THE WAR ON FAUCI, BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE KOCH NETWORK

If you watched Anthony Fauci's appearance before a Senate committee this week and are wondering why Republican base voters still despise him years after his retirement, and years after COVID peaked, let me remind you that the war on mainstream COVID science was funded by right-wing billionaires, particularly the Koch network -- the same people who finance and weaponize all the other propaganda that makes your Fox-watching grandparents crazy. When these folks implant an idea in GOP voters' brains, it stays implanted.

In 2021, the Center for Media and Democracy reported on the Koch network's involvement in COVID propaganda:

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute....

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution....

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

Bhattacharya is now the director of the National Institutes of Health and the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

... the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) ... which hosted and filmed the [Great Barrington] conference ... is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute.

And as HuffPost reported in July 2020:

A seemingly obscure Capitol Hill press conference by a fringe group of self-proclaimed medical experts quickly became on Monday the most widely seen propaganda video about the coronavirus after Breitbart News livestreamed it on Facebook. The post racked up tens of millions of views across social media in a matter of hours....

The video featured a string of right-wing talking points that criticized lockdown measures, demonized public health officials, called for schools to reopen and urged Americans not to wear face masks. The speakers, who were all portrayed as doctors, often declared hydroxychloroquine a “cure” for COVID-19....

But in fact, a conservative dark-money group was behind the press event that created this viral propaganda moment. The group featured in the video, “America’s Frontline Doctors,” sprang from nowhere only days ago and appears connected to groups involved in the Save Our Country Coalition, which was a driving force behind the “reopen” protests in April that lobbied for America’s rapid reopening, even as death tolls spike in hot spots across the country....

Monday’s livestreamed event featuring the America’s Frontline Doctors group was organized by Tea Party Patriots, a wealthy Republican donor-backed nonprofit that, in partnership with FreedomWorks and other right-wing dark money groups, launched the Save Our Country Coalition in April to push for America’s rapid reopening. Jenny Beth Martin, TPP’s co-founder, spoke at the conference alongside the self-proclaimed frontline doctors, urging people to call their elected officials to demand access to hydroxychloroquine....

The coalition’s groups have largely been funded by prominent billionaires, including oil and gas mogul Charles Koch ― who has donated to SOC group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ― and Richard Uihlein, a major donor to Tea Party Patriots.

Many people think the country, or at least the Republican Party, began to go crazy in the summer of 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. Many people think Republican lunacy all stems from him.

Some of it does. But quite a bit of it should be blamed on the Kochs and others who began professionalizing culture-war politics long before Trump stepped onto that escalator. Crackpots like Robert Kennedy Jr. fanned the COVID-denialist flames, but he found a receptive audience for his quackery only because right-wing billionaires had made GOP voters as crazy on the subject of public health as they were on the subject of Barack Obama's presidency. Trump just followed their lead.

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you tomorrow.

DO J.D. VANCE'S BIGGEST ADMIRERS EVEN CARE IF HE'S "INAUTHENTIC"?

Oh, dear -- we're talking about "authenticity" again. In The New York Times, Thomas Edsall writes:

Whenever Vice President JD Vance takes the microphone, he has to decide which combination of his multiple identities to select for the specific audience before him, a choice he sometimes seems to find bewildering.

The range of Vance’s mix-and-match choices includes hillbilly, intellectual, Trump successor, raging MAGA loyalist and high-tech investor, not to mention veteran threatening other countries and veteran no-long-wars guy....

Vance’s problem is his failure to find comfort in any combination of identities so that he comes across as inauthentic, cross-pressured, forced — even counterfeit.

As regular readers of this blog know, I don't believe in political "authenticity" -- or, to be more precise, I don't believe that the word is used in politics in a way that has anything to do with realness or fakeness. When we say a politician is "authentic," we mean the politician (usually a man) is personable. Donald Trump is the biggest liar on the planet, but we call him "authentic." We usually use the word "inauthentic" in politics in reference to politicians like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. They're not phony at all. They're just awkward. For the most part, they are who they seem to be -- they say what they mean, they just don't say it personably.

Vance has that problem, but I agree that he's also truly inauthentic, in the sense that he'll change his opinions to suit the prevailing trends. But I think there's an aspect of his personality that's utterly genuine, even though one of Edsall's sources -- Harvard's Randall Enos -- disagrees:

Part of Trump’s appeal is that, despite his ideological incoherence, you believe his commitment to the politics of resentment is genuine because he is personally motivated by resentment: feeling that he was disrespected by the establishment is his casus belli. In the end, that seems to be the only consistent feature of his governing style.

Vance lacks this characteristic; rather, he appears to have adopted resentment politics because it serves him politically.

Really? If there's any Vance characteristic that seems utterly genuine, it's resentment. He just seems like a deeply resentful guy. The object of his resentments may change, but the anger remains. (“Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.)

Republican voters leap from resentment to resentment -- whatever and whoever the right-wing propaganda machine tells them to hate, they'll hate. So I'm not sure they care about the specifics of Vance's resentments, as long as the resentments don't directly contradict their own. (They'll forgive Vance for formerly being a Trump critic just the way they'll forgive Trump for inviting the Clintons to his third wedding.)

Notably, it's only Republicans who like Vance:

Civiqs amassed 53,032 voter comments on Vance’s favorability/unfavorability ratings over the past two years and found that an overwhelming majority of Vance’s support is concentrated among Republicans, 86 percent favorable, 7 percent unfavorable, while independents were 33 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable, and Democrats 3 percent favorable, 95 percent unfavorable.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, has a theory about the one specific group Vance appeals to most:

There is, according to Anderson, only one constituency firmly in Vance’s corner: “It’s men who spend time in the so-called manosphere, which is where Vance cultivated his political support. He knows how to talk with that demographic on their own terms, so they are more likely to identify with him.”

That's plausible. Why would men in the manosphere care about authenticity? Much of the propaganda of the manosphere is about the importance of turning yourself into a fake, artificial, "maxxed" version of yourself. Change your name, like Myron Gaines (born Amrou Fudl). Get buff. Change your facial features -- with a hammer if necessary, like Clavicular. Andrew Tate went from atheist to Christian to Muslim over a period of four years. People in the manosphere believe they need to be phony versions of themselves in order to make money and get sex. (Let's face it, these are their only goals.)

So if Vance is inauthentic, they don't care, as long as he's resentmentmaxxed.

WHAT IS THE GOP'S 2026 MIDTERM MESSAGE? "FAUCI SUCKED SIX YEARS AGO!"

A couple of months ago, Ezra Klein said this:

My pet theory right now is that President Trump is not trying to win the midterm elections.

... if he wanted to win the midterms, he’d be moving to the center. He’d be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He’d be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts.

He’s not doing even a little bit of that.

Many people agree with Klein. They see a president who's focused on construction projects and the SAVE America Act rather than affordability and assume he's not thinking about motivating voters.

It's widely assumed that House and Senate Republicans are different. They passed a bipartisan housing bill! They're at least trying to seem like a party that wants to help people!

