NAZA Is a Jump-the-Shark Moment for Israel’s Critics

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

The title of the “documentary” NAZA, which received a mandatory Stalinesque record-breaking ovation at the Venice film festival, is an acronym for the Hebrew term for “collateral damage.” It concerns a system developed by the Israeli military to predict the collateral damage of any strike before it is approved.

 

And that explains why the project, made by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has landed with a thud rather than an explosion—at least outside any venue in which participants were required to clap.

 

Why would Israel need a system to calculate the collateral damage of a near-term strike before it’s approved? There are three possibilities.

 

The first: So the IDF can reduce civilian casualties. If one needs approval for a strike, and one is required to note for the record how many people would die in that strike, one is less likely to have that strike approved.

 

The second: So the IDF can increase civilian casualties. The assumption here is that Israelis are psychopaths who gamify war and therefore they will only carry out a strike if the collateral damage is above a certain level.

 

The third: For no reason at all. According to this theory, the IDF doesn’t care how many people die in a strike. It has gone through the effort and high cost to design a world-leading technology to predict collateral damage because… someone needed a cool party trick? I guess?

 

This multiple-choice question is easy: The only possible answer is the first, that the purpose of NAZA is to reduce civilian casualties.

 

Does that automatically let Israel off the hook for every single anonymously sourced claim in the anonymously sourced film? No, of course not. There is the possibility that the casualty limit was too high during the most recent war. Nobody has shown this to be the case, however, and that is unlikely to change.

 

The film hasn’t been screened widely because the filmmakers didn’t want the IDF to have a chance to respond to the allegations before launch. That’s because the point of the film isn’t accuracy in reporting but to establish a baseline narrative in which Israel is guilty until proven innocent. But what has been available thus far does not bode well for the possibility that the full film establishes NAZA as a tool of civilian death.

 

For example, the film’s biggest accusation seems to be that NAZA returned an estimate of 500 casualties for one strike. Since there is no record of such a strike—and the Gaza Healthy Ministry, as Hamas is often called in news reports, is famous only for inflating numbers like the floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade—the conclusion one is left with is the following: NAZA said 500 would die and the IDF commander in charge called off the strike.

 

But again, the filmmakers have been hiding the film they are so proud of from the general public until their narrative can gain a firm footing. So it’s possible they have something damning. More likely, they simply don’t understand what they’re looking at. Who are the soldiers interviewed? Nobody knows. We have no evidence that the filmmakers spoke to anyone who knew anything about complex high-tech IDF systems and the officers who oversee their use.

 

Should we have expected this? Yes. Last year, Abraham wrote a piece intended to have the same effect: establish a narrative, bury the counter-evidence. The claim was that the overwhelming majority of casualties in Gaza were civilians according to the IDF’s own calculations. To demonstrate this, Abraham referred to a database of known terror operatives from only two groups operating in Gaza and considered any death not on that list of operatives to be a civilian.

 

In other words, it doesn’t account for unnamed deaths, for unknown operatives, for any militant or combatant who wasn’t on Israel’s list for just two terror groups, etc.

 

The share of civilian casualties given by the article is, therefore, entirely debunked by the article itself. You just have to read far enough past the headline.

 

The level of sloppiness in that story made it very clear that this was not a “documentarian” whose work could be trusted without extensive re-reporting.

 

The larger point, to me, is that this is another example of a broader problem among Israel’s critics: They take something Israel has done as a means of protecting civilians and turn it around into a nefarious sci-fi plot.

 

You can see this mode of argumentation in Israel’s determination to evacuate neighborhoods before dropping heavy bombs on them. The number of bombs dropped, together with the physical destruction of the bombed area and the low numbers of civilian casualties in those specific bombings combine to show that the IDF stalled its own offensive in order to move Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. So the world decided that these evacuations were themselves the crime, some form of “ethnic cleansing” or other crime.

 

In some cases, Israel’s humanitarian steps undermine its legitimate military aims. It delayed the progression of its Rafah mission during the war until it could evacuate the area, ultimately moving nearly a million Palestinians out of harm’s way. So, again, the world called the Rafah evacuation the crime.

 

And so it is with Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties by forcing commanders to record the number of expected deaths from a strike before approving it. NAZA’s impact has been limited by its implausibility, but no matter: Everyone knows you should never be the first one to stop clapping.

The Makings of a Prewar World

By Thomas Wright

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

Donald Trump offered perhaps the clearest summation yet of his worldview in an otherwise discursive address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. Defending the American takeover of Venezuelan oil, he invoked an old maxim: “To the victor belongs the spoils.” He then presented Iran with a choice between accepting his terms and being driven “into hell with no chance of survival.”

 

These remarks are the latest sign that world politics is entering an era when might makes right. Yet Trump is only one of the leaders driving this rupture from the post–World War II international order. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have also broken the order, although their methods differ profoundly—morally, legally, and otherwise. American policy may change when Trump leaves office in January 2029, but Putin and Xi may remain in power well into the next decade.

