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

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

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

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

In an essay on the subject, he writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balk writes:

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

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

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

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

Balk's version is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MOST EFFECTIVE ARGUMENT AGAINST TRUMP'S BRIBE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IF TRUMP IS HATED, WHY AREN'T THE POLLS PREDICTING MORE DEMOCRATIC BLOWOUTS?

I saw this chart at Reddit. The numbers appear to be accurate.

In many states, Democratic Senate candidates are running more than ten points better than Kamala Harris did in 2024. Some or all of these candidates could win in states that have been widely regarded as red.

But if red-state Democrats are running a dozen or so points better than Harris, why aren't purple-state Democrats doing the same thing? In addition to the less-than-spectacular numbers being put up by the Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan, Maine, and Minnesota, why does Democrat Chris Pappas have only a two-point lead in the New Hampshire Senate race, according to the Real Clear Polling average? Harris beat Trump in New Hampshire by 2.78%. Why isn't New Hampshire's Democratic Senate candidate trouncing the Republican in what seems like a very Democratic year?

You could argue that this comes down to "candidate quality." Pappas is running against John E. Sununu, whose father and brother were both popular New Hampshire governors. In Maine, Troy Jackson is an unpolished speaker who was a replacement for primary voters' overwhelming favorite, Graham Platner. In Minnesota, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan needs to outrun the corruption scandal that brought down Governor Tim Walz. And in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed has been demonized by both the GOP and members of his own party.

But shouldn't there be some Democrat who's about to win a landslide in a purple state? Maybe it will be Jon Ossoff in Georgia or Roy Cooper in North Carolina, but so far, I see only one huge win developing for Democrats in purple America: Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro currently has a lead of more than twenty points in his reelection bid.

I keep thinking about the late-June New York Times poll of Maine, in which respondents said they preferred a Democratic Senate to a Republican Senate by a double-digit margin (54%-42%), but also gave Graham Platner, who was still running at the time, a lead of only two points over Susan Collins. Sure, Platner was a special case -- but it's as if voters in some states don't see that the way you get a Democratic Senate is by electing Democrats.

I think a major problem is that Democrats don't tout the Democratic Party -- progressives attack it from the left, while moderates brag about bipartisanship and wear their Democratic affiliation almost apologetically.

And Democrats don't attack the Republican Party.

This seems absurdly simple, but: Republicans talk *all the time* about how Democrats are bad. Not this or that individual Democrat, but the party, the ideology, the very idea of Democrats. Democrats almost never do this about Republicans. Not in a coordinated, concerted way.

— David Roberts (@volts.wtf) September 5, 2026 at 3:17 PM

This was the ideal year for Republican-bashing: not only is the Republican president wildly unpopular, but every Republican is his enabler, apart from a few who are hounded out of the party if they don't enable him.

You might not like Hasan Piker, or agree with him about the appeal of leftist policies, but I nod in agreement when I hear him attack Democrats' calls for "a strong Republican Party":

No, I want no Republican Party. I'm going to be very honest with you. I want an ineffective, feckless, weak -- kind of like the Democratic Party is currently. I want the Republican Party to be like that. I want a Republican Party that is utterly dominated and humiliated in broad daylight that people are embarrassed to say that they're voting for a Republican. That is the reality that I want.

Whatever you think of this, it's true that in large swaths of the country, the Democratic Party "is utterly dominated and humiliated in broad daylight" and "people are embarrassed to say that they're voting for a" Democrat. This could have been a year when Democrats expanded the much smaller area of the country in which the same is true for Republicans. We should have given more people in the heartland a new narrative to consider: not "Republicans are the go-to party, but this particular Republican president is so uncharacteristically bad that I'm considering a totally counterintuitive vote for a Democrat, which I'm sure I'll never repeat," but "Actually, Republicans suck in so many ways that I can't understand why everyone around here likes them." I think there are a lot of soft supporters of the GOP who would be receptive to that message.

Even if Democrats are highly successful this year, two years from now they'll wish they discredited the GOP more, because Donald Trump won't be on the ballot. Meanwhile, they're doing fine now, but they could be doing better.

COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM, BUT FOR BELIEF SYSTEMS

The tone of this Fox story is objective, but the report is meant to delight Fox's audience:

The Texas Board of Education gave final approval to changes to the state's high school social studies curriculum, a controversial move that will impact how students are taught about Islam and Christianity....

The board approved language asserting that "radical Islam" motivated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks rather than taking a more narrow focus on the terrorist groups involved in the attack.

The material also requires students to study early Islam through Prophet Muhammad's "brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes," the "normalization of slavery" and the taking of female captives as "harem slaves."

An earlier Texas Tribune story notes:

The GOP [board] members voted against eliminating the word “brutal,” as suggested by their colleague, Will Hickman.

They did not revive a previously deleted expectation that schools teach about Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy.

The Tribune story adds this:

Students testified earlier in the week that the decision to instead portray Islam as violent will cause significant harm to them and their classmates.

“I feel attacked, as if my religion doesn’t belong,” Habiiba Quresh, 15, told board members. “I shouldn’t have to defend my religion in the middle of history class because of one sentence someone on this board wrote.”

These changes have been in the works for years. It doesn't surprise me that the GOP-majority board (currently 11-4) approved them this year, at a moment when the state Republican Party's main message appears to be "Booga-booga! There are Muslims under your bed!" The anti-Muslim bigotry in the state is so flagrant that even The New York Times took notice last month.

I've had doomer thoughts about where this is leading, in Texas and eventually in a future GOP-led America: first to Nuremberg laws that exclude Muslims from professions and neighborhoods, and then eventually to camps and genocide, or at least ethnic cleansing. Bo French, the GOP candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, certainly talks that way -- the Times story I've linked quotes a tweet in which he wrote, “I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.”

That nightmare future is certainly possible (and certainly possible for other groups: trans people and eventually everyone in the LGBTQ community, non-whites, socialists, Jews, eventually Democrats). But there's another possibility that seems more likely.

Most Texas Republicans seem not to want to drive Muslims out of the state, exclude them from professions, or take away their right to vote. Instead, they seem to want to declare as official policy that Muslims are second-class citizens by definition. Texas doesn't seem to want to prevent Muslims from running for office -- it just wants non-Muslim children to grow up believing that Muslims should never hold office (and to believe, presumably, that no politician who embraces Muslims as full citizens should hold office either).

The difference between what the Nazis did to Jews and what Texas Republicans are doing to Muslims seems analogous to the difference between pure authoritarianism and what Professor Steven Levitsky calls "competitive authoritarianism."

In competitive authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held regularly and are hard-fought affairs. However, the “playing field” is uneven: control of the media, abuse of state resources, coercion, and/or limited fraud give incumbents an unfair advantage over the opposition. Because elections are not free and fair, these regimes are not democratic. Yet neither are they fully authoritarian.

In Texas, you still have freedom of religion, but if you're a Muslim, the government has mandated that the education system defines your religion as dangerous and "brutal." You can run for office in Texas, but Texas wants to mold citizens who will never vote for you.

This isn't exactly Frank Wilhoit's portrayal of conservatism as the belief that "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." If you're a Texan who's a Muslim (or a member of some other suspect group), the law won't force you out of a profession or off a ballot. Instead, it will work to ensure that you're always seen by the majority culture as "less than."

I think the future of Republicanism is competitive cultural authoritarianism in many areas. The New York Times reported this over the weekend:

The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents....

The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families.

To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department fund that was created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school.

Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money.

The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country.

This is pure Orbanism -- favoring married couples over non-married couples and single parents, favoring couples with stay-at-home mothers over single parents.

This is the future that Republicans want: a government thumb on the scale on their behalf and against any group they don't like. With that unlevel playing field, they'll probably allow the unfavored to live here as nominal full citizens, just as long as they can use the unfavored as political punching bags and keep them and their advocates out of power forever.

OFF FOR THE WEEKEND

This should be the last trip for a while. See you on Tuesday. Happy Labor Day.

FETTERMAN ISN'T DOING HIS JOB, BUT HE'S DOING EVERYTHING HIS REPUBLICAN FANS THINK A POLITICIAN SHOULD DO

This Wall Street Journal story (free to read here) won't hurt John Fetterman at all in the eyes of his current fanbase:

... behind closed doors, the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.

