Stephen Miller: Heritage American

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

Here are some names that do not appear on the passenger manifest of the Mayflower: Cheinman, Mandelowitz, Pekar, Grossman, Glosser, Apter, Taubman, Weisberg. According to the family tree over at Geneastar, those are the names of the great-grandparents of Stephen Miller, recently named Donald Trump’s new chief of staff. His family at one point adopted the common Anglo surname Miller, but Mr. Miller is an American thanks to an enterprising ancestor from what is today Belarus, Wolf-Leib Glosser, who arrived on a boat from Antopol, then in the Russian empire, just under 13 decades too late to have fought at Lexington and Concord, 267 years too late to have enrolled in the first class of Harvard, more than a century too late to have attended the constitutional debates about whether Jews (and Muslims and Catholics) should be allowed to hold office or enjoy protection of their religious liberty.

 

It is remarkable how few of those who adhere to the philosophy of conferring privileges upon “heritage Americans” or cling to advocates of that view are white Protestants such as James Talarico (grandson of a Baptist pastor from South Texas) or Barbara Bush (a Talarico donor whose ancestors did, in fact, arrive on the Mayflower) and how many are Jews such as Mr. Miller and his family, Hindus such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Mrs. J.D. Vance and her family, Arabs such as Alina Habba and Janette Nesheiwat (the daughters of immigrants from Iraq and Jordan, respectively), scions of relatively recently arrived families (anti-immigration activist Mark Krikorian is the grandson of refugees who fled the Ottoman Empire to escape the Armenian genocide), etc. But, then, one also thinks of how many of our “nationalists” and super-patriots have maintained Budapest mailing addresses for all these recent years or how many right-wing champions of traditional masculinity are such men as literal cuckoldry fetishist Roger Stone or Claremont figure John Goldman (who calls himself “Jack Murphy”), another literal cuckold fetishist and sometime performer in homoerotic pornography, or else devotees of Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, a barely closeted homosexual with a thing for “young blond boys,” as Stone put it. (“Roy was not gay,” Stone insisted to The New Yorker. “He was a man who liked having sex with men.” Well, then!) An odd gaggle of geese, these butch gentlemen who delight in watching Donald Trump dance to the Village People while casting a connoisseur’s eye on other men’s assets.

 

Trump, himself the son of an immigrant mother and the grandson of an immigrant—and a tax-dodging, horse-butchering Yukon pimp, at that—says of Miller that he wants a country in which everyone looks like him, but that isn’t quite right. Miller has shown himself somewhat fixated on the immediate postwar era—one of the things sentimental right-wingers have in common with sentimental progressives is an idiotically idealized view of the 1950s. Mr. Miller, poorly if expensively educated, may not be entirely familiar with what was actually going on in the United States in the halcyon 1950s and 1960s, but it is worth knowing that elite institutions such as Ivy League universities were still actively discriminating against Jews such as himself, for instance by limiting the enrollment of Jewish applicants to universities under the old numerus clausus system. But Mr. Miller’s family was doing alright in those years, and maybe that is the point. The Millers had advanced high enough up the ladder to start to think about pulling it up behind them.

 

There is a peculiar tendency among well-off members of certain minority groups to romanticize and idealize the historical moment just after people such as themselves and their ancestors were welcomed into mainstream society and ceased to be, culturally speaking, minorities. Italian Americans represent a good example of this, the sting of anti-Italian sentiment having faded into a cultural curiosity that no one thinks about very much unless they are watching The Godfather Part II. There are more than a few Irish-American political commentators and activists who hold views on immigration that are identical to those of certain gentlemen of an earlier generation who would have sent their Irish ancestors’ potato-eating asses back to Dingle on the first leaky ship that could be commandeered for the purpose. John Adams grew up near Boston, the U.S. city now most strongly associated with Irish-Catholic immigrant culture, but Adams himself had never seen a Catholic church until he visited Philadelphia as an adult because Catholic practice was legally restricted in Massachusetts, where no Mass was publicly celebrated until Adams was 53 years old. It is very strange to me that so many of the same people who claim to celebrate American tradition and American heritage also envision an “integrated” social order in which American affairs are ordered by Catholic religious and social teaching. It is also strange that Jews such as Stephen Miller believe that these people are, in the long term, his allies, as though the “problem” of Jewish-American political power per se were not already an obsession on the Catholic fringe right. What those recently (in the great sweep of history) assimilated groups have in common is parents or grandparents who were doing pretty well by the Kennedy-Johnson years, which makes it easy to forget what came before, e.g., having one’s children beaten bloody for walking down the wrong street in one of the Balkanized ethnic neighborhoods of Philadelphia or Chicago, or being unable to get a job at one of the best banks or law firms whatever one’s qualifications, or a house in one of the better neighborhoods whatever one’s means, if you had a surname ending in a vowel or -berg or -witz. Not every U.S. minority group suffers from that problem—African Americans and Mexican Americans are notably exempt from it—but it is curious how common it is.

 

This is America, and Americans are not beholden to our ancestries, even to our immediate parentage. As such, there is no reason that Krikorian, a thoughtful and intelligent man, cannot legitimately and honorably hold the positions on immigration he holds simply because of who his grandparents were or that Mr. Miller cannot advocate policies that, in the words of his uncle, would have meant that “his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol,” had those policies been in place at the time. Writing in Politico, that uncle, David S. Glosser, adds:

 

Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was no state-sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children, and we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.

 

The miracle of America is made possible by certain virtues, including our liberal, commercial culture and the intelligent principles underlying our constitutional order. But that miracle also is advanced, in an important way, by certain American vices: our materialism, our selfishness, our short-sightedness, our historical forgetfulness, our habit of conducting ourselves as though we were a people with no ancestors and no progeny. “The fierce urgency of now” is something that cuts both ways. Mr. Miller’s urgent now may dishonor the memory of his ancestors and it may lead to the social and political diminishment of some future generation of his family, but these are tenuous things, and Mr. Miller is an American who, being fully assimilated, has little use for the past or the future except as servants of his immediate appetites and interests—it is not difficult to see why Trump regards him as a kindred spirit, or at least a kindred stomach with a similar appetite for grift, petty advantage-seeking, retribution, and the servicing of grievances.