But they're not all that different from the president. You really need to understand that this is their idea of an election pitch:

Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci will appear before the Senate this week for a hearing. Leading up to his appearance, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released thousands of pages of Fauci’s diary entries from 2020 to 2022.

Right now, normal people care about gas prices, grocery and housing costs, produce that causes explosive diarrhea, and other concerns related to the world we live in right now. But this story, about a government official who retired nearly four years ago, is a right-wing media obsession now. Here's just a sample of the headlines:

* Amanda Macias, Fox News: Fauci's Newly Released Covid Diaries Reveal Bizarre Fixation on Fame as Pandemic Deaths Mounted

* Bob Hoge, RedState: Fauci's Diary Reveals Astonishing Level of Sycophantic Groveling by the Legacy Media

* Alana Mastrangelo, Breitbart: Actress Patricia Heaton on Fauci Diaries: Lying COVID Tyrant Was ‘Exulting in His Fame’ While We Were Locked Down

* Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire: The Hero Complex That Held America Hostage: For Anthony Fauci, it was Anthony Fauci and his ego, everywhere, all of the time.

* Hans Mahncke, The Federalist: 10 Questions for Congress to Ask Fauci About His Covid Corruption and Coverup

And on and on.

Why this now? Why these hearings now? No one's going to get Fauci to change his mind about the origin of the virus -- he still believes it emerged naturally, not from a lab, as do many other experts. He won't denounce the government's efforts to minimize death and suffering during the worst of the COVID pandemic, when -- it should be noted -- he was working for Donald Trump, not a Democrat. (Fauci was serving as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a job to which he'd been appointed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.) The facts of his career don't matter -- to the GOP base, Fauci in 2020 represents Democrats in 2026.

Will these revelations and hearings really inspire voters in the Republican Party's grievance-collector base to turn out in November? Hard to know, but Republicans need something, as The Washington Post noted a couple of days ago:

Republican pollsters and political groups are raising the alarm that their party faces a listless and demotivated base ahead of November’s midterm elections....

The lack of enthusiasm is reaching deep into Republicans’ loyal base, spreading to the party’s most consistent voters — who have shown up to vote in all of the past four primaries and general elections, according to an analysis done by Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative super PAC affiliated with billionaire Charles Koch....

About 1 in 5 reliable Republican base voters are at risk this November, according to Nathan Nascimento, executive director at AFP Action.

Apart from that housing bill, Republicans have nothing positive to offer their own voters. So they're giving them hate. We'll see if it works.

I DO NOT THINK THAT WORD "INCUMBENCY" MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS

This is a peculiar story from Axios's Andrew Solender:

Democrats hit the anti-incumbency trap

Democrats are learning a hard lesson Republicans know all too well: The party out of power doesn't just ride the anti-incumbency wave — it can also get swept up in it.

Why it matters: The populist energy surging through the left after President Trump's return to the White House is roiling Democratic primaries and fueling establishment fears about the party's general election chances.

Just ask Senate Republicans how that went for them in 2010, 2012 and 2022.

In 2010, Senate Republicans gained 6 seats (and House Republicans gained 63 seats), so even though they failed to win the Delaware Senate race with Christine ("I'm not a witch") O'Donnell and perhaps blew a couple of other potential wins, they had no real reason to complain. The "anti-incumbency wave" in 2012 ended with the re-election of the incumbent president, so maybe there was no anti-incumbency wave at all. And 2022 ended with Republicans gaining 9 seats in the House and Democrats gaining 1 seat in the Senate, so, again, maybe it wasn't really a strongly anti-incumbent year.

What are Solender's examples of anti-incumbency pressure on Democrats?

Former state Rep. Amish Shah — whose grassroots, door-to-door campaigning tactics the DCCC does not believe are effective — prevailed over the party favorite, ex-TV journalist Marlene Galán-Woods.

The DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] ran a $500,000 joint ad buy with Galán-Woods and outside Democratic groups spent millions more to support her, but to no avail.

Shah's win came after progressives Randy Villegas of California and Matt Dunlap of Maine defeated DCCC-backed rivals in primaries last month.

But none of the losing candidates in these primaries were incumbents.

While Villegas and Shah are running to flip GOP-held seats, Dunlap is simply trying to hold retiring Rep. Jared Golden's (D-Maine) district.

"Incumbent" is a word that has a meaning. It means you're the current officeholder. The establishment-endorsed candidates in these races weren't the current officeholders.

It's as if to Solender -- and maybe to the establishment Democrats who served as spin doctors for his story -- "incumbent" means preferred establishment candidate. Just being in the clique -- being the Democratic establishment's favorite -- is like being the incumbent.

Solender continues:

Add that to Democrats' big mess in Maine, where populist left-wing darling Graham Platner dropped out earlier this month amid allegations of sexual assault, which he denied.

Platner, a self-described oyster farmer, had won the Democratic nomination after muscling out Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the preferred choice of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Instead state party activists have turned to Troy Jackson, a progressive logger and state Senate majority leader who is already facing scrutiny over alleged angry outbursts during his time in the legislature.

Jackson is leading in the first poll of the race and is a 67% favorite according to Polymarket, but this is a "big mess" for Democrats, according to Solender. And hey, it might be -- Collins consistently trailed in the polls the last time she ran, then won handily. But the polling this time might be right -- the betting markets think so. In any case, Janet Mills may be the incumbent governor, but she's not the incumbent senator. Yet it's as if she was owed the nomination because she was the establishment's preferred candidate.

You can probably guess which race this is leading up to:

One of Democrats' biggest headache this cycle is Michigan, which has primaries on Aug. 4.

Centrist Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and progressive Abdul El-Sayed are pummeling each other to be the Democratic candidate in what is sure to be a highly competitive U.S. Senate race.

Establishment Democrats are petrified about an El-Sayed win....

Again, what does this have to do with incumbency? Neither Stevens nor El-Sayed is the incumbent. (That would be Gary Peters, a Democrat, who's retiring.) But it's as if being the establishment favorite is effectively incumbency, to Solender and his spinners.

As I said yesterday, I'm worried about this race, mostly because of the intra-party pummeling Solender mentions. But polling suggests that both candidates are equally viable -- they each lead Republican Mike Rogers by 0.5% according to the Real Clear Polling average -- and Polymarket thinks Democrats are 70% favorites.

Still, none of this has anything to do with incumbency, unless you think of the establishment Democratic Party -- powerless and stuck in the minority -- as an incumbent party that deserves to retain its status forever, powerless or otherwise.

WHY IS HALEY STEVENS USING HILLARY CLINTON'S 2008 PLAYBOOK?

Here's how Haley Stevens is running against Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary:

"Cool kids on the Internet. They're doing the cool kid chatter. Some of 'em might be the coastal elites, making fun of how I talk. But let's be real. They're making fun of Michigan. They're thinking they're better than us. Their jokes, their criticism, only make me fight harder." -- Haley Stevens

[image or embed]

— Howard Mortman (@howardmortman.bsky.social) July 25, 2026 at 1:14 PM

Remind you of anything?

