The Truce Is Over

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

I’ve been toying lately with a hot take that the era of political activism driven by cultural grievances is ending.

 

The gist of it is that a politics based on culture war is a kind of luxury, the sort of thing people fight about when their country is sufficiently well off that they don’t need to prioritize fighting about money. Pitched battles over trans rights and Confederate statues make sense when inflation is low, labor-force participation is high, and interest rates are ZIRP-y.

 

When times are good, you can afford to roll the dice on a con man selling luxury nationalism as a panacea for all ills. How much harm could he do, right?

 

But when times are no longer good; when inflation is chronically high and unremediated by administrations from both parties; when America can no longer guarantee the stability of Middle Eastern oil markets; when chaotic government and a spiraling national debt are pushing rates ever upward; when politicians from the party of “fiscal responsibility” seem to think it’s bad that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency; and when a frightening new technology promises to make tens of millions of jobs obsolete—in an era like that, the fate of Confederate statues will no longer seem so important.

 

Ergo, the future of partisan political activism in America is economic, not cultural, warfare, I tell myself.

 

Then I think: That’s the stupidest idea you’ve ever had.

 

When, historically, has economic turmoil ever eased cultural divisions rather than inflamed them? If anything, privation is the great incubator of cultural radicalism. Impoverished people will make all sorts of moral compromises in politics if they’re promised relief from their financial misery in return. Joining a kulturkampf against some designated scapegoat is a small price to pay for being able to feed your family.

 

It took less than a decade after the stock market crash of 1929 for the Nazis to rampage through Poland. And it wasn’t an economic vision that they were there to impose.

 

Hard times economically in America might plausibly cause activists on both sides to escalate their cultural disputes and grow more radical in their goals. You don’t need to look hard for recent examples in the GOP: From screeching about an ad that dared to depict a Medicaid recipient as white to conversations in populist media about, and I quote, “the Indian question,” race is an increasingly prominent part of political identity for elements of the young grassroots right.

 

For 10 years their party has been led by a guy who regularly bellows about expelling undesirables. They’ve taken that worldview to its inevitable conclusion.

 

There’s an exception to my theory of privation and culture war, though. Last week I pointed out the curious “truce” on abortion that’s emerged between the two parties, a notable cultural deescalation in an era of escalating economic hardship.

 

During his debate with Joe Biden in 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump went as far as to say, “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill, and I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.” Wary of the backlash in 2022 to the end of Roe v. Wade, the president has ducked the issue since returning to office. Democrats, meanwhile, have had bigger fish to fry politically, flogging the cost of living and the war in Iran and generally feeling little urgency to address a status quo in which abortions have in some ways become easier to obtain than ever.

 

But the truce is ending, apparently. According to the Washington Sun, Iran isn’t the only war that the president is preparing to resume after the election.

 

Two avenues.

 

Citing a senior administration official, the Sun claims that Todd Blanche has been told by the White House to go slow on abortion litigation—until November. “Once the midterms are over and it’s truly lame-duck time, we’ve heard the gloves will be off,” one conservative source told the outlet.

 

Before we go further, I know what you’re thinking: Yes, it is remarkable that the president would be dictating law-enforcement priorities to the Justice Department based on his party’s political needs before an election. And yes, it’s extra remarkable that he would be doing so on this subject in particular. How many thousands of infant lives were lost this year because Trump and Blanche feared that impeding abortion might hurt Republicans’ midterm prospects?

 

And yes, it’s extra extra remarkable that the White House evidently intends to respond to a midterm drubbing by doubling down on initiatives which they have every reason to expect will be unpopular, like Iran and new abortion restrictions. But I wrote that piece already.

 

Anyway, the litigation that Blanche is slow-walking has to do with mifepristone, the so-called “abortion pill” taken in tandem with misoprostol that’s now responsible for more than 60 percent of terminations. Pro-lifers spent the last few years challenging the lawfulness of the FDA’s initial authorization of mifepristone decades ago but have been stymied in court so far on procedural grounds. They might eventually revive that line of attack depending on lower court rulings, but the legal strategy to halt distribution of the drug has since branched out.

 

One avenue is to have the FDA, now under Trump’s control, restrict mifepristone itself. The agency is currently conducting a safety review of it; the president’s new nominee to lead the FDA was cagey during her confirmation hearing about which way that review might go. Deauthorizing mifepristone altogether would be a bombshell, igniting ferocious political and legal battles, but the agency wouldn’t need to go that far to reduce access to it. (And might be reluctant to do so, given the drug’s other medical uses.) It could simply require women to seek prescriptions in person instead of obtaining them via virtual “telehealth” appointments with doctors in blue states and then ordering the pills by mail, as they’re currently able to do.

 

“Tens of thousands of patients in states with abortion bans” have gotten hold of mifepristone that way, the New York Times notes. A new FDA rule closing the telehealth loophole would make it considerably harder to evade state abortion bans.

