We Need More Regret in Our Politics

By Andy Smarick

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Forget everything negative you’ve read about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ viral essay about knowingly sending her daughter to bad schools in the name of social justice. This is actually a moment for optimism. For the time being, put aside the treatment of a child as an interchangeable widget in a political struggle, put aside her daughter’s justified hurt and anger, put aside the examples of classroom malpractice. Focus instead on one word: “regret.”

 

Jones writes, “But now I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”

 

Jones now knows she did wrong. All children should be able to trust that their parents will be their most tenacious advocates and protectors. All parents should know that their most solemn duty is tenaciously advocating for and protecting their children. Yes, Jones should have sensed regret was coming when she wrote a few years back, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.” No, it should not have taken example after example of her daughter falling behind academically. It should not have taken her daughter’s heartfelt protests or repeated complaints about chaotic lunchrooms and poor instruction.

 

Jones’ acknowledgment of her regret is a sliver of a slice of a silver lining. Regret can be a powerful change agent: Realize your error, admit its costs, and then commit to doing better.

 

Jones is not alone. In fact, regret seems to be in the air on America’s political left. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently laughingly conceded that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” Rahm Emanuel, a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, describes his party as “toxic,” “weak,” and “woke.” A major left-leaning think tank created a long list of words, including “privilege,” “othering,” and “safe space,” that Democrats need to stop using. More and more Democratic officials and writers admit that their side went haywire in recent years. Even Malcolm Gladwell regrets being forced by the left to adopt insensible political positions.

 

We’re witnessing the kind of contrition seldom seen in public life outside of infidelity press conferences and courtroom allocutions: Figures freely admitting, “I’m the problem.”

 

Why did this mass mea culpa become necessary? How did the most influential thinkers and officials on the political left simultaneously, over an entire decade, make the same decisions that many now regret? Ferocious idealism. They embraced a crude but compelling view of society, and it turned them single-minded and excessive.

 

Ideology isn’t all bad. It’s easier to make political choices when you have a simple, coherent view of your surroundings. Whether it’s “personal freedom must be maximized!” or “justice requires the collective ownership of property and means of production!” or something else, a crisp scripture can be a terrific guide. But ideology can also curdle the mind. When real-life events don’t fit your framework or progress comes too slowly for your liking, you start to believe brash reforms are obviously necessary. Deliberateness and half measures become intolerable. Obstacles to your vision become villains. Dramatic action becomes warranted because only dramatic action will deliver justice. This is why extremism so often follows ideology.

 

Parts of the left came to believe that systemic oppression of marginalized groups defined American society. Radical proposals followed naturally. For instance: Prisons and police should be abolished. Property crimes should not be prosecuted. Homework and standardized tests should be ended. Defenders of oppressive colonial states should be named and shamed. Rules regarding bathroom use and sports participation should be rewritten. Public statements that hurt the underserved should be censored. Language should be policed. Media outlets should advance social justice, not “objectivity.”

 

Ideologies should be held lightly. They should encourage us to ask probing questions, not force us to accept pat answers. They should nudge us in a general direction, not demand we follow a dubious path. If you allow any ideology to hold too much sway, it will almost always lead you toward unreasonable conclusions. This is why principle and prudence—not ideology—have generally been the standard of American leaders. We want officials who stand for something and possess a coherent vision of governing. But we also want them to exercise good judgment and address issues pragmatically. We don’t want leaders who follow a dogma mechanically and ruthlessly.

 

The left is now recognizing the costs of following a dogma, and the resulting regret could lead to better decisions ahead. In fact, it probably explains why less ideological Democratic officials, like governors Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Wes Moore of Maryland, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, have seen their stocks rising. Those of us on the right should be encouraged by the left’s possible new direction. But we should also recognize that some regret is in order for our camp.

 

Corners of the right also fell victim to ferocious idealism—and its consequences—over the last decade. Angered by the direction of economic and social change, the left’s aggressive agenda, and the belief that some conservative officials hadn’t fought hard enough, a tear-it-all-down, anti-institutional ideology took over. It would’ve been one thing had that ideology been lightly held. But it became a kind of creed and led to the support for, or at least the toleration of, extremism.

 

Consider all of the shocking anti-institutional behavior we have seen. From the president to members of Congress to state and local officials to advocates and commentators, we’ve witnessed bashing of the courts (and specific judges and justices), unsubstantiated claims about the insecurity of elections, threats to the stability of NATO, whitewashing of the events of January 6, and attacks on the credibility of the intelligence community. Unqualified, inexperienced individuals with poor temperaments have ascended to top positions in governing institutions, and tech-industry whiz kids with no or little governing experience were put in charge of DOGE, which, unsurprisingly, ended up as a massive impairment of government functions without meaningful changes to federal spending.

 

An equally corrosive aspect of the era has been the degradation of behavioral institutions—-honesty, civility, and integrity. The casual cruelty, insults, mendacity, carelessness, self-dealing, and nepotism have damaged our capacity to govern well and torpedoed citizens’ faith in public life. The resulting aura of unseriousness can be seen in a Congress full of wannabe pundits and pundits entirely more concerned with personal fame than the public good.

 

Just like test scores showing your daughter hasn’t learned what she should have, public life is now full of evidence—inept domestic governing bodies, a bevy of foreign-policy errors, stubborn inflation, growing distrust in institutions, a terribly unpopular president, perpetual populism—that some on the right made bad decisions with awful consequences. And just like those test scores, you can’t ignore the results and just hope things get better. You need a course change.

 

Just about everyone on the right can play a constructive role in this rehabilitation project. First, we need to stop empowering those trafficking in over-the-top rhetoric and proposals. That means firmly mentoring the young professionals engaging in extremism (e.g., no antisemitism, no sexism, no flirting with authoritarians), telling advocacy organizations to tone it down (e.g., if your language sounds like a Marxist revolutionary, you’re not behaving conservatively), and encouraging those with platforms to behave responsibly, not chase renown (e.g., you have a republican duty to put our shared institutions above your media hits).

 

Second, we need to strengthen our institutions through action. We need more people working honorably inside key organizations instead of making a living commenting on them from the outside. So our work includes encouraging good people to serve, developing a generation of young professionals who think in terms of public service instead of personal brand-building, stopping selfish people from using institutions for their own purposes, and backing board members who protect their longstanding institutions from unwise, destructive fads. But we must also recognize that customs and norms are institutions, too. That means we all have a duty to act right: Cut out the personal insults, watch your language, tell the truth, don’t cheat.

 

Third, high-ranking public officials set the tone. Their words and behavior are taken seriously by millions of people; party loyalists often form their views based on their leaders’ pronouncements. “Reaganism,” “Nixonian,” “Jeffersonian,” “Jacksonian,” and “Lincolnian” became not just policy agendas, but ways of seeing the world. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” influenced how millions understood foreign relations; Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society shaped how millions saw the role of Uncle Sam. To change course, change those at the helm. Sincere personal regret means having a hard conversation with the person in the mirror. Sincere political regret means finding new leaders.

 

Indeed, we’ll know that we’ve begun to put this dreadful decade behind us once we see public support coalesce behind leaders who prioritize sober-mindedness, service, and statesmanship and swear off rigid ideologies and the ferocious idealism and extreme politics they beget.

As the Hamas Narrative Disintegrates, Can Its Devotees Rejoin Reality?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

The following sentence in the Telegraph contains an absolutely gobsmacking statistic:

 

“The BBC has reported the deaths of 53 ‘journalists’ in Gaza who have been claimed as terrorists by Hamas and other groups.”

 

Fifty-three. That’s out of (in the BBC’s case) somewhere just north of 180.

 

And counting, by the way. That 53 number is more likely to go up than down.

 

I’ve written about this particular problem before, but the Telegraph’s reporting has implications beyond just the obvious.

 

The fact that every facet of the “genocide” accusation against Israel has fallen apart, along with the disintegration of numerous other false claims, raises a serious concern. The debunking of the claims of genocide, deliberate starvation/famine, mass targeting of journalists, and others, plus the near-halving of the number of war dead that can be reasonably attributed to Israel, means that the war that happened was entirely different from the war that much of the media-consuming population thought happened.

