The Republican Party Must Be Bigger Than Any One Person

By Brad Raffensperger

Friday, November 13, 2026

 

In 1967, Ronald Reagan offered a reminder about the Republican Party that is as relevant today as it was nearly 60 years ago: “Unity does not require unanimity of thought.” Reagan understood something fundamental about political leadership: A party is not a personality cult. It is a coalition of Americans united by shared principles, even when they disagree about policy specifics.

 

In the aftermath of the midterm elections, Republicans have serious questions to confront. The results demand reflection and an examination of what we believe and what kind of political institution we intend to be. I believe in the Constitution, limited government, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, and personal accountability. Those convictions have not changed because of political pressure, nor are they dependent on who occupies the White House.

 

The conversation about the Republican Party’s future should begin with five truths.

 

First, principle must come before personality. Party unity should never require unquestioning loyalty to a person: presidents, governors, and members of Congress. The principles that define a political party must endure long after any leader leaves office.

 

A Republican should be able to support a president’s policies while disagreeing with his conduct. A Republican should be able to question a candidate without having his conservative credentials challenged. And no Republican should be expected to abandon his convictions for any reason. There is a profound difference between supporting someone because he or she advances your principles and changing your principles to accommodate someone you support.

 

Second, integrity cannot be negotiable. I learned firsthand that doing the right thing is not always politically convenient. In 2020, Georgia conducted the most contentious election of my lifetime. We counted the ballots and followed the law. When the outcome was challenged, my responsibility was to tell the truth. My office did not get to choose the winner. The voters made that decision.

 

I was a conservative Republican before that election, and I still am. My responsibility to uphold the law never depended on which candidate prevailed. That experience reinforced an important lesson: Integrity means applying the same standards to your allies that you demand of your opponents. We cannot insist on accountability when Democrats are in power and excuse Republican misconduct. We cannot demand respect for the Constitution when it benefits us and disregard constitutional limits when they become inconvenient. The rule of law is not partisan. It’s the foundation of our republic.

 

Third, disagreement is not disloyalty. Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party was a coalition of voters of all political stripes, and he did not expect them to agree on everything. Today, there are real disagreements over trade, foreign policy, spending, and government. We should have those debates. But when disagreement triggers political exile, a party stops questioning its assumptions. Fearful of speaking candidly, leaders let bad ideas pass unchallenged, prioritizing blind loyalty over prudent judgment.

 

Fourth, competence matters as much as conviction. Americans do not elect public officials to generate headlines or cause endless confrontation. They elect us to do a job. As secretary of state, I have been responsible for administering elections, overseeing professional licensing, maintaining business records, and safeguarding sensitive personal information. These responsibilities require competency, pure and simple.

 

A government agency is effective when it serves citizens accurately, efficiently, and lawfully. Headlines or no headlines. Leaders should be judged by what they accomplish, not just promise.

 

Finally, public service requires courage. Confrontation is often mistaken for courage, but this is misguided. Sometimes courage means telling people what they do not want to hear. It means disagreeing with friends or facing criticism because the alternative means sacrificing our integrity.

 

I have experienced that pressure, but service requires understanding whom we serve. We serve the people, including those who voted against us. We serve the Constitution we swore to uphold and the institutions that must remain trustworthy. The oath of office is not conditional upon convenience. That is not a political principle. It is an American principle.

 

The future is bigger than one election, and the midterm elections’ results will produce plenty of finger-pointing. But our future course cannot be charted by looking at the past. It also depends on the standards its members set, the ideas they are willing to debate, and the institutions to which they’ve been elected.

 

Reagan understood that a political party could have firm convictions without demanding uniformity of thought. Nearly 60 years later, his words still challenge us to put principles first. Whatever that conversation produces, it should begin with a simple understanding: Our oath is to the Constitution, our responsibility is to the people, and success begins and ends with our principles.

How the Electoral College Dies

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Friday, November 13, 2026

 

In the wake of the 2026 midterms, we are on the cusp of a total transformation of the U.S. election system. After decades of Republican dominance in state legislatures, Democrats now control enough state governments to push the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact past its 270-vote activation threshold and dismantle the Electoral College from below.

 

But it seems like the right has barely realized the importance of the fight that’s about to begin.

 

Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all gained Democratic trifectas in this election (in addition, both houses in New Hampshire flipped blue, although the state retains its Republican governor). Formerly red states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas have divided chambers.

 

For decades, activists in blue states have exploited a clever loophole scheme to eliminate the constitutional framework of the Electoral College. According to proponents, if state legislatures control their electors to that body, the state can choose to pledge them to the national popular vote winner, regardless of which candidate that state’s voters support in that election. Eighteen states and Washington, D.C., virtually all solidly blue — and crucially representing 222 Electoral College votes — have signed on. Virginia is the latest entrant to the compact after Democratic victories there last year. To mitigate fears of throwing Democratic state electoral votes to Republican candidates in the interim, the compact includes a clause triggering its existence only if enough states sign on to reach the 270-elector majority necessary for victory.

