The ‘Fifth Avenue’ Election

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

I’ll say this in defense of Steve Witkoff. You don’t need to believe that he sincerely admires Vladimir Putin to understand why he said what he said yesterday.

 

You’re free to believe it. I believe it myself. But you don’t need to believe it to make sense of why a White House envoy would praise the butcher of Ukraine—to his face, on camera, shortly before three new waves of Russian missiles crashed down on Kyiv—as a “humanitarian.”

 

For Witkoff, I imagine, bowing and scraping is simply how courtiers interact with authoritarians. He works for a president whose own Cabinet meetings are filled with effusive flattery from deputies, remember. Whether the flattery is sincere is irrelevant; what’s important is that those deputies are willing to stoop to it, acknowledging their leader’s authority by prostrating themselves before him.

 

Praise under those circumstances is probably more effective when it isn’t sincere, frankly. Telling a guy with a 31 percent approval rating that he’s the greatest president ever, or Putin that he’s Albert Schweitzer as he depopulates a neighboring country (and his own), shows him that you’ll take sides with him against reality itself. Fascists demand nothing less. That’s how they know you’re a man they can do business with.

 

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much,” Donald Trump himself observed a few days ago when asked about a potential summit with Russia and China to discuss Ukraine. That’s a man with whom Putin can do business. It can’t be long before reveries about the powerful muscularity of the Russian leader’s ass become a topic in the president’s increasingly homoerotic stump speeches.

 

In 1936, the U.S. Olympic delegation famously refused to salute Adolf Hitler as it paraded before him in Berlin, declining to dip the American flag as other delegations had done with their own standards. All you need to know about how Trumpists relate to authoritarian power is to understand that the president and his allies would have lowered the Stars and Stripes without hesitation. All the way to the ground, if requested.

 

Especially if there was something in it for them to do so.

 

It’s one thing for America to knife Ukraine in the back while getting nothing in return. (That’s the art of the deal.) It’s another for its leadership to resort to whitewashing Russian evil gratuitously. Witkoff’s startling Orwellian “humanitarian” slobber was an unusually shameful comment—and it came during an unusually shameful week, for an unusually shameful administration, at an unusually inopportune moment with a national election 12 days away.

 

Americans might notice. They might even (gasp) care.

 

Add it up. In the past few days, we’ve had Trump and Witkoff rhetorically shining Putin’s shoes; Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance making hay of the sexual abuse an opponent suffered as a child; various new exposés of administration corruption; de facto admissions of corruption, sometimes thinly veiled, sometimes not at all; and assorted WTF picayune weirdness from the president, whose interests include building ballrooms, admiring the derrieres of Republican men, renaming New Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, but not so much as addressing the cost of living.

 

This is the closest we’ll ever come to seeing a political party actively try to alienate voters. As undecideds, including disgruntled Trump 2024 supporters, go about making up their minds, Trump and Republican apparatchiks are doing everything possible to make backing the GOP as embarrassing as it can possibly be.

 

Unintentionally, they’ve turned the midterms into a stress test for the personality cult that’s defined right-wing politics since 2016. Is there any combination of policy failures and immoral antics that can overcome the fathomless partisan loyalty of the modern Republican voter?

 

If not now, when?

 

Now or never.

 

For an election that’s shaping up to be as lopsided as this one is, drawing firm conclusions about Americans’ big-picture political preferences from the results will be tricky.

 

I wrote about that last month. A huge Democratic wave can and will be read, fairly, as a repudiation of Trump’s first two years back in office. But it won’t be a repudiation of postliberalism.

 

How could it be? Public discontent is mostly being driven by the Iran war and its inflationary consequences; postliberals opposed that war, as they’ll eagerly remind you. If the president had stuck to “America First” isolationism and avoided another needless Middle Eastern entanglement, his approval might be in the low 40s instead of the low 30s and his party wouldn’t be sweating control of the Senate.

 

Postliberals will claim that Republicans lost not because Trump listened too much to Tucker Carlson and too little to Lindsey Graham and Benjamin Netanyahu but vice versa. And they’ll have a point.

 

Here’s another example in which drawing a firm conclusion from a result will be tricky: What’s the “lesson” if Democrat James Talarico ends up upsetting Republican Ken Paxton in Texas’ Senate race?