 

Mr. Miller’s low character is not rooted in his holding views of which some of his ancestors may have disapproved; his low character is attested to by his viciousness, fanaticism, smallness, ignorance, arrogance, and dishonesty. What is interesting about his holding the views he holds on immigration as a descendant of Jewish refugees is how it attests to the power of nostalgia, however idiotically that nostalgia is come to.

 

It also attests to the awesome power of grift.

 

On Fox News’ The Five, grifty Trump sycophant Emily Compagno (no Compagnos on the Mayflower, either) celebrated the elevation of Mr. Miller to chief of staff, insisting that “the American people want Stephen Miller in power,” which is a damned funny thing to say in the wake of Tuesday’s elections. But grift is a short-term game, too: People such as Compagno will continue saying whatever baloney they think Fox News viewers want to hear for as long as the ivermectin money keeps coming. Dan Bongino may have lost the respect of everybody he ever has worked with and embarrassed himself as a comprehensive failure at the FBI, but he got paid—and that, evidently, is what matters to a man such as that. Honor is not a meaningful consideration to such men, and neither is shame. Mr. Miller feels at home among such specimens for obvious enough reasons.

 

And that is the thing to understand about Donald Trump, Trump-ism, and the universe of misfits, criminals, and degenerates surrounding the lame-duck president: It has always been a grift, and it will keep being a grift. Trump does not care about his political forebears or progeny any more than Miller cares about his literal ones. Having been humiliated in the midterms and lost any opportunity to secure congressional power to use for his purposes, Trump can be expected to invest zero time, zero effort, and $0.00 in the political future of the Republican Party, which he judges to be of no use at all—finally, the president and I find something about which to agree.

 

In fact, Trump’s appetites may be better served by betraying and abusing Republicans and the voters who brought him twice to power—as much as he pretends to hold the media in contempt and prefer the goodwill of those “real Americans” out there in the farms and the meth rehabs, Trump is manifestly a man who cares intensely what the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the men at the commanding heights of American business think about him. It would be very easy for him to buy some goodwill from progressive-aligned sources of power and prestige by, e.g., flip-flopping once again on abortion and abandoning entirely the pro-life cause, something about which Trump has never cared and can barely be bothered to pretend to care except inasmuch as it was profitable to do so. Gun-rights advocates should probably watch their backs, too.

 

Trump is a lame duck, to be sure, but avian metaphors are the wrong ones: Ducks, even lame ones, cannot get rabies. Trump is the rabid trash-panda out there rummaging around in the great American dumpster. The old rabies treatment still in use when I was a youngster involved something like 20 excruciatingly painful shots to the stomach. The current treatment is much easier to bear. Americans have just signed up for the political equivalent of a self-administered rabies shot, and, as a conservative, I expect that it is going to hurt some.

 

But the alternative to a rabies shot is rabies, and surely with such a figure as Stephen Miller roaming around the White House we’ve all had quite enough foaming at the mouth already.

 

Words About Words

 

Some metaphors get mixed, others get vivisected and then run through a Cuisinart by Ron DeSantis:

 

“We got wiped out in Texas, the biggest anchor we have in Republican politics,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Wednesday. “So really, Florida is the last main anchor standing.”

 

I think he meant “last man standing” but may have chickened out, consciously or subconsciously, about the gender-inclusive use of man. Anchors don’t just stand there, and if you’re down to your last anchor—how’d that even happen, cap’n?

 

That isn’t what “disinterested” means, Noah Rothman:

 

Throughout it, [Troy Jackson] has appeared disinterested in the race he’s running, and he’s shown peevish irritation when pressed to engage with it. Jackson’s recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash was, in my view, illustrative of his frustration with the indignities of the public life he sought for himself.

 

Disinterested means impartial, free from selfish motive. The word for uninterested is uninterested.

 

That isn’t what “lampooned” means, some jackass Young Republican:

 

“I’ve always supported the administration, but this Israel-first policy that has been employed has absolutely lampooned us nationally,” [Stefano] Forte wrote. “I lost major opportunities and was blackballed for saying this. Feeling very vindicated now.”

 

A lampoon is a piece of pointed, humorous mockery, usually written. The kind of thing one might write about America First guys who can’t quite manage the language used in these United States of America. Hey, Young Republican: Maybe you lost opportunities because you seem stupid when you speak.

 

That isn’t what “mitigate” means, National Review editors:

 

Trump also did himself and his party no favors. Though he closed the border and expanded the signature tax cuts from his first term, he mitigated these wins with unforced errors. Despite being given a second term in large part because of consumer frustration with the cost of living, he decided to pursue an erratic and unconstitutional tariff policy, which, by design, made consumer goods more expensive.

 

To mitigate something is to improve it by making it less harsh or severe. A win is a good thing, and you don’t mitigate it, or anything else, with mistakes—you diminish it.

 

That isn’t what other means, Daily Beast marketing email:

 

Unlike other cowards, we never bowed down to the MAGA bullies. We fearlessly revealed the truth about Trump’s failing health, the shameless corruption, and the rotten state of MAGA’s failed candidates. And we’re only getting started.

 

The literal sense of the above is: “Yes, we are cowards, but we are unlike other cowards in this way.”

 

That isn’t what history means, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times:

 

When Beto O’Rourke ran for Senate in 2018, he was on his own, without a strong slate of statewide candidates. But this year, [Gina] Hinojosa was running alongside James Talarico, the young, dynamic Senate candidate, and, for the first time in Texas history, Democratic candidates in every statehouse and congressional district. “We’re ready,” she said.

 

The claim about the Democratic statewide slate is not true.

 

This is the end product of a game of telephone. This was the first time in recent history that the Democrats have fielded a candidate in every Texas statehouse and congressional district, but not the first time in history. If you go back and read the history of this claim, you can see the word “recent” suddenly disappear between one account and the next.

 

In 1965, for instance, the Texas state Senate was 100 percent Democratic and the state House was entirely Democratic save one Republican, who had run against a Democrat, while the U.S. House delegation from Texas was entirely Democratic and Republican Sen. John Tower had been elected over Democrat William A. Blakley in a special election in 1961 to replace Lyndon Johnson, who had vacated the seat to become vice president. The Democrats not only fielded a candidate in every race, they won practically all of them. But it has been a while.

