he fucks up, but (as he might put it) he fucks up "very strongly," in an aggressive, intimidating way, and it all works out for him. That's what he wants out of the midterms: he wants the feeling of being a vicious aggressor, and he wants to survive if he can't win. But whether he's consciously aware of this or not, he'd rather lose as a thug than win shrewdly -- as long as he can keep going, even in defeat.

MAKE TRUMP'S CORRUPTION A KITCHEN-TABLE ISSUE (updated)

I keep thinking about something Hakeem Jeffries said late last month:

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Sunday said Democrats will not focus on impeaching President Trump if they regain a majority in the lower chamber after midterm elections.

When asked if impeachment was a top priority, Jeffries said “of course not” during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living,” the House minority leader added.

In other words, We're not getting distracted by calls for impeachment -- we're focused on ordinary Americans' finances. To be fair, this approach appears to be working: Democrats now have a 7.2-point lead on the generic congressional ballot, according to Real Clear Polling. In the new New York Times poll, that lead is 50% to 39%.

But this story makes me think that Democrats could sell impeachment as a pocketbook issue:

The Justice Department on Monday announced that it would create a new $1.776 billion taxpayer-backed fund that could pay out money to people — including President Trump’s allies and supporters — who think they were wronged by the department under previous administrations.

This amount of money -- $1.776 billion -- is about $5 for every person in America. That's not a life-changing amount of money for most people, but it still sounds like a big outlay, at a time when Americans feel that they're hurting. I've always believed that most Americans don't do any kind of mental arithmetic when they hear about government expenditures, so critics (usually Republicans) can easily get them angry about government outlays that might even be in the six-figure or five-figure range -- in other words, less than a penny per person in America. This is a lot more money.

If I were leading the Democrats, I'd be denouncing this corruption and linking it to Americans' financial pain: You're struggling, and Trump is using your tax dollars to pay himself and his alllies. Especially when this is just one element of Trump's campaign to enrich himself using the power of the presidency. David Rothkopf writes:

... the president has, throughout his time in office, engaged in thousands upon thousands of stock trades that appear to cash in on unique knowledge he had as president or of actions he intended to take. His sons run companies doing multimillion-dollar deals with the Pentagon and with governments worldwide seeking Trump’s favor.

Trump has accepted aircraft, donations to projects designed to glorify him, golden statues, bitcoins, and cash from suckers eager to buy up Trump swag. Trump phones, Trump watches, and the branding rights to Trump Airport in West Palm Beach are part of his scheme. It looks like the “Trump Presidential Library” may well include a hotel where people can pay to honor Trump in the way that means the most to him: with cash that ends up in his bank account.

Where is the money that the U.S. made from selling oil we stole from Venezuela? Who controls the billions that have been allocated from the U.S. Treasury and governments worldwide to the Board of Peace for Gaza? How many times has Trump sold pardons or lifted regulations or prosecuted or persecuted the innocent in exchange for campaign contributions?

I think Democrats should draw up articles of impeachment focused on this monetary corruption, and every Democrat in Congress should sign on as a sponsor. I think Democrats should introduce a bill preventing any outlay from that $1.776 billion fund, or even establishing an office to pay the money out, and every Democrat in Congress should sponsor that bill as well. I think they should link anti-corruption to a focus on Americans' financial woes.

Obviously, none of this can pass now. Obviously, an impeachment is likely to fail in the Senate even after the midterms. But putting Democrats on record as anti-corruption -- and Republicans in Congress on record as pro-corruption -- would send a message.

At the very least, I think Democratic campaign ads that alternate images of high gas prices with headlines about how much richer the Trump family has become since he returned to office would be powerful. Make Americans think about his finances when they think about their own.

*****

UPDATE: They're not linking it to the economy, but this is a start:

Important: Dems will seek to force Republicans to vote on a bill blocking Trump's illegal $1.8 billion slush fund, Rep Jamie Raskin tells me. Dems will use discharge petition. Hakeem Jeffries is supportive of Raskin's efforts, I'm told. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/2106...