 

A new American president will likely not be able to restore the old order or create a better one, even if they want to. Their greatest challenge will be to arrest the slide.

 

International order is a notoriously vague and politically contested concept. Many leaders in the global South, along with Western critics, reject the idea that the United States ever consistently abided by a rules-based system. They point to Western military interventions, double standards, and the unequal distribution of power within international institutions. But the old order’s failures do not mean that its restraints were meaningless.

 

In his first book, A World Restored, Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy. Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself. The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy.

 

Under the old international order, major powers did not, as a general rule, conquer and annex the territory of their neighbors. The global trading system was based on reciprocity, tariffs were historically low, and markets were relatively open. And, although it was the world’s strongest country, the United States exercised enough self-discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners, not vassals to be constantly squeezed for concessions.

 

Over the past decade, and decisively since the pandemic, that consensus about permissible conduct has collapsed. Putin launched the largest war in Europe since World War II with his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He more than anyone has revived the idea that countries can expand their borders through the use of force. Combined Russian- and Ukrainian-military casualties (those killed, wounded, and missing) have reached approximately 2 million people. European governments have accused Russia of an expanding campaign of sabotage, cyberattacks, arson, and drone incursions below the threshold of conventional war. North Korea has intervened directly in this war, and many other nations are indirectly involved—China and Iran on the side of Russia; Europe, the United States (at least under Joe Biden), and Asian democracies on the side of Ukraine.

 

Under Xi, China has broken the global trading system. Xi has used the power of the Chinese state to establish dominance in advanced manufacturing, reduce China’s imports as much as possible, and aggressively grow its exports. The result is that China has enormous excess capacity. Its goods flood into the rest of the world at prices impossible to compete with, leaving other countries to choose between deindustrialization and protectionism. More and more of them are selecting the latter. This policy is not as morally egregious as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but it has toppled a key pillar of the international economic order.

 

Since taking office for a second term, in 2025, Trump has turned American power against U.S. allies and partners. He imposed the highest tariffs in nearly a century on Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, and the European Union and used the threat of more to extract hundreds of billions of dollars in investment pledges. He mused about making Canada the 51st state and seizing Greenland. He pushed Ukraine to sign over a share of its mineral wealth in the middle of a war for its national survival. Under Trump, the United States sees itself not as the guarantor of an alliance system of like-minded democracies, but as a dominant power that wields its influence for singular, transactional gain.

 

Trump has broken the restraint that made American primacy tolerable to most of the rest of the world. Reports suggest that he may meet Xi and Putin for a “big three” trilateral on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Summit in Shenzhen in November, which could mark the formal end of the old order.

 

The rupture has produced an international environment that feels ever more like that of a prewar period. This does not mean that a major conflict is inevitable. But if one occurs, future historians will not find its causes sudden or mysterious. They are in plain sight.

 

The major powers are building up their militaries and racing to master drone warfare and artificial intelligence. Trump’s lack of commitment to alliances, especially in Europe, raises the prospect that an aggressor may calculate that it can act without triggering much of a U.S. reaction. Meanwhile, America’s rivals are more and more aligned as they integrate their military production, share sensitive technology, and assist one another in battle.

 

The shift has generational and psychological drivers. Putin, Xi, and Trump are elderly, sometimes erratic, insulated in information bubbles, and animated by ideological visions of national revival. The moment may feel like a closing window—a now-or-never opportunity to remake the world while they still can.

 

A future American president may promise to build a new and improved international order. But Xi and Putin will have little reason to accept the restraints that Washington wants to restore, and although American allies may welcome a return to a more internationalist U.S. foreign policy, they will harbor doubts that it will survive the next election.

 

Rather than promising what they cannot deliver, aspiring presidents should level with the American people. The international order has come to an end. The next president will inherit one of the most unforgiving international environments since 1945. Their task will be to stop the deterioration, inject some stability into world affairs, and begin to lay the foundation for a better future, even if that is not achievable in the short term.

Farmers Voted for This

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” is a vote for trade wars.

 

Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got.

 

And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year. This is an entirely predictable outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

 

In much the same way that Americans lately have been promised that gasoline and diesel prices are just on the verge of going back down—and in much the same way that the Republican standard-bearer has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for 12 years now and running—Trump keeps saying that the Chinese have committed to buying $x billion worth of this or that commodity from U.S. farmers, and—surprise!—those commitments continue to go unrealized, with China being at the moment many, many billions of dollars behind on promised orders from U.S. farmers. “We like to hear commitments from Chinese buyers, but we also need to see beans on boats headed west,” says a board member of the American Soybean Association. It is almost as though one cannot quite trust in the good intentions of an authoritarian police state run by Communist Party oligarchs or in the sound judgment of a serially bankrupt former game show host who once tried to overthrow the U.S. government. Which raises the question:

 

Why are American farmers such a bunch of chumps?