 

This kind of thing happens. You may have heard the urban legend that domestic-abuse incidents skyrocket during the Super Bowl, which is fiction. There was a study showing that emergency-room visits in Washington seemed to increase very slightly on game days when the Redskins lost, which got repeated with embellishments until it became a story about domestic violence and then a story about domestic violence and the Super Bowl. Total baloney, but baloney that everybody knows to be true even though it isn’t.

The Inconvenient Truth at the Center of the Immigration Debate

By Blas Nuñez-Neto

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

Have liberals learned anything from the border crisis that helped return Donald Trump to office two years ago? Many have not, if a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union is any indication. The group claims to offer a “way forward” for the country’s asylum system, which has become a back door for economic migrants. But the ACLU instead recycles arguments that immigration advocates have made for decades. Too many progressives fail to understand, or acknowledge, the real reason migrants, including those intending to seek asylum, cross the border illegally: People come when they think they can stay.

 

I have been working on border and immigration policy for more than 20 years, serving in senior roles at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security as well as Senate staff. I have seen, up close, surges in illegal immigration under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Again and again, the loudest and most extreme voices have set the immigration agenda for each party, to the detriment of the country. Despite Trump’s concession in yesterday’s 60 Minutes interview that his administration’s handling of immigration was “too tough,” his elevation of the anti-immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as his chief of staff suggests that this trend will continue. Immigration advocates who deplore the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics have an obligation to propose realistic, constructive alternatives.

 

Yet on the left, the ACLU and other immigration advocates continue to argue that enforcement at the border, including restrictions on asylum eligibility, do not prevent or deter illegal immigration; they simply create pent-up demand and encourage migrants to attempt more dangerous routes. As a result, according to advocacy groups, the only way to stem the tide of illegal immigration is to address the underlying problems that push people to leave their countries, and to provide more legal pathways for these migrants to come to the United States.

 

In reality, the United States’ inability to promptly remove those who lack a legal basis to remain in the country has been the driving force behind every major surge in illegal immigration since the Obama administration.

 

***

 

The U.S. asylum system, created by Congress at the height of the Cold War, presumes that almost everyone who passes an initial screening deserves legal protection. As a result, more than 80 percent of people who claimed asylum at the border from 2014 to 2019 were released into the country, yet immigration judges ultimately granted asylum in less than a fifth of these cases. This legal process can take years, during which seekers are allowed to apply to work, which makes it easy for economic migrants to game the system. Nobody would spend $15,000 in smuggling fees and experience the mortal dangers of the journey north if they didn’t believe that they could stay and get a job.

 

Before 2011, only about 2 percent of people who crossed the border illegally claimed asylum. But as word got out that most people who claim asylum at the border are let in, the percentage of undocumented border crossers who claimed asylum steadily increased, to 16 percent in 2013 and then to 59 percent in 2023––far outstripping the U.S. government’s capacity to process applications in a timely manner.

 

The Obama administration experienced its first surge in migration from Central American families claiming asylum at the border. At the time, advocacy groups persuaded senior officials and key members of Congress to focus on the root causes of illegal immigration—such as violence, corruption, and political instability in other countries—instead of tackling the incentives in the asylum system that encouraged migrants to come here. In 2016, the U.S. invested a record $750 million in aid in projects to create jobs, enhance governance, and improve security in the region. The initiative made modest improvements, but could not fix the problems that were encouraging so many people to flee. What kept illegal border crossings at manageable levels on President Obama’s watch was an increase in border security, a more stringent enforcement of immigration laws within the country, and record-high deportation numbers—for which immigration advocates gave the president the not-so-flattering title of “Deporter-in-Chief.”

 

At the start of Trump’s first term, the new president’s tough talk about the “invasion” at the border seemed to have deterred some would-be migrants and so further reduced illegal crossings. But migrants soon realized that they could still game America’s asylum system. By 2019 Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border exceeded 850,000, up 115 percent from 2018. Trump’s initial response—to separate the families of asylum seekers at the border—was both ineffective at deterring migration and abhorrent to many Americans. Other restrictions on asylum that his administration introduced in 2019, such as the “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases played out in U.S. court, had inhumane consequences but did curb border crossings. Emergency measures during the coronavirus pandemic cut the number of crossings even more. But as the pandemic eased, people began moving north again.

 

When President Biden took office in January 2021, illegal crossings had already begun to surge, averaging 70,000 a month from October 2020 through his inauguration. Instead of addressing this problem, Biden spent his first days in office fulfilling campaign promises to immigration advocates. He announced a moratorium on deportations and ended Trump’s asylum restrictions, sending a clear message that the U.S. border was going to be open. He also put Vice President Harris in charge of a strategy to invest more than $5.2 billion in private-sector funds to create more economic opportunities in Central America, which once again did not reduce immigration from the region.

 

***

 

Another common argument among immigration advocates is that expanding access to legal immigration will take pressure off the border. The problem is that no realistic amount of legal pathways will satisfy global demand to immigrate to the United States. When I was in the Biden administration, we oversaw the largest expansion of lawful pathways for migrants in a generation, explicitly to reduce illegal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. What we found was that illegal crossings dropped only when they triggered clear consequences at the border, such as repatriation of ineligible asylum seekers to Mexico. The United States can and should increase legal pathways for immigrants, but the goal should be to enhance economic growth and reunite families—not to prevent illegal immigration.

 

There is a cruel irony in the fact that, by pushing policies that enable economic migrants to gain entry into the United States via the asylum system, human-rights advocates have encouraged migrants to put their lives at risk on their way to the U.S. border. In 2023, I was part of a delegation to Colombia and Panama to urge those governments to close the Darién Gap—a treacherous and sometimes lethal route between the two countries through which migrants trekked to the United States. From a helicopter, I saw thousands of people streaming out of the jungle after a week-long ordeal. On the ground, we met children who survived the journey but were alarmingly weak from exhaustion and dehydration. We learned that human-rights groups were providing migrants with supplies—including birth control for women, many of whom would be sexually assaulted by smugglers during the illegal crossing. I believe that none of those migrants would have risked these dangers if they didn’t think that the United States would let them stay.