 

The second avenue is for the Justice Department to start enforcing the Comstock Act, about which I’ve written a few times before. That’s an old federal law that prohibits sending material “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion” via U.S. mail or common carriers like UPS. It was rarely enforced during the Roe era, being presumptively unconstitutional under that case’s holding, but it was also never repealed. The end of Roe made Comstock viable law again, which means the DOJ could use it to try to block interstate commerce of mifepristone even if the FDA doesn’t issue new rules restricting it.

 

And if it does, it might go further than barring women from receiving the drug directly from providers. It could “also stop pharmacies and health care providers from getting shipments,” according to experts who spoke to Axios in 2023. If that happens, even a patient who visits a doctor in person to get a prescription might find that there’s no one locally who’s able to fill it for her.

 

Presumably Trump’s post-midterm abortion strategy will draw from both approaches. The FDA will announce that it’s discovered alarming new evidence that mifepristone is unsafe and will issue some restriction on it; the president and his attorney general will then use that finding to revive Comstock, insisting that the health risk to women is a national emergency that they have a solemn duty to address.

 

How is that likely to play out politically next year?

 

Wargames.

 

The polling on this topic isn’t voluminous, but it’s safe to say that something resembling a total ban on mifepristone would be quite unpopular.

 

In 2024, an Axios poll found that 76 percent of independents and even 51 percent of Republicans believed women should be able to obtain the drug from their doctor or a clinic. Another survey taken this past June by the Kaiser Family Foundation backed that up, with 65 percent opposed to prohibiting “medication abortion” versus 33 percent in favor. If the FDA deauthorized mifepristone entirely, or the DOJ used Comstock to keep it out of pharmacies, Trump and the GOP would need a very compelling “safety” argument to avert a serious backlash.

 

Ask Americans whether the pills should also be available by mail, though, and opinion softens. The same Axios poll saw independents drop to 51 percent and Republicans to 23 percent on that question. A recent poll by the Center Square detected ambivalence as well, with 51 percent of adults somewhat in favor of abortion by mail and 37 percent somewhat opposed. When asked whether they’re more concerned about safety and verification risks in sending drugs through the mail or more concerned about women’s access to abortion if they can’t visit a clinic in person, the sample split 48-39.

 

An FDA ruling that mifepristone is unsafe might push public opinion further toward the pro-life position. And if the White House were to eventually land on a compromise in which the drug remained accessible in blue states but unavailable in red ones, I can imagine Americans broadly tolerating it on federalism grounds. What’s the point of letting states ban abortion, they might reason, if those bans can be skirted by simply dropping something in the mail?

 

On the other hand: How likely is it that Trump, having just been reduced to a lame duck, will agree to a politically feasible compromise following a humiliation at the polls that exposed just how lame he is? What will be stopping him post-drubbing from going big on abortion (and Iran, and tariffs, and everything else Americans don’t like about his agenda)? Having been rudely owned by the libs at the polls, an all-out war on mifepristone would be an obvious way to own them right back.

 

Again and again during his second term, he’s taken issues on which his party is either competitive with Democrats or enjoys an advantage over them and farked them up so badly that they’ve become liabilities. Overreaching on abortion by mail feels like the logical next step.

 

Trump isn’t the most interesting political player in this conflict, though.

 

Democrats.

 

The new Democratic Congress will see obvious opportunity in a renewed culture war over abortion, particularly given the left’s post-Roe electoral advantage on the issue. Legislation punishing the FDA for restricting mifepristone would be sketchy—defunding a scientific agency because it reached the “wrong” finding about a drug’s safety is horrendously bad precedent—but the Comstock Act is a more fruitful target.

 

A bill to repeal that law’s abortion provisions would pass a Democratic House easily.

 

It would also almost certainly die in a Democratic Senate, a casualty of a Republican filibuster. (Unless November’s blue wave is truly tidal, I suppose.) But maybe the left would prefer that for selfish electoral reasons: If the new restrictions on mifepristone are allowed to linger until 2028, they can be used as a cudgel against Republican presidential nominee J.D. Vance and his party during that cycle.

 

And while it’s true, as I said, that the public might accept restrictions on sending abortion pills through the mail to states where it’s banned, it’s hard to predict how opinion might move on that question following a pro-choice messaging onslaught. Democrats would push hard to convince Americans that mifepristone is safe no matter what Trump’s highly politicized FDA might say to the contrary, with lots of doctors on their side.

 

“If the drug were dangerous, there would have been an epidemic of side effects among the millions of women who have taken it over the years,” they’ll say. “If the evidence that it’s safe were thin, the drug wouldn’t have remained legal for years under Democratic and Republican administrations.” Those arguments will carry weight.

 

The very fact that the White House asked Todd Blanche not to make any sudden moves on abortion before November means Trump’s own team believes Republicans are likely to lose the battle for public opinion. And I don’t blame them: The KFF survey I mentioned earlier found opinion split 36-64 when Americans were asked whether it should be a crime for healthcare providers to send abortion pills to women in states where abortion is banned. That’s a bad starting point for a national abortion dragnet.