After this campaign moment in 2007, Politico's Roger Simon wrote:

When I saw a video of Hillary Clinton downing a shot of Crown Royal whiskey in Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Ind., on Saturday night, I was delighted to see that she has finally learned what campaigning for president is all about.

Last week, Barack Obama went to a private fundraiser in San Francisco and made some semi-coherent remarks about how people in small towns “get bitter” and “cling” to “guns or religion.”

Clinton blasted Obama for being “elitist and out of touch.”

“I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Sen. Obama made about people in small-town America,” Clinton said.

Clinton began campaigning this way when Obama was close to clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, and it didn't change the outcome. Stevens is campaigning this way in a race that could go either way.

Stevens is the candidate of Chuck Schumer, James Clyburn, and other aging establishmentarians. I know what they're thinking: that moderate candidates like Stevens are more broadly appealing than progressives like El-Sayed, that progressive candidates alienate moderates but moderate candidates don't alienate progressives.

Progressive voters might rally around moderate candidates in states where there aren't a lot of alternatives -- progressives will probably vote for Roy Cooper in North Carolina or Mary Peltola in Alaska. But in part that's because those moderates aren't showing active disrespect for a progressives. In Michigan, a moderate candidate should recognize that attacking a progressive candidate and his supporters means attacking part of the base you'll need to win the general election, as well as poisoning moderates' minds against a progressive who might be the general election candidate.

That's the nature of bitter primaries, which is why it's a bad idea to maximize the bitterness. Clinton's attacks on Obama (as, in effect, the candidate of the "cool kids") didn't cost him in 2008, but he was an extraordinary political talent running against a reviled Republican Party after years of a despised war, followed by a financial collapse. When the ideological pressure went the other way, in 2016, it's quite likely that that the Bernie Sanders campaign helped alienate enough progressive voters to cost Clinton the election.

Hillary Clinton wasn't an Obama-level campaigner. Neither is Stevens -- as the clip above makes clear. I hope 2026 is as difficult a year for the GOP as 2008 was. But if Republican Mike Rogers is competitive in Michigan, Stevens is making it easier for him to win.

TRUMP IS THE WORST PRESIDENT WE'VE EVER HAD, BUT NOT THE WORST PRESIDENT WE'LL EVER HAVE

I've been busy with other matters and haven't had a chance to watch President Trump's White House Correspondents' Dinner speech or read the full transcript, but I'm struck by this in Shawn McCreesh's New York Times write-up:

One particularly awkward moment played out when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.”

Mr. Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”

As the reporters took their awards, Mr. Trump threw his hands in the air theatrically, as if to say, Oh well, what can you do.

Trump is an authoritarian thug who's perfectly comfortable ruining other people's lives in order to get what he wants, but he's not the worst imaginable authoritarian, for one reason in particular: It's all a game for him.

He wants to win all the time, but sometimes he loses, and sometimes he shrugs and accepts that. He reworked his tariffs to be in compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling. At long last, he cut a check to E. Jean Carroll (though he's now trying to claw the money back).

If pressure from his adminstration destroys CBS News or (perhaps sometime next year) CNN, terrific. If not, we'll, that's how the game goes (though he won't stop fighting). He'll show up at next year's dinner and make nice with everyone he tried to bring to ruin.

All his life, Trump has fought dirty, but often he didn't win -- the courts, the political system, or, most often, the marketplace defeated him. His businesses went bankrupt. Many lenders wouldn't lend to him. Oh well, what can you do.

He's dangerous now because a Supreme Court full of partisan hacks and a party-over-country congressional GOP have given him near-unlimited power, but he spent most of his life not having this level of power. He's used to that. He's destroyed a lot of guardrails, but he's left some standing. He hasn't disbanded the lower courts that have ruled against him. He hasn't put Khadeeja Safdar in the gulag.

We'll have a Republican president someday who won't be so restrained.

President Vance or President Bovino or President Carlson will take the power granted by the Supreme Court and congressional Republicans and treat it as merely a baseline. A future GOP fascist president won't see authoritarianism as just a power game in which you respect your opponents and assume they're fighting dirty just like you. A future fascist will fight for all the power, with nothing but contempt for anyone standing in the way.

Unless we fascism-proof the country starting in 2029 (or 2027), or fight like hell when an even worse Republican president is in office.

THEY HATE ME, J.D. VANCE BOASTED

Here's The Washington Post's lead story right now:

As JD Vance prepares to make a decision about his 2028 plans, the vice president is facing a barrage of online attacks from within his party, criticism his allies say appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to poison the well for him politically.

His detractors have adopted the “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media, especially over the past week, with attacks including claims that Vance is “unfit” to be vice president due to his efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. They have asserted, without evidence, that Vance is making policy decisions not supported by President Donald Trump. They have likened him to former president Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

The sustained public hostility from Vance’s own side of the aisle is unlike that faced by other vice presidents in decades, both in intensity and in the early timing — two years before the party will choose its next presidential nominee.

This seems bad for Vance -- until you take a closer look at the story. It doesn't quote anyone who's part of this well-poisoning campaign. The only people quoted are "a close ally of the vice president," "two other people with knowledge of Vance’s strategy," and "other advisers," all anonymous, along with "Steve Cortes, a conservative commentator supportive of Vance," and, to provide historical perspective, "Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to [Vice President Mike] Pence in the White House."

This story came from Vance World. He wants it understood that some Republicans hate him. He thinks it will help him win the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.

Why does Vance think this is happening?

Vance’s political team remains dismissive of the social media onslaught and its impact on Republican voters, believing that many of the attacks are not organic....

Vance’s allies are keenly aware of and monitoring the online attacks, but his team says the criticism sends a signal to the conservative base that establishment Republicans and opponents they label as neoconservatives hate Vance. That, they say, could ultimately strengthen his standing in a GOP primary.

Vance's team seems to be concerned that not enough Israel skeptics in the GOP noticed this in his recent Joe Rogan interview:

During the show, Vance described himself as a “reasonable moderate” in the debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship. He also cited a recent Time report about an online pro-Israel influence operation run by a former Trump campaign official, through which Vance said he was being attacked “in dishonest ways” by paid influencers.

“You know, my response to that is, ‘Well, go to hell,’” Vance told Rogan. “I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first, and that’s the way that I’ve tried to do this job.”

The operation described in the Time story isn't just "pro-Israel" -- it's financed by the Israeli government. The story tells us:

Last September, the global ad agency Havas hired [2020 Trump campaign manager Brad] Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME. Under the agreement, Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month.

The campaign doesn't appear to be working:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had hired Parscale to improve the nation’s standing among conservatives, only to watch support continue to erode on the American right and across the broader U.S. electorate. "We are pissed at Brad Parscale," says [an] Israeli official familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. "He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse."

But it's out there. The Post story reports:

A Washington Post analysis of conservative influencers’ posts on X found that criticism of Vance spiked immediately after his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.