 

The Biden administration learned the hard way that the only reliable way to deter illegal immigration was to restrict asylum—such as by setting more stringent screening criteria and requiring asylum seekers to set up interview appointments in advance and use a designated port of entry—and increase resources to enforce these laws at the border. In 2023, these curbs on asylum-seeking worked initially, but encounters at the border with Mexico surged when enforcement by Mexican authorities waned, and fell sharply when this enforcement expanded in concert with U.S. efforts in early 2024. By mid-2024, when Biden introduced more asylum restrictions at the border, encounters dropped by roughly 55 percent—from about 120,000 in May to about 56,000 in July.

 

But by then, the perception that his party couldn’t or wouldn’t keep the border under control had helped doom Democrats’ prospects in the November election. Following the advice of immigration advocates when he took office and waiting too long to change course were among Biden’s biggest mistakes.

 

At least some progressive leaders seem keen to avoid these mistakes. “I think we’ve learned the lesson,” Michigan Senator-Elect Abdul El-Sayed said about the chaos at the border under Biden in a preelection 60 Minutes interview with Ross Douthat. “You can humanely enforce the border.”

 

***

 

Voters are plainly tired of the wild swings in policy between permissiveness and cruelty. The Trump administration’s poll numbers on immigration suggest that the president’s merciless approach to migrants—which led to the fatal shootings of people protesting enforcement actions—contributed to his party’s stunning electoral defeat last week. Trump promised a crackdown on the “worst of the worst.” Instead, his administration has redeployed federal resources that were once used to address and prevent more serious crimes, such as terrorism, fentanyl smuggling, and child sex trafficking, to deport otherwise law-abiding people in the United States.

 

The Trump administration has also waged an all-out war on legal immigration, rescinding the lawful status of about 1.8 million immigrants, restricting access to green cards, halting visa processing in mostly nonwhite countries, and cutting naturalizations of new U.S. citizens by 75 percent. This despite the warnings of economists that these policies would measurably harm economic growth. American agricultural producers now say that ICE’s indiscriminate raids are hurting domestic farmers and threaten to raise grocery prices even further.

 

Like Biden, Trump is listening too closely to the most radical voices in his coalition—and he has paid a political price for it. Every single congressional district on the U.S. border with Mexico is projected to be held by a Democrat next year. But his promotion of Miller, the architect of his cruel and nativist approach to immigration, suggests that he has not learned from this electoral rebuke.

 

Most Americans hold heterodox views on border and immigration policies: They want strong enforcement at the border, but they want this enforcement to be fair and humane, and for people who have otherwise lawfully contributed to their communities for years to be able to stay. Immigration policy shouldn’t be just the province of ACLU-style progressives and hard-liners such as Miller. Lawmakers should stop pandering to the extremes of their bases and step up to fix America’s broken immigration and asylum system once and for all.

How This Administration Talks About Itself

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

The world will little note nor long remember what the new White House chief of staff had to say after getting the job — but maybe it deserves a little more notoriety.

 

It was the privilege of a lifetime to join President Trump all the way back in 2015 when he came down that golden escalator.

 

And let me tell you, if it wasn’t for President Trump, the United States of America would not exist right now. This man saved America.

 

He saved our military from collapse. He saved our economy from destruction. He saved our border from annihilation. And he saved our country from threats at home and abroad, which would have been the end of the American dream forever.

 

This man took a bullet for us. He faced down life in prison for us. He saved the Republican Party from the ash heap of history and has made it stronger, more popular, and more resilient than ever before.

 

We need to stand with the man who has stood with us and this country with every fiber of his being. It is the honor of my life to be President Trump’s chief of staff, and I swear to you, and I pledge to you, Mr. President, my absolute loyalty, my unwavering commitment, and my total devotion to your success and the success of this country.

 

There are several true, and even more plausible, things one could say in praise of President Trump. Miller hurtled light years beyond anything remotely sane.

 

We’re used to it by now. Trump aides speak this way about their boss so routinely that Miller’s comments hardly stand out, even though they would have in any other president’s administration, no matter how egomaniacal the president.

 

If the White House is this detached from reality, it would explain a lot. There are other possible explanations for why an intelligent adult might talk this way in public, or why his boss might want him to. Maybe Trump just enjoys flattery, or making his underlings abase themselves. Maybe he thinks it sends a useful message to other employees, or that it’s still important to cater to the fans who find this sort of thing amusing and delightful.

 

The way top officials in the Trump administration speak about the president does not give anyone not deep in the bunker confidence in him. It also does not suggest that these officials are encouraged to give him candid, reality-based advice. Which would also explain a lot.

The Grandest Bargain

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

On Friday Stephen Miller was named White House chief of staff. I’m chuffed about it.

 

Honesty in politics is rare, especially under this administration, so I appreciate it when I see it. Replacing Susie Wiles with Miller is like a lizard person peeling off its skinsuit to reveal the monster underneath. Wiles was a placid professional mask of semirespectability on a snarling fascist project; repudiated by Americans and freed by lame-duckery from ever again needing to care what they think, the president has decided there’s no longer any need to keep up pretenses.

 

Like his boss, Miller has always seemed to me less a person than a personality type. Inspect any authoritarian movement in history, and you’ll find the two of them under other names: the charismatic megalomaniac at the head of the mob and the sadistic ideologue whispering in his ear to be more ruthless. More so than anyone in government, the new chief of staff embodies the foulest aspects of postliberalism—demagoguery, tribalism, obsession with purging undesirables, and slavish obsequiousness.

 

“I pledge to you, Mr. President, my absolute loyalty, my unwavering commitment, and my total devotion to your success and the success of this country,” Miller said on Friday evening at an event at Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump has his Roy Cohn at last and now, by extension, so do we. Americans are about to get their clearest look yet at what they empowered by electing these cretins in 2024.

 

That’s another reason I’m pleased with Miller’s appointment. It raises the odds of a second Republican wipeout at the polls in 2028.

 

No conservative can look forward to that without misgivings. A second blue tsunami two years from now would give Democrats total control of government, possibly with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. They’ll use that power irresponsibly in some ways, as all parties granted unchecked power do. But another drubbing for the GOP after two years of Miller steering this rocket into the ground might deliver what last week’s rout did not, a repudiation not just of Trump but of Trumpism.