 

Probably the safest prediction about how Democrats will react to restrictions on mifepristone, though, is that it will further boost the party’s support for court-packing.

 

Whatever the administration is planning will be litigated out the wazoo, needless to say, and a Supreme Court that overturned Roe and usually defers to presidential authority over all aspects of the executive branch is unlikely to meddle with Trump’s agenda at the FDA and DOJ. If the court upholds his attempt to limit abortion in blue states by curtailing national access to mifepristone, that’s another talking point for progressive Jacobins bent on radical judicial reform.

 

2028.

 

And then there’s the vice president.

 

J.D. Vance is certainly pro-life but has been characteristically slippery about the extent to which federal power should be used to restrict abortion nationally. In 2022 he declared that a 15-week ban proposed by Senate Republicans was “totally reasonable.” The same year, in an interview, he considered the problem of pro-choicers providing transportation for pregnant women in red states to seek abortion in blue ones. “If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?” he wondered. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”

 

But as the GOP’s new vice presidential nominee in 2024, he committed to not imposing a federal ban on abortion and said Trump would veto any effort by Congress to pass one. “Donald Trump wants to end this culture war over this particular topic,” he declared, and called for “letting the states figure out their own abortion policies” so that the federal government could focus on bringing down the cost of living.

 

Two years later, having failed to bring down the cost of living, the Trump-Vance administration is preparing to revive the culture war over this topic in a way that might end up affecting blue states’ ability to set their own policies on abortion. Was the “real” J.D. Vance the guy who called in 2023 for using the Comstock Act to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations” nationwide or was the real Vance the guy who said a year later that he supports keeping mifepristone accessible? I suppose we’re about to find out.

 

As with Iran, there’s no truly good outcome for him in a renewed abortion conflict, I think. If Vance were to try to distance himself from this war the way he’s tried to distance himself from that other one, it would deepen the doubts that some Reaganites have about his ideological kinship with them. Some conservatives have already begun building the case against letting the GOP continue on a nationalist trajectory post-Trump; Vance going squishy on restricting abortion by mail because he’s worried about swing voters in 2028 would add a pro-life angle to that case.

 

He does need to worry about voters outside the Republican tent, though. The VP’s infamous comment about “childless cat ladies” before he ran for Senate has done him enough damage that he felt obliged to renounce it in his latest book, an almost unheard-of example of a Trump toady expressing regret for speaking intemperately. Clearly he thinks he has work to do rehabilitating his image with women to improve his chances in 2028 (his recent appearance on The View also points that way)—yet now here he is, on the verge of his administration resuming the abortion wars with a dramatic escalation that will land squarely on younger women.

 

At some point the president’s how-low-can-he-go job approval will start to weigh on his heir apparent and a broadly unpopular abortion initiative is unlikely to lighten the load. Ultimately Vance may have little choice but to do what he’s going to end up doing on everything else for the next 27 months—defending the boss as best he can, urging socialists to “get the hell out” of the country, and hoping that what’s left of the GOP’s favorability come 2028 isn’t a smoking crater. Maybe devising a few more new welfare benefits will help him atone.

Your Data Center Life

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

We are in the midst of a passionate debate over the desirability of “data centers.” Thus far, this debate has been stained by a profusion of silliness, superstition, and cynicism. But more than anything else, it has been notable for its profound tardiness. In 2026, data centers are such an inextricable part of American life that to discuss whether they are welcome is the equivalent of agonizing over what we think of this newfangled “television” thing. The public, we are told, has become anti–data center. If so, it is upset by the “center” rather than the “data” part of that equation, for whether they know it or not, Americans now rely on data centers in much the same way as they rely on their lungs. In every moment of every day, data centers are humming away behind the scenes, making the modern world possible. In 1973, Arthur C. Clarke suggested that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Were he writing today, he might have gone further: once that “magic” technology has been widely adopted, wonder can turn to contempt.

 

Certainly, we wildly underestimate the extent to which we rely on data centers. Take my actions today. This morning, I sat down with my coffee and looked through National Review’s website. To get there, I typed “nationalreview.com” into my browser, and before I’d even hit “Enter,” my computer used a data center to look up where that site was located on the web. Once that location had been discovered, my browser then contacted the website via its primary IP address — which, in the case of a popular site such as National Review, meant a digital “visit” to whichever one of the many “proxy” data centers happened to be geographically closest to me. After a secure connection to that data center had been established, my browser then started assembling the text, images, videos, podcasts, fonts, scripts, advertisements, and other elements that made up the page I hoped to see. Because this involved all manner of different content types — some cached, some dynamic, some streaming — and required the use of application servers, database servers, and distributed content-delivery networks, it invariably required trips to multiple data centers, all playing different roles. Thus, before I had read a single word, my computer had been served 150 web requests, across 34 domains, having contacted roughly ten data centers spread across networks operated by nine different companies. Because everything worked as it should have, this process was invisible. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Without seeing it, I had taken a remarkable journey around the world.