 

Therefore the test put before the public is the following: Can these folks admit they were wrong about their whole impression of the war and acknowledge that they were fooled—willingly or unwillingly—by a global propaganda scheme on a scale we’ve probably never seen before?

 

This question is especially relevant in democracies. A self-governing people must inhabit a shared reality. The villainous portrayal of Israel during the war was exactly backwards. Can these folks join the rest of us here, where the truth lives?

 

Over the weekend, I read Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Exit Party. Ever since her novel Station Eleven, which was about a global pandemic, Mandel has been obsessed with alternate paths and realities. Exit Party tackles the idea of dimension-hopping, and there is a moment when we meet a character who has just arrived from an alternate version of the same physical location, and he has to get briefed on what life is like in this timeline.

 

That’s how I feel about everyone who bought into the post-October 7 anti-Israel narrative.

 

First of all, welcome. Acclimating to reality will be disorienting, but it is essential that the totalitarian ideology of the Western Hamasnik cult be punctured by the truth.

 

Stalinism is probably the closest relative this toxic ideology has. Stalinism was a way of speaking that eventually became, for all too many, a way of thinking.

 

When the supposed genocide “consensus” was found to be a mirage, Israel-haters only clamped down further on dissent. It was shocking to witness just how important it was to these people that the word “genocide” be used. But it wasn’t hard to figure out why the specific use of that word had suddenly become all that mattered. “Genocide” was a way of ending conversations before they started. You might object to the extremism of someone’s political tactics, to which they would respond well if you won’t make exceptions for GENOCIDE then your norms are worthless. The point of saying “genocide” was twofold: First, it allowed you to say and do whatever you wanted to the “Zionists” in your life. Second, it stopped you from having to defend your worldview.

 

If you replaced the word “genocide” with what actually took place in Israel-Gaza, which was “a war,” you would have to discuss and debate the complexities of that war. Since the “pro-Palestinian” movement in the West’s preferred victim was the one who started the war, that would get uncomfortable real quick.

 

The obsessive, Stalinist insistence on using only the word “genocide” was to prevent as many people as possible from understanding what actually happened.

 

But the truth broke through anyway. It’s there, it’s easily accessible, and even the purveyors of the Big Lie are finding it difficult to avoid. So the BBC doesn’t refute the claims made against it, but rather meekly insists its reporting was “based on the information available at the time it was published.” The UN’s affiliated food agencies post statistic-rich reports in which the lack of starvation in Gaza is made clear and unambiguous. And so forth.

 

Reality is steadily intruding in such ways. How, and to what extent, the adherents of the anti-Israel propaganda cult can welcome its arrival will tell us whether we all can in fact inhabit reality together.

We Happen to Be Winning the War in Iran

By Luther Ray Abel

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

“There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time.” So observed the gray General Kutuzov in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Napoleon’s force, with its many advantages, could not defy logistical realities forever. And now we’re seeing much the same with Iran.

 

In April, I penned a column titled “Why So Grim About Iran?” responding to the emerging consensus among the American press that we had, after killing Iranian leadership and sending their armies diving underground, lost the war. I was reliably informed by these voices that it was incumbent upon any decent American to rend his garments and cover his head with ashes — Midianite levels of self-sabotage.

 

I concluded with:

 

Breathe . . . let the U.S. military do its thing. We’re still fresh into this conflict. Round One just concluded. We’d have taken this result if given the option before the bout began. Our fears are hypothetical, while our successes are stone cold.

 

Six months later, the snake remains beheaded, while its thrashing has subsided.

 

Our Noah Rothman reports:

 

Iran is in a terrible position. Its currency is valueless. Its trade relationships are being severed. Its citizens and political officials cannot fly in or out of the country. Its political class is in a state of semi-permanent revolt against the informal leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Protests are once again breaking out in Iran’s universities, despite the explicit threat represented by the hated Basij. And there are now credible reports of insurrectionary activity in outlying provinces such as Baluchistan, where at least one IRGC commander was killed in the fighting.

 

It’s probably worth mentioning that the locus of hysteria of a few short weeks ago, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), is returning home to San Diego notably absent either dietary catastrophe or drownings, and the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) steams west to take the watch from USS George Washington (CVN-73).

 

The military is doing its thing, despite the combined froth of information warfare, ignorance, and admirable-but-unhelpful anxiety from the American public for its sailors.

 

Noah continues:

 

Since mid-August, the Trump administration has maintained that the blockade, and its efforts to protect shipping through the strait’s southern Omani channel, is bearing fruit. At the time, the claim met with some understandable skepticism. But, as I wrote then, it made sense that the inventories that Trump officials had described were invisible to trackers. They wouldn’t become visible until they’d successfully evaded Iran’s dragnet. Now, six weeks later, “It’s clear that Washington’s figures were substantially correct,” former Bush administration official Michael Allen observed. “As many as 22 million barrels may have passed through the strait in 48 hours over the weekend, compared with about 20 million a day before the war.”

 

Let’s add to this the recent episodes in the U.K. and in the skies over Saudi Arabia, which suggest that the regime’s surviving elements are activating what assets they have left. It reeks of desperation.

 

As ever, a blockade is a test of will. We can still surrender our advantage . . . all it takes is a set of orders. But given that, after seven months, we continue to float acres of non-skid and haze gray in Iran’s backyard swimming pool, and I’m feeling pretty good about the White House’s resolve on this matter.

 

Last thing: For those who watched and commented on war like it was a $10 six-leg parlay, consider your paroxysmal histories when America next rouses itself to dissolve a hostile regime. Those hysterics weren’t just embarrassing; they were succor to those who would see us dead.

Impeaching Pete

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

Yesterday Pete Hegseth delivered the Pentagon’s “State of the Force” address. Which was not a thing that existed in American government, as far as I can tell, until he made it a thing last year with his Strangelovian turn before a roomful of generals and admirals in Virginia.

 

Like his boss, another former television host, Hegseth is a performer at heart. The “State of the Force” address is a pretext for him to perform the sort of strutting machismo that seems to soothe the insecurity he plainly feels at leading so many men more accomplished than him. “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department,” he informed his audience on Wednesday, as if the military he now leads hasn’t been the most fearsome on earth for generations. From now on, he added, there’ll be “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals.”

 

Whether there will be victories, given the state of play in Iran, is unclear.

 

Hegseth’s shtick has grown stale after nearly two years and now routinely verges on self-parody. “The ideological clowns are out,” he said at one point in his speech. “The patriotic cowboys are in with testosterone testing on top.” In another passage, he paid lip service to the virtues of a free press—before comparing America’s media unfavorably to Iran’s, accusing them of “treason” by “[smearing] the troops and the historic mission that they are undertaking.”

 

All the while he paced the stage, seeming less like a Cabinet official than a motivational speaker. The vibe, broadly speaking, was a sort of fascist version of James Cagney performing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

 

Hegseth did make bona fide news when he announced a new, and overdue, Pentagon initiative on autonomous warfare. He also revealed something called “Project Meridian” that will spend the next 120 days assessing the future of warfare and will be led by, among others, Elon Musk. The man atop SpaceX and Starlink won’t be as far out of his depth this time as he was the last time he did a short stint in the federal government, but the appointment still reeked of a gimmick given his lack of military expertise.

 

It’s as if Hegseth thought, “Who do I know who’s future-y and also hates ‘woke’?” and landed on the most obvious name. He already had brilliant minds with actual battlefield experience under his command who were thinking hard about the future of war. If that subject was a priority for him, why did he fire them?

 

Still, the most memorable detail about yesterday’s address came from a Wall Street Journal report on what happened beforehand. Quote:

 

Those [service members] in attendance, hundreds of whom worked out with the defense secretary outside the Pentagon that morning, received a book called “The War Department Field Manual,” a compilation of Hegseth’s past speeches. In a foreword written by President Trump, the troops were told: “As your commander in chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb wars.”

 

I will not ask you to fight dumb wars, the leader pledged, as the dumb war in Iran that he ordered the military to fight threatens to swallow his party whole in the midterms. That paragraph is a perfect time capsule of this absurd political moment; the thought of the troops receiving a bound copy of the defense secretary’s musings on testosterone is the icing on the cake.