 

Thomas Frank’s famous thesis, spelled out in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, is that shady right-wing corporate interests have successfully used culture-war rhetoric and Jesus talk to snooker Middle America’s farmers, blue-collar workers, and small-business owners into—all together now!—“voting against their own interests.” It isn’t a very good thesis, inasmuch as the evidence very strongly suggests that voting in a way that would appear to be at least superficially at odds with one’s self-interest is so common as to be nearly universal in American politics. Americans are not especially self-interested voters.

 

For example, college-educated white voters and college-educated African American voters are, on average, more progressive than the non-college-educated of their respective racial groups, and college-educated white voters in particular are more likely than their non-college counterparts to support redistributive tax and welfare policies that are likely to increase their own tax burden while providing no benefit to them, their families, or, in general, to people who are economically similar to them. The Democrats are the party friendlier toward redistributive tax and welfare policies, and it is the Democrats—not the Republicans—who in recent years have seen the most growth in their support among the educated and affluent most likely to be disadvantaged by those policies. As Sam Zacher, a researcher with the progressive Analyst Institute, observes in a very interesting 2024 paper titled “The Polarization of the Rich: The New Democratic Allegiance of Affluent Americans and the Politics of Redistribution”:

 

Strikingly, in multiple elections since the 2010s, the data actually show a form of “backwards” polarization: majorities of affluent voters voted for Democratic candidates. Specifically, some evidence shows that Democratic candidates actually beat Republicans in attaining support from the top 5% (by income), the highest income stock- owning voters, and even the top 1% of voters (by income) over the past decade.

 

That being well-disposed toward welfare programs (to linger on an illuminating example) does not neatly follow income should not surprise you very much if you have thought through the issues a little bit. There are many possible factors at work. High-income African American voters, having the shared experience of racial discrimination, may be more oriented toward racial solidarity than class interest and may see their socioeconomic status as necessarily tied up with the shared interests of black Americans, who are more likely to rely on welfare programs than whites. (African Americans make up about 13 percent of the overall population but more than twice that share of SNAP beneficiaries, for example.) Similarly: For years, I have been chronicling the leftward political drift of Wall Street, and people who are surprised by the political loyalties of the men and women at the commanding heights of finance should consider that these voters are disproportionately products of the Ivy League and other elite universities, that they largely live and work in and around New York City and other major metros, and that they have a great deal politically in common with similarly situated voters who do not work in finance but who share experiences and interests with the Wall Street gang even if they occupy lower tax brackets. A related, albeit cynical, possibility is that affluent Americans of all backgrounds have an unarticulated but understood interest in giving the poor just enough to depress any more radical efforts at economic reorganization, in much the same way that many historians see the emergence of the Bismarckian welfare state as an essentially conservative program meant to take the steam out of the socialists with more far-reaching ambitions.

 

Whatever the reason, it is reasonably well-established that economic self-interest has very little reliable effect on voting or policy preferences. As the economist Bryan Caplan observes, “self-interest has little effect on public opinion.” Caplan is among those who believe that we would have better politics if voters were more self-interested because altruistic attitudes so often lead voters to support “foolish policies,” and he laments that the stereotypical, conspiracy-theory-adjacent view that our policymaking agenda is dominated by billionaires is—alas!—not quite true. Rather, there is broad agreement across income groups on many big policy questions, including the big economic ones, though the very wealthy do tend to prevail in those cases where they sharply disagree with the non-wealthy. In those cases, Caplan writes, “democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich. And since I think that statist policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes, my sincere reaction is to say, ‘Thank goodness.’”

 

In much the same way that Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling Wall Street traders vote a lot like Harvard-educated, Manhattan-dwelling nonprofit executives, rural America has a fair number of export-dependent farmers who vote a lot like the clerk down at the feed-and-seed. Many of those farmers are multimillionaires with graduate degrees from Texas A&M who run sophisticated high-tech businesses and know a hell of a lot more about crop genomics than Bobby Kennedy Jr. does and a good deal more about practical Chinese politics than Marco Rubio does: They aren’t rubes—but they vote like rubes.

 

Well, I didn’t vote for an assault on American farmers! I didn’t vote for $6.59 diesel because I wanted to spend $320 to fill up my F-250. I didn’t vote for chaos! I didn’t vote for this! I hear that all the time. But the truth is, some 77 million Americans did vote precisely for this. Trump ran as a trade-war and tariffs guy. This is what a trade war looks like: It makes you poor and vulnerable. Trump’s low character was a matter of public record way back in the ancient days when the great big wall in our political discourse was the one running through Berlin. His profound ignorance, biliousness, and moral grotesquery long have been observable in American public life for anybody with enough money to buy a copy of the New York Post. Americans should have known better in 2016, but there’s no excuse for not having known better in 2024. Farmers voted for this just as much as Philadelphians have spent two generations or more voting for high crime and crappy schools and Angelenos have voted for ... well, go there and have a look around.

