How to Think About Impeachment No. 3—and the One After That

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

The Democrats are sitting on a clutch of very promising-looking political eggs, but they won’t be hatched until the first Tuesday in November. You never know about chickens, but the widely held consensus is that the Republican majority in the House is fixing to be as dead as the fried ones over at KFC, and more than a few observers are betting on a Senate flip, too.  

 

It is of some interest that Republican dogs are not barking much about impeachment. Donald Trump’s foundering popularity is such that Republicans rat-paddling away from the sinking ship of his administration evidently have calculated that there is not a lot of cheese to be got from squeaking about the threat of a third impeachment. Rep. Jim Jordan, who is only the second most detestable Republican from Ohio on the political scene, complained last week that Democrats would conduct a campaign of “nonstop weaponized investigations” once in the majority. Coming from a Trump loyalist, that is a little like hearing the ghost of Sonny Barger complaining that a few of the mourners didn’t wear ties to his funeral.

 

Mostly, Republicans are not talking much about the possibility of another Trump impeachment, mainly because doing so would perforce remind voters that Donald Trump is still the president of these United States and that they are sycophants groveling along behind in his debased wagon train and making barely a peep as he and his circle loot and murder their way around the globe.

 

Democrats are divided. That is how they like to be, flattering themselves, as they do, that this is a sign of their independent spirit and high-mindedness: “I am not a member of any organized political party, I am a Democrat,” and all that self-aggrandizing Will Rogers humblebrag baloney. Democratic division on impeaching Trump—and Pete Hegseth, and Scott Bessent, and others who need impeaching—mainly is not a matter of principle but a matter of self-interested political calculation.

 

About that: If Democrats do indeed win a majority in the House and—the possibility seems more real by the day—the Senate, too, then all of the ones who promised on the campaign trail to prioritize their own political careers and the short-term interests of their party have my personal permission to make whatever calculation they think best. But the ones who ran for office promising to put country ahead of self and principle ahead of party should probably do that instead, since that’s what they said they would do.

 

What would that mean?

 

A Democratic majority in the House will have to do the bulk of the political work on a third Trump impeachment irrespective of the outcome in the Senate: In case of a small Democratic majority in the Senate or continued Republican control, Democrats will have reasons—substantive reasons and reasons having to do with political calculation—to give the case against Trump and his allies a full, extensive airing in the House rather than hastily sending articles of impeachment over to the Senate, because, absent some currently implausible scenario, a small Democratic majority in the upper chamber would produce the same result as a small Republican majority: The articles would fail to produce a conviction, which requires a two-thirds majority.

 

That is, unless some Republican senators can be shamed into acting like the thing they always boast about being: patriots. As we all know, Republicans at the moment are immune to embarrassment, and all political plans that require the Republican Party to suddenly grow a conscience are nearly guaranteed to fail. Democrats have before them a considerable task of persuasion: They need a few million Americans to come around to their point of view, and a dozen or so of them need to be Republican senators. The Democrats’ historical weakness for sliding into mere moral hysteria and rhetorical excess is a real danger here. What’s needed is careful investigative and political work, not a couple of hundred elected Democrats all simultaneously vying for viral social-media moments.

 

Democrats will have excellent political incentives to drag out investigations, oversight hearings, and impeachment proceedings over the course of many months beginning in January. They will also have good practical reasons to do that: Some of the issues are complicated as legal and constitutional questions, and others will require extensive work in investigating, reporting, and documenting matters of fact. What probably should be understood is that, as tall an order as it would be to impeach Trump and remove him from office, the challenge before Congress—and prosecutors and the courts—is bigger than that. Things are going to be complicated: It is not only Trump who needs to be removed and prohibited from holding office; in many cases, impeachment and removal will be a prelude to criminal charges; in some cases, it is likely that investigators will turn up substantial wrongdoing, including criminal wrongdoing, among people who are not officeholders subject to impeachment or other similar sanction. Oversight proceedings, congressional investigation, criminal investigation, and impeachment-related work all will be necessary, in some cases will need to proceed simultaneously.

 

There are three broad categories of misdeeds to consider, those being personal corruption (the improper enrichment of the Trump family and its allies in matters ranging from the largesse of Russian oligarchs to questionable government contracts awarded to Trump-connected firms), lawlessness (the illegal wars in Venezuela and Iran, the illegal imposition of a new national system of taxation in the form of unauthorized tariffs, ongoing attempts to rule by decree, etc.), and incompetence (Pete Hegseth is always ready for his close-up).

 

It is important to keep in mind that Trump has not acted alone in these matters: Consider, for example, that the Trump administration conducted an unauthorized war on Venezuela, kidnapped its president, and is operating a puppet regime in Caracas for the purpose of appropriating Venezuelan oil wealth—and this was in no small part the work of Marco Rubio, whose relatively mild public temperament should not be mistaken for moral distance from the administration and its crimes. Investigations into the administration’s financial corruption are certain to involve scrutiny of Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick. J.D. Vance’s role as an enabler of the abuse of ICE as a political weapon to be wielded against Democratic cities such as Minneapolis will be of interest. There is plenty of room inside the cordon sanitaire.

 

Democrats should take a look across the aisle at an old nemesis, one whose sad example ought to haunt Democratic leaders: Nobody wants to play Mitch McConnell’s part this time around and leave the one needful thing undone. Yes, Trump should be impeached a third time—and if it comes to it, a fourth time, a fifth time, and twice on Sunday. The work is not done until the work is done.

The Epstein Election

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

It’s a distant memory now, but the president spent a meaningful part of the summer of 2025 reprising the scene from The Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen tries to do crowd control in front of an exploding fireworks factory. Nothing to see here. Please disperse.