 

Reading it reminded me of something that had somehow slipped my mind: Hegseth faces an impeachment vote next month.

 

Libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth in mid-September, most of them related to the illegality of various military operations. Because Massie made his impeachment resolution “privileged,” the House must take it up. Speaker Mike Johnson was so reluctant to do that with the midterms approaching that he chose to send the House home until November instead. There will be no impeachment vote before Election Day.

 

But there will be one after Election Day. How is the Hegseth impeachment process likely to play out?

 

The House.

 

I think there’s a chance that the House will vote to impeach.

 

Massie was clever twice over, first in his choice of targets. Every patriot shares (or should share) Kevin D. Williamson’s “cull ’em all” approach to impeaching the president and his Cabinet, but we all understand that the right’s personality cult will dismiss any demand for accountability from the particular personality around which it’s organized.

 

It’s easier for Republican lawmakers to rationalize not impeaching Trump than it is for them to rationalize not impeaching Hegseth. Massie declined to make it easy for them.

 

He was also clever in his timing. By waiting to file his impeachment resolution until shortly before the election, he forced an agonizing strategic dilemma on Johnson. If Johnson had put the resolution on the floor immediately, House Republicans would have faced a lose-lose choice. Opposing Hegseth’s impeachment would have amounted to symbolically endorsing a hugely unpopular war, angering undecided voters. Supporting it would have amounted to a symbolic vote of no confidence in the White House’s management of that war, angering the MAGA base.

 

Johnson spared his members that lose-lose choice by recessing early. But by doing so, he increased the odds that Hegseth will be impeached when the House returns: If a huge blue wave crashes down on Republicans in the House and Senate next month, turning dozens into lame ducks, those members may no longer feel pulled by partisan duty to support the president and his Cabinet.

 

The opposite, perhaps. Some might feel so disgruntled at having had their careers short-circuited by Trump and Hegseth’s foolish war that they’ll want to impeach. Revenge is a factor here.

 

Even Republicans who support the president and his defense secretary might conclude that impeaching Hegseth during the lame-duck session is preferable to not doing so. Defeating Massie’s resolution would make it easy politically for Democrats to revisit impeaching Hegseth when they’re in charge next year—which they sound motivated to do—on grounds that it’s unfinished business.

 

Whereas impeaching him now and letting the Republican-run Senate dispose of the charges against him before January would make any future Democratic attempts feel a bit like double jeopardy. “Are they impeaching him over Iran again?” voters might wonder. “Didn’t they do that last year?”

 

Add to all of that the many grievances that congressional Republicans have with Hegseth—the war, his bizarre jihad against respected Army officers, the fact that “he and his staff are dismissive of their questions and frequently unprepared for briefings”—and there’s no reason to think that partisan goodwill will tip the balance in his favor on a tight impeachment vote. He could plausibly end up as the whipping boy for a post-wipeout lame-duck GOP House majority.

 

The Senate.

 

The fate of a Hegseth impeachment in the Senate is both simpler and more complicated than it is in the House.

 

It’s simpler with respect to the outcome. Senate Republicans are incapable of mustering the courage needed to remove a Trump toady from office for committing impeachable offenses, at least when he has the support of the president and the MAGA base. There’s no chance that there will be 67 votes to remove Hegseth, even after a blue wave.

 

And in a way, that’s fitting.

 

The first three articles of impeachment in Massie’s resolution accuse Hegseth of unconstitutionally exercising war powers that rightly belong to Congress. But why should Senate Republicans suddenly awaken to those abuses now, after seven months of meekly deferring to Trump on them? The time for them to get chesty about their constitutional prerogatives was last year, before the president gained so much confidence in his ability to steamroll Congress that he thought it’d be fine to start a major war in the Middle East on his own say-so.

 

The Iran war is a failure of House and Senate Republicans’ leadership more than it is a failure of Hegseth’s, and the impeachment process risks obscuring that. The most one can say about removing him from office now, very belatedly, is that it’d be a small first step toward Congress reclaiming power from an administration that’s so disdainful of legislative authority that it often doesn’t bother to let lawmakers know what’s going on.

 

The complicated part of the Hegseth impeachment process for the Senate isn’t the outcome, which is foreordained, but the path to it. Would Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his GOP conference agree to hold a trial, or would they dismiss the charges summarily, as Senate Democrats did after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was impeached in 2024?

 

The calendar matters in that calculus, especially if Democrats end up flipping the Senate. Thune and his colleagues won’t want to devote precious time during the short lame-duck session to a fruitless Hegseth impeachment when there’s more urgent business to attend to—funding the government, for one thing, as well as confirming various Trump nominees in the pipeline before Republicans lose their power to do so.

 

The war could complicate things further, as the president has said publicly and privately that another round of attacks on Iran could come after the midterms. How likely are Senate Republicans to put Hegseth on trial at a moment when the bombs have begun falling again, requiring the Pentagon’s undivided attention? That would be a perfect excuse to choose the Mayorkas option by rejecting Massie’s articles of impeachment before taking them up.

 

On the other hand.

 

Revenge is a potential factor in the Senate too, as a blue wave could wash away numerous red-state Republicans who expected to hold their seats for decades. Combine them with the members of Thune’s conference who’ve already been driven into retirement by Trump—at least one of whom appears to support impeaching Hegseth—and with the chamber’s 47-member Democratic caucus, and there’s a solid majority in the making who might relish sticking it to Trump by putting his defense secretary on trial.

 

There’s even a strategic reason for Republicans to consider doing so. (Well, two strategic reasons if you count the “double jeopardy” point from earlier.) Thune and his colleagues could use the potential embarrassment of the spectacle as leverage to persuade Trump to fire Hegseth and nominate someone more qualified. “The new Democratic majority will squeeze you on Pete’s replacement if you wait until next year to get rid of him,” Thune might tell the president. “Ditch him now, and we’ll ram through a new nominee before January.”

 

He might even come to Trump with a list of names whom Senate Republicans are willing to approve. A lame-duck GOP majority would have leverage here as the president’s last, best chance at congressional cooperation on key priorities before he leaves office in 2029. Take advantage, Thune might say. Soon, replacing Hegseth will be hard, if not impossible.

 

Who knows? Trump might end up welcoming that ultimatum, seizing it as a ready-made excuse to rid himself of his Hegseth problem. Sparing his next crop of nominees from having to run the gauntlet in a Democratic Senate next year should suffice for most of his fans as an explanation for why he needs to let go of some of his Cabinet now.

 

The president.

 

But it’s never that simple with Trump, is it?

 

Asking Trump to dump Hegseth after a midterm drubbing would be tantamount to asking him to admit that Iran was a mistake and drove the popular backlash that ousted his party’s majorities. As a matter of temperament, Trump is no more comfortable with losing face than House and Senate Republicans are with political courage.

 

His instinct following a Democratic rout will be to double down on his defense secretary, partly to signal his conviction that voters’ judgment about his war is incorrect and partly out of juvenile spite.

 

All the more so, I think, if the House impeaches Hegseth. Firing him under those circumstances would compound the sense that the president had been badly weakened by the Democratic landslide. Instead of coming out “fighting” against the new legislative threat to his authority, he’d be bowing to it by handing his enemies in the House and Senate a scalp. Who is Congress to tell him who he should and shouldn’t have in his Cabinet?

 

Give in to them on that, and soon they’ll be thinking they’re an equal branch of government.

 

There are other factors that might lead Trump to keep Hegseth around. A big one is that he may believe, with some justification, that the tide has turned in America’s favor lately in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Navy’s stranglehold on Iranian oil exports is working, enough so that the regime recently sought a ceasefire that would have lifted the blockade temporarily. (Trump declined.) Iran’s own stranglehold on the strait isn’t working as well, meanwhile: More oil from America’s gulf allies has been getting out lately, driving regional crude exports up toward 80 percent of their prewar levels.

 

Come November, the president might assume, it’ll be sufficiently clear that America has regained the advantage over Iran that Congress will lose its appetite for targeting Hegseth.