Vance clearly wants anti-Netantyahu (and anti-Semitic) GOP voters to know about this. He wants them to know who hates him.

Vance is trying to walk a fine line on Israel and anti-Semitism. He'd like to retain the support of at least some voters who are uncomfortable with anti-Semitism while also dog-whistling to anti-Semites. Here's a passage about Charlie Kirk from Vance's recent memoir:

He called me in the summer of 2025 to talk about two things he was seeing among young conservatives that really worried him. The first was that they were very angry about Israeli influence in American politics. The second was that some were going from legitimate disagreement with the Israeli government to anti-Semitism.

“Young people think we allow Israel too much influence over our foreign policy, and they’re concerned about it. But for some, that concern is turning to anger, and even Jew hatred.”

Charlie saw that heated foreign policy disagreements, filtered through the internet, could bleed into ethnic hatred. And while Charlie loved Israel, he agreed with a lot of his young fans that the Israeli government was not always aligned with the interests of the United States. He knew the situation was delicate and complicated, and he worked directly with young activists on how to prevent their views on this political issue from feeding bigotry.

Ironically, Vance's pal Kirk once advised Netanyahu to conduct a social media influence operation much like the one Parscale is running, as the Time story notes:

In a private letter to Netanyahu in May 2025, which TIME reviewed, Kirk warned that anti-Israel sentiment online had reached "record levels" and urged an aggressive communications campaign: mobilize influencers, send former hostages on speaking tours, flood social media with stories that humanized Israeli society. "I know you've got a 7 front war and my kvetching pales in comparison. But I'm trying to convey to you that Israel is losing support even in conservative circles," Kirk wrote. "This should be a 5 alarm fire." Netanyahu never responded to the letter, though he spoke to Kirk on the phone last year, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

Kirk later made some remarks that were critical of Israel. Right-wing influencers -- Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly -- believe Kirk was pressured to tamp down his criticism of Israel (and Owens has blamed Israel for Kirk's murder). But Vance seems to think Kirk had positioned himself correctly, and he seems to want to occupy the same spot. He wants to seem appalled by anti-Semitism while appearing to be anti-Semitism-curious (and anti-Israel-curious). Hence this Post story.

THIS MIGHT BE HOW TRUMP INTENDS TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS, WITH MIKE JOHNSON'S BACKING

A couple of polls released this week suggest that Democrats are in a strong position to take back the House in November. A Fox poll gives Democrats a 7-point lead on the generic congressional ballot and a record-high level of support:

If the election were today, 53% of voters would back the Democratic candidate in their House district and 46% the Republican.... Notably, 53% is the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.

An Emerson College poll gives Democrats an even bigger lead:

A new Emerson College Polling survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%.

But because of gerrymandering, there aren't a lot of swing districts for Democrats to win, so even a blue tsunami is likely to leave them with a single-digit or low-double-digit majority.

And that could be before the challenges begin.

David French has pinpointed one way the Republican Party might try to steal the House after the midterms:

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” In plain English this means that the House and Senate make their own decisions regarding who belongs in each chamber of Congress, and those decisions are not reviewable by any other branch of government, including the courts....

The actual process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969.... The actual grounds for overturning an election are left to the discretion of the House....

The law gives a losing candidate, which it calls the “contestant,” 30 days after the certification of the election by state election officials to file a challenge with the House. The challenge is then referred to the Committee on House Administration, which investigates the contestant’s claims.

The contestant is supposed to bear the burden of proving that the election result should be reversed. But the matter is ultimately decided by a simple majority of the House, and the House can refuse to seat any member while the contestant’s challenge is pending....

This means that even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.

Would every Republican unite to deny a half-dozen or dozen Democrats their seats? Maybe disaffected Republicans like Thomas Massie wouldn't, but I'm not sure.

French tries to imagine the possible excuses for the challenges:

And as the 2020 election conspiracies illustrate, the challenges could be based on virtually anything. A contestant could use the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE Act to claim that illegal immigrants voted for his opponent in large numbers. Or he could claim that a state’s refusal to turn over voter rolls to the Trump administration meant that the election was corrupt. Or he could go right back to the 2020 playbook and cast doubt on mail-in ballots.

All of these sound plausible. For mail-in ballots, I'd expect Republicans to focus in particular on ballots counted after Election Day in California, where one or more Democrats might win after trailing on Election Night, simply because Democrats like to vote by mail more than Republicans do.

Republicans could also categorically proclaim that no socialist should be seated in Congress. Donald Trump and Mike Johnson has been talking about socialism quite a bit lately. Early this month, Johnson said:

We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we're going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall....

There has been a small number of times in the history of America where the actual experiment in self-governance was on the ballot. The idea that we would preserve a constitutional republic, one nation under God, a government of, by, and for the people. All that is in question right now. For the first time, really in my lifetime, this is a real question. The American people have to decide in November, in a midterm election for Congress and Senate. It’s not something that we would've projected. I hoped and prayed it would never come to this, but here we are. The barbarians are in the gate.

The three Zohran Mamdani endorsees who won congressional primaries this year will all have Republican challengers in November. All three endorsees are likely to win in November, probably by two-to-one margins -- but all of their Republican opponents could challenge their elections on "OMG communism!!!" grounds. There could be challenges to democratic socialist candidates elsewhere in the country (Melat Kiros in Colorado), and even to long-established House members who are democratic socialists (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib).

I suspect that whatever the Trump administration does to try to steal the midterms up to Election Day will be the tip of the iceberg. The worst will come after the elections. It might not work, but it will at least discredit the new Congress in many voters' eyes -- although no Democratic victory will ever again be seen as legitimate by the majority of Republican voters, which is no way to run a democracy.

"JUST SAY ANYTHING" IS STILL SORT OF WORKING FOR TRUMP

Citing his own Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll for July, G. Elliott Morris declares triumphantly that the public now recognizes President Trump's mental failings:

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll in July 2024 found 44% of Americans thought Trump had the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president, against just 14% for Biden — a 30-point gap.

Today, Trump is 80 and has increasing bouts of trouble in public (he sleeps a lot during press conferences and frequently slurs his speech), and voters are taking note. Overall, 46% of Americans rate his sharpness as president as “poor” — within a few points of the 50% who retroactively said that about Joe Biden.

But do they? Do voters really rate Trump's mental sharpness today almost as poorly as Biden's during his presidency?

The "poor" numbers are comparable -- 46% for Trump now, 50% for Biden in retrospect -- but 38% of respondents still rate Trump's mental sharness as excellent or good, as opposed to 24% who say the same thing about Biden when he was president. If we treat this as a binary, with the top two ratings as positive and the bottom two as negative, Trump is at 38%-59% now and Biden as president is at an abysmal 24%-73%. If we treat "fair" as a neutral rating and eliminate it, Trump is at 38%-46% now (which isn't a horrible spread) and Biden as president is at 24%-50% (which is).