 

If all new Democratic trifecta states pass the compact, they would claim 71 electoral votes, without needing a single divided state — activists only need states representing a mere 48 electors to activate the compact. If not stopped in the courts, they could use this to destroy the Electoral College system and fundamentally transform elections in the United States.

 

It’s also far from clear if courts will save us from this end run around the constitutional system. The most prominent challenge was brought in 2019 in Washington State, a compact state. Opponents argued that interstate compacts of this kind needed to go through the Article I, Section 10 process and seek congressional approval; that the compact exceeds state authority even over their own electors; that it diluted the vote of Washington voters; and that it violates the equal-protection and privileges-and-immunities rights of all American voters. But because the compact hadn’t been activated, the case was dismissed on procedural grounds without the court examining any of these claims, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal without elucidating further.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court, in cases dating all the way back to the 19th century, has repeatedly ruled that state legislatures have a lot of power over their electors. As recently as 2020, the highest court again confirmed that states have the authority to enforce elector candidate pledges. While there is a strong argument that this — eviscerating the functionality of the Electoral College — is one thing state legislatures can’t do without violating the Constitution, it isn’t an ironclad one.

 

The danger is compounded by the astonishingly poor civic education the last several generations of Americans have received.

 

American voters, even those who are Republican or the independents who decided the midterms in red or purple states, aren’t familiar with the Founders’ arguments for our Electoral College system and think a national popular vote sounds pretty good. Pew Research has a long-term poll on the concept, which as recently as 2024 had a solid majority of 63 percent of voters in favor of the national popular vote. Even among Republican voters, support for the Electoral College barely ekes out a win, with 53 percent in favor and 46 percent against.

 

Despite growing interest in the plan, some of the most popular arguments of proponents have shown themselves obviously false in recent years. The idea that a particular set of swing states would occupy permanent outsize influence in the election process, for example, is no longer a viable claim. Just ten or 15 years ago, everyone “knew” that Ohio and Florida were the critical states that delivered the presidency. Blue tsunami and bad candidates in Ohio aside, both those states are solid red now. But several previously solid Republican states, like Arizona and Georgia, have been in play for several elections. A national popular vote would move the locus of elections to a handful of massive, deep-blue cities — a fact of our politics that’s far less likely to change in a decade or two than which states become toss-ups.

 

Of more immediate political impact are the potential consequences on election integrity if we moved to a national popular vote. Currently, the U.S. election system is difficult to rig at the national level, because the potential riggers would have to know where to put those votes distributed among several swing states. Mass-registering the homeless in Los Angeles, for example, may affect local elections, but as far as national ones, all it does is make California bluer. A national popular vote would reward with influence, and thus incentivize, any state that encourages the maximum number of votes, whether it’s by legalizing non-citizen voting or stuffing ballot boxes. It would set off a registration arms race and punish, with less influence over national elections, any state that tried to put in place anti-fraud protections.

 

As a matter of pure partisanship, the Electoral College has delivered the presidency to two candidates who lost the popular vote in the last century: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016. Democrats have every incentive to push for the evisceration of the system our Founders wisely crafted in the Constitution and award themselves something much closer to a permanent majority. And thanks to this wave election, they have the states and means to do so.

The American Surrender to Russia Continues

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, November 12, 2026

 

Today, Thursday, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will meet U.S. special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Moscow. It will be the tenth time in less than two years that Witkoff has met Putin in person. (I’ll bet you haven’t seen some of your relatives in person as often as Witkoff sees Putin.)

 

In that time, Putin has made zero concessions, unless you want to count prisoner exchanges or a four-day cease-fire in the Oleshky region, a cease-fire that demonstrated that Russia can stop the war any time it wants. (And according to the White House, “First Lady Melania Trump and her representative worked directly with Russian and Ukrainian leadership to define the terms of the localized ceasefire.” Doesn’t sound like Witkoff or Kushner had much to do with that.)

 

Considering two years of regular meetings have led to almost no discernible progress, you might think that the administration might A) give someone else a crack at it (didn’t we used to have a secretary of state? Have you seen this man?) or B) give up on being an impartial negotiator entirely.

 

Wednesday, Kushner said, “The reality is there is ⁠no trust right now between the sides and that is to be expected after a conflict like this,” adding that the talks in the capital of the United Arab Emirates had touched on territorial issues and that these would be the hardest to resolve.

