The False Witness of J.D. Vance

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

J.D. Vance would very much like you to know that he is a Christian. “Christian” is the first word in his most prominent social media bio. He recently published a ghastly, stupid, profoundly dishonest book about his supposed Christian faith and his supposed conversion to it, a preposterous pile of nonsense on theological stilts that is every bit as transparently and imbecilically dishonest as his story about his other notable conversion, to Trumpism.

 

The religious principle most directly applicable to Vance’s public life is no Christian principle at all but an Islamic one: taqiyya, the religiously sanctioned lie. It is a doctrine that is easy to distort and easy to make too much of (consider this interesting debate on the subject, if you are interested in the broader intellectual context) and, indeed, it is common to see the doctrine deployed rather loosely both by jihadists preaching a kind of Islamist realpolitik and by certain critics of Islam who wish to characterize Muslims as a whole as generally deceitful and untrustworthy. The reality is that Islam places a very great emphasis on the virtue of personal honesty among adherents but, when it comes to religious conflict and adversarial relations with the non-Muslim world—it’s complicated.

 

There is, of course, a longstanding debate within Christianity as to when deceit is allowable, which proceeds along a fairly straightforward line regarding the prevention of a greater evil, e.g., just as the Biblical midwives deceived Pharaoh to save the lives of Jewish children, those who deceived the German authorities to save other Jewish children (and adults) from the Holocaust—at great personal risk—were engaged in virtuous acts of charity and courage rather than in vicious acts of deceit. But virtuous acts of charity and courage are entirely unknown to the vice president of these United States, who has waged a campaign of vicious deceit against some of the most vulnerable people in our society, from the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, slandered by the vice president and his coterie as pet-eating savages, to victims of horrifying childhood abuse—the indictment at the center of the current controversy involving Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy was, let us recall, for the rape of a 12-year-old girl by her stepfather, who had been charged with incest in a separate case.

 

Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, trailing in the polls, put out an advertisement in which his opponent’s estranged mother denounced her daughter as a serial liar, without disclosing the relevant facts, i.e., that the mother had had no contact with her daughter in nearly 50 years because she lost custody owing to her decision to live her life with the fugitive charged with raping her preteen daughter. When normal people and a few Republicans still capable of shame recoiled in revulsion from the ad, Vance popped up to defend it.

 

What is interesting—indeed, remarkable—about Vance’s campaign of dishonesty is not that his religious instructors seem to have somehow overlooked the bit about “bearing false witness” that is an ordinary part of Christian religious formation, but that Vance so openly and publicly embraces bearing false witness, in direct contravention of the commandments of the religion he supposedly professes, as a matter of political strategy.

 

Vance is distinguished as the rare sort of politician who is honest about his dishonesty: In the Springfield matter, he justified his deceit on pragmatic political grounds, with a dose of preening moralistic self-righteousness to boot: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN. About the Vivek Ramaswamy ad in Ohio, Vance said: “I’ll be honest with you”—thanks for that!—“whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern. … Politics is a tough business, and my message to my fellow elected Republicans is if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race.”

 

Vance praised Ramaswamy’s “audacity” in putting forward this ridiculous smear.

 

The notion that one does not owe honesty to those who do not share one’s beliefs and that dishonesty is not only allowable but virtuous when used to advance one’s beliefs—that is where the taqiyya flavor comes in. Perhaps the notion I am describing here is not authentically Islamic, and I mean no anti-Muslim slander by the comparison: What I do mean is that the principle is in no legible way Christian, the deceit in question being repugnant to the moral teachings of the church that Vance purports to embrace.

 

I can hear Vance and his apologists before they speak the clichés: Politics ain’t beanbag, buddy.

 

The tough-guy stuff—“stop whining” and all that—is familiar enough, part of Vance’s outreach to a sociopolitico milieu that is planted thick with lonely childless men who insist that they are “alpha males,” blissfully unaware that, for all the unhappy things H. sap. has in common with the chimpanzee, we do have a distinct form of social organization that departs somewhat from the chimps’ rigid dominance hierarchy. But the worst kind of tough guy is the tough guy who isn’t actually tough, and if there is one thing that can be said with absolute certainty about J.D. Vance, it is that he is a coward—specifically, a moral coward unable to stand up to the ever-changing demands of his ever-changing succession of patrons, sponsors, and paymasters. My time at National Review overlapped with Vance’s period as a contributor to that magazine, and I have been in the room to watch Vance pitch his venture fund (and the economic ideas supposedly animating it) to potential investors, shared the stage with him at public events, etc., but one need not have an up-close view to understand that he is perfectly happy to tell the book-buying public one thing when it suits his ambitions, tell National Review editors and readers another, tell Peter Thiel something else, and tell Donald Trump something else again, whatever it takes.