 

“Nothing to see here” doesn’t work when thousands of skyrockets are going off while men leap from third-story windows. And it doesn’t work for the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, whose contents hold roughly the same mystique for American populists as the contents of the title object did for the audience at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

(Can you tell from my film touchstones that I’m Gen X?)

 

I thought “nothing to see here” would work for Donald Trump, though.

 

I said so in a newsletter published on July 18 of last year, after the Wall Street Journal revealed that the president had (allegedly!) sent Epstein a birthday message in 2003 alluding to “certain things in common” that the two men shared and hoping that each new day would continue to be “a wonderful secret” for his friend. The text of the note was “framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker,” the Journal noted.

 

Days earlier, with rumors of an impending revelation swirling, Trump warned in a post on Truth Social that no true fan of his would be suckered by “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” perpetrated by Democrats and the liberal press. He went as far as to say of right-wingers who remained credulous about it, “I don’t want their support anymore!” Nothing to see here.

 

Surely his followers would obey his commands. Don’t they always? “The Journal’s bombshell is effectively, and ironically, the end of the scandal as a political threat to Trump rather than the start,” I predicted at the time. “MAGA simply lacks the civic integrity to keep pursuing the truth about Epstein now that it’s been transformed, stupidly and cynically, into a referendum on the media.”

 

Was I wrong? Maggie Haberman seems to think I was wrong.

 

The New York Times reporter claimed recently that, in fact, Trump’s Naked Gun reaction to the Epstein files was a turning point in his second term. “That was when, according to his own top allies and advisers, that was when they could start seeing his own base stop believing him quite as much,” she told an audience in Austin, Texas. “It was the first time that [fellow Times reporter and co-author] Jonathan [Swan] and I could recall, and we’ve read about this, Trump saying, ‘Believe me, not what you’re hearing over there’—and it didn’t work.”

 

In Raiders, the villains’ faces melted when they opened the ark. In the Trump analog as told by Haberman, the villain’s face began to melt politically when he refused to open it.

 

With the benefit of hindsight, I think there may be something to that. If right-wing turnout ends up lagging this fall, Epstein might be an underrated factor.

 

The crack in the dam.

 

I continue to doubt that Trump’s self-serving skepticism about an Epstein conspiracy has cost him many votes directly. The polls don’t support it either: If his stonewalling on the DOJ’s files last July had angered populists, one would think, we should have seen his job approval numbers drop afterward.

 

We didn’t. His net approval was flat for two full months after Epstein mania broke big in July 2025.

 

If there is (or was) an Epstein backlash on the right, I’d also expect to see it hit so-called MAGA Republicans especially hard, as they’re the most ardently populist wing of the GOP. Reagan conservatives might be interested in the Epstein matter, but MAGA types are invested in it.

 

The evidence isn’t strong there either, though. Self-identified MAGA Republicans have remained vastly more loyal to the president this year than non-MAGA Republicans have. And while there’s reason to believe that some MAGA Republicans are shifting into the non-MAGA column, raising the possibility that they’ve been alienated by the Epstein saga, there’s also some reason to doubt it.

 

On the other hand.

 

A Change Research poll published this year found public credulity about an Epstein cover-up to be widespread and bipartisan. Among Republicans, 57 percent said they suspect the government is keeping information about the late pedophile secret, and 17 percent said they believe the cover-up is aimed at concealing “significant” material in the files about Trump. Another 14 percent answered “not sure” when asked about that—meaning that nearly a third of the president’s own party isn’t giving him the usual benefit of the doubt in this matter.

 

Forget Republicans, though. Among independents, a group whom Trump came within 3 points of winning in 2024, opinion on Epstein is radioactive. Fully 81 percent think the government is hiding things about him, and 66 percent(!) suspect that “significant” information about the president has something to do with the reason why.

 

In an America where there’s no war in the Middle East and inflation is at 2 percent, none of that would matter in November. Only the most committed cranks would vote against the ruling party at a moment when things are going well economically and overseas because they’re mad that Trump didn’t open the Epstein ark for them.

 

But in an America where we’re stuck in another “forever war” and diesel is $6.50 per gallon, the Epstein disappointment may have been just the trick that granted certain disaffected Trumpy populists psychological “permission” to break with him without feeling like traitors by doing so.

 

Absent that disappointment they may have felt obliged to stick with the president on matters like Iran, reluctant to betray him by siding with the hated left. But the fact that he crossed them on Epstein last year has given them a face-saving way to express their broader disenchantment with his presidency: It was he who betrayed them by not eagerly exposing America’s pedophile class, a supreme populist priority, and so now they’re free to oppose him on anything they like. Including the war.

 

Politico published a case study in this phenomenon yesterday in a piece on buyer’s remorse among some of the “Front Row Joes,” aka MAGA fanatics who have attended dozens or hundreds of Trump rallies:

 

[Trisha] Hope saw her faith shaken during a July 8, 2025 Cabinet meeting when a reporter asked then-AG Pam Bondi about the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Before she could answer, Trump interrupted: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.”

 

“It was like a dagger in my heart,” Hope said. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.”

 

The war with Iran vindicated those feelings. “He’s said the war is over 600 different times. He tells us they don’t have a military, they don’t have a navy. They’re still blowing up things. It’s just all lies.”

 

Another “Front Row Joe” who’s soured on Trump responded, “Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me” when asked why.

 

Call it the “Marjorie Taylor Greene effect.” Greene has become a poisonous critic of the president since leaving Congress, particularly regarding Iran, but what opened an unbridgeable rift between the two was her pursuit of the Epstein files. For her and populists like Trisha Hope, it seems, their belief that Trump shared their commitment to exposing conspiracies involving predatory elites was a dam that restrained their misgivings about aspects of his behavior and policy agenda.

 

Then the dam failed. Now everything is rushing through, washing away their support. And the usual gimmicks aren’t strong enough to patch the crack.