 

The Ukrainians have every reason in the world to not trust the Russians. On February 18, 2022, Putin claimed that Russian military drills along Ukraine’s borders were “purely defensive” and “not a threat to any other country.” Days later, the easily and widely predicted full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. The regime in Moscow has broken just about every treaty it ever signed. Why would anybody in his right mind make a concession to Russia in exchange for a promise that Putin or his successor is just about guaranteed to break?

 

The Russians have their own reasons to not trust the Ukrainians; roughly 1.6 million Russian soldiers killed and wounded since the start of the war. (For perspective, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. had 58,279 service members who died in theater from 1957 to 1975, and more than 300,000 were also wounded during the war. So in terms of soldiers killed and wounded, in four years and eight months, the Russians have suffered about four and a half Vietnam Wars.)

 

But apparently the latest move from the Trump administration is . . . to offer Russia a role in future decisions by NATO. I wish I were making that up.

 

Axios:

 

For years, Russia has sought a European security deal that limits NATO expansion and scales back its military presence in Eastern Europe. The U.S. has rejected those demands in the past but now appears open to them in some form as part of a broader agreement to end the war in Ukraine.

 

Why on God’s green earth should Russia get a veto over which countries join NATO?

 

Whether or not there are any countries we want to invite to NATO is almost immaterial to this. (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine are non-member “partner countries” that have declared a desire to join the alliance.) The question is, who makes the decisions about which countries are in NATO? Since its founding, the answer was simple: All member states had to agree, unanimously, on admitting a new member.

 

Now, suddenly, the Trump administration’s position is that Vladimir Putin should get a say.

 

And Russia wants NATO to shrink. From the Wall Street Journal:

 

In late 2021, shortly before launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin demanded an effective rollback of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in countries that were formerly Soviet satellites or part of the Soviet Union, such as Poland and the Baltic states.

 

Moscow also demanded a ban on admitting any new members to NATO and the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe.

 

Note that the U.S. is offering this concession to Russia as A) Moscow is intensifying its hybrid war against our allies in Europe and B) night after night, all or almost all Russian ballistic missile attacks target civilians in Ukrainian cities, not military targets.

 

Under this deal, do we get a veto over Russia’s alliances with China, Iran, and North Korea? If not, Moscow can go pound sand.

 

The Journal had a revealing detail in another scoop, that Vice President JD Vance is considering face to face talks with a top Iranian security official as he emerges as the lead negotiator with Iran:

 

Trump in recent weeks has privately criticized the June memorandum of understanding that Vance helped negotiate and questioned whether it was a costly mistake, two officials said, arguing that it gave Iran critical time to regroup and rake in oil revenues before the U.S. imposed a naval blockade. A White House official denied that Trump had second thoughts about the MOU and said the negotiators had operated in good faith. A spokesman for Vance declined to comment.

 

Now, think back to what people said about the memorandum of understanding in June.

 

The Editors: “Trump has said in the past that Iran has never won a war yet never lost a negotiation. As the president and his administration now make the case for a memorandum of understanding that doesn’t meet any U.S. strategic objective, it’s impossible to say he was wrong.”

 

Rebeccah Heinrichs: “The MOU gives the momentum to Iran. There’s not much for Americans to like about the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran.”

 

This newsletter: “The U.S. government end[ed] up giving away the store to Tehran. There’s a lot to unpack in the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, and almost all of it is bad.”

 

Meanwhile, what was the president saying back in June? “We reached an agreement with Iran that achieves everything we set out to accomplish, everything and much more, ending the current conflict, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

 

Now, the president reportedly thinks the memorandum of understanding with Iran was a “costly mistake.” Often what the administration’s fans perceive as baseless criticism and “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is just clear-minded folks trying to save the administration from its own bad judgment.

 

Some serious questions: Does the president truly understand what his negotiators have agreed to on his behalf? Or whenever they come back with, “We’ve got a deal,” does Trump just reflexively start telling reporters that he is signing the most consequential document since the Magna Carta?

 

And if the president thinks the memorandum of understanding with Iran was a “costly mistake” . . . why is he trusting the same crew to keep negotiating on his behalf?

 

ADDENDUM: Over in the Corner, an observation that former President Joe Biden seems oddly blasé about his doctors not doing a PSA test on his blood — the kind of test that would have detected his prostate cancer earlier, before it spread — for more than a decade, and pointing out that while we should always stand up against hatred and discrimination against any religious group, including Hindus. We do not have to make Diwali a federal holiday to do this.

Does Anyone Remember Who Our Enemies Are?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, November 11, 2026

 

They say ignorance is bliss. What they don’t yet say, but may soon have to concede, is that it’s also apparently a pathway to power.