[image or embed]

— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) May 19, 2026 at 1:08 PM

HOW BAD IS TRUMP'S HEALTH?

Late Saturday afternoon, within the space of twenty-eight minutes, Donald Trump posted these three images on Truth Social:

Trump's Truth Social feed generally includes attacks on political enemies, promotions of pet Trump projects, and hyperbolic proclamations of his own magnificence -- but these posts seem different. They seem like Trump's attempts to persuade Americans -- and himself -- that he's supernaturally healthy, as if he's concerned that Americans won't believe he is ... or as if he doesn't believe he is.

I think Trump is self-soothing here. I think he's lying to himself.

As The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire notes, Trump has been under quite a bit of medical scrutiny lately:

The White House announced this week that Trump will undergo a medical and dental checkup on May 26, which will be his fourth publicly disclosed doctor’s visit in his second term. (He has also had two dental visits in Florida.) Last year he had an annual physical in April 2025, and then what the White House described as a “routine yearly checkup” in October. Across his terms, Trump has bragged repeatedly about acing multiple cognitive tests, a boast that only raises more questions.

On those dental visits, HuffPost notes:

The White House has its own dental suite. Which raises the question of why Trump would schedule routine appointments elsewhere if they’re actually routine.

Lemire wonders why we're not focusing on Trump's apparent frailty the way we focused on Joe Biden's. I know many of you think it's because the media hates Democrats and protects Republicans. I think the media feels it displays its independence when it attacks Democrats and shows its lack of bias when it cossets Republicans, and I think that's part of the problem. But I think Lemire is close to the truth here:

... as Trump himself grows older—traveling less, switching to more comfortable shoes, and seeming to nod off during meetings—his age isn’t getting the same kind of scrutiny.

I have long thought that a reason for that is the president’s sheer size. Trump stands 6 foot 3 and, according to his most recent physical, weighs 224 pounds (yes, questioning that number is a legitimate thing to do). He is a big presence in any room, as opposed to Biden, who grew visibly thinner as he got older, adding to the appearance of frailty. Trump is also LOUD; Biden’s voice was frequently reduced to a gentle whisper. And Trump has the gift of omnipresence. His genius is in capturing attention. Biden’s public schedule grew sparse, and he actively avoided generating news; Trump holds multiple events in front of the press nearly every day. He fills Americans’ TV screens and social-media feeds seemingly nonstop, with an almost-unspoken message: How could he be fading if he’s everywhere?

I think it's not just that Trump is bulky and loud, while Biden increasingly seemed thin and whispery. I think it's also the fact that Biden struggled to finish some of his sentences, and Trump just plows on. As I wrote just after the 2024 election:

... Joe Biden ... frequently stops speaking while he gropes for the right word or phrase. Trump just keeps going until his sentences and anecdotes end somewhere, then he looks pleased with himself and moves on. I think millions of people think he sounds like a normal guy on a talking jag, not like a dementia patient....

And Trump's sentences frequently end with him hurting people. Decent Americans (as opposed to Republican voters) find that repellent, but it's still a power. What we notice -- and this, of course, shows up in his deeds as well as his words -- is that Trump clearly retains the power to cause pain.

Here's a recent example:



He's asked, “Mr. President, you are here against the backdrop of the war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now? We're still seeing gas prices soaring.” He snaps back:

We're fixing up the reflecting pond to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and you say, "Why are you fixing it up?" Because you can understand dirt maybe better than I can, but I don't allow it.

This is one of the worst reporters. She's with ABC fake news and she's a horror show. She's saying, "Why would you bother fixing this up?" Why would I bother taking eleven or twelve truckloads of filth out of the water in front of the Lincoln Monument? That's what made our country great. Beauty made our country. People made our country great. A question like that is a disgrace to our country. Any other questions?

Beauty made our country great? This makes no sense! What does it even mean?

But the words just keep coming, and a person who doesn't think very hard about what Trump is saying can come away with the impression that the reporter (a Black woman, of course) really must be unpatriotic and have an unacceptable tolerance for "dirt" and "filth."