 

‘The grand conspiracy.’

 

That may explain why the White House has resorted to some unusual gimmicks lately instead.

 

If it’s true that lagging enthusiasm among the right-wing base has something to do with unmet demand for conspiratorial revelations, we should expect Trump and his aides to try to increase the supply during the final weeks of the campaign. They may have begun: At The Bulwark yesterday, Will Sommer made the case that a bizarre clip posted over the weekend by top lackey Dan Scavino on social media was actually a tease aimed at QAnoners.

 

But that’s small potatoes compared with “the grand conspiracy” that the president’s law firm, the Justice Department, is working to expose.

 

The “grand conspiracy” probe is being run out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami and intends to prove that “high-ranking officials from the Obama and Biden administrations engaged in a decades-long, ‘deep state’ conspiracy to violate Trump’s civil rights,” according to the Washington Post. It’s a sort of unified field theory of crankery about Democrats “weaponizing” the federal government, which is MAGA-speak for “investigating genuinely dubious behavior by Trump and his aides.”

 

The president has been let down before by cronies who, for ethical reasons, failed to deliver the sort of nakedly political prosecutions that he craves. But he took no chances with “the grand conspiracy,” bringing in a pair of celebrated 2020 election deniers to lead the probe. With former prosecutor Joe diGenova in charge and former White House aide Kurt Olsen by his side, the team has spent months digging for evidence of malfeasance by former CIA chief John Brennan, among others.

 

Trump may have disappointed his base by not revealing the “truth” about Epstein, but exposing the “grand conspiracy” would demonstrate that he still shares their priorities about wanting to hold conniving left-wing elites accountable. If the investigation snares enough of those elites, it might even patch the crack in the dam.

 

But it probably won’t, it turns out: Olsen resigned yesterday, and diGenova quit several weeks ago “amid disagreements over the pace of the investigation,” per the Washington Post. When pressed about the nature of those disagreements, diGenova told the paper vaguely that “time was needed to build those cases” and “people differ on how long that should take.” But he was more specific, and sterner, in a comment to the New York Post. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence,” he complained, “you have an ethical problem.”

 

He didn’t have the goods. His predecessor as lead prosecutor didn’t have the goods either; she was removed from the probe earlier this year because “she did not believe there was enough to make a case.” No fewer than seven attorneys involved have departed, according to Britain’s Daily Mail, because “Main Justice”—that is, Justice Department headquarters in Washington—won’t stop pressuring them to seek indictments despite the fact that evidence is thin and the charges are unlikely to produce convictions.

 

If that’s true, it means Attorney General Todd Blanche’s operation is so preposterously corrupt and politically compromised that even prominent “rigged election” truthers are having moral qualms about working for it.

 

One DOJ official gave away the game about “the grand conspiracy” when he told the Mail that “this case was initiated to make the president and the public think something is happening down there [in Miami], when in reality, it’s not.” It’s a political pageant being staged by Blanche and his cronies to excite demoralized Republicans (and Trump) before the election by harassing old nemeses like Brennan. They want indictments right away, whether or not there’s enough evidence to convict at trial, because this is about dangling “proof” of a conspiracy to goose right-wingers’ enthusiasm to vote, not about punishing anyone for actual crimes.

 

Which is some gimmick, no? Promising Americans $5,000 if they support your party is one thing, but hauling unconvictable people into court and putting them through the ordeal of a criminal trial because doing so might boost your party’s Election Day turnout is truly going the extra mile. Ultimately, Blanche’s department is searching for evidence of “weaponization” of government in the same way that J.D. Vance is searching for fraud: In both cases, they’re diverting public attention away from the most obvious culprits right in front of them by redirecting it toward conspiracies further afield.

 

I’m curious to see how the right will react if “the grand conspiracy” probe collapses under its own weight and the FBI’s investigation into 2020 ballot rigging, to which hundreds of agency employees have been assigned, fizzles out before Election Day. Epstein isn’t the only conspiracy disappointment that MAGA fans have endured, remember—the Durham investigation, which was Trump’s first stab at uncovering “deep state” malfeasance in the Russiagate investigation, was also a dud. And while Blanche’s DOJ has done its postliberal best to indict the president’s enemies, the only scalp it’s actually taken was John Bolton’s.

 

That’s a lot of frustration for a vengeful movement of conspiracy addicts to have to swallow. And the president is short on excuses: He can claim with some justification that the behavior of Iran and global oil markets is beyond his control, but the behavior of the executive branch is very much within it. If he can’t produce the secret evidence that proves “the grand conspiracy,” and he won’t produce the secret evidence that proves the Epstein conspiracy, not much is left of the populist argument for electing him in 2016. He fought the swamp and the swamp won.

 

Except … he didn’t even fight it, did he? Maybe, as with the war, the truth about that will also start to rush forward through cracks in the dam caused by the right’s disappointment over Epstein and other conspiracies. A record-high share of the public now believes that the government is corrupt, topping the previous record by 10 points; tellingly, while the share of Democrats has surged since 2024, the share of Republicans has barely declined over the same period. Trump’s supporters know he’s corrupt, in other words, and they know it well enough that they can’t be bothered to pretend otherwise even when talking to pollsters.

 

The swamp won because Trump wanted it to win, those supporters might conclude—on war, on influence peddling, and on Jeffrey Epstein. If any meaningful part of the right ends up entertaining that possibility in November, the president and his party are cooked.

Another Flight 93, Averted

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

While you were sleeping, the fate of the Middle East (and, frankly, the world along with it) teetered along one of the most tragic fault lines imaginable — and miraculously held together, thanks to the quick thinking and unflappable heroism of the Israelis whose lives were in the balance. For those only shaking the sleep out of their eyes: Overnight, passenger jet FlyDubai airlines flight FZ1073, en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv, was subjected to a truly horrifying terrorist attack — one eerily reminiscent of 9/11.