 

Across the Western world, an outbreak of cultivated obliviousness has overtaken its political classes. Today, elementary inferences that we expect schoolchildren to deduce — little things like who our friends and enemies are in the world — reliably elude our enlightened leaders.

 

Take Canada’s benighted Prime Minister Mark Carney. This week, Canada’s head of government doubled down on his effort to popularize the impossibly solipsistic notion that the “security risks for our partnership” with the Chinese Communist Party are “much, much, much, much less than the security risks, for example, of the United States.”

 

Whether fueled by obdurate petulance or understandable pique, that is a foolish thing to say. It is, after all, blindingly and obviously untrue.

 

Don’t take my word for it. Take Canada’s. In the last few years alone, Ottawa has blamed Beijing for compromising government-owned communications networks via cyberattacks. They have accused Chinese entities of interfering in Canadian elections. China is as hostile a trading partner under Xi Jinping as Donald Trump has been. Indeed, Canada estimates that Beijing’s weaponization of its dominance in the rare-earth mineral export market is designed to be coercive. For some reason, none of this seems to bother Carney much.

 

For some equally incomprehensible reason, Trump has seemed bound and determined in his second term to antagonize the Canadians. He succeeded. But Carney’s response to his bullying has been to attempt to engineer a wholesale geopolitical reorientation away from the continent on which his country is permanently situated. The humiliation he has endured with his unrequited overtures to Europe and appeals at the feet of the Chinese communists does not deter him. We can therefore conclude that Carney’s approach is not strictly rational. This is a tantrum on a national scale.

 

Carney isn’t the only Western official who would sacrifice durable, values-based friendships with allied nations abroad in service to the illusory notion that our geopolitical adversaries are just friends we haven’t made yet.

 

The incoming Democratic Senate majority may soon be riven by a fight over caucus leadership. Senator Chuck Schumer is bleeding support while his prospective challenger, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, subtly lobbies for the job. But Van Hollen’s name was first floated for a leadership role by incoming Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed in June, and the only policy the Michigan Democrat cited to justify his support (save one high-profile deportation case) was Van Hollen’s suspicion of Israel.

 

The Old Line State’s senior senator knows precisely what his pathway to power looks like. So, to satisfy the radicals, he’s predicated his leadership bid on his hostility to language in U.S. legislation that deepens the U.S.–Israel defense technology-sharing relationship.

 

In a dispatch from another universe addressed to Senate Republicans, Van Hollen led his Democratic allies to contend that even provisioning Israel with defensive kinetic interceptors with no offensive utility at all is “not in the U.S. interest.” In addition, the “counterintelligence threat from Israel” cannot be underestimated.

 

Israel’s intelligence services are among the best in the world. Indeed, their ability to cultivate human sources compensates for America’s recent deficiencies in that realm, augmenting America’s signals intelligence dominance. And Israeli intelligence is acknowledged by Western leaders to have played instrumental roles in thwarting Islamist and Iran-linked attacks on civilian targets in Greece, Denmark, Germany, Australia, and Mexico — and that’s just over the last several years. Israel isn’t just a reliable U.S. partner. It is doubtlessly one of America’s most capable partners.

 

But Van Hollen knows where his bread is buttered. The Democrats to whom he is appealing are the sort who insist Israel is engineering a “genocide” in a territory where combat operations ended 14 months ago, 40 percent of which is controlled by Hamas, and who cannot bring themselves to say that Iran is a threat to American national security.

 

Some are more blatant than others. Incoming New Jersey Representative Adam Hamawy, for example, was pressed five times by CNN’s Pamela Brown on Wednesday to acknowledge that the Islamic Republic is an acute threat to U.S. interests and the lives of its civilians and soldiers. He refused each time.

 

Hamawy has an ally in Senator-elect El-Sayed. Not only did Michigan’s new senator pointedly and repeatedly refuse to draw any security-related distinctions between Iran and Israel, he also assured anyone willing to listen that his foremost political objective is to decouple the U.S. from “the currently existing state of Israel.” After all, “the government of Israel has done nothing but use us,” he said, hypnotizing the president into conducting a war that was against his and America’s interests. “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally.”

 

If Vice President JD Vance disagrees with El-Sayed there, it’s hard to see how. The vice president’s politically self-serving analysis of the 2026 election results lays the blame for the GOP’s shortcomings at the president’s feet. The war, and the war alone, brought the GOP low. What’s more, the only policy that Vance would implement in response to the election, beyond recommitting to “America First,” would be to “change our relationship with Israel.”

 

The Trump administration is as confused as the left about who our friends and enemies are. It was ironic that Trump stood beside Carney when he refused to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin as an “enemy.” In rhetoric, the president has always had a conspicuous soft spot for his autocratic Russian counterpart, but his policies often departed from his stated, albeit strategically incomprehensible, position.