 

There are better ways to govern. We could begin with Caplan’s observation—which is unimpeachable—that Americans’ “policy preferences rest on a long list of empirical and normative mistakes,” e.g., that a country can get rich by blockading its own ports, literally bombing its own supply chains, having the state seize the means of production, and deporting a chunk of its workforce—and doing so because a pampered and half-literate New York City real estate heir thinks socks and building supplies aren’t expensive enough.

 

Yes, Americans voted for this: Farmers and car dealers and a whole lot of people who should have known better. The question is how much pain it is going to take for Americans to choose something better.

When the Bottom Falls Out

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

My editor threw me a curveball this morning while we were brainstorming about a topic. “On the off-chance that Republicans hold both chambers” of Congress in November, she asked, “do they keep going along with Trump for the remainder of his term?”

 

At any other moment since 2016 save for about five minutes on January 6, a question about Donald Trump’s party sticking with him would have been silly. No matter what crimes the president might be committing, no matter how many people he may have shot on Fifth Avenue, the answer was always the same: Of course the wretched class of servile power-grubbing cowards we know as “elected Republicans” would go along.

 

But at some point this week, it ceased being silly. Some GOP lawmakers have suddenly … stopped going along.

 

The reason they’ve stopped going along is that, just as suddenly, the prospect that their party will retain both houses of Congress has become almost unimaginable. “Polls for Republicans are just getting worse by the day in a way that isn’t actually all that common in midterms,” Nate Silver marveled this morning. I noted last week that Democrats’ lead on the generic congressional ballot had begun to balloon, but the numbers since then have somehow turned even gorier for the GOP.

 

Some surveys, now sampling likely rather than registered voters, have Republicans down 14 points on the generic ballot. Trump’s net job approval has fallen to -22.4 points in Silver’s tracker, the worst rating of his second term. Seven different polls of Texas’ Senate race this month have Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton, some by as much as 6 points. For all the hype around Beto O’Rourke’s candidacy in Texas in 2018, never once did O’Rourke lead Republican Ted Cruz in a survey of that race.

 

Forecasters now see states as dependably red as Kansas and even South Carolina potentially coming into play if the GOP’s position continues to erode. The outlook is so grim that Trump himself has reportedly begun to entertain an unthinkable scenario: that his party might lose an election without the vote being rigged against it.

 

Some Republicans have decided that this, at long last, is the moment to utter a little light blasphemy about their lord and savior, the president. After 20 months of ceding practically every constitutional power they possess to a deranged Caesar, they’re keen for voters to know that they’re their own people.

 

At least four statewide candidates in the Midwest piped up this week to say that the Iran war needs to end. Trump’s name has disappeared from some GOP campaign ads and websites, most notably that of Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds. (How bad is the internal polling if Donalds feels obliged to disown the president in a Trump +13 state?) Utah Sen. John Curtis, who’s not on the ballot, seized the opportunity to squeeze the president’s family, calling for a probe into why Donald Trump Jr. is receiving lavish gifts from Russian oligarchs. Sen. John Cornyn seconded the idea.

 

There’s even been some grumbling about Trump rolling out the red carpet this week for the world’s most dangerous communist, Xi Jinping.

 

The probability of the GOP holding the House and Senate has grown sufficiently low that we needn’t consider my editor’s question about how Republicans might behave toward the president in the aftermath. What we should consider is how they might behave toward him in the much more likely scenario that he leads them to total annihilation at the polls.

 

Will a post-rout Donald Trump still exert overweening influence over the craven villains of the congressional GOP, who have conveniently discovered their spines at the very moment that it became in their own self-interest to do so?

 

Losing influence.

 

We can safely predict, I think, that his influence over Republican officials won’t be as oppressive after a blue tsunami as it’s been for the last decade. That’s a matter of simple electoral math and simpler political reality.

 

Like Ronald Reagan in 1980, Trump’s victory in 2024 rested on a “three-legged stool” of policy. Reagan offered fiscal conservatism, social conservatism, and Cold War hawkery; Trump offered a lower cost of living, an end to “forever wars,” and hostility to immigration of all stripes. The coalition his platform produced was diverse and unusual, uniting ardent right-wing nativists with middle-class Hispanics disgruntled by Biden-era inflation. Toss in populist independents who resent business-as-usual Washington interventionism and you had a winning margin (barely) in swing states.

 

That coalition has now been obliterated, shattered by Trump betraying his electoral mandate so completely that I’m stumped to think of a historical precedent. The first two legs of the stool have collapsed and the third, immigration, has been handled so poorly that it’s become a net liability for the White House. Read the polls and you can see the constituent parts of his 2024 base melting away in real time in anger at the foolish war he started and the oil crisis it’s caused.

 

The loyal right-wing base is no longer as loyal as it used to be. One new survey found Trump’s overall job approval dropping to 33 percent this month due to an 11-point decline in net approval among Republicans and “leaners” since August. His support within that group now stands at 71-27, no great shakes for a president normally known for attracting cultish devotion. Among those who voted for him two years ago, “strong” approval is down from 53 percent early last year to 35 percent now.