 

This time the threat didn’t come from terrorists disguised as passengers — in fact, quite the opposite. The plane’s co-pilot, an Omani national whose identity has not yet been disclosed, was the attempted terrorist. He stabbed the pilot multiple times, yelled “Allahu Akbar!” and then steered the plane directly toward the ground, in an obvious attempt to kill everyone on board. (According to data readouts, the plane, cruising at an altitude of roughly 30,000 feet, dropped 17,000 feet in 29 seconds.) Several passengers, even as they were being tossed about the plane’s cabin, rushed the cockpit in a desperate attempt to subdue the madman.

 

I know what you’re thinking, because it’s what I thought too: This was Flight 93 all over again. All the horrifying beats, leading to the only possible fated end. Only, this time . . . it didn’t end that way at all. In what can only be described as a cross between an authentic miracle and a tribute to never-say-die competence, everyone is alive and unharmed — except for the poor pilot (himself from the UAE), whose life was apparently saved by a well-trained Israeli dentist.

 

Instead, the passengers and remaining aircrew forced open the cockpit door, yanked the terrorist violently from the controls, and re-righted the plane in mid-dive. Tom Cruise couldn’t have done it better — because he’s an actor, and these men were dealing with deadly reality. But understand both the improbability of all this (two spare pilots as passengers, ready to take over and make emergency maneuvers?) as well as the frankly hilarious truth that, to quote one proud Israeli commentator, “Overall, the probability that a plane full of Israelis will contain a trained assault team, two additional pilots, and, statistically, at least one cardiac surgeon, psychologist, lawyer, and diamond dealer is substantially higher than 50%.”

 

It’s easy enough (and right) to celebrate this sort of unexpectedly exhilarating outcome. But think for a moment if the more likely outcome had happened. Think about what kind of situation we would be waking up to in the Middle East, with the core of the Abraham Accords suddenly up for question. Think about the endless conspiracy theorizing we’d be getting from the Candace Owenses and Dave Smiths of the world. Think about the simple human tragedy of it all.

 

All avoided, because of quick thinking, solid training, and a blunt refusal to ever accept the fate others designate for you. Here’s to the passengers of FZ1073, who have provided us with something more than a grateful headline during dark times: They have given us a lesson on how to live life and never quit.

The Mob Never Learns

By Justin Dillon & KC Johnson

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

The mob has now come for Cornell. And this time, it even has a superhero.

 

Last week, a female Cornell student claiming to have been gang-raped by members of the Chi Phi fraternity almost two years ago sued Cornell, Chi Phi, various Cornell administrators, and — by name — the seven Cornell students who were allegedly involved in the rape. The case quickly went viral, and the reactions have broken down along predictably partisan lines — with everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Hollywood actress Florence Pugh (who plays the Black Widow–esque Yelena Belova in the Marvel Universe) weighing in, and most people immediately assuming guilt.

 

The lawsuit was filed by a plaintiffs’ firm that has previously sued Harvey Weinstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs.  There is much in it that should raise some eyebrows — but not necessarily for the reasons the plaintiff wants.

 

Here’s what we know: In 2024, almost three weeks after the incident, Jane Doe filed a report with the Cornell University police. According to the local district attorney, who would later decline to file charges in the case, what she said then is not what she’s saying now:

 

Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual. My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later. Furthermore, I have never been contacted by Jane Doe’s attorneys. Not to inform me the original statement was inaccurate and not to ask me to reconsider our decision. Rather, I reached out to Jane Doe’s attorneys after the lawsuit was filed to understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit’s allegations and the proper path forward in light of the lawsuit’s allegations.

 

District attorneys almost never release statements like this — much less include, as he did, a lengthy excerpt from a statement Jane Doe gave his office two years ago.

 

It’s unclear whether Cornell had access to the DA’s legal analysis that the conduct, as alleged, did not constitute sex without consent when the university went forward with its own Title IX investigation. (While a Title IX process uses a lower standard of proof than does a criminal trial, the underlying factual question — did Doe’s allegation, if true, constitute a sexual assault — was the same in both matters.) Subsequent statements from both Doe’s attorney and Cornell indicated that the university’s investigation found all seven of the male students responsible for at least some form of misconduct. Two of them were expelled, and the other five appear to have received suspensions or some other form of punishment.

 

We don’t know why Cornell expelled only two of the students, because no one has (yet) leaked the investigation report in the case. Doe’s lawyers could have included the report as an exhibit to their complaint but chose not to do so. They also failed to mention texts showing that the accuser told one of the young men just two days after the incident that “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” And we also don’t know if Cornell was aware of those texts, which most reasonable people would consider highly exculpatory.

 

We do know, however, that Cornell is almost the last school in the country that would bend over backwards to help a male respondent beat a Title IX charge: It is in the top five of universities nationwide that have faced lawsuits by male respondents who claim their cases were handled unfairly. There is simply no reason to believe that in a case involving allegations of a gang rape by fraternity members, Cornell suddenly decided to favor respondents.

 

Yet the plaintiff has sued Cornell and the seven accused students, almost two years after the fact. Why the wait? The answer is almost certainly the vulgar screenshotted text that was pasted into the complaint, which the New York Post reported was leaked much later by someone in the group chat. That text doesn’t shed light either way on whether or not the plaintiff consented or whether she was too drunk to consent. But it does indicate — as the DA later noted — that “the behavior of certain Chi Phi fraternity members was without question disgusting and morally reprehensible.” Her skilled attorneys clearly understood its PR value — and they were right.