 

This fall, however, as spiking energy prices undermined the Republican Party’s domestic political prospects, Trump turned against America’s partners in Kyiv. He and his hand-picked envoys so often float the potential for lucrative postwar deals with a suddenly pliant and cooperative Kremlin that they must believe their own hype. They and the president alike expected Americans to live down to their own rapacity, and they must be surprised to learn that the public’s hunger for cheap diesel fuel does not outweigh their contempt for an enemy of the United States.

 

And make no mistake: Moscow is an enemy. It executes brazen and increasingly dangerous attacks on Western targets inside allied nations, including a plot to detonate explosive devices on U.S.-bound aircraft. It is alleged by Trump’s own Justice Department to have sought to recruit Americans to conduct acts of sabotage and even assassinations at Moscow’s behest. It is as dedicated as ever to testing NATO, looking for weak spots that could sever the relationship between Europe and America. The administration knows all of this. And yet, elements within it still view the alliance as the problem, not the American adversary attacking it.

 

This shouldn’t be difficult. Putin’s Russia is an implacable enemy of the West. China is, too. So are Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and the constellation of anti-Western non-state actors in their respective orbits. They work together, openly and without hesitation, to weaken the West and expose it to deadly threats.

 

It is not too much to expect our elected representatives to have a basic apprehension of our shared reality. At least, it shouldn’t be.

A Personal Matter

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, November 12, 2026

 

Nearly everyone who reads this newsletter also reads The Morning Dispatch, I presume. (The reverse isn’t true, unfortunately.) So I shouldn’t need to rehash the Jensen Huang scandal that was ably covered in Wednesday’s edition.

 

But if you missed that, and you’ve somehow also missed the coverage in every other news outlet in America, the long and short of it is this: The man whose company is almost single-handedly propping up the global economy and powering America’s advantage in artificial intelligence turns out to have been shtupping a Chinese spy.

 

And the president and key players in his Cabinet knew about it. For a long time. And weren’t all that concerned.

 

Shocking, right? Who could have guessed that a guy known for stashing classified documents next to the toilet might not take national security seriously?

 

A few hours ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang became former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. His dalliance with a Chinese intelligence asset isn’t the only affair he’s been accused of this week, but it’s the only one with implications for the future of AI, for American GDP, and for Donald Trump’s presidency. Huang’s mistress was an executive at Megaspeed, a tech company based in Singapore that did business with Nvidia. She’s now accused of using her, er, connection to Huang to acquire Nvidia chips that couldn’t be sold directly to China due to U.S. export controls and funneling those chips to Beijing.

 

It’s an AI version of the Rosenberg scandal, potentially. The United States has an edge in developing the most innovative and destructive new technology on Earth, and Jensen Huang might have given that edge away. Not for ideological reasons this time, but for something much grubbier.

 

The scandal might not be as bad as it looks. It’s plenty bad, make no mistake, but I haven’t seen any claim that Megaspeed got hold of Nvidia’s most advanced chips (aka Blackwell or its successor, Rubin) and diverted it to China. It’s the H200, an older-generation chip, that they’re alleged to have transferred. That’s still outrageous—but bear in mind that, thanks to the president, Nvidia was already free to sell the H200 directly to Beijing itself. In return for granting that permission, the White House secured a 25 percent cut of the sales and a generous $25 million contribution by the company to Trump’s ballroom a few months earlier.

 

In fact, according to Reuters, China’s government is actually reluctant to use the H200s it’s acquired for fear of developing a path dependency on U.S. technology. Hundreds of thousands of the chips are reportedly piled up in Hong Kong, awaiting shipment to the mainland, but the powers that be are slow-walking their importation lest Chinese tech companies end up relying on them too heavily.

 

So maybe this isn’t the Rosenberg scandal after all. But it’s certainly a White House scandal, and it could be a big one.

 

L’affaire Huang touches all sorts of political third rails: anxiety about AI, fear of a global order dominated by China, disgust at Trump’s corruption, resentment toward tech oligarchs who’ve amassed unfathomable fortunes while doing terrible damage to the social fabric and wider culture. If it turns out that bribes were being paid to administration officials to overlook Huang’s exposure to Chinese influence—besides the ballroom “donation,” I mean—that’s slam-dunk impeachment material.

 

Even Senate Republicans would have a hard time rationalizing voting to acquit. Although I’m confident they’d find a way.

 

In the meantime, though: What did the president know and when did he know it?

 

The fall guy.

 

Actually, we already have some insight into the answer.

 

Per the New York Times, U.S. intelligence was sniffing around Megaspeed last year when it discovered Huang’s “close relationship” with his mistress, whom it suspected of being a Chinese asset. That information was then sent up the chain. Quote: “Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information.”