 

The Lone Star state is now a battleground, liberals will insist. Is that right? Or will a Talarico victory simply be the fluke result of a freak, once-in-a-lifetime perfect political storm? Trump’s approval is the worst for any president heading into a midterm in 80 years; the opposition party now leads on every major issue, in most cases by double digits; the Texas GOP nominated the worst Senate candidate it reasonably could have; and the Democratic nominee is a mild-mannered Christian seminarian—a cultural leftist, to be sure, but an awkward fit for the traditional “far-left bogeyman” role.

 

Everything that realistically could have happened to boost Democrats’ chances at winning Texas this year has happened—and even so, Talarico leads Paxton by just 1.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average. His margin was more than twice that on October 6 but has since crumbled under the weight of an avalanche of Musk-bucks. To all appearances, notwithstanding the parade of recent Republican moral imbecility that I described earlier, GOP voters are “coming home” in the final weeks of the race.

 

If I had to bet on the outcome, I’d bet on Paxton prevailing narrowly. And if he does, I think we can draw a firm conclusion from that result: Despite anger at the cost of living and an aimless war, despite the Republican candidate’s flamboyant scumminess and the Democrat’s inoffensiveness, despite screaming headlines about the betrayal of Ukraine and preposterously brazen corruption, despite the White House planning to resume a war most Americans hate, most right-wing voters would still rather reward an incompetent and dissolute GOP than endure six years of representation by the other party in a Senate that won’t be able to do anything until 2029 at the earliest anyway.

 

Not all right-wing voters. The latest Fox News poll found 28 percent of self-described “non-MAGA Republicans” supporting Talarico this year. But enough of them.

 

Texas’ “perfect storm” has made it the supreme stress test for postliberalism this year, which, as noted elsewhere, is why so many right-wing activists—and their foreign allies—are invested in the race. But the lesson of a Republican victory there would also apply in other red-state battlegrounds like Alaska, Kansas, and Ohio. If a decisive share of center-right voters can’t be persuaded to cross the aisle in this environment, with this administration behaving this way, then they’ll never be persuaded. Period.

 

Insofar as Trump getting reelected after January 6 didn’t already broadly confirm his famous hypothesis about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, the GOP holding the Senate next month will do it. And he and his team will recognize that, and act accordingly in the two years he has left—beginning with their inevitable “rigged election” campaign next month aimed at discrediting Democratic victories.

 

Lessons for postliberals.

 

Postliberals will draw their own lessons from the results, some silly and some not, if Republicans hold the Senate after doing more or less everything possible to blow it.

 

“Postliberalism is popular!” will be a silly one. Needing Elon Musk to pony up $158 million to drag Ken Paxton over the finish line in Texas—barely—does not mean that Americans have a fever and the only prescription is more right-wing amorality. It will mean, quite obviously, that nihilism and corruption are serious political liabilities even in red states and the party would be wise to penalize such qualities in candidates. How many Musk-bucks might have been spent in, say, North Carolina to defeat Democrat Roy Cooper if they hadn’t been needed in Texas?

 

But “postliberalism isn’t disqualifying, even in the worst political environments,” will be a lesson fairly drawn. In fact, I’m willing to draw it right now. Is there any doubt that Paxton and other Republicans locked in tight races in red states would be on their way to comfortable wins if inflation were down and Trump had stayed out of Iran?

 

What we’ve learned about American voters since 2016 is that they’ll elect a scumbag if they believe doing so will be good for their bottom line. Only when it turns out not to be so good does the scumbaggery bother them—although not enough for them to do anything about it, assuming the GOP holds the Senate.

 

Or is that unfair?

 

After all, Democrats are assured of winning the House. They need to flip only a few seats in the lower chamber to have a majority, and they’re far enough ahead on the generic ballot to make that a fait accompli. Whether there are any broad conclusions to be gleaned from the midterms about the state of cultishness among Republican voters probably depends on the scope of the House’s blue wave. If, in an era of ruthless gerrymandering, Democrats nonetheless manage to gain dozens of seats thanks to votes from across the aisle, that will tell us something about the right’s waning appetite for shooting people on Fifth Avenue.