 

For years, accusers’-rights lawyers have been trying to convince courts to make a positively dystopian legal ruling: that refusing to find a respondent guilty and expel him can — standing alone — violate Title IX. So far, they have failed — in the Sixth Circuit against Michigan State, in a district court decision involving the University of Nebraska that the Eighth Circuit declined to immediately review, and most recently in the Seventh Circuit against the University of Wisconsin.

 

That may be why the plaintiff here filed not in federal court — which has been uniformly hostile to some of the claims she brings here — but in state court. (And oddly, in Manhattan — even though Cornell is located in Ithaca, N.Y., more than 200 miles away.)

 

Other strategic choices she made raise similar questions.

 

For one, the complaint is littered with inflammatory or misleading statements. The plaintiff claims not to know whether the Title IX process against the accused students has been completed — even though, under federal law, Cornell had to tell her that, and one of her lawyers has admitted that the process ended with two expulsions. She insinuates that some of the punished students only had to write a reflection paper, which is almost certainly untrue and likely referred to reflection papers that are submitted as part of a typical sanctioning process. And she took the highly unusual step of identifying the accused students by name, knowing full well that doing so would set a mob upon them.

 

Indeed, the mob responded as expected. The Cornell student newspaper threw any semblance of objectivity to the side and authored a grotesque house editorial that literally began by listing all the male students’ names. The editorial added that “if Cornell follows the law, then we should have access to a public deposition issued from the school.” But the Title IX process doesn’t involve sworn depositions, and in any event federal law requires that campus sexual assault hearings be closed to the public.

 

AOC, meanwhile, traveled to Ithaca to denounce Cornell’s “culture of rape,” shown by an incident in which “seven men drugged and gang-raped a 20-year-old woman.” (The New York City congresswoman did not indicate how she reached this factual conclusion.) She castigated Cornell for only expelling two of the male students, while making “the rest write essays as their form of punishment.” Even Doe’s lawyer hadn’t made such a claim, which Cornell publicly denied. And for good measure, AOC’s rally opened with the student sponsors leading the crowd in a chant for a free “Palestine,” “from the river to the sea.” (Because of course it did.)

 

All of this is happening as Democrats are poised to take over both houses of Congress — and possibly the White House in 2029 — and call for a return to Obama-era Title IX policy, when respondents had few due process rights and bias toward complainants was seen as a feature, not a bug. So voilà, we have an allegation that Cornell somehow swept a gang rape under the rug, even though the facts seem to suggest no such thing.

 

We have seen high-profile college gang-rape allegations before, and we don’t yet know how things will turn out. At one extreme were the Duke lacrosse case from 2006 and the 2014 UVA/Rolling Stone case, both utter hoaxes where no sexual contact of any type occurred. At the other extreme was a 2013 gang rape by several Vanderbilt football players that led to several criminal convictions and the two ringleaders’ receiving long terms in Tennessee prison.

 

At this point, the Cornell incident most resembles an allegation of gang rape against members of the 2016 University of Minnesota team. In that case, the school immediately suspended (and thus publicly identified) ten of the players right before a bowl game. Only later did it become clear that at least some of the players were wrongly accused — even if the general conduct of multiple players having sex with an intoxicated woman in their dorm room was, to borrow from the Cornell DA, “disgusting and morally reprehensible.” The university ultimately paid $500,000 to the female complainant — while arguing that at worst its Title IX policies were biased against all accused students, and not just accused men, to defend a lawsuit filed by the accused football players.

 

The point of due process is to sort the sheep from the goats, so that guilty people can be held responsible and the lives of innocent people will not be ruined. Allegations are not evidence, and mob justice is no more real justice than Florence Pugh is a real superhero.

Republicans Backing Away From Trump As Midterms Draw Near

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

“If you want to know what a politician is up to, watch his feet, not his mouth,” historian Marvin Meyers wrote in his magisterial The Jacksonian Persuasion in 1957.

 

It’s still good advice. In private conversations, Republicans are talking a big game about how they’re not worried about November’s midterms, according to several informed sources I’ve talked to. But it’s just not in private. “Today, I don’t think there will be a blue wave at all,” White House deputy chief of staff James Blair told The Free Press earlier this month. Blair is the man tasked with overseeing the midterms for President Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC.

 

At the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s recent retreat in Sea Island, Georgia, NRSC pollster Erik Iverson insisted that every incumbent GOP senator will be reelected and that Republicans are even on track to pick up a Senate seat.

 

There is no public polling that agrees with this rosy GOP scenario.

 

Ah yes, but the polls are “fake” as Trump likes to say, even though, at the end of August he claimed in an interview that if the election were held today, he would win by “25 points.” Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings in the polls are at record or near-record lows. If they were an EKG, doctors would tell the patient to get his affairs in order.

 

But let’s ignore the polls. Given the difficulties with polling and its occasionally spotty record in recent years, skepticism is defensible. Which brings me back to Meyer’s advice.

 

At the Republicans’ faux midterm convention in Dallas a few weeks ago, Trump promised to campaign aggressively for GOP candidates in competitive states and districts around the country, asking voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”

 

Trump said he’d barnstorm the country to help Republicans in competitive races. His feet tell a different story. Since that pledge he’s held just one rally and one tele-rally. But this week he will have two big events—in Oklahoma and Alabama, ruby red states he won in 2024 by 34 and 30 points, respectively. On Tuesday, he added a campaign stop  this weekend for faltering Sen. John Husted in Ohio, a less red state (Trump only won by 11 there in 2024).

 

There’s not much polling in Oklahoma, but in early August, Kevin Hern, the GOP Senate candidate, was up by more than 20 points against the potential Democratic candidate. Polling in Alabama is even more sparse, but Republican Barry Moore was up 15 points in early July.

 

No other rallies or campaign stops are have been announced.

 

I doubt that Hern and Moore are in any trouble, but that’s the point. Trump likes enthusiastic crowds, and there aren’t that many states where he can find them outside of places like Oklahoma and Alabama.