 

Because human beings are human beings and not, say, iguanas (I suppose it is the symbolic chameleon that is most relevant here), the toughness of supposed tough guys is not just for feeding themselves and seeing off mating rivals—among human beings, a strong man’s strength is supposed to be strength for something. In the religious tradition with which Vance has for some reason decided to pretend to associate himself, the purpose of such strength is in no small part the protection of the excluded, the weak, and the vulnerable: poor, struggling immigrants trying to build new lives, for example, or, perhaps, a 12-year-old girl who has been raped by her stepfather, a child whose life was turned upside down when she was legally removed from her family home as a result of the criminal charges in that matter.

 

Vance—not me, and not his critics—has chosen to put Christianity at the center of his public identity. There is no cognizable Christian principle that could possibly justify Vance’s active and culpable dishonesty in the Springfield matter or his utter indifference to the truth—indifference he confesses with his own lips and justifies—in the Ramaswamy matter.

 

(I will admit that I smile when I consider how such Indian-hating right-wing weirdos as Texas Republican politician Bo French and other champions of the “heritage American” will tie themselves into cleat hitches and double-overhand stoppers watching their champion debase himself on behalf of Vivek Ramaswamy, presumably a Ramaswamy of the Mayflower Ramaswamys.)

 

I am not the greatest admirer of Robert Cardinal McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, whose squishy progressivism is not precisely my 20-oz can of sugar-free Red Bull. But I can find no fault with his 2020 observation:

 

The notion of truth itself has lost its footing in our public debate. Collegiality has been discarded. Principles are merely justifications for partisan actions, to be abandoned when those principles no longer favor a partisan advantage. There is a fundamental lack of political courage in the land.

 

...

 

[T]he personal qualities of the candidates we elect constitute a particularly central element in effective faith-filled voting at the present moment, and another reason why faith-filled voting cannot be simply reduced to a series of competing social justice teachings.

 

Of course it matters what a candidate thinks about abortion, the cardinal argues, but it also matters what he thinks about other issues, say, immigration. And the Trump-Vance approach to that? “This is simply not only incompatible with Catholic teaching, it’s inhumane and is morally repugnant.” It is also authoritarian and, in the case of the homicidal histrionics in Minneapolis, a textbook case of state terror.

 

I myself am no theologian. (And I surely am no exemplar of Christian virtue or Catholic orthodoxy.) But at the risk of wandering into Puritanism, I will note that I can, in fact, read. And here is something I have read:

 

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

 

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

 

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

 

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

 

And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

 

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

 

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

 

Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

 

But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

 

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

 

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

 

Thou shalt not kill.

 

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

 

Thou shalt not steal.

 

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

 

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

 

Trump, who lately has made a practice of coveting his neighbor’s ass in a very weird public way, makes a point of violating nine out of 10 of the commandments by my count. Vance’s soul is opaque, of course—perhaps it is opaque even to Vance—but he is at the very least a culpable party to the murder, graft, and idolatry of the administration he serves with such degraded sycophancy, and to its corruption and viciousness and godlessness. But it is to the energetic violation of what Catholics number the Eighth Commandment—the prohibition on bearing false witness—that the vice president brings the greatest diabolical gusto.

 

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church contains a few surprisingly Burkean lines. Edmund Burke famously observed: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” The Compendium argues: “Those who govern have the obligation to answer to those governed, but this does not in the least imply that representatives are merely passive agents of the electors.” The authors continue:

 

Those with political responsibilities must not forget or underestimate the moral dimension of political representation, which consists in the commitment to share fully in the destiny of the people and to seek solutions to social problems. In this perspective, responsible authority also means authority exercised with those virtues that make it possible to put power into practice as service (patience, modesty, moderation, charity, efforts to share), an authority exercised by persons who are able to accept the common good, and not prestige or the gaining of personal advantages, as the true goal of their work.