 

And that’s just for a visit to the homepage of a website. Presumably, like me, you have a smartphone. Have you ever thought about how it works? At the same time that I was visiting nationalreview.com today, my phone was relentlessly pinging data centers across the globe. An email arrived, a message appeared in the family group chat, a video from yesterday finished uploading to the cloud: those actions were the result of data centers, data centers, and — yep — data centers. When my weather widget refreshed its forecast, my calendar picked up a change to an appointment, one of my apps downloaded an update, and my stock ticker moved: data centers did that. Each one of the little conveniences that I have slowly stacked over time involved computers in one or more data centers doing work on my behalf. Magic? Not on your life.

 

Having had my coffee, I ran some errands in my car, and as usual, I used Waze to avoid the traffic. In so doing, I blithely connected to an unfathomably impressive piece of infrastructure — all of which remained out of sight. My phone accurately calculated its position on Earth by listening to a series of precisely timed signals sent from a bunch of satellites up in space and comparing the data issued by each to determine where I was. At the same time, its internet connection linked it to a host of servers that, among other things, supplied the requisite maps, calculated optimal directions, and processed real-time traffic information that had been collected from other drivers. To obtain even the simplest of instructions — “turn left” — I was the beneficiary of signals from space, mathematics in my pocket, and information that had been processed by distant computers in data centers across the world. While driving, I turned on Apple Music, and thanks to a data center nearby, I had at my disposal virtually all of the music that has ever been recorded. On my way home, I made a phone call to my wife and thereby relied on a data center in my carrier’s network to connect us and route my conversation to the right place. Had I driven through a toll, a data center would have matched my transponder to my billing record. If I’d stopped for gas or lunch and paid by card, the payment would have been authorized by my bank’s data centers. All this, for a simple trip to the barber!

 

We take all this for granted. Once, we had to go to the bank to cash a check, wait on the phone to buy a plane ticket, take a trip to a shop to buy a light bulb, drive to a video store to rent a movie, call theaters for showtimes, and consult encyclopedias to find the most elementary of facts. We don’t now — because of data centers. On Sundays, during NFL season, I watch the games over the internet on my TV, which requires a lot of data centers; I participate in two fantasy football leagues and one pick ’em league, all of which are hosted in data centers; and, like many others, I text my friends during the games — via a data center, naturally. So reflexive is this behavior that we have forgotten how it works. But we’d notice if it went away. If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

 

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another data center, that is maintained by another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

 

I am not deaf to the criticisms of the architects of our present artificial intelligence boom, many of whom have inexplicably decided to sell their product by telling people that it will put them out of work or perhaps even kill them. But I cannot accept the argument that America’s many data centers have been built despite the public rather than because of it. Whether they wish to admit it or not, Americans love the internet. They have filled “the cloud” with baby pictures, wedding videos, group chats, school assignments, tax returns, saved games, and emails stretching back 20 years. They expect their entire photo library to survive a lost phone, their documents to appear on whichever computer they happen to be using, and the 107 videos of their child’s first steps to remain available indefinitely.

 

In aggregate, the scale of data storage may be vast, but the items that make it up are invariably personal. The retention of this information has required an extraordinary amount of physical infrastructure, and there is no good reason to expect that AI will be any different. Pew reports that half of American adults have used AI, and that a quarter — that’s 65 million people — use AI every day. In computing jargon, this translates into antiseptic terms: “exabytes,” “teraflops,” “megawatts,” and the like. But that’s a distraction from what matters — which is that when someone types “How do I fix my dishwasher?” into his iPhone, he expects to receive an answer.

The Unbearable Lightness of American Restraint

By Ludovic Hood

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being turned on a cruel paradox: A life unburdened by weight feels like freedom until the weightlessness itself becomes unbearable.

 

A similar temptation inspires “restraintism,” a school of foreign-policy thought that has gained traction among the populist right, including influential pockets of the Trump administration. Reports this month that the Pentagon is weighing cuts of between 25,000 and 40,000 troops in Europe — while Russia escalates its hybrid warfare on the Continent — mark the latest turn in a fierce behind-the-scenes debate.

 

The “restrainers” promise a lighter foreign policy: narrower interests, an end to wars of choice, and the use of force only as a last resort. After two decades of costly, inconclusive war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the appeal is easy to understand. However, a great power cannot shed its mass simply because it has grown weary of the weight.

 

The populist-right restrainers are not the Barry Posen realists who would prune “liberal hegemony” while keeping a balance-of-power watch on Eurasia. Nor are they progressive budget-cutters who recast strategy around “human security” and climate policy. Their political project is more radical.