 

At the time of the midterm “Trumpalooza,” CBS counted 60 “battleground” Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates. Of them, only about two dozen attended the event. Since then, handicappers have expanded the list of vulnerable Republicans. But that’s based on polling, which we’re supposed to ignore.   

 

Still, the ever-growing number of GOP candidates who’ve scrubbed or drastically downplayed their ties to Trump must be noticing something. Rep. Young Kim of California replaced her slogan “Stand with President Trump to deliver a bold America First Agenda” with “Taking on Career Politicians to Restore the American Dream.” Byron Donalds, running for governor in bright red Florida, has downgraded Trump on his site to a mere afterthought. Texas congressional candidate Carlos De La Cruz changed his self-description from “Trump conservative” to “strong conservative.” And so on.

 

In Iowa, a state Trump won by 13 points in 2024, Rep. Ashley Hinson is on the ballot for the Senate. She’s started running ads about how she’s eager to work across the aisle with Democrats. She voted with her feet by refusing to appear at a rally with J.D. Vance, citing unspecified scheduling conflicts.

 

Rep. María Salazar’s South Florida district is 73 percent Latino. In 2024 she won by 11 points, and Trump carried her district by 15. Earlier this month, she released an ad directly criticizing Trump’s immigration policies. The ad invited Trump’s wrath, but he has not yet withdrawn his endorsement.

 

A corollary to Meyers’ “watch his feet” advice might be the Watergate era rule, “Follow the money.” So far MAGA Inc. hasn’t spent much of its $400 million war chest. But almost 95 percent of what it has spent—about $15 million—has been deployed in Texas, which Trump won by almost 14 points in 2024, and which hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office in 32 years.

 

In the primary, Trump endorsed the biblically corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over the incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who virtually everyone agrees was a lock to get reelected. The GOP has spent, so far, $140 million on Paxton.

 

Paxton is trailing Democrat James Talarico by 5 points in the latest polling, with independents supporting him 2-to-1.

 

But, as we all know, the polls are fake.

El-Sayed’s Selective Condemnation of Oppression

By Raleigh Adams

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

During a “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall Wednesday, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed returned to his alma mater, the University of Michigan.

 

His homecoming featured expected critiques of the Trump administration and allusions to a Kamala Harris 2028 presidential run, but tensions rose when student Iman Dashti questioned El-Sayed about the violence in Iran.

 

“My cousin was hunted in the streets of Iran by the IRGC because her hijab wasn’t on right,” Dashti said, going on to describe other members of his family beaten by the regime. He asked the candidate to state “unequivocally” that he is against IRGC violence and political oppression.

 

El-Sayed responded that the United States has too often acted as “the world’s policeman” while affirming his support for democratic movements abroad. “I will always stand for and with democratic movements, always,” he said, but added that America was wrong “to go to war to topple the government of Iran. . . . It is the responsibility of the people of Iran to decide what their leadership should look like.”

 

Dashti pressed him further with a simple question: “You stand with us?”

 

El-Sayed again affirmed his support for freedom and democracy . . . so long as change came from the Iranian people.

 

This would be an unremarkable exercise in a politician avoiding an uncomfortable foreign-policy question were El-Sayed ordinarily so reticent about passing moral judgment on foreign governments. He is decidedly not.

 

El-Sayed has explicitly called Israel’s conduct in Gaza “genocide,” campaigned against American military assistance to Israel, and defended making Gaza an issue even when politically costly. He could have easily answered Dashti in one sentence: Yes, I condemn the IRGC’s repression, and no, I don’t believe America should impose regime change.

 

Quick and simple. And yet, El-Sayed wouldn’t say that.

 

El-Sayed’s hesitation around Iran points toward a broader distortion in American politics: Suffering now arrives pre-interpreted, neatly wrapped in red and green with a ready-made vocabulary of victims and oppressors, resistance and complicity. Other suffering must first pass through its thicket of qualifications before that same moral fervor can even begin to be applied.

 

That is what makes the peculiar place of “Palestine” in leftist politics worth examining. It increasingly functions not merely as a foreign-policy cause but as a totalizing political symbol. The issue stretches into every aspect of life: Does supporting Palestine mean having to go to a Macklemore concert? Does your instructor have a contract that honors adjunct professors’ struggle and its obvious equivalency to Palestine? Must Pride have a foreign policy? Even more pressingly, must cheese?

 

The peculiarity does not lie in caring about the conflict in Gaza, where there is  abundant human suffering worthy of moral attention. But, ironically enough, there is fitting language within the Marxist tradition for what El-Sayed is exemplifying: fetishism. Considering that he keeps close ties to Marxists and socialists, El-Sayed should at least be vaguely familiar with the concept.

 

Marx was writing about commodity fetishism, but the structure of his argument is useful here. “Gaza” or “Palestine” becomes an ideological object detached from the realities of the people there: a political fetish. Particular Palestinians and their suffering matter insofar as they symbolize abstractions — colonialism, oppression, resistance — while suffering elsewhere that complicates that symbolic function is pushed aside.

 

An Iranian woman chased through the streets because her hijab doesn’t meet morality-police standards invites qualifications about intervention, sovereignty, and the proper limits of American foreign policy. A Palestinian killed by Israeli military action, by contrast, is immediately legible: victim, oppressor, injustice. The suffering of Palestinian women under the rump Hamas regime who are being sold for food or coerced into marrying the man who raped them is no less Palestinian, but it sits outside the black-and-white narrative that activists rigidly uphold.

 

Even Palestinians themselves can become strangely incidental to the Americanized politics of Palestine.

 

That is the trouble with any political fetish. Some Palestinian suffering readily acquires enormous political meaning when it suits Western leftist agendas. Other suffering, when not politically convenient, is discounted.