 

Members of Vance’s circle talk and write a great deal about the common good—but who could fail to see the preeminence of the quest for “prestige or the gaining of personal advantages” in that orbit? Vance in particular, in his quest for advancement, impoverishes the public good by means of his habitual dishonesty, which disfigures the common property that is the political sphere and political process itself. The Compendium continues:

 

Among the deformities of the democratic system, political corruption is one of the most serious because it betrays at one and the same time both moral principles and the norms of social justice. It compromises the correct functioning of the State, having a negative influence on the relationship between those who govern and the governed. It causes a growing distrust with respect to public institutions, bringing about a progressive disaffection in the citizens with regard to politics and its representatives, with a resulting weakening of institutions. Corruption radically distorts the role of representative institutions.

 

As I have written and argued on many occasions, the issue of virtue in politics—whether understood in explicitly Christian terms or in terms of the classical virtues necessary to small-r republican citizenship—often is talked about as though it were some airy-fairy, otherworldly, purely metaphysical concern, something to worry about in the next life rather than this life during which we should “stop whining about” truth and honesty “and go win the race.” But for a few thousand years, better men than J.D. Vance have understood that honesty in politics is an eminently practical concern: Lack of trust in the state and its institutions imposes real economic, military, political, and social costs—costs that are even steeper when, as at the moment, that distrust is an entirely rational response to the untrustworthiness of the institutions and the men who run them, including Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

 

Some right-wing Catholics believe that the bishops should have publicly excommunicated figures such as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for their lamentable views on abortion and their culpable advancement of abortion as a political cause. (I am sympathetic to that view.) One wonders what a figure such as Vance would have to do to get their attention, to inspire them to take the same exact view of Vance’s habitual bearing of false witness that they take of Nancy Pelosi’s abortion-rights advocacy. One wonders which religion it is they are in fact following, and whether that religion leaves anything at all to render unto God once they have rendered, and rendered, and rendered—with such grotesque and supine enthusiasm!—to all these second-rate would-be Caesars.

Why Trump Can’t Sell Putin a Deal

By Thomas Wright

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

On April 7, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University in which he effectively offered to build the equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority for North Vietnam on the condition that Hanoi cease supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam. On the helicopter ride back from the speech, Johnson leaned across to an assistant, put his hand on his knee, and said of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, “Old Ho can’t turn that down, Old Ho can’t turn that down.”

 

Ho did turn Johnson down. Today, the incident is taught in political-psychology courses to illustrate how presidents can naively think that transactional politics, commonplace in states and cities, will work on the global stage, only to find out that nationalism, ideology, and rivalry matter more.

 

Donald Trump has fallen into the same trap with Vladimir Putin, apparently believing that the right economic incentives will persuade the Russian leader to make peace. This approach is not working. Instead, it’s closing off the one realistic pathway to end the conflict with Ukraine, and making the war likelier to expand and worsen.

 

Early in his second term, Trump was surprised that Putin would not end the war quickly with a freezing of the territorial lines and a promise that Ukraine would not join NATO. Rather than seeking to improve Ukraine’s position on the battlefield or apply leverage against Russia through sanctions, Trump decided to convince Putin that peace would be financially rewarding. Trump pulled his Ukraine envoy, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, off the negotiating team after the Kremlin complained that he was too favorable to Ukrainians and replaced him with his friend Steve Witkoff, a real-estate tycoon. The Russian financier Kirill Dmitriev would be Trump’s conduit to Putin.

 

Witkoff and Dmitriev worked out a deal almost a year ago that included a full lifting of sanctions, joint U.S.-Russian business ventures, and even Russia’s readmission to the G7 (turning it into the G8), but it foundered on Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory on the battlefield. Witkoff and Dmitriev continued their efforts.

 

The latest version emerged in the past week as U.S.-Ukraine relations reached their lowest point since the Oval Office bust-up in February 2025. Trump and Putin struck an agreement in which Russia would provide diesel fuel to the United States and global markets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the arrangement, saying that it was “not fair and honest” and that it looked like “a happy-birthday present for Putin.”