A couple of things are happening here. This is a result of GOP hero worship -- Democrats never regarded Biden as a demigod -- but it's also because Trump just talks and talks. He gets to the end of nearly every sentence, and the sentences make sense to the poorly informed because most voters are poorly informed. The sentences often rely on simplistic formulas (Democrats are communists; we're fighting a war because Iran must never get a nuclear weapon), and that's fine because most voters' understanding of the issues is as shallow and simplistic as Trump's.

Biden really did understand the issues at a deep level for most of his life. I think he still understood them in depth at the end of his term, and maybe part of his struggle to communicate was difficulty summoning up the words to convey the complex things he knew. He had a lifelong stutter, and I think speaking became harder and harder for him as he aged, but I'm not sure his thinking about the problems he needed to deal with in his job had really diminished. Biden struggled to craft sentences to convey complex concepts, but Trump just yammers, expressing simple-minded ideas that don't take much brain power.

I believe that Biden in 2024 not only had a sharper mind than Trump in 2026, he also had a sharper mind than Trump in 2017 (or 2000 or 1986). But Biden's tongue was too weak to convey what he knew. Trump knows fuck-all, so that's not a problem for him.

SICKENED BY FORTUNATE SONS

Our cryptospora crisis might be worse because of DOGE, CNN reports.

As head of the federal lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks throughout the nation, Dr. Joel Barratt watched with alarm as Trump administration cuts and hiring freezes last year slowly depleted his staff.

By the time his 11-person team was reduced to three in September, Barratt said he had enough and resigned. But before leaving, he said, he sent emails to higher-ups at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the risks of losing staff and how it could hurt the response to future outbreaks.

And now, those warnings have become reality, with the employees working to rein in a growing cyclospora outbreak in the Midwest, forced to do more with less.

The Bulwark's Andrew Egger adds:

Meanwhile, some Democrats have zeroed in on another, separate cyclosporiasis-surveillance program that was DOGE’d out last year. Last week, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking why he had terminated surveillance of the cyclospora parasite in the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. “Your foolish and self-indulgent demolition of critical public health programs,” Ossoff wrote, “puts Americans at risk.”

Some critics describe Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy as eugenicists, men who are using the government to try to rid the world of ethnic and racial groups they regard as lesser. I think that applies to Musk, who hates Black people, particularly African Blacks. He knew what his assault on USAID would do to health programs in sub-Saharan Africa and he got the outcome he wanted.

I'm not sure this applies to the Kennedy/MAHA crackpots. A New Yorker article from late May by Dr. Dhruv Khullar begins this way:

Last November, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health and an acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ... wrote a short piece with the N.I.H.’s principal deputy director for the conservative publication City Journal. The piece argues that the country should largely stop trying to surveil for new pathogens, assess the risk they pose to humans, or develop vaccines and drugs to manage them. These activities, the authors suggest, mostly serve to keep scientists happy and funded. Instead, the public should be encouraged to become “metabolically healthy” by, for example, “eating nutritious food” and “getting up and walking more.” Bhattacharya has railed against the politicization of science, but the piece concludes that the best way to prepare for deadly pandemics is by “making America healthy again.”

I don't imagine that Jay Bhattacharya and Robert Kennedy agree on an ethnic group or groups that constitute the master race. What I think they do agree on is the classic right-wing idea that if you're vulnerable, well, tough luck, because they aren't. You don't deserve public health programs.

Like many corporate bosses and cult leaders, they think you should do what they do -- they like it (Kennedy loves his supplements) and nothing terrible has happened to them. And when something bad does goes wrong -- Kennedy's youthful heroin addiction, for instance -- they have rich parents or other resources. Doesn't everybody?

Khullar writes that Bhattacharya believes

the public should be encouraged to become “metabolically healthy” by, for example, “eating nutritious food” and “getting up and walking more.”

He wrote this piece in May, when the deadly pathogen making headlines was hantavirus, not cryptospora. Khullar added:

Notably, the first known hantavirus death in the U.S., in 1993, was of a nineteen-year-old marathon runner. Metabolic health only gets you so far.

But men with power whose lives are going well think everyone should be as lucky as they are, and if you're not, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The government should be both laissez-faire and paternalistic: we won't help you, but we'll tell you what you ought to do, and if life doesn't work out for you, it must be because you aren't doing what we assume works for us.

What's really working for them is wealth, privilege, a recognition that saying what rich people want to hear about government assistance (that it's bad if it goes to the non-privileged) will position you well in life -- and luck. Condemning everyone who can't manage to get situated this way to whatever fate throws their way is a non-racial form of eugenics.

THE GOP IS THE "LITTLE ALBERT" PARTY

I've been meaning to write about a couple of clips I watched last week as unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires spread from the Upper Midwest to New York City.

Fox host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the advice of the network’s own senior medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegle, by saying there is “not a chance” he will wear a KN95 mask.

[image or embed]

— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) July 17, 2026 at 10:53 AM

And there was this:

MAGA cultist Eric Metaxas was outraged by seeing an air quality alert triggered by the Canadian wildfires that suggested people limit outdoor activity: "How dare they say that. Who has the right to tell me or you or anyone anything? It's a free country. I can do whatever I want."

[image or embed]

— Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) July 16, 2026 at 1:03 PM

(Yes, that's Eric Metaxas, the Yale-educated biographer of Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who went full MAGA and punched a protester who cursed at him as he was leaving the Trump White House in August 2020.)

We know the right's complaints about the public health measures taken in the first couple of years of the COVID pandemic. They didn't like being ordered not to gather in public. They didn't like being told they needed to wear masks. They didn't like being compelled to get vaccinated. They said that the virus is less harmful than the vaccines. They said that the virus is a deadly pathogen devised to engineer a massive reduction in the world's population. (Those last two can't both be true.) They said that the virus was engineered specifically to defeat Donald Trump. (I don't think it occurs to them that it was a problem all over the world.) They said that the Deep State suppressed the truth about alternate treatments they like. They said that the entire pandemic was engineered to put everyone under the control of the global elite.

None of this was relevant to these clips.

It's been said that right-wingers didn't want to wear masks or get vaccinated at the height of COVID because they don't really believe in taking action for the common good. But Dr. Marc Siegel isn't suggesting that Brian Kilmeade might want to wear a mask in unhealthy air so Kilmeade can avoid spreading a pathogen to others -- he's saying Kilmeade might want to do that to protect his own lungs. The same goes for the suggestion that Metaxas (and everyone else) might want to limit outdoor activities in bad air -- it's for your benefit, dude.

And despite what Metaxas seems to believe (or cynically wants his intended audience to believe), no one is forcing anyone else to take precautions in this bad air. This isn't like a vaccine mandate or a store's mask policy in 2020 and 2021. Why would anyone in authority make these measures compulsory? Bad air isn't spread person to person.

But to right-wingers, this feels like the COVID era. So it's easy to make them angry.