 

So disaffected are Republican voters that they’ve begun to shift their allegiance from Trump himself back to the party. Per Echelon Insights, 56 percent now say they consider themselves primarily a supporter of the GOP versus just 34 percent who consider themselves primarily a supporter of the president. That’s a complete reversal of right-wing opinion at around the time of his inauguration last year, when answers to that question split 36-59.

 

And what about the many Hispanics who defected from the Democratic Party to support Trump in 2024? Nate Cohn noted today in a piece for the New York Times that that demographic now leans 64-29 toward Democrats in an average of the generic ballot. According to the latest Times national poll, Trump’s approval among Hispanics on immigration stands at 26 percent and on the cost of living—no typo—at 8 percent. A wipeout among that group on Election Day could put numerous supposedly “safe” Republican districts in Texas and Florida in play, turning a smallish Democratic House majority into a large one.

 

All of this makes things straightforward for congressional Republicans in 2027 and 2028. If they want any shot at reassembling their victorious 2024 coalition in the next election cycle, they need to stop doing whatever Trump wants just because he wants it. The softening of his support on the disillusioned right gives them an opening to play to the middle by siding with the majority of Americans on contentious issues. Ending the war, reducing the cost of living—beginning with reining in idiotic, unpopular tariffs—and riding herd on the AI industry are all matters in which they stand to profit from breaking with the president after a midterm wipeout.

 

In some ways the political circumstances of a post-wipeout presidency will make it easy to do so, as Republican voters’ personal investment in Trump is destined to weaken. For one thing, they’ll at last confront the reality that someone else will lead their ticket the next time they vote for president. Meanwhile, “America First” postliberals like Tucker Carlson will eagerly (and fairly) be egging them on to blame Trump himself for the party’s electoral humiliation, insisting that the GOP would still be in power if not for his “neocon” adventure in Iran.

 

And that message will grow in fertile soil. Americans are under no illusions that the current administration, not its predecessor, is to blame for their financial misery. Per CNN’s Aaron Blake, 66 percent say that Trump’s policies have made economic conditions worse; the worst number Joe Biden ever got on that question was 58 percent. When asked whether tariffs have had a positive or negative effect on their finances, respondents split 13-67. When asked whether the war in Iran has, they split 8-73.

 

It’s the political equivalent of the paradox, “Can God make a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it?” Can Trump govern so terribly that even the thick propaganda bubble he built around the right can’t shield his fans from the truth about how terrible he’s been? We have our answer.

 

He’ll own the coming electoral disaster completely and even many of his current and former supporters will be in no mood to deny it, so it’s a cinch that congressional Republicans in the aftermath won’t be as obsequious as they’ve traditionally been. If I’m right that Trump is likely to behave more aggressively on foreign policy and trade, not less, following a midterm rout, then we really might see some meaningful Republican resistance in Congress to his policies as 2028 approaches.

 

But probably not that meaningful.

 

Partisan combat.

 

The reason I have difficulty imagining a sustained GOP revolt in the House and Senate during Trump’s lame-duck period isn’t because Republican voters categorically won’t tolerate it. It’s that they won’t tolerate it during a period of fierce partisan combat with Democrats.

 

The lack of meaningful partisan combat in Washington since January 2025 has been a serious political liability for the president. Nationalist demagogues thrive when they have formidable domestic enemies to rally their supporters against, and Trump hasn’t had one of those since he returned to office. Democrats have posed few problems for him in Congress, and in rare cases where they have—like filibustering the SAVE America Act—the president has flogged Republican skeptics of the bill with more relish than he has the other party.

 

His base is adrift because they have no domestic threat to get excited about and unite against. The closest thing is democratic socialism, and Trump keeps undermining that by holding hands with Zohran Mamdani every chance he gets.

 

His fans are demoralized. He, and they, need a foil to inspire them to light their hair on fire anew. And here’s the good news for them in a midterm wipeout: They’re about to get one.

 

We’ve seen this movie before. We know how Republican voters react when Democrats perpetrate a new “hoax”—i.e., a meritorious investigation of troubling behavior—on Trump. Absent the four criminal indictments filed against the president while he was out of office, Ron DeSantis might have won his party’s nomination in 2024. But once partisan warfare began around Trump, the reptilian impulse toward tribalism swept all other considerations aside.

 

In a vacuum, right-wing voters might condone Republican lawmakers locking arms with Democrats to try to end the war or overturn Trump’s tariffs. But locking arms with them at a moment when they’re digging for dirt on the president, hauling members of his family before Congress with subpoenas, and impeaching his dumbest Cabinet members? That’s partisan high treason, aid and comfort to the enemy in the middle of war.