 

Many of these restrainers would retrench to the Western Hemisphere; they regard NATO as a bad bargain and view Ukraine as a problem for Europe to solve. Some see value in Pacific alliances that constrain China, though they demand more quid pro quo from the Japanese, Koreans, and Australians; others argue for pulling back to the second island chain.

 

Restrainers are not two-dimensional isolationists. They support international trade, diplomacy, and a strong military with which to safeguard the homeland. What they reject is the post–Cold War claim that Americans’ security and prosperity are bound up with global stability, specifically the order made possible by Pax Americana.

 

The restrainers’ diagnosis contains kernels of truth. The United States arguably overreached after its triumph over the Soviet Union; nation-building projects proved unbearably costly; threat inflation became a Beltway habit; and allies underinvested because they could. But none of that makes the remedy of restraint sound.

 

While geography and a nuclear arsenal make America difficult to invade, they do not make us immune to coercion. A hostile power that dominates Asia or Europe need not land a soldier in California or Connecticut to coerce markets, choke energy routes, weaponize supply chains, and force American firms and U.S. partners to live on its terms. Homeland security is downstream of he who writes the rules beyond the water’s edge.

 

Slogans such as “strong defense” and “diplomacy first” are compatible with almost any worldview — the fight is about thresholds and presence. If restrainers would deter China while drawing down in Europe and the Gulf, they owe an account of why Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and Canberra should treat American commitments as more credible after Washington has advertised its eagerness to leave. A smaller forward presence does not make diplomacy easier. It makes stalling, probing, and seizing cheaper for adversaries.

 

“Allies will do more if we do less” is a hope, not a plan. Free-riding is real, as are abandonment panic, nuclear hedging, and bandwagoning with the nearest bully. Spheres of influence, sold as sophisticated great-power politics, mean a Russian veto over Ukraine; a Chinese veto over Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and an Iranian veto over the Gulf and the Red Sea.

 

The record of restraint is not encouraging. On at least three occasions in the 20th century, Washington narrowed its commitments and advertised new lines in the sand — and then watched adversaries cross former red lines, leading to conflicts that were more costly than if the United States had stood its ground.

 

In 1919, after U.S. intervention proved decisive in ending the First World War, America’s political class chose to withdraw from European security, spurning President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of collective security and the League of Nations. Isolationism carried the day in the 1920s and 1930s, but it emboldened two revisionist powers: Japan to the east and Germany to the west. The Axis’s subsequent declaration of war on America in December 1941 brought Washington and the American people into a conflict far costlier than early engagement might have required.

 

Less than five years after World War II, American attempts to prioritize commitments in the Pacific backfired when Secretary of State Dean Acheson laid out an American defensive perimeter that ran through Japan and the Philippines but omitted the Korean Peninsula. Within months, Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States then fought a three-year war costing 36,000 lives, essentially to restore a frontier that its leaders had implied was not worth defending.

 

In the 1970s, a war-weary America retrenched in the wake of the Vietnam denouement, counting on Cold War equilibrium to deliver stability. What followed, however, was a decade of Soviet and proxy advances, from Angola and Ethiopia to South Yemen and, in 1979, Afghanistan, capped by the humiliation in Tehran. Adversaries had read American fatigue as opportunity — and Jimmy Carter, a president who longed for a foreign policy of restraint based on “moral idealism,” was compelled to reassert American hard-power redlines in the Middle East via his Carter Doctrine.

 

The same dynamics are visible in Eastern Europe. Russia’s 2022 invasion followed 15 years of unanswered probing: Georgia in 2008, Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, then a full-scale war now in its fifth year. A settlement that ratifies conquest would not close the file. It would signal to Moscow — and to Beijing — that aggression and nuclear threats can move borders. That is why publicly floating a large-scale U.S. drawdown in Europe, while Russian drones and sabotage campaigns test NATO members, is not burden-shifting. It prices the next grab as a bargain.

 

The historical record is not an argument for reflexive primacy. Responsible American leadership means bearing the weight where American power is irreplaceable, coaxing rich allies to carry more of the load, and avoiding nation-building projects. The opposite of reckless hegemony is not frictionless withdrawal — it is a visible, potentially costly presence in the theaters that will decide whether the next decade is contested or conceded.

 

Restraint has its appeal, but it belies what follows when America does less: emboldened rivals, rattled allies, and rules written by states that do not share core American interests. Pulling forces back from Europe or the Pacific will not insulate Washington from great-power conflict; rather, it all but ensures a more costly reckoning down the road. Lightness feels elegant, right up until the floor gives way.

Why the Right Is Nixonmaxxing

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Earlier this week, Donald Trump shared a 43-second clip of CNN’s Harry Enten going through the latest midterm polling data.

 

“In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, [Trump] got 99 percent of the MAGA GOP vote—perhaps surprisingly, I might have thought it’d be 100 percent, but it was 99 percent,” Enten said in the clip. “Compare that to his approval rating now with the MAGA GOP. It’s 98 percent; there’s been no real decline in MAGA support.”

 

You can understand why Trump would celebrate this news.