 

He might also want Hegseth on his team for a reason famously articulated by Lyndon Johnson, that it’s better to have potential troublemakers “inside the tent p—ing out than outside the tent p—ing in.” As hard as it is to imagine a Renfield-tier toady like Hegseth turning against Trump, it’s also hard to imagine the psychological impact of being booted out of the world’s most prestigious military job and sent back to the dismal obscurity of weekend-cable-news-chat-show-host hell. Our secretary of defense seems to be prone to grudges; if he were to lose his gig playing Patton before captive military audiences because the president chose to make him the fall guy over Iran, he might understandably resent it.

 

And if he did, he’d be a potentially useful witness for Democratic investigators who are planning to put the Trump White House through the wringer next year. Hegseth might even feel obliged to cooperate with them to save his own skin, knowing that Democrats are after him too. Trump might conclude that keeping Hegseth in the job, letting him go on purging the Pentagon of capable officers and generally setting the place on fire, is a small price to pay for retaining his personal loyalty as the cops close in.

 

As for the argument that he should want to replace Hegseth soon, before control of the Senate changes hands and gives Democrats veto power over a prospective nominee, that would make sense if he were a “normal” president who respected the legislature’s advice-and-consent power over executive nominees. He is not and does not. Trump is Trump: If he tires of Hegseth next year, he’ll simply resort to procedural chicanery by slotting in some even bigger chud as “acting” secretary of defense rather than cooperate with Democrats on a mutually agreeable choice.

 

Almost certainly, with impeachment destined to fail, that will be the only way Hegseth exits. The president will need to tire of his defense secretary, which is unlikely given his stupendous affinity for Renfields and Hegseth’s equally stupendous zealousness in that role. Only if and when the war becomes such a fiasco that the president grows desperate for a scapegoat, perhaps, will he conclude that Hegseth’s highest service to him is being dropkicked out of the Pentagon.

 

The only alternative I can see is if the new Democratic Congress opts to play hardball by issuing Trump an ultimatum: No money for the war until, among other things, Hegseth is out. I doubt the Democrats have it in them, but electoral landslides have been known to do funny things to a party’s confidence. Here’s hoping.

Pulling Apart

By Michael Warren

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

What could Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right former congresswoman from Georgia, say to a room full of middle-aged, tote-bag-toting liberals that would make them uncross their arms, turn to each other in amazement, and break into a raucous round of applause?

 

“I think MAGA is dead,” Greene said last week at the First Baptist Church in Austin, where she was participating in the keynote conversation on the first day of the Texas Tribune Festival.

 

Despite the cheers from the lefty audience, Greene was voicing her disappointment and disillusionment with Donald Trump’s political movement because of how it failed to live up to her hopes and expectations. On everything from avoiding foreign wars to exposing government cover-ups and conspiracies, she said, Trump’s second term has been a failure.

 

Her change of heart about the president began, she told Robert Draper of the New York Times while on stage, when she opposed a bill establishing specific regulatory frameworks for a type of cryptocurrency—a bill that Trump wanted to see passed. Greene said she told the president that if her amendment to the bill could get a vote and pass, she’d support the legislation; otherwise, she couldn’t vote for a bill she believed was a “backdoor for central bank digital currency.”

 

“He was furious at me,” she said. “They put a little chair up in front of the Resolute Desk. Imagine sitting in a chair in front of the president of the United States, where I proceeded to get yelled at for not voting for his bill.”

 

But the true break came when Greene tried to force transparency on the federal government’s evidence file on the late convicted felon Jeffrey Epstein. What she got in return was Trump calling her a traitor in public and yelling at her in private, she said. Since she resigned from Congress at the beginning of this year, Greene has been outspoken in her opposition to the war in Iran and to American support for Israel, which she calls a “murderous regime.” She has argued for invoking the 25^th Amendment to remove Trump from office and said the GOP should be “burned to the ground.” So whether or not MAGA is dead, it’s obviously dead to her.

 

In Austin last week, Greene argued there’s a distinction between the broader MAGA movement, which is still behind Trump, and “America First” proponents like herself that the president’s actions have isolated.

 

“They’re completely against foreign wars, against our hard-earned tax dollars being sent to foreign countries, and supporting killing children in places like Gaza, and sending our military to fight constantly,” she said. “That’s what we call America First.” MAGA, on the other hand, has “grotesquely changed into something I can no longer support.”

 

One of the pressing questions about Greene’s attention-grabbing divorce from MAGA and Trump is how many voters she and her fellow America First, disaffected cranks (including soon-to-be-former Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, former Trump administration intelligence official Joe Kent, and Tucker Carlson) could conceivably pull away from the GOP into a third party—or if that’s even the honest goal of Carlson’s effort to build some kind of political movement based on the idea that real MAGA hasn’t been tried. Watching the liberal TribFest attendees applaud Greene’s every word of opprobrium directed at Trump, I had the nagging sense that she isn’t the herald for a great exodus of Republicans.

 

But then I think about Kevin Stitt, the two-term governor of Oklahoma, who spoke just a couple of hours before Greene took the stage at TribFest. Stitt comes from a different wing of the GOP—business-oriented, pragmatic, and conservative but not conspiratorial—but has been expressing his own brand of independence from Trump. Last year, he criticized Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in states where governors objected, said Trump was getting “bad advice” in his draconian approach to interior immigration enforcement, and even got into a dispute with the president in his capacity as chairman of the National Governors Association. (Trump declined to invite two Democratic governors to a traditionally bipartisan meeting at the White House during the NGA’s annual gathering. Stitt said the meeting could therefore not be organized by the NGA, prompting Trump to post on social media that Stitt was a RINO. It was a whole thing, but relations are better now.)

 

I spoke with Stitt after his onstage interview in Austin about a number of economic issues and heard less disillusionment and more exasperation with a conservative party he views as having lost its way by doing a pale imitation of liberal economic policy.

 

“We need to get back to the Republican Party of getting our fiscal house in order, and I really believe that will bring prices down,” Stitt told me. “Deregulation, free markets: That’s what brings prices down. Not free grocery stores, not mandating 25 percent less beef on imports.”

 

That last reference, to beef imports, reflects the most recent area where Stitt, who was first elected in 2018, has directly challenged the Trump administration. In an attempt to lower beef prices, the president last month issued an executive order to increase certain beef imports and require this foreign beef to be sold at 25 percent below domestic market value. Stitt responded by urging “free market solutions” and the removal of government barriers to increase the supply of domestic beef.

 

The benefits of free markets and smaller government used to be almost an article of faith among Republicans, but since Trump’s ascension the party seems to have lost that understanding. I asked Stitt what’s changed. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we’re populist now or what the deal is,” Stitt said. “The farmers and ranchers that I’ve talked to in Oklahoma, they’re not worried about the competition and exports and imports because … as long as there’s been freezers, we’ve been importing beef. Where they had a huge concern was importing beef and demanding it [be] sold 25 percent lower. Like, that’s what we thought was weird.”

 

The word “weird” jumped out at me. It’s been more than 10 years since George W. Bush declared Trump’s first inaugural address “some weird s—–t,” but there’s always been a contingent of loyal Republicans who have tolerated, or learned to tolerate, the president’s unusual approach, priorities, and interests in governance. But these deviations in ideas and policies are harder to swallow when they’re not boosting the economy, solving problems, or helping Republicans win elections. For this certain class of Republicans, the weird stuff starts to be a problem.

 

During our conversation, Stitt indicated he wasn’t comfortable with the direction of the right on a number of issues. He agreed that the outright anti-immigrant position of people like Bo French is a problem for the GOP and argued for his interesting (but constitutionally questionable) proposal for giving states the authority to issue workforce permits to foreigners. He balked at the idea of the federal government taking ownership stakes in companies, something the Trump administration has embraced. (“That’s like Russian oligarch-type stuff, right?” Stitt said.) And he shook his head at the president’s proposal to write every American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans retain control of Congress after the midterms.

 

“I think it’s not good. It just doesn’t feel right to, you know, it feels like you’re trying to buy votes,” Stitt said. “It doesn’t feel good.”

 

My takeaway from the one-two punch of Stitt and Greene in Austin is that the MAGA coalition is breaking apart in ways that make it difficult to predict how the Republican Party will reconstitute itself ahead of 2028. Trump’s tent was big enough to include reluctant chamber-of-commerce types, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and everyone in between, but his second term is giving those folks fewer reasons to stay inside the tent.