This isn't a thoughtful repsonse, but it still stings. I'll believe he's really losing it when he launches into one of these attacks and freezes up, unable to summon up the next nasty word he wants to say. I look forward to that the day, the day he tries to slip the verbal shiv in but can't manage to do it. I hope it happens.

Maybe he's experiencing some form of dementia. But for now, his words, even when they're incoherent, have power. And that's primarily why he's not judged the way Biden was, even though he's probably in terrible physical health, and he knows it.

TRUMP'S POWER IN PRIMARIES IS A GIFT TO DEMOCRATS, IF THEY'LL USE IT

Let's assess where we are.

Approximately 60% of the country despises Donald Trump. That's a very solid majority in a country that's been seen as 50%/50% for most of this century. The people who hate Donald Trump are the normal people. "Donald Trump is a terrible president" is largely an agreed-upon fact in America.

But a relatively small percentage of the country -- less than 40% -- worships the ground Trump walks on and will do anything he tells them to do:

For the second time this month, Republican primary voters sent a message about the price of defying the president, this time by retiring Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The outcome in Louisiana on Saturday followed losses by a group of Indiana state lawmakers whom the president targeted for political payback. And it arrived just ahead of another big test on Mr. Trump’s retribution tour: a House primary in Kentucky on Tuesday.

Cassidy finished third in a four-way race. He didn't even make it to a top-two runoff. That's how loyal the freaks and weirdos of the MAGA cult are to Trump. In Kentucky on Tuesday, they'll defeat Thomas Massie, on behalf of a president 60% of America hates.

This is an opportunity for Democrats to start saying what they should have been saying for years: not "Trump is bad," but "The entire Republican Party is bad."

Over clips of news stories about Trump's successful campaigns of revenge against Republican dissenters, Democrats can say:

Tired of Trump? Don't expect Republicans to do anything to help. Republicans can't. If they challenge Trump, their political careers are over.

This is where I'd like to see Republicans represented as a crowd of non-player characters saying what actual Republicans in Congress have effectively been saying for the past year and a half:

And while the message that follows this might be hard to craft -- many Democrats haven't exactly been brave anti-Trump warriors -- this is a good setup for a Democratic challenger who promises to fight. Incumbents, meanwhile, can say, We want to fight Trump, but first we need to change control of Congress.

This isn't the full message I want to hear from Democrats. The Republican Party is bad and was bad long before Trump. It's bad in many ways that have nothing to do with Trump. (For instance, Trump isn't the one removing Roots from school libraries in Knox County, Tennessee. That was based on a state law passed in 2022, when Trump was out of office.)

But it would be a start. Democrats could attack all Republicans as Trump bootlickers knowing that Trump is massively unpopular and that hating Trump is America's default mode now. Eventually they need to say that Republicans are massively out of step with normal Americans -- on taxation of the rich, on healthcare, on the minimum wage, on abortion. But they can begin here.

NO, DEMOCRATIC SUPPORT FOR PLATNER IS NOT A MIRROR IMAGE OF REPUBLICAN SUPPORT FOR TRUMP

In a New York Times discussion between two liberal graybeards, E.J. Dionne and Robert Siegel, their young right-wing interlocutor, Sarah Isgur, wags a finger at Democrats while pretending to wag a finger at both parties:

Isgur: ... David French wrote this in The New York Times — I thought the piece was brilliant — that this idea that Democrats are going to get behind Graham Platner, a guy in Maine, who, until quite recently, had a Nazi tattoo — an S.S. tattoo — and has said horrific things about women and sexual assault, because that’s the way that we have to fight Donald Trump. That’s the way we can win, by being more like Donald Trump. It’s just a sad statement, I think, on 2026 midterm politics that, again, I hope the ship is turning, maybe slowly, where the Graham Platners and the Republican equivalents lose.

What Isgur doesn't say, perhaps because she's in denial, is that "the Republican equivalents" of Trump are pretty much the entire party. Hatred, especially hatred for Democrats and groups who are acceptable to bash, is Republicans' default mode now.