 

It shouldn’t be. A minimally sophisticated adult should be able to endorse working with the other party in matters that serve the common good, like repealing tariffs, while waging combat against it in others, like whether Trump should be free to commit crimes with impunity. But that’s not how the partisan mind—and especially the right-wing mind after a decade of postliberalism—works. All policy initiatives will end up being seen through the lens of combat, which means repealing tariffs will be viewed less as a sensible means to lowering costs than as a cruel Democratic ploy to snatch away the president’s favorite toy.

 

And so the post-rout GOP resistance to Trump will be crippled from the jump. After a midterm calamity, the base might be more willing to indulge congressional Republicans in disagreeing with the president on policy. But supporting Democratic efforts to constrain his powers via legislative action will be considered a betrayal.

 

Especially with Trump himself encouraging right-wing voters to treat it as such. You don’t need me to tell you that the president won’t graciously accept his new lame-duck status; he’ll look for ways to reassert control over the party following a blue tsunami, fearful that defeat will loosen his grip if he doesn’t. I suspect he’ll become even more profligate than he’s been in the past in threatening primary challenges in the next cycle for Republican lawmakers who back Democratic attempts to overturn his policies.

 

He might even be looking for excuses to do so. Replacing John Cornyn types in Congress with Paxton-style miscreants will be one of Trump’s last chances to leave an enduring stamp on his party as he prepares to leave office. Some House and Senate Republicans won’t be cowed by those threats, calculating that he’s lost too much juice politically to successfully punish them for defying him on policy.

 

But most will worry, true to their cowardly nature. Knowing that the people most likely to vote in Republican primaries are MAGA fanatics, they’ll reason that even a diminished Trump will continue to pose more of a threat to their reelection in 2028 than swing voters will. Besides, they’ll tell themselves, what’s the point of siding with Democrats on a bill that the president will veto anyway? It’s one thing to betray your party for a bipartisan policy win, but to betray it for a bipartisan policy loss? What’s to be gained?

 

Silver lining.

 

There’s one more reason congressional Republicans may continue to stick with Trump as he runs the country into the ground. After a decade of authoritarian conditioning and 20 months of Duma-fication, I’m not sure they know how to govern anymore.

 

When Sen. Kevin Cramer was asked this week about the Senate recessing for the midterms in lieu of hanging around to address the cost of living, he replied, “If there was something that we could get done that would help, I’d be all for it. But I don’t know what it would be at this point.” I mean, they could at least try to get 67 votes to repeal tariffs. Even with the House out of session, that gesture would be more politically productive than the dopey ban on diesel exports that some Republicans favor, which will likely drive up the price of foreign goods—and domestic gas!—and further alienate American allies.

 

The fact that addressing tariffs didn’t occur to Cramer, or that it did and he feared mentioning it, tells us a lot about how feeble the post-midterm GOP resistance to Trump in Congress is likely to be.

 

If you’re looking for a silver lining about how congressional Republicans’ behavior might improve after a midterm blue tsunami, I suggest lowering expectations for whether they’ll oppose Trump on policy and raising them for whether they’ll reject his inevitable “rigged election” spin about the outcome.

 

The more the public comes to expect a blue wave on Election Day, the more credible a blue wave will seem when it arrives. By breaking with the president on some of his initiatives lately and babbling to every reporter they see on background that they’re expecting a wipeout, Republicans are helpfully preempting Trump’s narrative that cheating must have been involved to produce a result so lopsided. The right knows why it’s losing and knows whose fault it is, and neither has anything to do with “ballot mules” or voting machines being hacked.

 

From top to bottom, the whole apparatus seems considerably less inclined to pretend otherwise than it was five years ago, the best efforts of a few truly committed wackjobs aside. Make it too big to rig, the president urged supporters during the 2024 campaign, encouraging them to hand him a margin of electoral victory so huge that Democrats couldn’t plausibly overturn it. Two years later, he’s on the wrong end of the same logic. Just deserts.

For Conservatives, There’s a Disconnect Between Principle and Party — Yet Again

By Daniel J. Flynn

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

This week’s cordial summit at Gracie Mansion between President Trump and Mayor Mamdani coaxed the New York Post to dub the pair of New Yorkers “the political odd couple.” The socialist mayor and the MAGA president represent the two poles in a polarized America, right?

 

Rhetorically, this seems about right. Socialists rail against red hats and MAGA, and red-capped MAGA enthusiasts rail against socialists. But in terms of policy, opposites increasingly attract. The president’s plan to pay every adult American $5,000, his response to the Federal Reserve’s rate increase that the body’s lending price to banks “should be 1%, or less,” his addition of $12 trillion to the debt during his time in office, and his pursuit of ownership stakes of about 10 percent of Intel, in IBM’s Anderon after a $1 billion investment, and in numerous other companies involved in semiconductors, AI, and minerals combine to suggest we’re all socialists now.

 

This disconnect between principle and party comes as not a new feeling for conservatives. The alienation of conservatives from prevailing party opinion today recalls the situation faced by intellectuals on the right in the postwar years. The obscured Old Right, more familiar figures of postwar conservatism, and those who acted as bridge between both iterations more or less united in suspicion of Dwight Eisenhower (notable exceptions included James Burnham, Henry Hazlitt, and Whittaker Chambers). So many felt cheated when Ike edged out Senator Robert Taft for the 1952 nomination. But policy disagreement and not merely lingering grudges primarily fueled the suspicion.