 

Greene told the TribFest crowd that she has no interest in ever running for office again, and Stitt is term-limited and will be leaving his office in January, so both of these very different Republicans have more license than your average GOP official to criticize their standard-bearer out loud. But if things go as badly for the party in November as the polls keep suggesting, get ready for more and more Republicans, including those with ambitions of higher office, to start getting louder about what’s really gone wrong, bad, and weird with MAGA. Those who won’t be on the ballot for several more years, such as reliable Trump ally Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, are already beginning to hedge their bets.

Was the Flydubai Hijacking the Latest Iranian Plot Against the West?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

Anyone who assumed that President Trump and his deputies were unreliable narrators — and, therefore, dismissed the administration’s early claims that the attempted terrorist attack on RAF Fairford in the U.K. was linked to Iran — probably encountered cognitive dissonance when Britain’s center-left prime minister confirmed Trump’s account. The subsequent arrest of a British-Iranian dual national in connection with that plot would appear to indicate that those arrested outside the air base were not just fuel thieves.

 

With this experience in mind, it would be wise to consider the possibility that the president may be letting us all in on the intelligence to which he is privy in relation to the thwarted hijacking of an Israel-bound airliner this week.

 

Trump isn’t alone in contending that Iran played a role in this potentially catastrophic plot:

 

 

These are extremely preliminary assessments, and they should be treated as such. What’s more, they conflict with the initial statements from Israeli officials who, for now, believe that the Omani national who stabbed the plane’s captain and attempted to take over the aircraft was a “lone wolf” who underwent “a process of religious radicalization in recent years.”

 

Perhaps Western security services are getting jittery. The elevated threat from Iran, as the Islamic Republic descends into blockade-induced penury, seems to have everyone on edge. But perhaps Iran did have its hand in this attempted hijacking, just as it seems to have had some level of operational control over the attempted attack in England. If so, Iran has now been linked to two potentially serious terrorist events — mass casualty events, had they succeeded — in the space of a week that is not yet over.

 

The civilized world got lucky in the U.K. and in the skies over the United Arab Emirates. But luck runs out. If you’re in a position to take as many shots on goal as Iran has in such a short period, you’ll eventually get one past the keeper.

Tennessee Poison

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Assessing the conditions in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde remarked: “If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her convicts, she doesn’t deserve to have any.” I wonder whether We the People of the United States deserve to have any convicts at all, or condemned men—or condemned women.

 

The story of Christa Pike, whom Tennessee officials have—so far—twice tried to poison to death, would be the blackest of black comedy if there were any comedy in it. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, being a Republican in 2026, is funny only unintentionally, saying of the twice-botched execution of his state’s only condemned female murderer: “Tennesseans deserve a justice system that is fair, that’s consistent, that is faithfully administered. My responsibility is to uphold the sentences that Tennessee juries have handed down, even when it’s difficult, and that is exactly what we intend to do in the days ahead.” If words mean anything, then the governor’s words would seem to mean that his state intends to try to kill her again in the interest of consistency and faithful administration and responsibility. I am tempted here to take the Lord’s name in vain.

 

There are many bad arguments against capital punishment: that an innocent person might be wrongly convicted (which is an argument against trials and punishment per se), that the willful taking of human life is categorically evil (as though war-making and self-defense were not unhappy necessities), that a death sentence cannot be reversed (as though we could give a wrongfully convicted man back his lost decades or the whole of a life sentence), etc. There are better arguments against capital punishment: One is that capital punishment is bad for the executioners (and, this being a republic, we are all executioners), which ought to be obvious to anybody who has been present at one of those festive “Burn, baby, burn!” rallies death-penalty enthusiasts sometimes stage outside of an execution or to anyone who has heard Donald Trump hold forth on the subject. Americans’ naturally violent temperament and our tendency toward religious fanaticism (which sometimes is disguised as political fanaticism) make us gleeful executioners who invariably debase and degrade ourselves when wielding the instruments of death.

 

Another argument against capital punishment is that we are not very good at it.

 

We are not very good at it in the particular instances—botched executions such as the one in Tennessee are surprisingly common—and we are not very good at it in the big picture, either, applying the lethal sanction willy-nilly, often to the wrong cases and the wrong categories of cases. A wiser society would consider death sentences, if it considered them at all, for serious crimes of a political nature, meaning crimes against the state and crimes against the public order. One teenage drug peddler in Chicago killing another teenage drug peddler in Chicago is, in the big picture, a mostly private affair, though there is a political aspect to the lawlessness of our cities. Crimes against the public order are more like the sort of thing we saw at the Capitol on January 6, 2021: sedition, rioting, corruption in high office, abuses of political power. Which is not to say that we need to drag every corrupt cop or senator or riot instigator in front of a firing squad, but crimes of that nature are distinct from the merely vicious crimes often described as common. (And they are too common, of course.) Such crimes necessitate the pursuit of justice, but prosecuting them and punishing them with a heavy hand also is an act of political self-defense, a necessary thing in a republic.

 

Catholic teaching (and much Protestant teaching) has largely held that putting criminals to death is acceptable when it is necessary for ensuring the protection of the defenseless against further violence at the hands of the lawless. That the Catholic authorities in the United States and elsewhere have interpreted this as amounting to a general prohibition on the death penalty is the result of technical rather than moral considerations: Given the penal powers of the modern state, putting offenders to death does not present itself as a practical necessity. The Catholic analysis of the case is reasonable and reasonably persuasive.

 

There is no question, to my mind, at least, that such a figure as Christa Pike deserved the death sentence—her crime was atrocious and cruel, involving not only the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer but also her torture: Convicting Pike was made easier by the fact that she had kept a broken-off piece of her victim’s skull as a keepsake and had shown it off to friends at school. Slemmer’s family is still awaiting the return of the last piece of her skull for burial, having received from the state, so far, only a portion of the skull. The 1995 crime defines heinous—but there is no absolute necessity, moral or practical, for Pike’s death.

 

As a matter of moral judgment, one might reasonably come down either way on the question.

 

As a matter of practical judgment, there is less room for disagreement: If Tennessee is going to wield the power of life and death in this slapstick fashion, then Tennessee does not deserve to have it. The governor has suspended executions for the moment; the legislature should move to get rid of them altogether, out of shame, at least, if not out of any sincere regard for decency.

Am I Lying to Myself About the Death Penalty?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

I am supposed to be against the death penalty.

 

Intellectually, I still think I’m against the death penalty. If asked, that’s probably how I’d describe myself. Practically, though, I’m just not sure that this remains true. In recent years, the gap between what I think about the death penalty and how I behave when the death penalty is at stake has grown so dramatically that I have come to wonder if I’m just lying to myself out of a desire to feel virtuous or open-minded. I don’t know if this is the result of my having kids, getting older, or moving to the South, but whatever it is, my job is to tell people honestly what I think about political issues, and what I honestly think about the death penalty in 2026 is that I am profoundly annoyed by the people who are against it.

 

Last night’s botched execution of Christa Pike has caused many Americans to call for an end to the practice. I have had the opposite reaction. The truth is that I think that Pike should be dead, and I am not at all upset that Tennessee tried to kill her. I wish it had succeeded, and I feel no qualms about this. I have read what she was convicted of — what she confessed to — which was this:

 

Later that night, Pike went to Iloilo’s room and told Iloilo that she had just killed Slemmer and that she had brought back a piece of the victim’s skull as a souvenir. Pike showed Iloilo the piece of skull and told her that she had cut the victim’s throat six times, beaten her, and thrown asphalt at the victim’s head. Pike told Iloilo that the victim had begged “them” to stop cutting and beating her, but Pike did not stop because the victim continued to talk. Pike told Iloilo that she had thrown a large piece of asphalt at the victim’s head, and when it broke into smaller pieces, she had thrown those at the victim as well. Pike told Iloilo that a meat cleaver had been used to cut the victim’s back and a box cutter had been used to cut her throat. Finally, Pike said that a pentagram had been carved onto the victim’s forehead and chest. Iloilo said that Pike was dancing in a circle, smiling, and singing “la, la, la” while she related these details about the murder. When Iloilo saw Pike at breakfast the next morning she asked Pike what she had done with the piece of the victim’s skull. Pike replied that it was in her pocket and then said, “And, yes, I’m eating breakfast with it.”