For example?

One morning in June, three paralyzed military veterans in wheelchairs from rural Pennsylvania arrived at the office of Sen. John Fetterman for a long-awaited meeting to discuss legislation that would improve their care.

Fetterman’s staff greeted them with bad news: The Pennsylvania Democrat had to cancel. He’d told his staff he may have eaten something bad and wasn’t feeling well, according to people familiar with the matter.

Less than an hour after his staffers met with the veterans in his place, Fetterman walked into his office, showing no signs of illness. He had an appointment he didn’t want to miss, he told staff: an interview on Fox News to discuss Israel and the war in Iran.

Another example?

Last September, when an aide told Fetterman that officials with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, known as CHOP, wanted to meet because they were worried about Medicaid cuts, he was dismissive.

Also:

In April 2025, veteran Pennsylvania state lawmaker Anthony Hardy Williams brought a busload of constituents to Washington from Eastwick, a poorer, flood-prone neighborhood in Philadelphia, to meet with their representatives in Congress and discuss Trump administration cuts to a grant program that had helped the area.

Fetterman was the only one who refused to meet with them, Williams said in an interview. At one point, they saw Fetterman walking the halls and yelled, but he didn’t acknowledge them, according to Williams.

Fetterman isn't just failing to stay in touch with his constituents:

Last May, several media reports highlighted Fetterman’s paltry attendance record at Senate hearings.... At that point, records transcripts show, Fetterman had skipped 11 of the 12 full hearings that year of his assigned committees—Homeland Security, Commerce and Agriculture.

Nevertheless, Republicans in his state love him:

In Pennsylvania, Fetterman’s shifting politics and public stances have led to a once unthinkable outcome in recent polling by the New York Times: He is more popular among Republican voters than the state’s Republican senator, Dave McCormick.

In that poll, Fetterman's favorable rating among Pennsylvania Republicans is 73%.

And why not? Sure, Fetterman seems to do nothing all day except go on cable news programs and bash Democrats, while burnishing his Israel-right-or-wrong credentials. He doesn't do the work. He just talks trash. A vile recent example:

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is raising the stakes for Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed, offering the Senate hopeful up to $100,000 if he hosts a rally about 9/11.

“I’m offering $50,000 for you to do a rally with Hasan Piker on 9/11, the anniversary, and you can all explain to people why America deserved that 25 years ago,” Fetterman said on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom on Wednesday.

But that's everything the hardcore Republican base wants from politicians. They don't like government. They don't expect politicians to do anything. All they want their pols to do is make liberals howl. They vote based on who will make their enemies the angriest and hurt them the most.

Polls show that the GOP's soft supporters are abandoning the party, but the hardcore base is still loyal because Donald Trump, in particular, still makes Democrats furious. Fetterman does the same thing. And that's really all his Republicans fans ask.

TRUMP'S MIDTERM "STRATEGY" IS TO THROW MONEY AT TOTALLY RANDOM STATES

A few days ago, CNN reported this:

The Department of Homeland Security is planning a surge in its efforts to investigate voter fraud in select states starting Tuesday....

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has accelerated efforts to make the department a central force in President Donald Trump’s hunt for purported widespread election fraud.

That's chilling -- but what are the "select states" DHS is focusing on?

Offices in nine states are expected to take investigative action from early September to mid-October, according to the guidance. Those states include Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut.

Why? Why those? Of the nine states mentioned, only Georgia has a tight Senate race. Why not Ohio or Texas, for instance? Sure, they're red states, and Trump wants to pretend that (imaginary) voter fraud by non-citizens is a blue-state problem. But in that case, why Missouri?

Yesterday, CNN reported this:

President Donald Trump’s extremely well-heeled political operation has begun an advertising campaign ahead of the 2026 midterm elections that Republicans have been eagerly awaiting.

But the first offerings focus on something decidedly unpopular: Trump himself.

The new ads from Securing American Greatness, the nonprofit arm of the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., seem to confirm reporting from the Atlantic and Trump’s recent comments suggesting the campaign will largely focus on Trump rather than the Republicans in Congress who will be on the ballot this fall.