 

Dashti wasn’t asking El-Sayed to invade Iran. He was asking him to name an oppressor. El-Sayed has demonstrated throughout his campaign that he does understand the difference. Naming “oppressors” has been central to his politics. The question put to him last Wednesday exposed the way his moral vocabulary shrinks when the subject is Iran.

Importing the Third World

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

“Import the third world, become the third world” is a slogan popular with postliberals who, for whatever reason, are reluctant to say the 14 words. Publicly, anyway.

 

Like “Great Replacement theory,” it’s wormed its way into semi-“respectable” right-wing discourse to a degree that out-and-out racism still hasn’t quite managed. I doubt, for instance, that we’ll ever see the president deliver a fascist salute while shouting “white power.”

 

But “import the third world, become the third world”? Not only might Donald Trump plausibly say it, in 2024 his campaign did say it. And the visuals it chose to illustrate the point were as subtle as you’d expect.

 

“Import the third world, become the third world” is the conclusion you reach when you’ve despaired of America’s formidable ability to assimilate immigrants, as postliberals certainly have. It implies a second conclusion: To avoid becoming the third world, all you need to do is to stop importing the third world.

 

But that’s as false as false can be, in case you missed the previous thousand editions of this newsletter. Under Trump, America’s government did stop importing the third world—and immediately set about adopting every civic pathology for which third-world regimes are known and despised.

 

American postliberals have no objection to third-world government. What they want, and have always wanted, is a third-world government that works for them, privileging their own racial, religious, and ideological tribe while penalizing rival ones.

 

Which brings us to the president’s—or is it the American people’s?—new ads.

 

Three times in the past week, the White House has released videos that are indistinguishable from campaign spots. The first, which aired on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, features audio of UFC honcho Dana White celebrating Trump as “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” Heroic images of the president flash onscreen, intercut with the words “America will never be a communist country.” A chorus sings “love me,” if you can believe it, in the background.

 

The second ad, more subdued, features Trump speaking about America’s future while romantic images of Mount Rushmore, fireworks, and crowds with flags float by. But the third is a return to form—the man in his element, glowering at the camera in black-and-white while audio plays from one of the most third-world speeches he’s ever given: “This is the final battle…. We will demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers…. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country…. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

 

That one aired this weekend during Saturday Night Live, Fox News Sunday, and various football games. Not only does it look like a campaign ad, it was a campaign ad. It repurposes footage that Trump posted to Truth Social as a candidate in 2024—footage that, per the New York Times, his team spent upward of $60,000 to boost online in the final days of that year’s presidential race

 

Why is any of this newsworthy? Because: All three spots released this week are captioned “Paid for by the U.S. government.” That is, by you and me.

 

The White House addressed the outcry on Friday with a press release titled “Presidential Public Service Announcements Are Nothing New,” but it’s unclear what the alleged “public service” in this case is supposed to be. The historic examples the press releases cites—public health announcements, entitlement enrollment information, morale boosters during war—all had a policy rationale. The new Trump ads don’t.

 

According to the White House, the rationale is “patriotism.” What could be more patriotic than a fascist demagogue seething about cleansing America of internal enemies?

 

What’s the real purpose of these ads?

 

Because he can.

 

I’m open to the theory that there is no “purpose” per se.

 

What was the purpose of putting the president’s face on the currency? For that matter, what was the purpose of last week’s summit with Xi Jinping?

 

There’s no “purpose,” only vanity and prestige.

 

Earlier this month Axios reported that the people around Trump have largely given up on discouraging his worst impulses, particularly when those impulses involve his self-glorification. (And when don’t they?) “Many aides and confidants have been worn down,” the outlet reported. “They know they can’t stop him, and they don’t even try. More and more, they humor his whims.”

 

Perhaps the taxpayer-funded campaign ads are just the latest perk of the imperial presidency for a term-limited egomaniac, no different in substance from minting a coin in his honor. He’ll never be on the ballot again; the right’s emotional investment in him is declining and will soon enough shift to some younger successor. He intends to cling selfishly to the national spotlight for as long as he can, and the new ads are one way to do it.

 

But I think that’s too simple. If you’ve paid any attention to the president’s campaign rhetoric over the past month, you know that there is a purpose to these spots and it ain’t patriotism. Before, during, and after the spotlight-clinging convention he held a few weeks ago, Trump has begged fans to “pretend I’m on the ballot” in November. (He did it again this morning.) MAGA diehards reliably turn out for their hero in presidential elections, but much less reliably in midterm campaigns, when he’s on the sidelines. He needs them at the polls this fall to hold down congressional losses.

 

The three new ads are all designed to impress upon them the sense that the president himself is on the ballot, reminding the red cap-wearing wing of the right why they put those caps on in the first place. Trump’s own political fate might not be at stake, the commercials seem to say, but the fate of Trumpism is.

 

If you wouldn’t call ads that amplify a party’s core election message “campaign ads,” what would you call them?

 

Of course they’re campaign ads, never mind that federal law prohibits using money appropriated by Congress for political propaganda. The question is why a guy whose PAC was sitting on more than $400 million as of the end of August connived to have the U.S. government pay to air them instead of picking up the tab himself, or leaning on some private-sector crony to do so. Sticking the taxpayers with the bill feels gratuitous, seeking out controversy when it could easily have been avoided. Why would Trump do that?

 

Because he can.

 

The caption “Paid for by the U.S. government” is a sort of advertisement within an advertisement. As I said, the dream of postliberals is to be governed by a third-world regime that favors them and disfavors their enemies. The three ads are Trump’s way of reinvigorating his unenthused base by showing them the extent to which he’s achieved that. I’ve weaponized the federal government so ruthlessly against the left, he’s suggesting, that I’m going to have the U.S. Treasury pay for Republican campaign ads.