 

Of course it leaves out a few things, including the other 13 minutes of Enten’s analysis. We’ll get to that. But the clip also ignores the fact that people who self-identify as MAGA are definitionally Trump supporters. It’s sort of like asking self-described vegans whether they support eating salad, or asking Hells Angels, “Do you think biker gangs should be legal?”

 

Weirdly, Enten, who is very good at his job, didn’t address this problem. In fairness, the share of voters who describe themselves as MAGA has not shrunk that much. From what I can tell, the share of people self-describing as MAGA has dropped about 7 to 10 points. So, if MAGA means “super-committed Trump supporter,” the total number of them has not dropped a lot, and, among self-identified super-committed Trump supporters, they remain super-committed to Trump.

 

Enten’s larger point was that Trump is venting support of non-MAGA Republicans like a space station with a blown-out airlock. In 2024, Trump got 56 percent of the non-MAGA GOP vote. Now, if polls are to be believed, he is supported by just 7 percent of self-identified non-MAGA Republicans, a drop of 49 points. “So, his support is definitely not just ebbing there,” Enten said, “but is absolutely crashing there.” Indeed, 10 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say they will vote Democratic in the midterms. Oh, and among “pure independents”—i.e., people who don’t lean toward either party—support for Trump has dropped like Hans Gruber exiting Nakatomi Plaza. In 2024, he won them by 15 points. Since then, support for Trump has dropped 86 points to minus-71. It’s as if Gruber plunged through the pavement and kept going.

 

Oh, and Trump’s overall approval rating is stuck in the mid-30s, and a new AP-NORC poll this week had his approval on the economy at 17 percent.

 

I know what you’re thinking: The obvious strategy for the GOP to climb out of this hole is to tell voters the economy is doing great and to pretend that Trump is on the ballot. Also, the best way to repel grizzly bears is to slather yourself in a thick paste of salmon, honey, and vanilla ice cream and then grab a bear cub for a selfie.

 

Dead, rested, and ready.

 

On the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent new right, Richard Milhous Nixon is supposedly so hot right now. The hotness is called “Nixonmaxxing.” Christopher Rufo released a video called “Nixon Forever.” Introducing it, he suggested emulating Nixon, who “left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.” On social media, Rufo helpfully explained that “[t]he right’s rediscovery of Richard Nixon is not about particular policies—some good, some bad—but about the aesthetic, the attitude and the narrative of the self-made man who won 49 states on behalf of the Silent Majority, and was taken down in a Deep State coup.”

 

To their credit, the Nixonmaxxers concede that the case for Nixon is mostly a vibes thing. Or as Rufo puts it with little apparent sense of irony, “aesthetics.” I mean we’re talking about the guy who wore a dark suit and wingtips on the beach and needed 3-by-5-inch notecards to navigate small talk with strangers.

 

Scott Greer, a dabbler in white identity politics, concedes that “the new Nixon myth … has issues.” Nixon, Greer writes, “had few substantive accomplishments as president, especially on the issues dear to the Online Right. While one of the better presidents when it comes to foreign policy, he had no real domestic achievements, aside from advancing liberal causes and programs. In many ways, the country actually got worse on his watch, with crime spiraling out of control and the economy plummeting. Nixon may not be responsible for these developments, but he certainly didn’t solve them.”

 

Greer really can’t avoid this conclusion given his belief that a “serious conservatism will always amount to white identity politics no matter how much its advocates deny it. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can make America great again.” So he acknowledges, with some soft-pedaling, Nixon’s central role in codifying affirmative action and extending the civil rights agenda of Lyndon Johnson.

 

(For an excellent primer on the strengths and weaknesses of Nixon’s legacy, I can’t recommend enough Dan McLaughlin’s “Nixon’s Not the One.”)

 

I think the vibes-merchandising of Nixon is pretty amusing. It reminds me of the hipster effort from a while back to make Spam—the tinned lunch meat—hip and cool. I mean, who can forget the SPAMERICAN Tour?

 

But given how Rufo, J.D. Vance, the Trump DOJ, et al. don’t seem to think it’s entirely a joke, we should give it some serious consideration.

 

I think there are a number of reasons why this is happening. Some of them are openly and honestly argued by the Nixonmaxxers. They like his Rousseauian appeal to the “Silent Majority.” They like his willingness to use all the instruments of the state for political advantage, including numerous economically preposterous moves. They prefer Nixon’s dour anger to Reagan’s sunny charm. I think some find Nixon’s intense white-dude awkwardness appealing as they try to embrace “whiteness” as an identity. They certainly love Nixon’s hatred of lefty elites. In a National Conservatism Conference speech, Vance won cheers for invoking Nixon’s line, “the professors are the enemy.”

 

Vance and others also insist that Nixon was taken down by the “deep state” and that, on the merits, Watergate would be “like a 12-hour news story” today; the “idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” he said.