The ads really are all about Trump, as I'll show below. But before we get to the ads themselves, let's look at where Trump's PAC is spending money to run them.

Per data from tracking firm AdImpact, the spots have begun running in major media markets like New York, Washington, DC, Chicago and Philadelphia....

Why? Why those markets? Again, not one of these markets has a tight Senate race. It's possible that ads running in the New York City TV market, to take one example, will influence voters in tight races outside the city. The Cook Political Report lists three New York races that are close, either "Lean D" or "Toss Up."

But there are no key races in or around Chicago. So what are these people doing?

We knew the ads would primarily glorify Trump, but it should have been possible to feed his ego and remind pro-Trump voters, Hey, if you love the big guy, get out and vote for Republicans in November. These ads say nothing about Republicans in Congress.

One of the spots, titled “Toughest Guy,” looks exactly like an ad that could be run for one of Trump’s campaigns. It features UFC President Dana White praising Trump’s toughness, followed by Trump delivering high-minded lines about the primacy of America.

“We will be prosperous. We will be proud. We will be strong, and we will win like never before,” he says.

The ad doesn’t even allude to Congress or the Republican Party.

That's this one:

Here's the new ad from Trump's political operation — it's all about Trump. pic.twitter.com/7dRL5tHvsj

— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) September 2, 2026

The second ad, “Tax Cut Prices,” is a little more conventional in that it focuses on things Republicans in Washington have done — at least some of which congressional Republicans were involved in.

“We gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security, the largest tax cuts in American history,” Trump says in the ad. “The price of eggs is down 60%. I took prescription drugs from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest. We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs so that no one’s prices will go up.”

The narrator then concludes: “He’s fighting for you every day. Help him finish the job.”

Several of the claims in the ad are false or misleading, including on Social Security taxes, prescription drug prices and making data centers provide their own power.

But it’s also worth noting that some of them — including the latter two — didn’t even involve legislation from Congress. They were executive actions.

I don't think normies pay enough attention to the details of what happens in Washington to distinguish the items that happened because of congressional action from the ones that came about because of presidential edicts. The key here is that the ad never makes an explicit connection between Trump and Republicans in Congress. It's all about him.

And here's another pro-Trump ad from Securing American Greatness that began airing nationally today. pic.twitter.com/wY3eNpCZOv

— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) September 2, 2026

They're just taking the old man's money, creating ads that make him feel good about himself, and spending money on them the fastest way possible, by buying ad space in the most expensive media markets.

As for the states Homeland Security is focusing on, I throw up my hands. Why those states? Your guess is as good as mine.

The people planning Trump's midterm speaking tour appear to be doing a better job of focusing it on contested races. NBC reports:

President Donald Trump pledged Wednesday to hit the campaign trail for Republican candidates in 35 races this fall in the lead-up to the November midterm elections....

Trump cited a few of the races he expects to travel for, including Sen. Dan Sullivan’s re-election bid in Alaska....

He added that he’ll also travel to Texas and stump for state Attorney General Ken Paxton....

Several of the Republicans at the White House for Wednesday night’s event in the Rose Garden face competitive races, including Reps. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Mike Collins of Georgia.

Yes, those are key races. The Senate candidates are struggling in the polls. House members Van Orden and Barrett are on Cook's list above, and Collins is running to unseat Senator Jon Ossoff.

Trump spoke about all this as if he actually understand the point of the exercise:

Trump said he’s not aiming to stump for shoo-in candidates.

“If you’re leading by 40 points and you’ve been there for 25 years,” he said, “please don’t ask me to come to your area and make a speech, right?”

This reads like one of those pronouncements Trump makes because someone just explained it to him, and now he wants us to think he understood it all along because he's really smart, unlike the rest of us.

Trump's ad people and his Homeland Security secretary didn't make a similar effort. They're just doing stuff wherever because the old man wants them to do something. They're not bothering to target their efforts because the old man doesn't realize that's important unless someone reminds him.

Well, at least he'll make his speeches in the right battlegrounds. Of course, the speeches will be all about himself -- his greatness, his grievances. He won't even mention the names of the people he's campaigning for. But at least they won't waste money sending him to Connecticut.