 

If you want to convince the American right that its postliberal experiment was a disaster that must never be repeated, letting Miller spend two years grossing out already disaffected swing voters is a good way to do it. Maybe he’ll talk Trump into suspending habeas corpus for illegal immigrants, as he reportedly tried to do once before. Maybe he’ll have journalists arrested in hopes of squeezing them into giving up their sources, an idea allegedly opposed by Wiles but favored by Miller. Maybe he’ll keep rhetorically dancing on the graves of Americans killed by federal agents by smearing them as “domestic terrorists.”

 

Sources told the New York Times that Miller’s top priority as chief of staff “is rebuilding the fractured MAGA coalition and pursuing policies that will energize the voters who elected Mr. Trump in 2024,” which sounds like a fancy way of saying he intends to be more ruthless. Two more years of the White House behaving indifferently, or even antagonistically, toward Americans might get the president’s job approval down into the low 30s by the time the next election rolls around. And that might finish off this garbage movement once and for all.

 

On Friday, shortly before he announced the shake-up in the West Wing, Trump revealed to Ross Douthat of 60 Minutes what appears to be the first plank in the great “reenergizing MAGA” effort to come. With nativist fanatic Stephen Miller by his side, the president said he’s eager to pursue … a deal with Democrats to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.

 

Wait, what? What?

 

‘Too tough.’

 

No kidding. It wasn’t Douthat who broached the subject, either. Trump brought it up when asked to name one thing he’d like to work with the new Democratic majorities in Congress to achieve.

 

The mass deportation program has been “too tough,” the president allowed. “When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as, you know, as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lotta good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden, they’re being taken outta the country, it’s tough,” he observed.

 

“There’s a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out,” Trump conceded, neglecting to mention that his new chief of staff is the spiritual leader of that faction. But the president appears to share the preferences of those who believe the White House should “work a deal” for nonviolent illegal immigrants “that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years.”

 

Why would a guy who wants to work with the left on comprehensive immigration reform, forging the grandest of potential grand bargains, put the one person in the White House who’s most hostile to that idea in charge of his administration?

 

Simple, you might say. Trump doesn’t actually want to work with Democrats on amnesty. He’s dangling the prospect of an immigration deal at them in hopes of persuading them to put the brakes on their plans to investigate him for corruption. There’ll be no cooperation on policy if they insist on waging war on him, obviously—but if they play nice, he’s suggesting, the sort of “border security in exchange for legalization” compromise that’s eluded Washington for years might be possible.

 

That might be what he’s up to. But I’m skeptical.

 

The strange truth is that the president has never been as militant about deporting illegals en masse as Miller and the right’s most racist elements are. In the past he’s shown sympathy for so-called DREAMers. He’s made promiscuous use of H-2B visas to hire seasonal foreign workers to do the proverbial jobs Americans won’t do at his various properties. He endorsed H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants when the right clashed over that topic shortly after he was reelected.

 

And as far back as February, he was reportedly telling advisers that “he wasn’t comfortable with how far Miller has gone on some fronts” on immigration, noting that business officials had called him to complain “about longtime workers being thrown out of the country.” The president may be a nativist, but he’s a rich country-clubbing entrepreneur first and foremost. He appreciates cheap foreign labor in a way that few of his devotees ever have or will.

 

In fact, if he does pursue an immigration deal with Democrats, it won’t be the first time.

 

In January 2018, he proposed “a path to citizenship for as many as 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants in exchange for an end to decades of family-based migration policies, a costly border wall, and a vast crackdown on other immigrants living in the country illegally.” That plan, co-authored by Stephen Miller, ended up going nowhere in the Senate because immigration proposals traditionally never go anywhere in the Senate, but if you’re dubious that Trump would ever spend political capital on an amnesty bill, be advised that he did so once before.

 

The timing of that 2018 bill was interesting in hindsight. A month earlier Trump’s job approval had fallen to 37.2 percent, which would turn out to be the worst number of his first term. (Worse even than after January 6.) Now here he is, a few days removed from the worst electoral blowout since Watergate, once again floating a major compromise on immigration. His attitude toward mass deportation resembles his attitude toward ending Roe v. Wade: He recognizes that the activists on his side support it but that most Americans do not, so when his political position turns precarious, he tilts toward trying to appease the majority at the expense of his base.

 

And he’s right in this case about what most Americans want. For someone so prone to self-delusion, Trump can be surprisingly clear-eyed about electoral realities. “I won on the border, and I won on groceries,” he said after he was reelected in 2024, alluding to high inflation during the Biden era. He was right. Two years later, he’s right again: Exit polling last week put ICE’s approval at 40-60 while 58 percent of voters said they believed the administration’s actions on immigration enforcement had gone too far.

 

Hispanics, the demographic affected most directly by mass deportation, broke 70-29 for Democrats last week. That was a 30-point swing from the 2024 election and nearly matched the magnitude of the landslide among that constituency that Republicans suffered in the last presidential election before Trump. (The party’s reaction to that rout was to propose—ta da—an amnesty deal.) The multiracial working-class coalition that MAGA thought it had built collapsed in one cycle thanks in part to “too tough” immigration policies.

 

Incentives for compromise.

 

I can’t imagine that Democrats will work with the president on immigration while Miller is on an authoritarian rampage in the executive branch, “cracking skulls” and contriving fake emergencies to justify new abuses of power.

 

The White House’s fash-y excesses will infuriate the left-wing base and make it impossible for likely Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries to compromise with Republicans. If there were even a small chance of the two parties avoiding all-out war over the next two years, Trump putting a “wartime consigliere” in charge of his operation presumably extinguished it.

 

But let’s say I’m wrong about that and the two sides figure out a way to compartmentalize, cooperating sporadically on policy matters of mutual interest while tearing each other apart during oversight battles. Would comprehensive immigration reform stand the slightest chance of passing?

 

Actually … yes? “The slightest chance” means no more than 5 percent, but I do think that chance exists.

 

It’s a question of incentives. Historians are invited to correct me, but it may be that America has never before seen consecutive election cycles in which first one party and then the other suffered devastating losses for mishandling the same policy. Democrats lost the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2024 partly because the Biden administration was too lax about enforcing immigration law. Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2026 partly because the Trump administration was too draconian about enforcing it.