America goes two ways.

Option A: Muslims and globalists institute THEIR laws on our society.

OPTION B: Christian men stand up and take their country back.

I’m going with option B. pic.twitter.com/sLpGNv2qnY

— Rep. Andy Ogles (@RepOgles) April 20, 2026

Isgur guilt-trips Dionne into more or less agreeing with her that Democrats support Platner because they believe that sometimes you need a bad person to take on a bad enemy:

Dionne: I want to go to your point about the Democratic image. Democrats are getting behind Graham Platner because they see a Democratic majority in the Senate as the only way to check Trump.

Isgur: Right, because it’s about power, not about principle, not about character. Well, it is about principle on some issues. All the things they said — that Republicans shouldn’t support Donald Trump because there were things more important than power — all went out the window the second someone dangled the Senate majority in front of them.

Siegel: You have Platner as a virtual David Duke on the ticket.

Dionne: Yeah. And I don’t think that’s fair to Platner, but I think the Democrats are saying, “This is a crisis election. We need a majority no matter what.”

That's not what Democrats who support Platner are saying, because Platner is not a Democratic Trump. I'll explain below.

Here's the David French column Isgur is citing. French cites the skeletons in Platner's closet, which are very real: the Nazi death's-head tattoo, the online remarks arguing that some women are complicit in their own rapes and that Black people are bad tippers, and so on. These are bad. If you can't possibly support Platner because of this history, I understand.

But Platner is not running as that guy. He's running as a person who has stopped being that guy. You can conclude that the reformed version of Platner is phony, and that he hasn't really grown or changed, but his supporters believe, or want to believe, that he has changed. They're supporting the person he's been on the campaign trail, not the person he was when he got that tattoo and said those offensive things. They're not consciously voting for a bad guy. They're voting for a guy they think is good now.

Platner hasn't said offensive things since he started his campaign. His supporters are backing the Platner they see on the campaign trail now. Trump, by contrast, has continued to say and do extremely offensive things since he took that escalator ride in 2015. His supporters back that Trump.

French says that Platner's voters are just like Trump supporters:

I know exactly where this process leads. For the past 10 years and counting, I’ve had a front-row seat at the festival of rationalization that’s turned the Republican Party into a Trump cult of personality.

The slide begins when you tell yourself that the stakes are just too high for normal politics. Of course I wouldn’t support this candidate in better times. But now? American democracy is at stake.

Is that what Trump voters have been saying? Nope. They support him precisely because he demonizes immigrants, Muslims, liberals and other political opponents, the media, women (especially Black female reporters) who challenge him ... the list goes on. Trump's voters find his hatred invigorating because they share it. Platner's voters find the hatred he's expressed in his past problematic, but want to believe it's behind him now.

If Democrats were becoming like Republicans, there'd be a wave of Graham Platners across the country. But name another Democrat in a key race who has a long history of offensive statements. James Talarico? Roy Cooper? Mary Peltola? Sherrod Brown? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. By contrast, there are Trump-like candidates running all over America on the GOP line: Tommy Tuberville, Ken Paxton, Paul Le Page, and a host of incumbents (Randy Fine, the aforementioned Andy Ogles, etc.). Trumpism is the lingua franca of the GOP.

Platner's supporters wish he didn't have that baggage. Trump's supporters don't even see his baggage as baggage. It's a feature, not a bug. That's the difference between the two parties.

ATTACK THE ATTACKERS

You should read a piece at The Farce headlined "How AI Plans to Buy 2026" just so you know how much money the tech Nazis plan to spend in an effort to buy control of America, and also to know what they really want (a dystopia for us, a utopia for them). What they want is bad for the rest of us, and they're largely getting their way.