MAYBE THE SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE FEWER SEATS (AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT A FIGHT I DON'T TRUST DEMOCRATS TO WIN)

This past Sunday, Congressman Jim Cyburn brought the notion of Supreme Court reform into the Democratic mainstream.

“Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker asked Clyburn if he agreed with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s request for court expansion in an interview.

“Yes, I do,” the South Carolina Democrat said. “I think we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress and we ought to expand, and 13 is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen, it would be a good number to have on the court.”

The party's leaders usually recoil in horror whenever a Democrat or progressive proposes a major shakeup like this, so Clyburn's statement represents a real change in the party establishment's thinking.

House Speaker Mike Johnson subsequently announced a plan to have the House vote on a constitutional amendment fixing the size of the Supreme Court at nine justices. This is pure theater -- a constitutional amendment needs to pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds vote, after which it needs to be ratified by three quarters of the state legislatures. That's not going to happen.

But this is just an early effort on Republicans' part to persuade Americans that what the GOP prefers is what the Founders would have preferred and what Democrats want is evil, weird, and un-American.

If Democrats hold both houses of Congress and the White House after the 2028 election, they'll have every right to change the makeup of the Court, the size of which is not specified in the Constitution. They can do it simply by passing a law.

But if they get serious about this, there'll be a massive propaganda camapign against it. The entire right will be opposed, and portions of the "liberal" media will undoubtedly join in. (Already, MS NOW has published an opinion piece headlined "Rep. Jim Clyburn’s Supreme Court Plan Isn’t Worth Discussing.") Democrats will need to out-message Republicans on this, and I hope they're up to the task. Some of what I'm seeing from the liberal commentariat right now seems to assume a nerdish understanding of the federal judiciary that most Americans simply don't have.

13 justices for the 13 districts has got to be the throughline; the age limits, senior status and rotations can roll into that. THIRTEEN JUSTICES FOR THIRTEEN DISTRICTS. MARCH.

— bskwitter.bsky.social (@bskwitter.bsky.social) June 25, 2026 at 8:39 PM

How many Americans know there are thirteen federal courts of appeals? If you're going to go in this direction, you'll need to start by doing some education. Well-educated Democrats often forget that ordinary Americans don't have the knowledge base they have. They can't win this fight in the court of public opinion unless they recognize how much ordinary Americans know.

Democrats could counter the suggestion that we need to stick with nine justices by saying that if you really want to do this the Founders' way, we should have only six justices, the way we did at the beginning, in 1789. If Republicans are such defenders of tradition, why don't they want that?

The key point Democrats need to make -- and make over and over again until all of America understands it -- is that the number of justices on the Court has changed several times in our history.

We're in the mess we're in because Republican presidents have appointed 15 of the last 20 Supreme Court justices. That's created a Court that's far to the right of the American public. I don't know whether Democrats want to stress that point, because to a large extent it's just luck of the draw. (Jimmy Carter had no vacancies to fill during his four-year term in office, and Joe Biden had only one, but Trump -- partly because Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on Merrick Garland in 2016 -- had three in his first four-year term.) But it still suggests how out of whack this Court is, and I think it's worth bringing up.

For sheer vindictiveness, I'd like Democrats to pass a law reducing the Court to six justices, with the (Democratic) president in charge at the law's enactment being given the discretion to remove three justices of his or her choosing. (Presumably the choice would be the three appointed by a president who went on to be convicted of dozens of felonies.)

But that's not a serious proposal. I think Democrats need to settle soon on a set of reforms and settle on a campaign built on talking points that explain why this is a reasonable thing to do and not a violation of the Constitution or federal law. They mustn't let themselves get outmessaged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His name is Lorenzo Sewell.

And you’ve probably never heard of him.

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

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

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

The response from the media: crickets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Donald Trump this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphasis added.)

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

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

As I wrote then:

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALMOST CLOSE TO GETTING IT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW FRONTS IN REPUBLICAN GRIEVANCE POLITICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mood on the right is punitive:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nolte quotes the study:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you on Friday.

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

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is half-assed authoritarianism.

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

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

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

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

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

I asked Vance if this was still his view.

“Yup,” he responded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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