 

A year ago.

 

The president was allegedly briefed on it again this past May aboard a flight to Alaska, en route to China, by Marco Rubio. Trump intended to have Huang join the delegation during its stopover; Rubio apparently saw the political peril in that, knowing how it would look for the president to have been palling around with a man diddling a Chinese spy after Huang’s affair was inevitably exposed. No matter: “Mr. Trump was not particularly moved by what he heard from his national security adviser, and continued with the plan to pick up Mr. Huang, the people with knowledge of the events said.”

 

On Monday the president took questions in the White House briefing room and was pressed on when he learned about Huang’s dangerous liaison. Didn’t Rubio circulate a highly classified memo about it at some point? I’ll have to check with the intelligence people on that, Trump replied, allowing that the topic might have been broached with him at some point. If it was, though, “certainly, it didn’t make much of an impact on me.”

 

That would be like Harry Truman finding out that Robert Oppenheimer was sleeping with a Soviet agent during the Manhattan Project, doing nothing about it, and later claiming that the whole thing had slipped his mind. But then, that’s always been Trump’s approach to being caught red-handed in a scandal: Simply play it off as no big deal. Act as if there’s nothing to feel scandalized about and those motivated by partisanship to defend you will decide there’s nothing to feel scandalized about.

 

The phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky seeking dirt on Joe Biden was “perfect.” The gabbing with Billy Bush about grabbing women by their privates was “locker-room talk.” The $3 billion Trump has made since returning to office? That was smart stock investments. Doing nothing as China went about (literally) seducing the head of America’s most strategically important company? Sure, that happened. So?

 

How can there be malfeasance if there’s no consciousness of guilt?

 

It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump having Huang join the flight to China despite Rubio’s warning was less a matter of reckless idiocy than of Machiavellian logic. Freezing out the Nvidia chief would have been seen in hindsight as proof that the president grasped the magnitude of Huang’s exposure, making his subsequent refusal to do anything about it that much more damning. But bringing Huang aboard strengthens the “no big deal” defense (which isn’t really a defense, of course). If what he was up to was really so egregious, obviously the president wouldn’t have invited him onto Air Force One, right?

 

Scandals are shameful—so if you don’t show shame, there can’t be a scandal. That playbook has worked for Trump in the past (usually, but not always), so naturally he’s turning to it again.

 

Designating a scapegoat is also part of that playbook, and the White House seems to have settled on one. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick isn’t long for this political world, I fear.

 

In fairness to the president and his cronies, this Axios report makes it sound like Lutnick really does bear considerable blame for the Nvidia-Megaspeed clusterfark. He too reportedly received the Rubio memo about Huang’s affair, and it’s his agency that’s responsible for blocking sales of key American technology to U.S. adversaries. Yet “six high-level sources” told Axios that Lutnick has dragged his feet repeatedly on implementing export controls authorized by Trump.

 

Lutnick seems to have bought into Huang’s argument that selling Nvidia chips to China is better for national security than cutting them off, precisely because doing so might make the Chinese dependent on American technology. That argument hasn’t prevailed in the West Wing, though—apart from the big H200 loophole, I mean—yet he continues to resist Trump’s orders to turn off the tap. Or so those six, very self-interested “high-level sources” would like us to believe.

 

Blaming Howard Lutnick for letting business between Nvidia and Megaspeed proceed feels like blaming Pete Hegseth for the war in Iran. A serious country wouldn’t have let either of them within 500 miles of power, and it’s likely true that both have damaged their respective agencies in ways beyond what the president himself desired. But if the Commerce Department went on looking the other way as China quietly went about eroding a key U.S. strategic advantage, culpability ultimately falls on one man—the same man who gave Hegseth the order to attack. And that man ain’t Howard Lutnick.

 

Why wasn’t the president more alarmed by Beijing’s influence over Jensen Huang? Why didn’t he use the powers available to him to rein in Nvidia and isolate Megaspeed?

 

It’s not business, it’s personal.

 

As usual with Trump, the answer has more to do with the vagaries of personality than with logic.

 

Others have already zeroed in on some of those vagaries: “He admires richer people, like Huang,” journalist John Harwood wrote, trying to explain the president’s indifference toward the scandal. “He fears stronger people, like Xi [Jinping]. He thinks cheating on spouses, like he’s done, is normal. He doesn’t really care about national security, just himself.”

 

At The Atlantic, David Graham pointed out that Trump has always trusted his own instincts when they conflict with U.S. intelligence, as any lowbrow populist confronted by “elites” with information he doesn’t want to hear would. The president may have ignored Rubio’s caution in this case because he had a “good feeling” about Huang or some such nonsense. Or he might have been “worried about the risk to the economy of any Nvidia turmoil,” Graham speculates, which would also be true to form. To Trump, an economic slowdown is the sum of all fears. If he thought turning a blind eye to Nvidia’s black-market sales of chips to China was required to keep the Dow above 50,000, he’d have covered both eyes.