 

. . . and, frankly, I cannot summon any other strong feelings than that she does not deserve to live. Per court records, her victim was so badly mutilated that her face could not be identified as a face:

 

On the day after the murder, January 13, at approximately 8:05 a.m., an employee of the University of Tennessee Grounds Department discovered Slemmer’s semi-nude, slashed, and badly beaten body near the greenhouses on the agricultural campus. He testified that the body was so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal. Upon closer inspection, he saw the victim’s clothes and her nude breast and realized it was the body of a human female.

 

I am supposed to elevate my commitment to abstractions over my desire to legitimately punish that desecration of a human body. I no longer think I can. This is not a question of due process or presumption of innocence or reasonable doubt, or of any of the other liberal principles that I hold dear. This is a question of sentencing. I often jokingly refer to myself as a “criminal justice squish,” which I am. But what I mean by that is that I am very much a defense-lawyer type of guy when it comes to the mechanisms by which we try the accused. In all criminal contexts, I want to see a fair trial that respects the edicts of the Constitution and that privileges the defendant in all the ways that the Constitution demands. But once that’s been done? Sentence away, to the full extent of the law. It does not follow that someone who is liberal on criminal procedure must be liberal in sentencing, too. I used to feel alarmed if I heard that someone had been sentenced to death. In cases where there is no doubt about their guilt, I no longer do. On the contrary: More often than not, when I hear about a death penalty case in the news, I look up the details of the crime that precipitated that sentence and think, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” If I’m annoyed at all, it is by the people who are supposed to be on “my side.”

 

Why? Well, because, as an activist class, the anti-death-penalty brigade strikes me as being dishonest, unlikable, and chronically incapable of prioritizing (or even acknowledging) the innocent. Please note that I am not talking here about the average citizen-opponent of the death penalty — almost all of whom are decent and earnest — but about the professional political movement that exists to try to prevent every execution. Over the past half century, these people have convinced the Supreme Court to rule that the Constitution says things about the death penalty that it absolutely does not (bluntly put, there is no originalist case whatsoever that limits the death penalty to premeditated murders — that is entirely made up); they have invariably gone further than their brief demands (opposing the death penalty does not require one to feel sorry for serial killers, or to elevate them to victim status); they have cheated when making their case about the method (it is just too rich to see the people who have got execution methods limited to lethal injection and then reduced the availability and efficiency of those drugs claim that the practical problems they have provoked represent an argument for their position); and they have caviled relentlessly about how long the process takes when the process takes as long as it does in large part because they have seen fit to extend it. Along the way, they have put me off their cause.

 

This, in part, is because I don’t trust them with the next step. I have noticed that the societies that abolish the death penalty are the same ones that are weak on crime in general. The European Union is institutionally opposed to the death penalty, and its members believe themselves to be morally superior to the United States because of this. But it is a serious problem that this opposition has not been offset by the imposition of the draconian prison sentences that are necessary if death is to be removed as an option. Portugal has a maximum prison sentence of 25 years, with no exceptions. Norway gave Anders Breivik — who murdered 77 people and said he wished he’d killed more! — just 21 years in prison. Germany, which on paper has a more sensible system, frequently undermines it by letting murderers out early (in 2024, the median time served for “life imprisonment” in Germany was 17.4 years). It is true that, in some European countries, the government is permitted to extend the prison term of a convict if that convict is deemed to present an ongoing threat. But that is not quite the same thing as handing down a permanent sentence for a heinous crime. I understand that people differ on this matter, but in my view, if we are not going to execute people who commit crimes that would be worthy of execution, then we need to lock them up with no caveats and no opportunity for parole. Unfortunately, most of the anti-death-penalty activists I have met seem to be against this. That concerns me.

 

As for Christa Pike? Well, it is a scandal that her execution was botched, but we must ask whose fault we imagine that was. One of the criticisms that I have often offered about the death penalty in America is that it is “euphemistic” — which is to say that, by medicalizing the process, we have obscured what the state is actually doing. I used to think that this was a knock on the pro-death-penalty position. Over time, however, I have come to wonder if I’ve had that backward. After all, it’s not the pro crowd who have demanded all this fuss; it’s the anti crowd. Every pro-death-penalty voter I know would happily replace lethal injections with a firing squad or a gallows; every anti-death-penalty activist opposes that. Tennessee has the death penalty, which means that the debate there is not over whether to kill but how. Is it really fair to blame those who didn’t insist on lethal injections for the problems that attend lethal injections? I am not so sure.

 

Which is all to say that, on this question at least, I have drifted helplessly into an endless battle with myself, and that I now occupy the muddled middle ground that I usually so disdain. I can rehearse both sides of the argument. I can respect normal people who take either view. Were I asked to settle the dispute, I do not know how I would vote. But I do know this: Fifteen years ago, I would have felt obliged to wrestle with this matter for the benefit of the condemned. Now, I do it solely for myself.

Of Mice and Monuments

By Mike Nelson

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

I recently observed a conversation on X between The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg and another user wherein they agreed the recent fight over the Kennedy Center, and President Donald Trump’s persistent desire to emblazon his name somewhere thereupon, mattered less beyond the Beltway than it does to local residents. Jonah made the correct point that this does not change the degree to which Trump is attempting to use illegal and impulsive means to do what he did in New York for decades—putting his name on buildings. It is true that the Kennedy Center is not high on the list of locations Americans visit when traveling to the nation’s capital. Nor does it have the same cultural significance nationally as the White House, which is also in the midst of its own transformation and associated legal battle based primarily on Trump’s whims. Likewise, many have raised aesthetic objections to the president’s planned triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, and those objections should be addressed, but most of America probably does not share my primary objection to the project—that it will gum up traffic for an undetermined period of time in a place that already has one of the worst-conceived traffic patterns outside of Europe or the Middle East. Admittedly, this objection is primarily based in self-interest as one with a morning commute.

 

But while these vanity projects may matter to varying degrees to the wider American public, that doesn’t mean we should hand-wave away the lawless and reckless impulses behind them. Nor should we discount the larger lessons we can infer about the president’s decision-making—patterns he replicates on matters of much greater import.

 

Character is destiny, and Trump’s personal traits ultimately determine how he approaches decisions—and all of us, largely, form the neural patterns we use to make choices and process information through our early-life experiences. A key difference between the president and others, however, is that he seems not to want additional information in helping shape his decisions, especially when that information is contrary to his impulsive wishes. And the voices that might have interjected and presented him with opposing information are practically nonexistent compared with his first term. The president relies almost solely on either gut instinct or personal desires; when he has made good decisions in the past, it was almost purely out of chance.

 

While Trump’s decision-making is an issue in itself, his follow-through only exacerbates the problem. The president’s decisions will be proclaimed either in an aside during a press spray or in a late-night social media post, and thus become a critical goal to be pursued by the government.

 

Trump will tell the American people we face an urgent problem with an obvious solution, one that had not been dealt with previously because all those who preceded him (theoretically including the 45^th occupant of the office) were stupid, lazy, or corrupt. He will proclaim the fix will be cheap, fast, and amazing—and that only he could ever make it happen. He makes announcements without even the slightest research into what would be needed—physically, legally, or otherwise—to accomplish his goals and refuses to build consensus among partners and allies. Then, when confronted with reality, he either loses interest, abandoning the project and anything broken along the way (e.g., the many times he has TACO’d), refuses to accept the new information and steamrolls ahead extrajudicially with his desire (e.g., the ballroom), or impetuously decides to break things more, throwing a fit and whining that if he can’t get his way, so everyone pays (e.g., the Kennedy Center).

 

If this pattern were limited to just design choices in and around Washington, D.C., we might be able to just shake our heads at a petty, childish narcissist for whom there will never be enough portraits, commemorative coins, banners bearing his visage on government buildings, or structures upon which to etch his name. But the impulsive lurching from shiny object to shiny object is not limited to architectural choices within the national capital region. The president has engaged in a shooting war with Iran and a trade war with the world, both seemingly out of thin air, neither with coordination or approval from Congress, neither with a clear end state or plan, and both exacerbating the inflationary and affordability issues he campaigned on solving.