I'm reminded of John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner's fsmous "Little Albert" experiment, the results of which were published in 1920. "Little Albert" was an infant exposed (as Wikipedia puts it) to

a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks (with and without hair), cotton, wool, burning newspapers, and other stimuli. Albert showed no fear of any of these items during the baseline tests.

Then Albert, at eleven months, was playing calmly with a white rat when he was exposed to a loud noise every time he touched the rat. The noise was upsetting to Albert, and subsequently he became distressed when he saw the rat, even without the noise. And not only that:

In further experiments, Little Albert seemed to generalize his response to the white rat. He became distressed at the sight of several other furry objects, such as a rabbit, a furry dog, a fur coat, and even a Santa Claus mask with white cotton balls in the beard. However, this stimulus generalization did not extend to everything with hair.

Right-wingers were so conditioned to hate everything to do with public health during the COVID era that they're distressed at the thought of nearly everything resembling those public health measures.

But not everything. Wikipedia says that Little Albert's distress "did not extend to everything with hair." Right-wingers' distress doesn't extend to masks when they're worn in a right-wing way. If you're an ICE goon or a member of the Patriot Front, right-wingers think your masks are awesome -- they'll never call those masks "face diapers" or suggest that they cause carbon dioxide poisoning.

We know that a major goal of right-wing propagandists is to keep Republican voters in a constant state of rage about things that aren't happening. See, for example, the governor of Arkansas:

In our state, you cannot replace Arkansas law with Sharia law. We will not allow it. Period.

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) July 17, 2026

(Muslims make up less than one percent of the state's population, and there's no effort underway to impose Islamic religious law on the state's population -- but hey, I guess you can't be too careful!)

When the conditioning really works, all the Little Alberts believe they're under threat even when there's no sign of what they fear. In 2024, they were spreading "do not comply" messages in response to an mpox (monkeypox) outbreak even though public health officials assured the public that no lockdowns or similar measures would be necessary. A few months ago, during a hantavirus outbreak, there was a similar response, even though no public health official ever threatened to impose restrictions on the general public. GOP propagandists keep the party's voters angry and frightened -- and it keeps those voters voting Republican.

TRAVEL DAY YESTERDAY

I wasn't able to post yesterday. Hope to post something today.

THE "AMERICA FIRST" ADMINISTRATION JUST GAVE U.S. TAX DOLLARS TO THESE POSH RIGHT-WING BRITISH TWITS

There might not be any federal dollars left for the rural hospital near you, but the U.S. government has $12 million available for these posh prats:

Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, the Guardian can reveal.

The intended grants, revealed in US government documents, are part of a package of support for European groups viewed favourably by the Trump administration....

The documents reviewed by the Guardian set out details of the grants for the first time. They include $7m for 878, a “leading British and American think tank” devoted to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration”....

The group appears to have been incorporated in the UK in March this year. 878’s website went live in early July, and says that its registration as a US nonprofit is “pending”. It takes its name from the year King Alfred the Great of the Saxons defeated the “Great Heathen Army”, led by a Danish warlord.

(Everyone in the global conservative movement really is a twelve-year-old boy.)

The state department has also set aside $5m for Free Speech Union International, citing its work “promoting free speech and countering digital overregulation across the UK, Europe, and Australia”.

The group is an offshoot of the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by the Conservative life peer Toby Young, and acts as an umbrella organisation for international sibling groups with similar goals.

One of the co-founders of 878 is Jacob Rees-Mogg (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, son of William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg, who was an editor of The Times of London and later a vice chairman of the BBC's board of governors). The younger Rees-Mogg has been a Leader of the House of Commons and a cabinet minister under Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He's also worked in finance, and his net worth was estimated at perhaps as much as £150 million in 2018. He doesn't need our money.

Toby Young is a prominent writer and editor who failed to become a journalistic superstar in America (back when there were such things) and parlayed this relative failure into a memoir called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which was a success in Britain. He was later a guest judge on Top Chef, an experience that inspired some of his most infantile and offensive tweets, which came to light in 2018 when he briefly served on a British government education board.

Young called these tweets "politically incorrect," a term he seems to use as an all-purpose cultural get-out-of-jail-free card. Other "incorrect" opinions include his views on working-class students at Oxford:

It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate ... Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses.

And on inclusivity:

Inclusive. It’s one of those ghastly, politically correct words that have survived the demise of New Labour. Schools have got to be ‘inclusive’ these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy. If [then education secretary, Michael] Gove is serious about wanting to bring back O-levels, the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t ‘accessible’ to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be ‘elitist’ and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.

And the former Top Chef judge believes schoolteachers have it easy:

Teachers complain a lot about how tough their job is. But, you know, the day begins in most schools at nine o’clock, ends at 3.30pm. They have six weeks’ holiday during the summer, two weeks’ holiday at Easter and at Christmas. Yes, they don’t just work when they’re at school, but even so, compared to a lot of other jobs, it’s not that tough.

Young (also a baron) has also been a spreader of COVID misinformation.

The mission statement of Rees-Mogg's 878 Institute is about what you'd expect from a grantee favored by the Trump/Vance/Miller/Rubio administration:

Our name – from the pivotal year of 878 AD – conveys the urgency of our own era. Britain and its closest allies are facing peril. But through the rediscovery of our ancient culture, making the right choices, and finding the will to face down our philosophical and military adversaries, our civilisation will survive and thrive.

Now more than ever, it is incumbent on us all to rediscover and nurture the roots of our shared English-speaking civilisation in order to defend it.

At 878, we are renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission. Future leaders in Britain and America will need to appreciate the deepest roots of our political life and our freedoms. Working with scholars in Israel and other closely allied nations, we are rejuvenating knowledge of the origins of our constitutional tradition. We build friendships with our closest civilisational allies to restore both the fabric of our countries and the resolve of our future leadership.

Young and Rees-Mogg are climate change denialists.

The two men are members of the Conservative Party, not one of the British parties further to the right. But these grants, along with other actions of the Trump administration -- see, for instance, Secretary of State Rubio's global anti-Antifa summit -- make clear that the Republican Party is not "America First" but rather "Global White People First," with "white people" defined as right-wing white Americans, Brits, Israelis, South Africans, and anyone else who might conceivably get a far-right party into power (AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, and so on), or is part of a fascist party in exile (Viktor Orban's Fidesz).

The American press needs to be more forthright about what the GOP is becoming. It's not a personality cult that will collapse when Trump is out of the picture. The leaders waiting in the wings may be uncharismatic, but they're young, tireless, and well funded, and they'll be able to tap into Fox News and the rest of the GOP's well-established propaganda apparatus as they try to go global with this movement. The Republican Party isn't going anywhere.

I UNDERESTIMATED TRUMP'S NARCISSISM

Yesterday I predicted, among other things, that President Trump would use last night's prime-time speech to link alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election to democratic socialist candidates running for office this year. I thought there was a logic to the prediction: Trump calls the democratic socialists "communists" and the ruling party of China is still referred to as the Communist Party.