 

But the two most important presidential personality quirks in this matter are also the most obvious. Trump doesn’t much care about national security (or anything, really) relative to his own interests, and examples of this abound, in case leaving state secrets by the commode at Mar-a-Lago wasn’t enough. And he palpably relishes being courted by the richest and most powerful people in the world, of whom Huang is (or was) one. When the president rolls out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin or prattles on about his admiration for Xi, he’s not just mooning over how dreamily authoritarian they are. It’s that they’re big. The biggest. Yet he can get them to take his calls at any time, which means he’s big, too.

 

Trump’s interest in schmoozing movers and shakers and his lack of interest in national security are actually two sides of the same personality coin, I think. The president seems to believe that America’s best defense against the threats it faces are the personal relationships he’s cultivated with influential people. That’s why the Huang scandal is no big deal in his mind, I suspect: You don’t need to worry about China stockpiling Nvidia’s chips because, after all, the president and Xi are “friends.”

 

Statecraft under Trumpism isn’t business. It’s personal.

 

Which, superficially, is weird twice over. It’s weird because the president is often described (with good reason) as “transactional,” and transactional people tend to be coldly calculating rather than invested in the warmth of their business relationships. It’s also weird because Trump is nominally a nationalist and so, one would think, he’d understand intuitively that foreign leaders with whom he transacts will always prioritize their own national interests over their relationships with him.

 

Weird or not, though, he appears to sincerely believe that the better his personal relations with an adversary are, the less threatening that adversary is to the United States. Trump’s first-term summits with Kim Jong Un were premised on the world’s greatest dealmaker somehow charming a belligerent anti-American communist regime into rapprochement. His campaign promises that he would end the Ukraine war in a day imagined him meeting personally with Putin and Zelensky and talking them into peace. He isn’t worried about China invading Taiwan, he says, because his friend, the dictator, personally assured him that he wouldn’t. (Until Trump has left office, that is.)

 

The exception to this “personalist” approach to foreign policy proves the rule. Iran hasn’t had formal diplomatic relations with the United States in nearly 50 years, and Trump has had no relationship with either the former supreme leader or the current one. Even if he tried to build one, the regime’s revolutionary commitment to anti-Americanism would make it impossible. So go figure that he resorted to attacking Iran last year and again this year amid lower-level talks on both occasions that might have peacefully resolved the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

 

Because Trump couldn’t make “friends” with the Iranians personally, he didn’t trust diplomacy to disarm the threat. Here, as elsewhere, he alone could fix it.

 

‘I am the code.’

 

Basing policy on personal relationships is weird. But maybe not that weird under the circumstances.

 

The president may be a nationalist, after all, but he’s also a grandiose narcissist with an autocratic streak a mile wide. Case in point: In September, the Washington Post reported that he had clashed with the original architect of the new White House ballroom over safety features. Trump wanted changes to the plans, but the architect feared those changes would violate the safety code, leaving too few emergency exit routes or fire-containment measures. To which the president allegedly replied, “I am the code.”

 

That’s him all over. Whether it’s turning the ballroom into a death trap, flying around in a plane from Qatar that lacks security measures, bombing Iran in the belief that it wouldn’t dare close the Strait of Hormuz, setting trade policy based on personal grudges, or doing jack squat about Nvidia chips being diverted to China, Trump’s selfish desires and recklessly high risk tolerance routinely override prudent advice from aides to take precautions that might protect others. My guess is that when he was briefed on Jensen Huang’s exposure, he thought, “I know Huang, and I know Xi, and they both like me, so we don’t need to worry about them doing anything to damage the United States that would embarrass me.”

 

He is the code, and if the code permits what Nvidia was up to, that’s all that matters. I hope the president and his fans enjoy that prerogative while it lasts, because it’s not going to last much longer.

Vance Gets Benched

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, November 12, 2026

 

On the podcast, maybe a year ago, I ventured that Donald Trump’s second term would end with him and JD Vance on the outs. Today, I’m feeling confident about my prediction. Judging from Trump’s Truth Social post this morning, we seem to be way ahead of schedule.
For full effect, the post must be quoted in its entirety:

 

I have asked Vice President Vance to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S. The Blue States, such as Minnesota, California, Illinois, and many more, are all poorly run, corrupt disasters. Billions of Dollars is being stolen each and every month. Our Budget could be quickly BALANCED with the correction of this large scale criminal activity. CORRUPTION is in the Democrat Leadership’s blood! We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT

 

I’ve got to praise Trump as an artist. That’s a remarkably skillful work of public humiliation.