 

Such messaging serves some obvious purposes. If Watergate is synonymous with a presidency-destroying scandal, that implies there’s a limit to what Trump can get away with. If Watergate was no big deal, then it’s an open question whether anything—from January 6 forward—can be considered a big deal. It definitely buries the dead letter of Congress’ impeachment power even more deeply.

 

Similarly, the idea that Nixon was unfairly taken down by the deep state makes the paranoia surrounding the thick constellation of conspiracy theories MAGA relies on seem more legitimate, and legitimizing, for the MAGA crowd whenever inconvenient facts get in the way.

 

And of course, retconning the story that Nixon marshaled the necessary integrity and character to resign from office for the good of the country into a sad mistake forced on him by his enemies in the deep state and media has to have particular appeal for Trump, given his adamantine inability to imagine doing such a thing.

 

Nixonmaxxed Weber.

 

But I think there’s another reason, which will take a minute to explain.

 

The great German sociologist Max Weber identified three sources of legitimate political authority. First there is traditional authority, which rests on inherited customs, the royal line of succession, and that kind of thing. Then there’s legal-rational authority, which is the impersonal rules of law and process, whether it’s democratic elections under a constitutional regime or the bureaucratic systems of, say, the old Soviet Union.

 

The third is charismatic authority. I should be clear that charisma in the Weberian sense doesn’t mean “charming” in the way we mean someone who has a lot of charisma or “rizz” (which is derived from “charisma”). But Weber does mean charming in the older sense, as in charmed, as if by spell or magic or, in biblical terms, gifted with divine grace or favor.

 

Charismatic authority rests on the heroic, exceptional, even superhuman traits the charmed see in a transformative leader. Napoleon, Jesus, Muhammad, Mao, Ayatollah Khomeini, Joseph Smith, Gandhi, Hitler, Mussolini, Atatürk: History is full of such examples, good, bad, divine, and satanic.

 

Weber is not offering normative or moralistic opinions about charismatic leaders—and neither am I. Please do not infer any moral equivalence here, because I am not implying any.

 

The challenge for societies, Weber argued, was when charismatic leaders die (or, I suppose, retire). The movements they built were based on an intense personal, often religious, but always passionate, commitment to the leader. When the leader is gone, that leader’s followers and elites are generally left with a conundrum: How do we keep going? How do we stay true to the mission, the cause, or the movement? What do we do with the power left to us, and how do we keep it?

 

Weber calls this the “routinization” or “bureaucratization” of charismatic power. Under a charismatic authority, people follow the leader because the leader’s authority is derived from him personally. He is the ruler. When the leader departs, “Do this because the leader says so” becomes “Do this because this is what the leader would have wanted.”

 

After Jesus ascended to heaven, the church was built to institutionalize his teachings. After Mao died, the party bureaucracy took over. When Fidel Castro died, the Cuban government stayed committed to Castroism. Charisma is replaced with rules, institutions, procedures, and laws that allow the uncharismatic to rule in the “spirit” of the leader’s ideas without the spiritedness of the leader’s personality.

 

Trump was elected as a legal-rational leader. In 2016, he lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. In 2020, he lost both. In 2024, he won both. But over this whole period, he has chafed, squirmed, and railed against the constraints of the legal-rational box he was elected to. He wants to be a charismatic leader who governs based on will, “instincts,” personal authority, and Weberian charisma. At the midterm “convention,” Republicans played a video that explained how “God made Trump” to save us. “On June 14^th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” Just this week, he once again explained that he was betrayed by his Supreme Court appointees because they haven’t shown him personal loyalty. The idea that Supreme Court justices should be constrained by the law rankles him because he thinks he is above the law and loyalty to him should be the highest law. Do what the leader says, for he is your leader.

 

Some Trump fans agree with this to one dismaying extent or another. Some of his sycophants and enablers merely pretend to, as political requirements demand. But everyone deeply invested in Trumpism, and the political projects made possible by it, is desperate to keep the party going. They don’t want to go back to the pre-Trump era of Reaganism.

 

Ironically, Reagan was a charismatic figure, too. When he finished his second term, he was very popular, which made it possible for his vice president to run as the inheritor of the Reagan mantle. People wanted four more years, which is why George H.W. Bush was the first sitting vice president elected directly to the presidency in 152 years. Bush distanced himself at the margins from Reagan when he ran in 1988, but Reagan’s popularity and success were what made victory possible. Bush was no Reagan, but the assumption that he would routinize Reaganism is what got him elected.

 

A lot of J.D. Vance’s fans have convinced themselves that he will have a similar success at the end of the Trump era. I am very skeptical that voters will want four more years of this at the end of Trump’s presidency. And it is dawning on some folks that Vance, for whatever skills you think he has, has nothing like Trump’s charismatic connection with voters. You might think he has charisma—I don’t—but he certainly doesn’t have Weberian charisma.