 

Last week’s wave swept numerous left-wing candidates into Senate seats in red states like Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, and (probably) Mississippi. To improve their chances of holding those seats in 2032, Democrats will need to show those states’ right-leaning majorities that they aren’t as hostile to border enforcement as they were during the Biden years. To improve their chances of winning them back, Republicans will need to show those states’ swing voters that they aren’t as hostile to nonviolent illegal immigrants and the “domestic terrorists” protesting ICE as they were during the first two years of Trump’s second term.

 

Hispanics in particular have emerged as a critical, arguably decisive bloc over these last two cycles. Trump nearly won the group outright two years ago en route to reelection; Democrats annihilated Republicans among Hispanics this year en route to the largest congressional popular-vote margin in more than 50 years. Left and right each have no choice but to compete aggressively for this cohort going forward, and competing aggressively evidently means rejecting the alienating immigration extremism of their respective activist wings.

 

Simply put, both sides have considerably more reason to embrace an “enforcement for legalization” trade-off than they did in 2018, the last time Trump offered the left a deal. And on paper, it’s doable.

 

Come next year, Democrats could have as many as 56 Senate seats, requiring just four Republican votes to beat a filibuster and get a compromise bill to the president’s desk. (Assuming that all 56 Democrats support the bill, that is—a hugely questionable assumption given how “poison pills” have tanked immigration bills in the past.) Could there be four GOP votes in favor in the chamber if Trump champions the deal, giving Republicans cover from the right-wing base?

 

Well, the famously maverick Lisa Murkowski will still be there and looking for ways to play to the center in Alaska. Florida’s Ashley Moody will be up for a full six-year term in 2028 and should worry about Hispanic support after beating a far-left challenger in last week’s special election by less than 3 points. Ted Budd of North Carolina just watched Democrats win a Senate seat in his own home state by nearly 20, giving him good reason to tack toward the middle. And Iowa’s Chuck Grassley is 93 years old and uncertain about running for reelection, making him the wildest of wild cards.

 

Sixty votes isn’t likely. But the gravitational realities of American politics before last Tuesday and since last Tuesday are not the same.

 

‘Trump Care for All.’

 

To pass an immigration bill, Senate Democrats will need to steel themselves against pressure from progressive activists.

 

The left will oppose any compromise, believing that the party is likely to have total control of government after the next cycle and can write its own amnesty bill without enforcement concessions to the right. But that’s precisely why Democratic leaders should prefer a bipartisan compromise now: An amnesty-heavy security-light agenda in 2029 would risk reantagonizing Hispanics and would be difficult for James Talarico and other red-state liberals to defend. Partnering with Trump gives Democrats an excuse to moderate.

 

More importantly, a deal before the next presidential election would neuter Republican “open borders” attacks on Democrats in the next cycle. “We can’t wait until 2029 to bring the undocumented out of the shadows!” Schumer and Jeffries might say to leftists, recycling a favorite metaphor of immigration doves.

 

Trump, meanwhile, will need to steel himself against pressure from right-wing border hawks, a constituency that wasn’t thrilled with his 2018 immigration offer and is newly skeptical of his leadership after last week’s electoral debacle.

 

The more ambitious his proposed compromise is, the more viciously those hawks will turn on him. The mystery—one of the biggest in politics following the blue tsunami, in fact—is whether he’ll care. Does a man who’s always seemed to view his return to power in terms of pure self-indulgence, an opportunity to punish his enemies and build ballrooms and get rich, give a flying fig about what his base wants now that he’ll never again need to worry about an election?

 

Frankly, he might quietly savor the chance to sign comprehensive immigration reform.

 

Trump has always loved the idea of doing big audacious things that his predecessors couldn’t or wouldn’t: meeting with Kim Jong Un, attacking Iran, seizing Venezuela’s oil, expanding America’s map by adding territory like Greenland. Democrats understand that about him and will seek to exploit it. Yesterday incoming Sen. Abdul El-Sayed made the president an offer regarding single-payer healthcare: “If he wants to pass Trump Care for All, which will guarantee health care to everyone and put his name on it like he’s putting his name on everything, I’m game.”

 

It isn’t crazy to think that a man so desperate for lasting legacies that he tried to give JFK second billing on the Kennedy Center beneath his own name would leap at an opportunity to make “Trump Care for All” happen. And guess what: Unlike immigration reform, single-payer healthcare might plausibly qualify for passage by a simple majority under the Senate’s budget reconciliation rules. Democrats, a party that could soon have 56 votes in the chamber, would need only 51 to put it on the president’s desk.

 

You might be the only president with the juice to get this over the finish line, they’ll tell him. Do you want to be remembered as the man who saved American healthcare? Or do you want to be remembered as the man who vetoed it, allowing us to take all the credit for ourselves if we manage to get this done with a Democratic president in 2029?

 

The danger of handing over your party to a man who prioritizes his interests over your ideology is that, well, he’ll prioritize his interests over your ideology. Trump’s second-term agenda, which has been startlingly left-wing in some respects, reflects that. And as he immerses himself fully in his “YOLO phase,” he might logically be willing to follow his own preferences at the expense of conservative dogma even more ruthlessly than he has over the past 10 years.

 

He didn’t get into politics to serve Republican voters; he got into politics so that they could serve him. Now that he no longer has any use for them electorally, it’s anyone’s guess how much or how little he’ll take their views into consideration when Democrats offer him a chance to make history—especially on paradigm-shifting initiatives like comprehensive immigration reform or Medicare for All that poll well.

 

“At some point I suspect Mr. Trump is going to turn on his party,” Peggy Noonan wrote last week following the tsunami. “They didn’t deserve him, they let him down, he tried to help them but they wouldn’t let him. It’s going to be real bunker talk. It’s how he was probably always destined to wind up, swiveling around from the desk and telling the audience it’s fired.” There will be plenty of “bunker talk,” it’s true—making Miller chief of staff is the first murmuring—but resentment and retribution might not be the president’s only motives for betraying his party.

 

Securing landmark legislative achievements, which he’s failed to do despite his own party having controlled Congress for four of his six years as president, might be another. If Democrats are willing to help him belatedly secure the sort of legacy that Republicans couldn’t (a big if!), he’ll hear them out. Possibly whether Stephen Miller, skull-cracker, likes it or not.