 

At first, you think it’s about Trump siccing his best attack dog on corrupt Democrats, and then—boom—it’s about sending that dog off to a nice farm in the country so he can’t tear up the house anymore.

 

It would have been kinder had Trump expressly said that he’s casting Vance into the wilderness for incompetence on Iran and disloyalty after the midterms. Instead, by giving the reader the tools to figure it out, he creates compelling drama.   

 

Hey, it had to happen. After the midterm massacre, the vice president took to X to blame the GOP loss squarely on the president’s decision to attack Iran and, of course, on America’s alliance with Israel.

 

Vance was trying to distance himself from a military confrontation that the U.S. is still engaged in. That’s not merely disloyal to Trump; as Seth points out in a terrific post today, it’s emboldening to the regime in Iran. So, too, was Vance’s grousing about Israel.

 

But, as I’ve been known to say, it’s worse than that. Vance has spent a good year sucking up to media figures who’ve orchestrated a right-wing revolt against the Trump administration. To whatever extent it’s true that former Trump supporters voted Democratic in the midterms because of the Iran war and the U.S.-Israel relationship, it’s largely the work of

Vance’s friends and allies. A day before Election Day, Tucker Carlson tried to set off a panic, claiming that Trump was about to drop a nuclear weapon on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

Vance himself has contributed mightily to the anti-Israel fever that he now blames for GOP losses. On Joe Rogan’s show, he claimed that an Israeli-funded influence operation blew up his U.S.-Iran cease-fire memorandum of understanding—when the Iranians simply rejected it. On the same episode, he stated, without evidence, that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent. And, of course, he likes to scold Israel or point out that its interests and America’s aren’t necessarily aligned.

 

Trump needs this? While he’s trying to win a war and turn around his presidency? Nope. So it’s desk duty for JD.   

 

I’ve never watched The Apprentice, but I now see the appeal. It is fun to watch Trump say, “You’re fired.”

Iran Is Still a Menace

National Review Online

Friday, November 13, 2026

 

The American public may not be interested in the Iran war, but it is still interested in us.

 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been moved from his home to a military base after credible Iranian threats against his life. Bessent helps oversee the crippling financial sanctions imposed on Iran, making him a particular target for the regime.

 

In the past several years, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and President Trump himself have also been the targets of Iranian assassination plots.

 

With the Iran war playing a prominent role in the GOP’s stunning defeat in last week’s elections, there is renewed pressure — both from incoming Democrats and critics on the right — to put an end to the conflict.

 

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that JD Vance had become lead negotiator with Iran, to the point of even contemplating direct talks with a top Iranian security official. The same article related that Trump had started to second-guess the wisdom of the June memorandum of understanding that Vance negotiated and that Trump gladly signed, wondering whether it allowed time for Iran to regroup and earn more oil revenue.

 

On Thursday morning, Trump, who has been vacillating between threatening to bomb Iran and touting imminent peace almost by the day, poured cold water on the idea of any renewed negotiations. The president took to Truth Social to say that he was asking Vance to focus on corruption in Democrat-run cities. “We don’t need a deal with Iran,” Trump wrote. “We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

 

Bombast aside, a status quo in which the U.S. maintains a naval blockade against Iran and escorts ships through the Strait of Hormuz may be the least bad of the remaining options. While maintaining that pressure, the U.S. should also look for ways to actively support the Iranian opposition, something President Trump implicitly promised in January with his “help is on its way” comments. But we obviously cannot bank on the Iranian regime falling or moderating any time soon. It is hard to see what can be accomplished strategically through another weeks-long air campaign, but the immediate diplomatic prospects are dim, as well.

 

Presumably, any deal that Iran would agree to in the aftermath of what it considers its victory in the midterms would be a bad one for the U.S., likely a repeat of Barack Obama’s disastrous Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, if not worse. Under that agreement, Iran enjoyed hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, preserved its ability to enrich uranium, and maintained its ballistic missile program. The scandal of the Iran deal was that even if it worked exactly as intended, it would have still allowed Iran to continue to develop a more powerful conventional military, to sponsor terrorism, and to exert a malign influence within the region and around the world. All the while, restrictions on its nuclear program were set to expire over time, putting the regime on a long-term glide path to weaponization. If any eventual agreements are to be reached with Iran, they must meet two tests: First, do no harm, and second, trade nothing for any promises of future conduct by the Iranians.

 

Iran’s plots against one of the most important U.S. cabinet officials, as well as Americans throughout the Middle East, underline the malignity of an Iranian regime that has been in a conflict with the United States for a half century. In short, it is still very interested in the war, and in doing us harm.