But I underestimated Trump's narcissism. When he thinks about the 2020 election, it's all about him. He's barely thinking about what Democrats believe (although he did refer to them as "the radical left" in last night's speech). He doesn't think about the ideology of China, or even Venezuela, a country he accused of election fraud within its own borders in 2020, although he didn't explicitly say that the same techniques were also used to rig elections in America.

Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that's exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country's elections in 2020. And that's what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop, to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.

This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past.

Last night, Trump didn't seem at all interested in the Democrats he presumably hopes to defeat in November. He didn't question the results of the 2020 Georgia Senate elections, as some observers had predicted, even though one of the winners, Jon Ossoff, appears to be the favorite to win his reelection bid this year and is harshly attacking Trump on the campaign trail. The message of Trump's speech was much simpler:

* Election fraud is rampant, and every conceivable form of fraud is used.

* The rigging of the 2020 election is glaringly obvious.

* The SAVE America Act would make everything better.

That's it.

All of it makes me wonder whether I was wrong in yesterday's post to criticize Ezra Klein's suggestion that Trump isn't trying to win the midterms. In May, Klein told us:

I’m not saying [Trump] wants Democrats to win, but I don’t think he’d mind it if they did. A Democratic-controlled Congress gives him an enemy to fight. I think he gets a little lost without an enemy. It frees him from the tedious work of trying to pass legislation. It puts him back in the place he’s most comfortable, which is not wielding power; it’s claiming persecution.

That seems half-right. Trump doesn't usually fight for legislation even when his party has total control of Congress -- he'd much rather rule by executive order, or by Stephen Miller or Russell Vought telling every Cabinet-level department how to be brutal in his name.

Klein is right, obviously, about how much Trump enjoys claiming persecution, but what I saw in last night's speech wasn't Trump getting ready to claim Democrats are persecuting him. Instead, he seemed to be saying that the electoral system persecuted him in 2020, and will persecute Republicans in 2026, unless he gets his precious SAVE America Act.

So I'll sat the obvious thing: Trump is trying to discredit the upcoming elections, which he expects his party to lose. His message is that the 2026 election will be rigged and the 2020 election was rigged. He's saying that likely Democratic victories are proof he was cheated six years ago, because there'll be pro-Democratic cheating this year, in the absence of the SAVE America Act.

A spring 2026 survey from Reuters/Ipsos found that 63% of Republicans agree with Trump that the 2020 election was rigged. Trump's message makes perfect sense to the overwhelming majority of voters who belong to America's dominant political party. None of these people will ever believe a Democratic victory is legitimate.

THE 2026 STEAL BEGINS TONIGHT

Politico claims that even Republicans in D.C. don't know what the president plans to say tonight.

President Donald Trump is promising to reveal “really big news” on election security. Many Republicans wish he wouldn’t.

... instead of touting the recent good news on declining inflation or hyping the new housing law, Trump plans to talk about 2020 and “free and fair elections,” alarming some in the GOP who worry he will continue to make baseless claims or repeat debunked conspiracies.

“The people I talk to are scared shitless,” said a former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Of course he'll continue to make baseless claims and repeat debunked conspiracies. The question is what else he'll do. I have a few thoughts, which I'll explain below.

I don't understand the argument, made by Ezra Klein a few weeks ago, that Trump doesn't appear to want to win the midterms, the evidence being that he's not doing what a conventional president would do with midterms approaching -- he's not touting legislative accomplishments, he's not tacking to the center, and so on.

But obviously Trump wants to win the midterms. He simply believes his own hype -- that America is "the hottest country," that "the Golden Age" is upon us, and that real Americans know this.

Paul Krugman is right to argue that he tried to end the war in Iran so gas prices would drop before Election Day, and his failure to get the war wrapped up probably explains the timing of this speech:

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that just as Trump essentially gives up, not gives up in the sense of abandoning his war, but gives up on trying to achieve anything he can even spin as a positive outcome, that we now have an announcement that this Thursday he’s going to have a primetime speech, which reports say is going to be about election fraud in 2020.

Trump does seem to think the SAVE America Act is the magic bullet that will guarantee GOP victories in every election until the end of recorded time. He may be one of the few politicians in D.C. who actually believes the talking points: that massive numbers of illegal votes are cast under current law, all of them for Democrats, and that the SAVE America Act will guarantee wins for the GOP only because every election would go the GOP's way if only legal votes were cast. Tonight he could conceivably declare that the act is law by executive decree, though if he does, courts will overrule him.

I don't think he'll announce that the midterms are canceled, because that would be an admission of defeat. He might declare that he will cancel the elections if the SAVE America Act isn't passed. He doesn't have the legal right to do that, as courts will rule, and he doesn't have enough troops to enforce the shutdown. So he might not go this route.

Here's a longshot prediction: He'll declare that "communism" is illegal in America, and therefore democratic socialists can't serve in Congress. I think he'll say this after the election, in which a number of DSA candidates are likely to win, but he might start saying it now. Again, the courts will overrule him, but his base will believe that these people are serving unlawfully.

I think he's also planning to say that no one can be seated in Congress who wins based on votes that were counted after Election Day. That could rule out winners in California, and anywhere there's an extremely close race.

He's going to oversell "evidence" of foreign interference in the 2020 election, which will be either rehashed and debunked nonsense (Chinese bamboo paper in the ballots!), or perhaps some new evidence of a foreign influence campaign that altered the 2020 information stream but wasn't actually election tampering, in the sense that it didn't involve ballots cast improperly. But if his alleged culprit is China, he'll link the country to DSA candidates. Democratic socialists are communist and so is China will make perfect sense to millions of Americans.

Keep in mind that because of racial gerrymandering and previous efforts to ensure that most House seats are safe for one party or the other, there aren't a lot of swing districts this year. Also, Democrats don't have a commanding lead in midterm polling. The New York Times recently got predictions of the midterm outcome from five pollsters or poll-oriented pundits. The predictions for Democrats ranged from a five-seat House majority (Lynn Vavreck and Perry Bacon) to an eleven-seat House majority (Nate Silver). Trump won't need to discredit very many Democratic victories to leave the outcome in doubt, at least until courts rule.

Congressional victors are certified at the state level. No one in D.C. is supposed to be involved. But if Trump says that certain victories shouldn't be ratified, Democratic winners in red states might not get certified. (They'll sue and probably win, though.)

There's a process to challenge certified winners in the post-election lame-duck session, when Republicans will still control the House. I imagine that challenges to late-ballot and democratic socialist winners will be mounted, on Trump's orders. They might or might not succeed.

After that, the winners are supposed to congregate on January 3, pick a Speaker, and be sworn in. Mike Johnson is not supposed to have a role in this, but very few Americans understand that, so I'm guessing he'll try to prevent winners Trump doesn't like from being sworn in. I don't think that will work, but it will be ugly.

But Trump clearly wants to act, or at least hold forth, now. I suppose he could declare some sort of state of emergency until the SAVE America Act is passed. I know that Senate Republicans don't want to eliminate the filibuster and give him this win, but I keep thinking they'll accede to his demands because he'll simply wear them down. That could be what this speech is all about.