America Needs an Arsenal of Democracies

By Mackenzie Eaglen & Daniel Flesch

Tuesday, November 10, 2026

 

An Israeli-developed missile is now rolling off an American production line. On October 9, Raytheon-Rafael Protection Systems, an American Israeli joint venture, announced the first Tamir interceptors manufactured in Camden, Ark. They are intended for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, with plans to produce a U.S. variant for the Marine Corps.

 

The Camden facility builds on decades of allied weapons production, including the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile with West Germany as well as the F-16 with multiple partners. But today’s conflicts require an industrial network that produces weapons at scale, maintains deliveries during disruptions, and replenishes forces across theaters. Co-production alone does not deliver that. It changes where a weapon is built; resilience depends on whether production can continue when something breaks.

 

The Camden example illustrates the potential and promise of allied defense production. The United States and its allies need alternative suppliers, geographically dispersed facilities, and systems for replenishing weapons during prolonged conflicts.

 

By combining American and allied innovation and manufacturing, Washington can strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base and expand capacity to meet shared threats. To safeguard American interests this century, the United States should renew “freedom’s forge” at home while building an arsenal of democracies abroad.

 

Recent conflicts underscore the urgency. During Operation Epic Fury, American forces reportedly fired more than 200 THAAD interceptors — more than two years’ output at the previously announced annual rate of 96. Capacity plans to raise production to 400 are a sign of progress, but repeated operations could consume that output while leaving depleted stockpiles unrestored. And because much of the funding to replenish stockpiles depends on the reconciliation bill’s passage, there is no guarantee it will arrive, leaving interceptor reserves further imperiled.

 

Ukraine demonstrates how quickly sustained combat consumes affordable weapons. During intense fighting in 2022–2023, its forces were estimated to fire 4,000–7,000 artillery rounds daily across multiple calibers. Ukrainian companies also produced and assembled more than 1.5 million FPV drones in 2024. Although production does not equal expenditure, that volume illustrates the scale needed to sustain warfare with inexpensive, expendable capabilities.

 

American efforts remain far more limited in scope. By December 2024, U.S. monthly 155mm capacity had reached 40,000 rounds — the equivalent of six to 10 days of Ukraine’s usage. The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program calls for 340,000 drones over two years, averaging roughly one-ninth of Ukraine’s annual FPV output. This procurement target is not total U.S. production, but the disparity illustrates the scale of the challenge.

 

America need not replicate Ukraine’s arsenal. A Western Pacific conflict could require fewer FPV drones and more long-range missiles. Yet wars in Europe and the Middle East demonstrate that regional conflicts have global consequences, drawing on shared inventories and competing for industrial capacity. Different operational requirements demand coordinated production and sustainment across the alliance.

 

Joint military manufacturing agreements allow allies to specialize, drawing on their respective industrial strengths and making better use of limited resources. By sharing expertise and avoiding unnecessary duplication, partners can expand output without each country building every capability independently.

 

America’s adversaries already cooperate on weapons production and supply, with China supporting Russia’s defense industry and Iran and North Korea providing military assistance. Their cooperation connects threats across theaters; the United States and its allies must organize an equally deliberate industrial response.

 

Where specialization draws on each ally’s unique strengths, manufacturing redundancy keeps those capabilities in production even when a partner’s factories come under attack or its country is at war. Factories in Ukraine and Israel already face missile and drone strikes, but that risk should not deter co-production with these allies or others closer to the front lines. Even distant U.S. facilities remain vulnerable to sabotage or terrorism. Distributing critical manufacturing across qualified sites — as Ukraine’s production initiative in Denmark illustrates — helps ensure that weapons keep flowing when one factory goes offline.

 

Redundancy also protects against industrial disruptions. In 2024, the Government Accountability Office identified a U.S. missile program that was halted for more than a year because of a supplier’s production problems. The program funded a second source — but establishing alternatives after deliveries stop can be too late during war.

 

Allied production must be resilient. Most co-production agreements are effectively production-sharing arrangements, with components manufactured in one country and assembled in another, and do not necessarily create alternative sources or surge capacity. Two assembly lines offer limited protection if both require the same irreplaceable input.

 

Similarly, allied production can shorten replenishment routes for American forces overseas. Qualified factories in Europe or the Indo-Pacific could reduce dependence on transoceanic shipments and increase speed to warfighters. Production standards, procurement access, and wartime allocation must be negotiated beforehand, with alternative facilities available if regional production is disrupted.

 

Washington should require alternative manufacturing sources for critical co-production programs, backed by production rights, technical data, tooling, and trained workers. The AUKUS export control reforms offer a precedent for predictable technology-sharing among trusted partners.

 

Co-sustainment should also be pursued with speed by allies. The Pentagon’s Regional Sustainment Framework calls for allied repair capabilities closer to operational needs. Production partnerships should similarly support spare parts, maintenance, and rapid battle-damage repair forward.

 

Industry will hesitate to expand domestic or allied production without confidence that sustained demand will justify the investment. Governments must therefore make additional capacity commercially viable. Multiyear orders, coordinated purchases, shared investment, and compensation for intellectual property can sustain alternative production lines. The Pentagon should support domestic industry and allies through multiyear contracts, co-production, and co-sustainment.

 

Camden offers a starting point for a modern U.S.-led defense technology alliance. America and its allies must coordinate innovation, production, and sustainment around distinct military requirements and shared strategic interests. American security requires building that arsenal of democracies now — before another regional war exposes shortages with global consequences.

The Young Right’s Nauseating New Battle Cry

By Noah Rothman

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

After Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts scolded the “venomous coalition” of conservatives who recoiled from Tucker Carlson and the cavalcade of bigots he so often features, but before Roberts’s organization melted down like a Soviet reactor, Heritage’s president tried to mollify his critics with an act of human sacrifice.

 

With Roberts’s scandalizing remarks inflaming passions on the right, he revealed that his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, had been reassigned to a less visible post within Heritage. Within a week of his humiliation, Neuhaus resigned. Still, Heritage’s spokespeople insisted there was no bad blood and that Neuhaus would doubtlessly “serve the movement in another capacity.”