 

An infuriated Trump called for Zelensky to be replaced and said that he was harder to deal with than Putin. In the days that followed, Kyiv accused Washington of curtailing intelligence cooperation, including by withholding information on incoming ballistic-missile strikes (the administration denied this). The Financial Times reported that the administration is considering returning some of the frozen assets to Russia as an incentive for a partial cease-fire. Trump then waived sanctions on Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, saying that doing so was in the national interest of the United States. On Truth Social, Trump posted that he was in negotiations to end the war and didn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”

 

As U.S.-Ukrainian relations seemed to nose-dive, the administration tried to convey a larger rationale behind its decision making. A senior official told The Washington Post’s David Ignatius that because a Ukraine deal was proving difficult to negotiate, the White House would enlarge the problem and negotiate a regional deal. This would include provisions to supply energy to Europe through a new pipeline, with profits to be shared between Ukraine and Russia, and the resolution of Moscow’s differences with European countries.

 

This proposal is, in effect, the Johnson plan. The naivete behind it would perhaps be excusable if Putin were a new leader with no track record, but he is a known quantity. Ukraine is his obsession, his white whale. He wants to subjugate it and has proved that he will pay an enormous price to achieve this goal.

 

The immediate diplomatic problem that Trump needs to solve is that Putin will not settle for anything less than the surrender of additional territory by Ukraine, which is something no Ukrainian leader can accept. Putin stands little chance of taking this territory by force: The front line is largely static, thanks to the saturation of the area with drones. However, the Russian leader has two hopes.

 

One is to break Ukraine this winter with a brutal air offensive that would destroy its energy grid and deliver misery to millions. Maybe such pressure would cause Ukraine’s front line to collapse or lead Kyiv to accept Moscow’s demands at the negotiating table.

 

The other prospect is to escalate Russia’s shadow war against Ukraine’s European partners. Moscow is already linked to assassination plots, arson, and the planting of explosive-laden drones in airports. A number of European leaders, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and French President Emmanuel Macron, have warned that Russia is considering hitting Eastern European states with drone and missile attacks that it would later deny. Putin hopes that this shadow war will weaken European governments and bring to power parties that will cut off aid to Ukraine and pressure it to capitulate to Russia’s demands.

 

If Putin succeeds in these two gambits—weakening Ukraine over the winter while stoking unrest in Europe—he will be confident that Russia can grind out a bloody victory over the next couple of years.

 

Putin seems to think that time is on his side. Trump’s concessions reinforce that perception. But if Trump can change Putin’s expectations about the future, a diplomatic deal might become possible. In particular, Trump must convince Putin that the war will not get any better for Russia, and that the deal he can get now is better than the one he can get later.

 

This means doing everything possible to ensure that Ukraine survives Putin’s winter campaign: supplying Kyiv with as much air defense as possible, providing advance warning of incoming missiles, encouraging allies to seize Russia’s sovereign assets to provide Ukraine with economic relief, and helping Ukraine impose costs on Russia.

 

It also means helping Europe deter Putin from escalating his shadow war against NATO members. This is difficult but doable. Europe needs to convince Putin that increased attacks, especially any that result in casualties, will deepen Europe’s and the United States’ involvement in the Ukraine conflict. For instance, Europe could say that if Russia launches missiles or drones against NATO members, a European coalition will place air defenses in western Ukraine. Trump could tell Putin that if Russia keeps harassing Europe, he will clear the way with Elon Musk for Ukraine to use Starlink to hit military targets inside of Russia.

 

If one of Russia’s attacks resulted in mass casualties, such as the downing of a civilian airliner, the allies could designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. When I served at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, we communicated this to the Russians after they plotted to place flammable devices on airliners carrying DHL packages. We made clear that such a designation would likely lead to the closure of the Russian embassy in the United States. They stopped the plots.

 

Helping Ukraine survive the winter and deterring Russian attacks on Europe will help keep diplomacy alive. But to close the deal, Trump needs to convince Putin that his window of opportunity is closing. Here, Trump’s political weakness could work to his advantage.

 

Putin surely fears that Trump’s successor—if a Democrat or a Republican other than J. D. Vance—will be more favorable to Ukraine. A new administration will likely increase U.S. support for Ukraine and rebalance any deal made in the Trump years, possibly linking sanctions relief to Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine.

 

Trump could turn this prospect into leverage. He can tell Putin that the opportunity for a favorable deal is real, but that it may not last forever. Only he can deliver it. If Putin keeps fighting, he will not make territorial gains, Ukraine will survive and retain the capacity to strike inside of Russia, Europe will become more involved, and the favorable terms will expire.

 

Then Trump needs to get serious about revising the offer so that it is acceptable to Ukraine. At a minimum, that means a freezing of the territorial lines, and no legal recognition of the occupied territory.