DEMOCRATS WHO WON'T DEFINE THEMSELVES AS FIGHTERS GET DEFINED BY FOX NEWS

In The New York Times, Nate Cohn tells us that Graham Platner, despite his personal failings, was succeeding politically in ways few Democrats do.

Mr. Platner did something that most progressive outsiders haven’t: He was able to appeal across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic primary electorate, even though he was unmistakably a factional candidate of the activist left.

Only 13 percent of Maine Democrats said Mr. Platner was “too far to the left” in a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll last month. He led his moderate opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, among self-identified moderate voters, 52 percent to 32 percent, in a University of New Hampshire poll taken before she dropped out of the race.

Mr. Platner’s progressive, populist message — anti-corporate, anti-establishment and opposing military aid to Israel, but not “woke” or democratic socialist — was able to occupy a kind of middle ground in the Democratic primary electorate.

What did Platner do? He defined himself politically before his opponents could do it for him. He was an economic populist who was angry at greedy billionaires and their enablers in government. But he wasn't anti-"woke." On the one issue that right-wing propagandists love to use more than any other to smear Democrats, Platner was maximally "woke," as he made clear in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" discussion last summer:

On LGBTQIA+ rights, Platner made one of his most pointed responses: “I stand right in the f***ing way of anyone who’s going to try to come after the freedoms of the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Here's what I wrote at the time about that answer and other comments Platner made in that Reddit forum:

[Platner] says that “Susan Collins is a tool of the billionaire class,” adding, “We ALL agree we’re all getting f***ed by the system.” When that's your main message, that's what people will remember about you. You define yourself; they can try running an ad against you saying you're "for they/them," rather than "for us," but even some transphobes will ignore it because they see you primarily as a person who wants to fight for "us."

Cohn writes:

Our last poll offered striking evidence that Mr. Platner’s views weren’t putting him at a particular disadvantage: Fewer Maine voters thought he was “too far to the left” than said the same of the Democratic Party in general. Let that sink in: A candidate recruited and elevated by the activist left wasn’t necessarily perceived as farther left than the Democratic Party.

Yes, because Platner's economic populism and anger at the plutocracy isn't regarded as "too far to the left" anymore, and Platner made sure that that's what you associated him with, at least until the scandals in his personal life caught up with him. As I wrote last year, that's not the approach of the typical Democrat:

Establishment Democrats don't want to take bold stances, which leaves them vulnerable: if they don't say anything memorable about themselves or their positions, opponents will choose a hot-button issue and make that what voters remember about them. To some extent, that's what happened to Kamala Harris, and it's what's happening to the party in general. People think Democrats care only about cultural issues because most Democrats have no memorable positions on other issues. That leaves their enemies free to portray them as caring more about pronouns than grocery bills. But if you take a strong stand on issues that matter to everyone, you can also take strong stands on cultural issues. More Democrats need to recognize this.

And I meant "a strong stand," not mealy-mouthed mush like "We're laser-focused on affordability." Cohn notes that one non-progressive seems to be succeeding the way Platner did:

Perhaps the only recent example of a successful, mainstream liberal populist is Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, whose re-election campaign has been focused on corruption and money in politics. He’s been one of the few mainstream liberals to earn acclaim from across his party in midterm campaigns this year. If Mr. Platner was an example of a progressive who was reaching toward this emerging Democratic middle ground, Mr. Ossoff is an example of a moderate trying to seize the same basic position.

I said that the key was taking strong stands, but what's necessary at a minimum is persuading voters that you're angry about the status quo and will fight. Platner came off as a two-fisted brawler and Ossoff can seem like a thoughtful associate professor, but he's found his anger. Watch the way Ossoff talks about Donald Trump (and Ossoff's GOP opponent in the Georgia Senate race, Mike Collins) in the part of this speech I've queued up:

Now, Savannah, I don't know if you saw the mess in Washington last week. The president -- the president was so humiliated in Hormuz, he threw his toys out the stroller and refused to sign the affordable housing bill. Did you see that? But wait, that's after he gave some felon donor a no-bid contract for the Reflecting Pool and it filled up with algae, which for some reason required the deployment of the National Guard. And then because of his war and his tariffs, inflation rose to over 4%. He promised to bring down prices on Day One. Do you remember that? Y'all know what today is? Today is Day 524, and groceries, rent, and healthcare are at their all-time highs in American history. Donald Trump and his puppet Mike Collins, they doubled health insurance premiums for more than a million Georgians and threw 300,000 Georgians off their insurance altogether. I heard from a woman with cancer who waits tables for a living and said she was going to lose her health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy. And they did this to pay for a tax cut that went overwhelmingly to the rich and to corporate America. Did you know that, Savannah? Savannah, I never want to hear these two pretend they give a damn about working people again.

Trump is going to make a speech tomorrow night in which he'll claim, among other things, that Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won illegitimately in the same 2020 election that defeated him. In part this is because of Trump's racism, specifically his hatred of Black women -- it kills him that Ossoff and Warnock won because of a strong Black vote, and it kills him that two embodiments of that honest democratic process were Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, Black election workers in Fulton County who were defamed by Trump's thuggish surrogate Rudy Giuliani, and who won a $146 million financial judgment against him.

But Trump can also see that Ossoff is the favorite to win again this year, and he's winning by attacking Trump. (Trump can't rebut Ossoff's attacks effectively, so he compared Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman in a mddle-of-the night post at Truth Social on the Fourth of July. Pathetic.)

All this brings me to Matthew Yglesias, who, preposterously, believes it's bad to fight if you want to win:

In the TV show “Andor” — the best recent art about politics — Diego Luna as the lead character observes, “We’re in a war. You wanna fight, or do you wanna win?”

And I think that this is a question I am constantly asking my “Politix” Co-Host Brian Beutler to look into his heart and ponder. Because for the last few years, it really seems to me that for many Democrats, the answer is that they want to fight....

“You voted for Trump because of legitimate concerns about Biden’s failures on immigration and inflation, and I hear and acknowledge those concerns, but Trump has betrayed his affordability promises and I can help” is a plausible message for winning over disillusioned Trump voters. “You and the majority of your friends and family voted for a racist, K.K.K.-like fascist movement and now you need to repent” is really not.

But that's a caricature of a Democratic "fight" message. It's not what Ossoff is saying. It's not even what Platner was saying. As Ossoff makes clear while campaigning in a quintessentially purple state, you can be very angry and appeal to normie and moderate voters in 2026.

Yglesias continues:

It’s fun for Graham Platner to campaign with the Dropkick Murphys, but that’s just another way of saying that expressive politics in blue states is more fun than winning over swing voters.

But the campaign in which Platner stage-dived during a performance by the proudly lefty, anti-ICE band was working, and would have worked if Platner's personal failings hadn't gotten in the way.

Voters want to see some fight right now. They know it's justified. And in addition, it can define you as a candidate before Trump or Fox can do it for you.