 

Neuhaus resurfaced this week as the head of a new political organization, American Ascent. Its mission statement, according to Politico, is to “replace the outgoing generation of politicians with a younger crop of America First-aligned lawmakers,” and it counts among its “allies” MAGA-aligned outfits like Turning Point Action and figures as prominent as the vice president.

 

This New Right youth movement has so far produced little beyond warmed-over surliness and bombastic triumphalism that mimics the president’s exhausted affect.

 

“For too long,” Neuhaus declared, “the Republican Party has relied on rerunning candidates over and over again.” That’s an oddly hostile way to describe incumbency. Neuhaus claims the 2026 midterm results show voters want new blood, but reasonable observers might expect at least one Democrat to have lost their reelection bids to a relatively inchoate anti-incumbent sentiment. That voters spared Democrats complicates Neuhaus’s narrative, so he’s endorsing a different set of facts.

 

Politico’s piece is replete with quotes that are indicative of the self-radicalizing solipsism that became a feedback loop in the Trump era. For example, persuasion is a “suckers’ game,” in Claremont Institute board member Thomas Klingenstein’s words. “America needs statesmen who understand we are fighting against an enemy that wants to destroy us,” he said of the Democrats.

 

But it was one-time RFK Jr. aide and incoming American Ascent Vice President Jackson Hines who managed to produce the most redoubtable quote in a report glutted with them. “We watched a complete rebuke of the type of Republicans that were in Congress,” he told Politico. “Old ideas are for old people.”

 

What a rare expression of profound ignorance.

 

These remarks present two equally mystifying delusions. The first is that the New Right is operating under the misconception that top-down statism and social engineering are new ideas. They’re not. The second and far more disquieting misapprehension to which Hines is apparently beholden is that the wisdom of the ancients is a spent and disposable commodity.

 

This is, of course, another rear-guard action designed to remind conventional conservatives that their time is over — an action that would not be necessary if their time were, in fact, over. It comes as a new audience tunes in to their critique of the GOP in the Trump era as a party beholden not to timeless, enduring principles but to the whims of one uniquely inconstant man. Their argument isn’t purely philosophical, either. A fixed ideology is a practical tool. It’s replicable, and candidates can articulate it without checking in with the White House to see whether a social media post invalidated this or the other ageless principle overnight.

 

But philosophy matters, too. Sure, the primacy of the individual, the virtues of liberty, and the maximally beneficial theory of social organization around limited constitutional government and the rule of law are “old” ideas. They also have not been improved upon over the centuries since the American Founding, in which humanity experimented with revolutions that sought to alter not just systems of government but human nature itself. Likewise, “old” ideas like moral seriousness and personal responsibility, which offer their adherents only the promise of opportunity commensurate with one’s merit and labor, are a hard sell when the other guy is promising utopia. But the old virtues have the advantage of being realizable in a just society that does not privilege accidents of birth, class distinctions, and ideological purity.

 

One way to read Hines’s comments is that they are a particularly vapid but otherwise unremarkable offering unto the cult of youth. It’s not the first time we’ve heard aspiring political organizers flatter the next generation’s benighted pretensions. But those who fancy themselves mentors fail our young people when they assure them that the olds have nothing to offer. The young people who want to believe them are doomed to navigate life unmoored from anything durable, groping for meaning as shipwreck victims would grasp at flotsam.

 

Our young people are getting bad advice.

The Jewish Vote Moves Toward the GOP

By Matt Brooks

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

November 3 was a hard night for Republicans, and I would be less than candid if I wrote otherwise. We lost good friends and principled leaders who stood shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community for years. We owe them our sincere gratitude, and we will feel their absence.

 

But if you want to understand what this election really means for American Jews, look past the top-line results and look at whom the Democratic Party just sent to Washington.

 

The Democrats did not merely drift leftward; they elected the most radical freshman class in the history of Congress. Candidates who make excuses for antisemitic violence. Candidates who campaign on defunding the police that guard our synagogues. Candidates who proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with terrorism apologists. Candidates who smear the world’s only Jewish state as genocidal, and who vote the Democratic Socialists of America line without exception.

 

These are not fringe activists. They are senators- and representatives-elect, with powerful votes, committee seats, and subpoena power. The silence from Jewish Democratic organizations, who spent decades assuring our community that their party had our backs, has been deafening and shameful.

 

Here is what should capture the attention of every American Jew and give Republicans reason for hope: Even on a brutal night for Republicans, the Jewish vote moved our way. According to early exit polls, Jewish voters swung sharply — 19 points nationwide — to the GOP from 2024. Notably, in the key battleground state of Michigan, where the Republican Jewish Coalition invested significant effort and resources to try to defeat Abdul El-Sayed, precinct-level vote data clearly show that the more Jewish the precinct, the bigger the swing to Republican Mike Rogers. In a community that has largely pulled the Democratic lever reflexively for generations, Jewish Americans are waking up — withholding their political and financial support, and in many cases, openly backing GOP candidates.

 

For years, we took it for granted that Jewish safety and the U.S.-Israel relationship had bipartisan support. November 3 ended that paradigm.

 

The Democrats’ choice clarifies ours. The Republican Party is now, without qualification, the political home for Americans who care about Jewish security, confronting Jew-hatred wherever it festers, supporting the U.S.-Israel alliance, defending Judeo-Christian values, and promoting the pro-America policies that have defined our nation’s greatness from the beginning. We have said it before: If you stand against the Jewish community, we will work to defeat you. A tough election does not change that standard; it only sharpens it.

 

So this is our answer to the 2026 midterm election: We are not discouraged, and we are not going anywhere. We will build a larger, stronger, and more politically engaged Jewish Republican community than this country has ever seen. We will keep making the case, family by family, vote by vote, that the Republican Party is the political home for pro-America, pro-Israel voters. And we are going to continue to hold public officials in both parties accountable, particularly those rising on the radicalized far left.

 

The forces arrayed against us are not hypothetical. They now sit in Congress. And that makes the work of the Republican Jewish Coalition not simply relevant but vital. While we are deeply disappointed by the midterm election result, we are not for one moment discouraged about what comes next. We are ready for this fight. The stakes have never been higher, the threats have never been clearer, and we intend to meet them head-on and win.