 

He might not have made groceries cheaper or weakened China or ended “forever wars” in the Middle East. But to the sort of anti-American cretin who believes that saving the country requires abusing federal power toward the goal of right-wing autocracy, he’s delivered in spades. That’s the sort of voter he needs at the polls in November and whose excitement he’s hoping to rekindle. “Forget the price of diesel,” the ads imply. “Remember the big picture here.”

 

It reminds me of Pete Hegseth commandeering Apache helicopters for him and Kid Rock to joyride around in, another memorable “because I can” postliberal moment that mimics the most loathsome aspects of third-world government. The ruling party makes no distinction between its personal interests and the national interest; high officials arrogantly flaunt their corruption, knowing that cronyism will guarantee their impunity; and the public, demoralized by the spectacle, loses confidence in liberalism’s ability to deter that corruption, which ironically feeds the opposition’s appetite for postliberal remedies.

 

All of that was true of the helicopter episode, and all of it is true of Trump’s government-funded ads. Even the “love me” chorus in the first spot turns out to have been obtained improperly, lifted from a song by an artist who didn’t authorize its use by the White House. The logic of choosing that music was “in for a penny, in for a pound,” I suppose: If the president was going to steal money from the U.S. Treasury to pay for the ads, he might as well steal intellectual property to make them to his liking too.

 

Americans imported a third-world political movement into the federal government in 2024 and now here we are. Import the third world, become the third world.

 

A game of horseshoes.

 

The most preposterous soundbite in the three ads is the audio of Trump grumbling about “expelling warmongers,” a bit of 2024 verbiage that’s aged post-Iran like milk left out on a windowsill at Mar-a-Lago. But I was also struck by how large anti-communism loomed in his message, given the fact that one of his own diplomats went on television yesterday and claimed that the president offered last week to sell weapons to … China.

 

That feels like a gag someone like me would write to satirize his infatuations with dictators and “deals,” but it’s no joke. “President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, told Fox News Sunday. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”

 

Selling weapons to an enemy regime that might plausibly use them someday to kill American soldiers feels like the logical endpoint of the Trump era, which began with bluster about getting tough on China and now seems to be steering toward some sort of illiberal “grand bargain” involving joint global hegemony via the two countries’ “spheres of influence.” Never mind what the ad says: In what way is the president’s administration still meaningfully anti-communist?

 

There are two notorious communist leaders on planet Earth, Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Trump’s desire for better relations with both is so effusive that it borders on personal affection. He also appears to have been sincerely charmed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, America’s most influential next-gen socialist, and does nothing to hide it.

 

I’m not exaggerating for effect when I say that not only does Trump appear more comfortable with illiberal left-wing leaders than any modern Democratic president has been, he’s practiced socialist economics more aggressively than any modern Democratic president has. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had sought government ownership stakes in 31 companies and counting, many grassroots right-wingers would have skipped the calls for impeachment and proceeded straight to egging on a military coup.

 

It all amounts to a second way in which Trump has “imported” the third world. Between his affinity for communist dictators, his cultivation of Arab client states, his abiding interest in rapprochement with Vladimir Putin and Russia, and his comparative hostility toward liberal powers in Europe and Canada, never before has American foreign policy held third-world forms of government in as high regard as it does now. At best, the president seems to view them as no worse than their Western counterparts. At worst, he actively prefers them.

 

It’s not his fault—or not entirely—that more than 40 percent of Americans now rate “socialism” positively, the highest share ever tracked by Gallup. That surge is a combination, I suspect, of years of loose talk on the right that foolishly made “socialism” synonymous with the welfare state (Americans love the welfare state!) and the cost of living having driven some desperate voters to give radical redistribution a second look. Trump is partly responsible for the latter, of course.

 

But I wonder if his presidency will end up durably destigmatizing third-world modes of government for younger generations. He’s governed largely by decree, has normalized Xi and Kim, has legitimized government meddling in the private sector, and is poised to reorient welfare programs around right-wing social engineering; as young Americans absorb all of it, this week’s new ads might seem even more ironically vacuous in hindsight than they already do. How could Republicans seriously campaign in 2026 on promising that “America will never be a communist country” while doing more than any other modern party to condition the public to tolerate statist autocracy?

 

The answer, I suppose, is that they’re not “seriously” campaigning on it. Terms like “communist” are substantively meaningless to the president and his fans, essentially just slurs that translate loosely to “domestic left-wing antagonist.” (That’s why, in the audio for the third ad, “communist” and “Marxist” are placed alongside “fascist” and “villains.” They’re all just empty swear words aimed at the president’s enemies.) When you hear “America will never be a communist country,” you’re not supposed to picture it being overrun by the Chinese army or under the yoke of some U.S. version of the Supreme Soviet. You’re supposed to imagine it being run by a Congress of “woke” twentysomething progressives with blue hair. Or President Jon Ossoff.

 

The essential disagreement in “horseshoe politics” doesn’t have to do with how government should operate, on which the far left and far right largely agree. It has to do with which side gets to be in charge. And, unintentionally, the three new ads illustrate that too: Insofar as their goal is to persuade Republican voters to turn out to vote and keep Congress in the GOP’s hands, they’re a plea to protect Trump’s quasi-autocratic powers by extending one-party rule in Washington. Normally the president doesn’t get to govern like a Chinese emperor just because his side happens to control the House and Senate, but in third-world America, the stakes in the midterms really are a choice between democracy and whatever the hell one might call the last 20 months.

 

You can have a communist country, i.e., one in which Democrats get to govern sometimes, or you can have the other thing, in which the attorney general mutters menacingly about media bias as a “national security issue” that Americans shouldn’t have to put up with. Having imported the third world into the government in 2024, voters will decide in November how much more of it they’d like to import.