 

Trump loudly proclaimed he would end the Ukraine war—the largest European conflict since WWII—in a single day, only to throw up his hands in frustration when faced with the complexities the rest of the world clearly saw. He has gone from boasts about being a master dealmaker whom the rest of the world listens to and respects to saying—in the cases of the Ukraine and Iran wars—that he’s lost interest in a deal. He then talks about the conflicts as though he is a casual observer, not someone who inserted himself into the middle of the former and initiated the latter. He has made many situations worse by firing off ideas with middle-school-level comprehension skills, leaving those who have been in the midst of the issues wondering whether to take the recommendations seriously, literally, or some other way.

 

One can be forgiven for forgetting many of his outrageous ideas over the last year and a half, but it’s important to remember that, beyond suggesting that we might make Canada, Greenland, or Venezuela U.S. possessions, Trump had also seriously proposed American ownership of Gaza and mass forced relocation of those living there, for the purpose of creating a Middle Eastern resort destination. They say there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, but perhaps we in the United States would benefit from a few steps between “the president has an out-of-the-box idea” and “the president announces his crazy idea to the world seconds later.”

 

And then there are the retroactive justifications developed to explain the urgency of the president’s desires once he realizes that just saying “I want” is not sufficient to marshal popular support—outside of his loyal army of influencers who spare no shame in leaping to demand he be given his heart’s wildest desires. The ballroom and proposed triumphal arch are now, apparently, essential to national security, and anyone not supporting them must hate the troops and America and is an obvious communist, right? Likewise, the Iran war, a conflict initiated without clear cause, criteria, consensus, or conclusion, went through a series of different explanations—coming to the aid of protesters, finally settling the 47-year conflict with Iran, etc.—before the now settled-upon message that the war is about preventing Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon. In the White House’s implication, anyone who raises questions about the war is enabling Iran in its nuclear desires. It matters not, in this reasoning, that the United States has done little to physically target the nuclear program in this round of conflict and may have hardened Iran’s resolve to join the nuclear club as a deterrent to future attacks of this sort. Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 indeed damaged Iran’s nuclear aspirations, something for which I gave the administration credit at the time. In hindsight, it seems that was likely less the result of a sober and reasoned decision and more the consequence, as has been widely reported, of the president’s envy over positive headlines from Israel’s strikes against Iran in the days prior.

 

During the criminal investigation into Trump’s retention and storage of unauthorized classified material at Mar-a-Lago after his first term, many people were quick to assign a nefarious motive to the president’s actions—that he had kept the material in order to sell it to foreign actors. While Trump has shown no qualms about blending public policy with private profit, I think it’s a stretch to accuse him of this specifically without evidence. Sometimes the most realistic explanation is much simpler. C.J. Ciaramella posited what became known as the “my boxes” theory—Trump wanted to keep the material because he viewed the documents as his own cool souvenirs, and didn’t feel the need to explain it to anyone. We can see this same decision-making playing out in the second Trump admin, in matters of structures or strategies—be it “my monuments,” “my tariffs,” or “my Iran war.” Trump wants it because he wants it.

 

As we all watch the various squabbles and suits about Trump’s many construction projects play out, we should not forget that each tantrum and outburst is more than just the dramatic spasms of an incredible narcissist obsessed with using public authority to compel honors and adulation—these are case studies into the mind and character of the man twice entrusted with greater power than anyone else on earth.

 

No law, tradition, or priority will give the president pause in his pursuit of personal desires, and in the cases where the obstacles to achieving them are too onerous for him to overcome, there is no second thought given to the damage done in the wake. And, like another who sought to create an enduring legacy through monuments and statues, our modern-day Ozymandias is establishing how he will be remembered—but, just like the subject of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, in a very different way than he believes.

Up Schmitt Creek

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

Critics are being too kind to Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt.

 

It’s hard to do justice to his exchange yesterday with former special counsel Jack Smith, the man who would have prosecuted Donald Trump for multiple crimes if Americans hadn’t handed control of federal law enforcement over to the suspect. If you don’t have time to watch the clip—really, treat yourself—the long and short of it is that Schmitt believed he was on the brink of a career-making moment, one that would propel him to instant right-wing superstardom.

 

It can’t be a coincidence that, a few hours before the hearing with Smith began, Axios reported that Schmitt “has grown close to Vice President [J.D.] Vance and is seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate.” Obviously, Schmitt’s camp planted that rumor with the outlet in anticipation of the buzzworthy trap he was planning to spring on Smith.

 

At the hearing, Schmitt pressed Smith on whether he’d conspired to persecute our poor president with Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, who pursued Trump on state charges related to his 2020 coup plot. Smith denied it. Isn’t it true, sir, Schmitt retorted, that you were in Atlanta on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis admitted to an affair with a fellow prosecutor? The implication was that Smith had rushed down there to consult with her on damage control, to keep their “deep state” plot against Trump from falling apart amid the sex scandal. Again, Smith denied it.

 

Then the trap was sprung. Schmitt produced text messages between Smith’s aides from February 3, 2024, proving … actually, it’s not clear what they were supposed to prove. They referred to a seat having been reserved for Smith at some unnamed event that evening; for reasons unknown, Schmitt determined that the event was an Atlanta Hawks basketball game—in Atlanta.

 

And there it was: Smith had lied about his whereabouts that day. You’re a “dirtbag,” Schmitt smugly informed him.

 

I never went to a Hawks game, a baffled Smith insisted, but I did go to a University of Iowa women’s basketball game in Maryland around that time to watch Caitlin Clark play. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar chimed in to note that the Iowa team’s nickname is the Hawkeyes. At which point the likely truth of what had just happened dawned on everyone present, including wide-eyed Republicans: Schmitt and his team had probably confused “Hawkeyes” with “Hawks,” collapsing the entire gotcha.

 

But as I say, everyone is being too kind to him. His error appears to have been considerably sloppier than that.

 

I’m not sure that the similarity in nicknames mattered at all, in fact. Schmitt said later in an interview that he assumed Smith was at the Hawks game against the Golden State Warriors on February 3 because it was the only NBA game that day. But it wasn’t, as a cursory Google search would have shown him. It was one of six games that evening.

 

And the NBA wasn’t the only league playing basketball on that date. Many college games, men’s and women’s, took place. One of them was Clark’s Iowa team at the University of Maryland—and video footage confirms that Smith was in fact in the stands that night, not at an NBA game in Atlanta.

 

But even if Schmitt had been right about everything, what would it have proved? At no point did he produce evidence that Smith had been in contact with Willis—the blockbuster claim that had inspired this entire moronic line of inquiry. At most, the text messages would have established that Smith had forgotten a trip he’d made to Atlanta to watch basketball. And, logically, why would Smith have done such a thing if the purpose of his trip had been to huddle with Willis about their sinister “deep state” conspiracy? Why would he have wanted to alert the world that he was in town by showing his face at an NBA game?

 

How Schmitt and his team screwed up so horribly, I don’t know. My hunch is that they outsourced their research to artificial intelligence, were sabotaged by one of those “hallucinations” AI sometimes suffers (“Yes, the Hawks game was the only basketball game that evening!”), and, amazingly, didn’t double-check.

 

And so Schmitt really did end up with a career-defining moment. Just not the one he expected.

 

Still, this isn’t the worst unforced Republican error in the news today.

 

Unconventional.

 

Will Saletan had the right take on yesterday’s hearing. The most remarkable thing about it wasn’t Schmitt’s remarkable screwup. It was the fact that, with the president’s job approval now below 38 percent and a massive Democratic wave impending, Senate Republicans nonetheless remained bitterly, theatrically hostile to Smith in Trump’s defense.

 

They did so even though Smith himself praised GOP witnesses to the 2020 coup plot who helped him build a case against the president. That was an opportunity for congressional Republicans to distinguish their party from its leader, something they’d reeeeeally like to do before voting begins. But they declined, and honestly, I understand why: Some beliefs, like the alleged illegitimacy of Smith’s prosecution, are so central in the modern right-wing catechism that to deny them is to deny the faith itself.