But I don't believe that the tech Nazis are invincible. This apparently worked, but its success wasn't inevitable:

In 2024, advisers to [Elon] Musk ran a $45 million false-flag campaign so precise in its cynicism that it deserves to be described slowly and disdainfully. Muslim voters in Michigan received pro-Israel ads designed to look like Harris campaign materials. Jewish voters in Pennsylvania received the opposite message from the same shop. Young liberals got videos about how Harris had betrayed the progressive movement. Working-class white men in the Midwest got warnings that Harris would institute racial quotas and take away their Zyn pouches. Four brand names, zero common origin, one coordinating strategy. They called it “false positives” internally. The goal was not persuasion. It was subtraction — push enough Democratic-leaning voters into confusion, disgust, or exhausted abstention. Harris dropped eight million votes from Biden’s 2020 total. Trump gained fewer than two million. The election was decided, as the architects intended, by subtraction.

Kamala Harris's campaign raised more than a billion dollars. If this worked, it worked because not enough of that money was devoted to countering campaigns like it.

A nimbler Democratic campaign would have seen this messaging in real time and would have engaged in counter-messaging. The deployment of contradictory messages to Muslims and Jews offers a perfect example of how Harris's people could have countered this: by letting the targeted groups know what the other groups were seeing, by identifying the evil billionaire messengers, and by linking them to Harris's opponent.

It might be hard to do this for every message, but discovering and exposing the overall scheme -- or even just pointing out that unidentified Trump allies with lots of money were simultaneously accusing Harris of contradictary offenses -- would have weakened the potency of the messages.

In Chicago-area Democratic congressional primaries earlier this year, AIPAC ran stealth campaigns, as The Washington Post reported:

Democrats in [Illinois] say they have seen an influx of ads focusing on issues ranging from immigration to health care by groups named Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now. None of the ads mention Israel, and none of the groups are publicly affiliated with AIPAC. But the ads benefit candidates favored by AIPAC donors....

Elect Chicago Women uses a mail vendor that shares identifying information with a mail vendor used by AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project. UDP’s vendor for phone banking also has the same address as the vendor listed by Affordable Chicago Now.

Two candidates in the primary in the 9th district of Illinois, Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh, called AIPAC on its secret spending. They finished first and second. The intended beneficiary of AIPAC's campaign, Laura Fine, finished third. That's how you do it: you make the people running the attack ads the issue.

I'm seeing this in my congressional district now. Alex Bores, a state legislator, used to work for Palantir, but is now a critic of Big Tech and a supporter of tech regulation. As Wired notes,

Bores is a vocal proponent of rigorous AI regulation and cosponsored New York’s RAISE Act, which became law in 2025 and requires major AI firms to implement and publish safety protocols for their models, among other guardrails.

Early in the campaign, I began receiving a lot of mailers attacking Bores for his past work in tech. The mailers were financed by Big Tech itself -- the tech Nazis were trying to keep a tech critic out of Congress by pretending to be tech critics themselves.

It's backfiring. Bores is now a leading candidate in the race, in large part because voters know that Big Tech is attacking him. As Bores told Wired,

I literally just came from a call with a tenant leader. It was about housing policy. It had nothing to do with AI. This leader said, “I started paying attention to your campaign because of all these ads.”

... They've been wonderful partners in raising up the issue of AI regulation and AI safety.

You can't stop stealth attack ads and disinformation -- and of course some candidates will be overwhelmed by big money. But if you've got the money -- as Harris did (and as does Bores, who was quite well paid when he was in tech), you should be able to attack the attackers.

The Farce story also tell us:

A rural organizing group found 58 percent of rural voters already believe Democrats are the most corrupt party. AI does not need to create that belief. It scales it with a hundred variations of the same message, each calibrated to a distinct psychological profile, none traceable to a common origin, arriving faster than any correction can travel.

Have Democrats ever considered trying to make the case that Republicans are the most corrupt party? I say this all the time: Democrats seem to believe that it's unseemly to say, "The other party is bad and we're better." Democrats will attack Trump, and individual Democrats will attack their oppponents in a campaign, but the GOP as a party always seem to be off limits. That's crazy! You're a politcal party in a two-party system! You can say categorically that the other party is bad!

Attack politics, AI-enabled or not, can hurt Democrats. But it doesn't need to be fatal.