 

John Chamberlain, Suzanne La Follette, and Forrest Davis, The Freeman’s editorial triumvirate, counseled the Republican presidential nominee in 1952 that “the truth is that the traditional Republicans do have a place to go, or, rather, a place to stay. And that place, come election day, is home.” In refusing to endorse Ike, Chamberlain, La Follette, and Davis — and others at the magazine — coaxed the wrath of The Freeman’s board and lost their jobs. Many found a home in varying capacities at National Review when it launched a few years later.

 

In a piece he penned for National Review, John T. Flynn, a prominent critic of Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic policies and head of New York’s chapter of the America First Committee, identified Eisenhower as a steward of the New Deal. “The authentic meaning of the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower is to be found in one of the oldest rackets in history,” he wrote in the 1956 piece ultimately unpublished by the magazine because of, its author believed, its criticism of Cold War militarism. “It is nothing more than the use of government money, acquired through taxes and created by debt, to buy the votes of numerous minorities and thus remain in power.”

 

In the magazine that same year, senior editor Willi Schlamm famously counseled readers not to vote for President Eisenhower. He reasoned, “A conservative ought to prefer a Liberal Administration opposed by the Republican Party to a Liberal Administration supported by it.” In other words, because conservatives countenance all sorts of violations of their philosophy by Republican presidents that they zealously oppose when pursued by Democrats, GOP defeat in such cases works to the advantage of the political right.

 

One may argue that the postwar conservatives graded President Eisenhower on too difficult a curve. One could just as easily make the case that the curve results all these years later in grade inflation. Whatever the verdict on the approach of conservatives to Republican presidents, it does seem instructive that rather than embrace a defeatism in the face of the “conservative votes, liberal victories” phenomenon, conservatives then fixated on ensuring what came next.

 

Robert Taft’s convention defeat to Barry Goldwater’s nomination to Ronald Reagan’s election took 28 years. That long road from conservative defeat to conservative victory involved withheld endorsements, internecine criticism, and primary challenges, the absence of which, one supposes, would likely continue a string of periodic Republican victories corresponding to perpetual conservative defeats. The temptation to dismiss such a counterfactual finds a rebuttal in the results of the right’s recent, all-too-real habit of fealty toward leaders who share party but not principles.

Benjamin Netanyahu Turns the Tables on Zohran Mamdani

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani rarely misses an opportunity to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to accuse him of various crimes, and to allege that he is the font from which so much Israeli perfidy springs — at least the sort that’s not endemic among the Jewish people.

 

During his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Netanyahu gave as good as he got:

 

 

Speaking directly to the “antisemitic mayor of New York,” Netanyahu issued a prolonged indictment of Mamdani’s character, judgment, and associations — establishing a pattern of behavior that fits the charge.

 

Netanyahu scolded Mamdani for praising “criminals convicted of supporting Hamas.” He attacked him for counting among his friends Hasan Piker, dwelling for a moment on the streamer’s belief that Americans deserved the 9/11 attacks. He wondered why it was that Mamdani welcomed into his home a Palestinian journalist who subsequently admitted that he not only filmed Hamas’s atrocities but covered the footage up so as to avoid embarrassing the terrorist group. Netanyahu even criticized Mamdani’s wife for having “liked a post praising the October 7 massacre” and another post that contended that the Israeli city of Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist.”

 

Contrary to the New York Times’ preemptive effort to throw itself in the path of the barbs Netanyahu hurled at the mayor, it’s all true. Mamdani did heap praise on the Holy Land Five, “who were blamed by a jury for the killing of a 17-year-old Jewish boy from New York City outside Jerusalem,” the Free Press reported. Mamdani did pal around with Piker during his bid for mayor despite — or because of — the streamer’s penchant for anti-American and anti-Israeli radicalism. He did embrace Motaz Azaiza, a gadfly Palestinian journalist who recently confessed to filming the events of October 7 and burying the footage. “I didn’t want to ruin the lives of the people filmed,” Azaiza explained. Mamdani’s wife did like those posts, although she has since apologized for her “harmful” social media habits.

 

Prior to his attack on Mamdani, Netanyahu addressed the foremost allegation against him and his country to which the mayor and his comrades are partial: the charge of genocide. With exasperation, Netanyahu described Israel’s efforts to protect civilian life. He described the “millions” of texts, calls, and leaflets sent out to alert Palestinian populations of impending Israeli action — an independently verifiable account, if any of Israel’s critics were to develop an interest in verification. “What genocidal regime gives one million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population? What genocidal regime enables the distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza? That’s one ton for every person,” Netanyahu asked. “Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century.”