 

So, what do you do if you’re professionally, politically, and personally invested in the Trumpian transformation of the GOP and politics writ large? How do you successfully routinize his shtick into our politics so that his uncharismatic heir can gain and wield power? Well, you might construct an ornate theory about another charisma-deficient politician who nonetheless navigated politics brilliantly. You might look for someone who symbolized and personified your own resentments. You might lionize a “realistic” statesman who was content to make peace with our enemies, withdraw from foreign wars, and dismiss the idea of standing up for freedom and human rights. You might try to rehabilitate a leader who shared your view that the point of power was to use it for the betterment of your team or tribe and to punish your enemies whenever possible. You might claim that a certain disgraced president was actually a kind of prophet without honor, a John the Baptist heralding what was to come.

 

In other words, you might just start Nixonmaxxing.

Don’t Be Like China

By Judson Berger

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

You might not have heard of the case of Guo Degang. He’s a popular comedian in China who recently was investigated for the offense of modifying the lyrics to a Chinese revolutionary song in, of all places, Wuhan. Reportedly, he changed the line, “The sun is about to set in the west; all is quiet on Weishan Lake,” by swapping the lake for “the Forbidden City.” You had to be there, I suppose. For this lyrical tweak, “he was reported to [Wuhan’s] culture and tourism bureau,” according to the New York Times, and fines followed.

 

Now, before you say, “but Jimmy Kimmel” — if only Kimmel could have been so subtle. Yet the Guo episode is one of many reminders lately that the China model is nothing to emulate.

 

For the record, the FCC’s Kimmel fit was “preposterous,” as we’ve editorialized, and the court system is taking up that fight. And that is a crucial detail, the independent judiciary. Ask Jimmy Lai. Jianli Yang, writing on Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, cites a more recent administration fight with the media to point up and appreciate our differences in that regard:

 

Here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.

 

The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.

 

Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.

 

Jianli goes on to argue that, in the emerging AI debate, America must hold onto its values and not adopt, for instance, “China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management” in pursuit of technological goals.

 

Yet Beijing’s command of economy and society continues to hold a certain allure among Western policymakers and provocateurs alike: whether seen in the New Right’s pursuit of an industrial policy of our own or the far left’s fandom toward (in the words of one noxious host) “Chinese-style Communism” and “Cultural Revolution sh**” or, going farther back, the media’s early praise for China’s Covid response.

 

Thérèse Shaheen, addressing other misconceptions, explains that the country is not doing nearly as well economically as is often portrayed. She writes,

 

The Chinese Communist Party has been working overtime to present China as an unstoppable economic and technological power. Artificial intelligence has become particularly useful to this narrative. China’s advances in AI are real. So are its accomplishments in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, drones, solar panels, and advanced manufacturing. But the Trump administration, along with other Western governments, much of the business world, and many economic and political analysts confuse the technologically sophisticated portions of the Chinese economy with the Chinese economy itself. China remains a mostly poor, mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so mesmerized.

 

Despite Trump’s praise for Xi as a “great leader” and his touting of their “fantastic relationship,” Jim Geraghty also lists the myriad ways China and its entities have tried to (almost literally) blow up that relationship: sending components to Iran that can be used in drones and missile guidance systems, providing satellite images to Iran of a U.S. base in Jordan before a fatal attack over the summer, allegedly conducting a cyber-espionage campaign that compromised federal agencies, and so on.

 

But most important, the personal liberties we take for granted remain unrealized in China, certainly by comparison. Guy Denton published a startling profile this week on a member of the long-persecuted Uyghur minority. Read it:

 

When Mihrigul Tursun arrived in the United States, nothing around her made sense.

 

The food, clothes, and buildings that permeated her new life were unfamiliar and disorienting. Insomnia and anxiety haunted her. When she managed to sleep, she was plagued by nightmares of what she’d escaped. In moments of distress, she would withdraw to the bathroom to scream and weep in privacy, running the shower and playing loud music to conceal the noise from her young children.

 

Slowly, however, she adjusted. And while the trauma of her past life will never fully disappear, America has come to feel like home. “I am safe here,” she told National Review in a telephone interview. “Nobody can hurt me.”

 

Tursun, a Uyghur Muslim, fled China to escape the government’s relentless campaign of religious persecution. Her arrival in America came only after years of abuse in China’s vast network of Uyghur internment camps. And her story is emblematic of a broader crisis unfolding in China that the Western world seems reluctant to address. The Chinese Communist Party does not simply wish to exterminate the Uyghurs — it seeks to purge China of all forms of religious faith.

 

As Guy reports, Tursun was detained in a Xinjiang camp several times, held once “in a roughly 45-square-foot cell with more than 60 other women,” conditions that led to several deaths: “The prisoners were frequently tortured. Tursun was once strapped to a chair and electrocuted. Others, she learned, were forcibly sterilized. Before she left China, Tursun was injected with a mysterious substance. She fears that it may eventually kill her.”

 

By all means, Hasan Piker, keep ranting about the model of Chinese-style imprisonment.

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.