 

But if Democratic gains are more modest than they were in Trump’s first midterm election, when they picked up 41 seats, the degree of difficulty created by modern gerrymandering won’t deter right-wing postliberals from finding encouragement in that outcome. “We lost because of the war and gas,” they’ll insist, “but Democrats still underperformed expectations. Americans are basically fine with everything else Trump is doing, including taking sides with Russia against Ukraine.”

 

And, again, they’ll have a point.

 

How postliberals react to the election is important because some meaningful number of Republican House (and possibly Senate) incumbents are about to be bounced out of office next month. Who succeeds them as their party’s nominees for those seats in 2028 and beyond will depend on which lessons the Republican base takes from this midterm.

 

“There’s functionally no difference between Dems having 225 vs 245 seats in 2027,” housing analyst Conor Sen argued this morning, “but I think it’d be good for the GOP (and America) to have a fresh start in 20 or so R+10 House districts in 2028.” Would it? I’m … not so sure.

 

It will be good if, as I say, the right concludes from November’s results that the electoral cost of unapologetic degeneracy is too steep to continue promoting candidates who suffer from it. “For the last decade, our party has been infected by a corrupted moral center,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said yesterday when asked about Ramaswamy’s new attack ad and the vice president’s defense of it. “Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease we should be seeking to cure.”

 

A string of upsets in R+10 districts might give Republican primary voters an electoral incentive to cure the disease in the next cycle. The president will be less popular then than he is now, as getting to spend two years governing as a lame duck with no electoral accountability will only make him worse. Rationally, the right-wing base should want to hedge against Trump’s unpopularity in 2028 by prioritizing electability and inoffensiveness in its congressional candidates. In so many words: fewer Paxtons, more Talaricos.

 

But this isn’t a movement known for rationality, is it?

 

Be careful what you wish for.

 

My guess is that Republican voters will do the opposite.

 

They’ll tell themselves, with some justification, that the 2026 wipeout happened only because their working-class base tends not to show up for midterms. Turnout in a presidential election year like 2028 will be plenty robust enough to flip those R+10 districts back to red no matter whom they nominate, they’ll say.

 

They’ll also have spent two years listening to Tucker Carlson and other J.D. Vance apologists insist that real Trumpism has never been tried. The president, a warmonger, betrayed “America First” postliberalism by attacking Iran, and his party paid for it in 2026, they’ll hear. The path back to power requires nominating a committed isolationist like Vance for president and like-minded postliberals downballot in Senate and House races—especially safe-ish R+10 districts where the GOP is likely to win regardless of who’s on the ballot.

 

To all appearances, as the party’s new nominee in 2028, Vance himself will follow Trump’s lead by promoting vicious ruthlessness as the indispensable quality required of all Republican leaders. “There is nothing J.D. has more personal disdain for than weak Republicans who reflexively kowtow every time the Dem-media demands a scalp,” a source close to the vice president told Axios yesterday of the backlash to Ramaswamy’s ad. “It drives him crazy to see the cucked reaction from some establishment operatives and politicians in the GOP, who he views as nothing more than useful idiots for the left.”

 

With Republican voters looking to a guy like that for political leadership, and with the right-wing media echo chamber amplifying his every word, whom do you think they’re more likely to nominate in House primaries? A Republican Talarico or Paxton 2.0?

 

Or something even worse?

 

As pleasant as it is to imagine scores of House Republicans being wiped out this year, and as much as they deserve that fate, the remorseless moral logic of 10 years of right-wing postliberalism is that things will get worse. I’m open to the possibility that the right will regain its moral bearings someday, but within one election cycle of a drubbing at the polls? Not bloody likely.

 

So if you’re excited for a “fresh start” for the GOP and its House candidates in 2028, I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve said about practically every political impulse Republicans have had since 2016: Be careful what you wish for.

 

On that note, I leave you with this link to the president’s latest Truth Social post, in which he weighs the merits of smearing Democrat Amy Acton as a liar for claiming she was sexually abused as a child—a crime for which her stepfather was indicted by a grand jury before going on the run. Can you guess whether Trump endorses that smear or condemns it? If not, here’s a hint: Postliberalism is a movement of sociopaths, by sociopaths, for sociopaths.

 

Maybe voters will care about that next month. Maybe they won’t.