 

Netanyahu went on to accuse Mamdani of his own criminal negligence: “Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York.” The city, he said, has become a place where the visibly Jewish are harassed, assaulted, and even stabbed — not at random but amid a growing campaign of anti-Jewish violence. “This isn’t the city we remember,” he said. “It changed so quickly.”

 

There’s truth to that, too. While anti-Jewish violence in New York started from an intolerably high baseline when Mamdani took office, the problem has only gotten worse under his tenure. “Antisemitic hate crimes are up 8% so far this year and make up more than half of the incidents in New York City,” CNN reported early this month.

 

“Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here,” Netanyahu concluded. “You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth.”

 

Mamdani often contends that the Israeli prime minister must answer the allegations that the mayor so regularly hurls at him. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Mamdani to hold himself to the same standard.

Britain’s Inertia Is a Warning to America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

In recent years, I have been privy to the curious trend of Europeans who, having been assiduously fed all manner of nonsense about life in the United States, have come to understand that their presumptions were all wrong. In yesterday’s London Telegraph, Allister Heath describes this phenomenon rather well. Beneath the pull-no-punches headline, “I saw a breathtaking glimpse of what Britain could have become,” Heath offers a blunt challenge to the smug among his fellow countrymen:

 

If you want to comprehend the scale of Britain’s decline, our economic, geopolitical and technological humiliation, the magnitude of the self-sabotage inflicted upon our nation by our incompetent political class, head to one of America’s booming Republican-run Red States.

 

It will guarantee a shock to your system, and jolt you out of any residual complacency. It will simultaneously energise you and plunge you into depression. You will be blown away by the growth, the clatter of construction, the siege of cranes across the skyline, the massive cars, the energy, drive and ambition, the wealth, abundance and cheap energy, the entrepreneurial go-getting, the ostentatious celebration of success.

 

I was born in Britain, and I live in Florida (the state that Heath visited), so I have seen this from both sides. And I can tell you, unequivocally, that the author’s assessment is correct. The juxtaposition of the two places is increasingly stark, and yet, because distance serves as a shroud, this is obvious only to those of us who have visited both regularly over time. Most British people have not, and because of this, Heath concludes, it has become possible for them to lie “to [themselves] about the depth of the hole [they] have jumped into,” and to remain unaware that, irrespective of their healthy self-conception, they are actually “poor and increasingly backwards.”

 

I take no pleasure in confirming this. I am the only member of my family who emigrated to the United States, and while I am indeed an unreconstructed Americaphile, I bear no ill will toward my country of birth, nor toward my parents, my sister, or the rest of my kin that still lives there. It’s just that . . . well, Britain has got it wrong.

 

Heath contends that Britain never truly recovered from Covid, but I’d put the decline a little earlier: Britain, like the rest of Europe, never truly recovered from the 2008 financial crash. In that year, the economies of Europe and the economy of the United States were the same size. Now, the economy of the United States is about 150 percent the size of the economies of Europe. And why wouldn’t it be, given that the countries of Europe haven’t actually done anything useful. Britain is a welfare state. That’s what it exists to be. That is its purpose, its role, its ambition. Neither its bureaucrats nor its people care about growth, innovation, or success — except insofar as they can use those things to pay for more welfare. Its National Health Service — which is awful — is seen not as a system that exists to serve people but as a political end in its own right. (If the British government wants the public to do something, it insists that it is necessary to “save the NHS.”) Its unbelievably lavish social spending is, bizarrely, widely described as “austerity.” Its vaunted attacks on “inequality” have stagnated wages and made everyone poorer. Its refusal to use its energy reserves — or abandon its ridiculous “net zero” aims — has made the price of energy a permanent crisis. The whiny are lauded; the useless are celebrated; and the handful of aspirational figures who are left are regarded as too pushy, too aggressive, too American to be trusted. The result is that Britain has become drab, lazy, inert, and, worst of all, fatally complacent.

 

As an American, do you feel good reading Heath’s description of the United States? I do. I also feel alarmed. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees that our country must be this way. On the contrary: America’s position in the world is the product of choices it has made. America, The Telegraph notes, values “success.” If it ceases to, it will get less of it. Relative to Britain, America has low taxes and no VAT. If that changes, so will the dynamism of its economy. America has no single-payer health-care system to permanently corrupt its politics and devour the energy and treasure of the middle class. If it introduces one, it will decline inexorably. America has a constitutional order that features a strong separation of powers, encourages gridlock, and entrenches protections of individual rights. If it deconstructs that system, it will collapse into dysfunction, infighting, and mediocrity. Like Britain, America faces the demographic trend of an aging population relying on a relatively smaller share of workers for the payment of government benefits; but unlike Britain, it has not yet enshrined the “triple lock” guarantee that ineluctably increases pension payouts and makes other reform impossible. If it does, it will fatally harm the group that is pulling the wagon.

 

Allister Heath is depressed by contemplating what Britain “could have become.” He is right to be. Americans should thank him for the compliment and then turn to worrying about what America could become, too — if, but only if, it follows the same path.