 

You can’t be a Christian without accepting Christ’s divinity, and you can’t be a Trumpist without believing that Trump’s obvious, overt criminality is some sort of Democratic “hoax.”

 

I suspect that explains why Schmitt remained unapologetic after his error about Smith was exposed, coming no closer to a proper mea culpa than tweeting “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” And it certainly explains why lackwit right-wing influencers continued to pretend in the aftermath that Schmitt really had scored a momentous gotcha at Smith’s expense. In modern Republican politics, stupidity and mendacity caused by an excess of zeal in trying to own the libs are not vices.

 

In fact, by refusing to concede that he’d done Smith dirty, I suspect Schmitt improved his chances at becoming J.D. Vance’s future running mate after all. Republican voters will tolerate all manner of incompetence in a politician if he’s ruthless enough toward their enemies. That’s the story of the Trump era in one sentence.

 

By going for the throat, missing, and not regretting the attempt, Schmitt demonstrated the requisite ruthlessness. Congratulations to Missouri on having the worst tandem in the U.S. Senate, at least until Ken Paxton joins Ted Cruz in the Texas delegation.

 

And speaking of which: That brings us to that other, more significant unforced error I mentioned.

 

This morning the New York Times scooped that Paxton met last week with nervous donors, who naturally enough wanted to know why he’s trailed Democrat James Talarico in every public poll taken since late August. Could it be because he’s the second-most corrupt politician in America? That he’s a lousy campaigner and poor fundraiser? That he’s unattractive, badly dressed, and charmless, as the president now frequently reminds audiences?

 

Paxton had a theory. “To be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers,” he told his audience. “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

 

It was the convention. Two days of “Trumpalooza” in Dallas earlier this month, with Paxton in attendance, had tanked his and other candidates’ polling. Critics had warned the president beforehand that parading himself before voters so close to Election Day would backfire, reminding them of why they dislike him and undermining GOP candidates’ efforts to separate themselves from an unpopular president. Paxton seems to think those critics were right.

 

Which is shocking. It would be shocking to hear any Republican on the ballot this fall admit that Trump is a liability for the party, of course, but Ken Paxton? A man who would have been removed from his office as state attorney general by his own party if not for the president’s intervention? Who may very well have lost his Senate primary this year to John Cornyn if not for the president’s endorsement? Who’s being bankrolled right now to the tune of millions of dollars from the president’s super PAC to keep him in the game against Talarico?

 

For him to declare “Trumpalooza” a major unforced error feels like an act of “disloyalty” on par with Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Russiagate investigation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the president pulled the plug on further financial support for Paxton in response, especially if Paxton slips further behind Talarico and Texas begins to look—if you can imagine such a thing—like a lost cause for Republicans.

 

There’s just one catch to the “it was the convention” theory of the GOP’s crumbling polls. Is it even true?

 

Dead weight.

 

I’m skeptical.

 

Start with the polling in Paxton’s own race. On September 8, the day before the convention, he trailed Talarico by 2.8 points in the RealClearPolitics average. Today he trails by … 2.9 points. That’s the “drop” in the numbers for which “Trumpalooza” is supposedly responsible?

 

For what it’s worth, Paxton’s campaign put out an internal poll yesterday that has him leading Talarico by 3. That represents a 1-point gain since May. Where’s the drop?

 

“Maybe Paxton is thinking of the generic congressional ballot,” you might say—and in that case, he’s on firmer ground. Check the numbers, and you’ll find the Democrats’ lead lifted off from 6 points on September 9, the convention’s first day, to a garish 8.7 points just a week later. That does look like a sudden, significant backlash in public opinion to some intervening event. What else could that event be except the convention?

 

Well, how about … gas prices? As it happens, the week of the convention was also the week that the cost of diesel crossed a psychological threshold, inching up over $6 per gallon for the first time in U.S. history. That generated the worst conceivable headlines for a Republican majority being crushed under the electoral weight of an affordability crisis. “Trumpalooza” happened to correlate with the news about diesel and the Democratic polling surge, but you know what they say about correlation and causation.

 

Forget the polling, though. Explain to me like I’m 5 years old why seeing the president on primetime television for two days would logically inspire a tectonic shift in voter preferences in 2026. After 10 years of daily exposure to Trump and hourly exposure to him during his presidencies, with bad news at the grocery store and at the pump staring Americans in the face every day, what’s the thought process by which watching him for a few hours on TV might have magically transformed people from ambivalent about their midterm choices to pro-Democrat?

 

Did he do something especially repellent at the convention that I’ve forgotten? There was the sort of funny, sort of creepy “pledge” he asked attendees to take on the second night, but surely the cultishness of Republicans is fully priced into the party’s political stock by now. The closest thing to news made over the two days was Trump dangling a $5,000 bribe at voters if his party retained control of the House and Senate in November. But, while Americans didn’t like that idea, the prospect of “free” money isn’t the sort of thing that usually ignites a voter rebellion.

 

Occam’s razor, then: The reason Paxton believes, or wants others to believe, that the convention was a significant unforced error is simply thate it moves the onus for losing Texas away from himself and onto the president. Trump’s digs at Paxton’s looks and personality are obviously designed to do the opposite, supplying an excuse in advance for why he couldn’t get Paxton over the finish line in a famously red state. He was dead weight, the president intends to say.

 

Grumbling about the convention is Paxton’s version of “back atcha.” The president was dead weight. It was the stupid convention that turned Texas blue, not the candidate.

 

But if you’re invested in the idea that the convention really was an unforced error, I’ll give you two theories for why you might be right. One has to do with the scheduling. By holding it right after Labor Day, Trump and his cronies timed it to coincide with the very moment that Americans traditionally begin making up their minds about a coming election.

 

It’s not that he said or did anything during “Trumpalooza” to alienate them. It’s more the case, I suspect, that he reminded casual voters that, oh right, they’re going to need to cast a ballot soon, which may in turn have “firmed up” their already existing preference for Democrats. Look again at the generic ballot polling, and you’ll see that Republicans haven’t lost any support since the convention; the Democratic surge seems to consist entirely of people who are coming off the proverbial sidelines after previously not stating a preference.

 

The convention made checked-out voters pay attention to the midterms. Those voters were always likely to vote Democratic due to anger about the war and the cost of living, and two nights of Trump and J.D. Vance served as their cue that it was time to pick a side. I wouldn’t call that a significant unforced error, though: At worst, it accelerated the cresting of an inevitable blue wave.

 

The second theory is less flattering to Americans. Maybe some swing voters are so childlike about politics that even now, after a decade of Trump, they can’t muster a strong opinion about him unless he’s (virtually) right in front of them. Like a parent hiding their face behind their hands while playing peekaboo with an infant, the president’s many failures somehow disappear in the minds of these voters—until he appears before them, and then, suddenly, there they are again!

 

As low as my regard is for the American people, it’s hard even for me to believe that two nights of primetime exposure to the most famous person in the world, who’s sought out and achieved ubiquity in media, might meaningfully influence anyone’s opinion about him at this point. But then I remember that there are voters—important voters!—who seem earnestly shocked that a guy who campaigned on mass deportation and complained about foreigners “poisoning the blood of our country” has turned out to be a little aggressive on immigration.

 

There are a lot of suckers in our electorate. That may explain why the president, despite urging fans to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” has steered toward campaigning in solidly red states lately and avoided battlegrounds. That makes no sense, as Ed Kilgore notes: If the key to holding down Democratic gains in November is motivating demoralized Republicans to turn out, Trump should skip Republican strongholds and show up where races are competitive. The fact that he isn’t doing that suggests that he thinks the “peekaboo” effect is real, that seeing him show up in their home states will antagonize local suckers more than it’ll galvanize loyal Republicans by reminding them how badly they were suckered in 2024.

 

Well, either that or he believes November’s blue wave will be so enormous that red states are the battlegrounds now.

 

Let’s hope so. This entire miserable era has been an unforced error by the American right, and a humiliating electoral drubbing would be a small first step toward encouraging people to admit it. It will be a while before we’re free of figures like Trump and Schmitt—whose dopey gaffe yesterday is not the thing for which he should be loathed—but we’ve got to start somewhere.