THE SUPREME COURT SEEMS TO BE LEARNING FROM TRUMP THAT INCREMENTALISM IS FOR LOSERS

Rick Hasen notes that there was a time when the John Roberts Supreme Court seemed to be gutting the Voting Rights Act slowly:

In 2009 ... Roberts wrote an opinion in the Northwest Austin case that raised questions about Section 5’s continuing constitutionality but ultimately punted on the question.... it took another four years, and another round of redistricting after the 2010 census, for Roberts to lead the court in the Shelby County v. Holder case to strike down the existing preclearance regime. In that opinion, Roberts not only assured readers that things had changed in the South; he pointed to Section 2 as an alternative means of providing protection to minority voters on a national basis.

The Court "whittled away" at Section 2, Hasen says, for another decade, but he relied on it in a 2023 case:

Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh then joined with the court’s liberals in the 2023 case Allen v. Milligan in holding that Alabama’s failure to draw a second Black opportunity congressional district violated Section 2.

But under similar circumstances in Louisiana v. Callais, Roberts and the rest of the Republicans on the Court have now made it impossible to use Section 2 to preserve Black voters' right to elect officeholders of their choice. And now the Court seems to be in a rush to implement this ruling:

First, the court agreed to issue its final judgment in Callais quickly, leapfrogging over the normal period when parties could seek Supreme Court rehearing. This ruling sent a signal that Louisiana had the green light to cancel its already ongoing primary election period and schedule a new House primary election using a map that eliminated a Black opportunity district. Then, in ongoing litigation out of Alabama, the court lifted a stay that was preventing the state from redrawing its congressional districts for the rest of the decade.

The Roberts Court played the long game with respect to the Voting Rights Act. Prior to that, it played the long game with respect to Roe v. Wade. Why?

I think the Court's Republicans believed that the most effective way to build their Republican utopia was to do it slowly, in ways that would escape detection by both normie voters and unimaginative journalists. Sure all those angry, bitter Democratic partisans would say that the Court is run by Republican hacks acting as unelected legislators in robes, but the vast majority of Americans wouldn't pay much attention.

But now the Court's Republicans seem to be rushing to implement their agenda. Why? Hasen has a few theories:

First, and most crassly, these decisions could have been motivated by partisanship.

Well, duh. Of course.

Second, even if not consciously biased in favor of Republicans, the conservative justices could be the victims of motivated reasoning: They see the risks of changing election rules at the last minute much more clearly when Republicans are hurt than when they are helped.

That's a charitable view. See theory #1.

Third, perhaps John Roberts sees the court as running out of time, and he wants to get many rulings in the books that change American politics in his preferred direction and forestall the move toward a multiracial democracy. He’s a 71-year-old chief justice now.... The Supreme Court’s rulings in cases ranging from abortion to presidential immunity to the power of the government to fight climate change are growing increasingly unpopular....

Roberts well knows that Democrats and progressives are mobilizing against the court.

"Running out of time"? Sure. John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas are all in their seventies. These are bucket-list projects for them.

Are they trying to nail down their agenda ahead of a backlash? Maybe. They might believe that Democrats are serious about Court expansion, age limits, or limiting the Court's jurisdiction. Democrats might be able to get some of this done if they win a 2028 trifecta. (I'll believe it when I see it.)

But I also think the Court's Republicans are looking at Donald Trump and thinking, Why the hell are we trying to sneak everything under the radar? The lesson the Roberts Court's majority and many other Republicans can learn from Trump is: Just do whatever you can get away with, while being perfectly frank about the baseness of your motives. You might get pushback, and there might be moments of public outrage, but you'll be able to get away with a lot, and quite a bit of it will be all but irreversible.

The Court's Republicans still aren't quite ready to openly acknowledge that they're doing what they're doing on behalf of their party, the way Trump does when he calls for gerrymandering or the SAVE Act or an end to mail voting, but they're learning from Trump that moving fast and aggressively allows you to break more things than playing the long game. And they're doing it.