 

Trump wants to be remembered as the president who ended the war in Ukraine, but unless he changes course, he may instead be remembered as the president who gave Putin the confidence to widen and prolong it. Trump has spent nearly two years trying to convince Putin that peace will be more rewarding than war. To get a cease-fire, he must now convince him that war will be more costly than peace.

The Iran Conundrum

By Elliott Abrams

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

The war with Iran will likely cost Republicans votes in the upcoming midterms. In part this is President Trump’s fault: his wandering explanations, excessive claims, and repeated threats to “decimate” or “annihilate” Iran or end its “whole civilization” are no way to persuade Americans that he has a sensible policy and is implementing it.

 

But if one puts aside the bluster and looks only at what has been accomplished, his policy deserves more support. It has been clear for decades that Iran is seeking to build a nuclear weapon. That’s why even the Russians and Chinese supported, off and on, U.N. Security Council sanctions on Iran, and why Barack Obama negotiated his 2015 Iran nuclear deal, though it only postponed Tehran’s program. Trump is the first president who looked at the advances Iran was making and, recognizing the narrow opportunity to stop them, struck. Today, Iran is no longer weeks or months away from a bomb but probably years away. Moreover, U.S. threats that we will never permit an Iranian nuke and will use force to prevent it (something even Obama threatened) will be taken far more seriously now that we’ve done it once.

 

In addition, Trump has blocked off the Strait of Hormuz for Iranian exports and imports, driving Iran’s economy into the mud. In early October, the Iranian rial hit its lowest value ever, having gone from roughly 800,000 to the dollar when Trump took office in 2025 to 2.7 million to the dollar. Meanwhile, non-Iranian oil exports through the strait are rising. The Wall Street Journal reported in late September that “Iran’s ability to choke off oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz . . . is breaking down,” with “Middle Eastern crude exports” rebounding. Oil is the lifeblood of the Iranian economy; it provides the cash the regime needs to survive, and Trump’s policy is squeezing it hard.

 

This is all good news, but it does not mean that the Trump administration has put tough decisions behind it. Iran may react to the pressure by seeking a deal, and if one is reached, it must be a better deal than the June memorandum of understanding. That agreement was an example of poor diplomacy and an embarrassment for the Trump administration. For example, at a moment when the new president and prime minister of Lebanon were denouncing Hezbollah and demanding that Iran butt out of Lebanese affairs, the MOU mentioned Lebanon three times in its first paragraph — an acknowledgment of Iranian involvement that U.S. negotiators should have rejected out of hand. The MOU also pledged that the United States would not “interfere” in Iran’s “internal affairs,” which is old Soviet language meant to bar U.S. support for human rights for the Iranian people. If Iran comes looking for a new deal, Trump needs a new team or at least new instructions to toughen up the U.S. position.

 

But the thugs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who are now running Iran, may react with more attacks instead of more negotiations. The Shiite militias that the IRGC controls in Iraq and its friends the Houthis in Yemen can expand their attacks on Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis can work even harder to block shipping through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal — a key alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. Iran itself can decide once again to bypass its proxies and attack Israel directly, though the penalty for doing that is potentially severe. The top IRGC leaders know that they can easily become Israeli targets, as the late Supreme Leader Khamenei was. They must also wonder what will happen if they restart their attacks on U.S. bases and get lucky; how would a post-midterm-elections Donald Trump react against Iran if an Iranian strike killed a significant number of Americans? Iran’s best bet in these circumstances, if the squeeze becomes unbearable, may be to hit Gulf Arab economic targets again, and harder. That would mean striking oil facilities, power plants, and desalination plants, which could do enormous damage not only to the Gulf states but to the world economy. The Gulf Arabs would then need to decide whether to sue for peace and try to bring Trump with them, or to recognize that the threat to them will never end while the IRGC rules Iran. That would mean asking Trump to continue the squeeze on Iran and bearing the damage they are suffering until the regime falls or is hit with enough military force to stop it from attacking its neighbors.

 

The fact is that almost every country in the world is suffering the consequences of Iran’s and its proxies’ actions: China, India, nearly all of Europe and all other oil consumers that must pay higher prices, Egypt (whose Suez Canal revenues have fallen by billions of dollars), and the Gulf countries that are Iran’s direct targets. The only possible exception is Russia, an oil exporter that profits when world prices rise and that, for its war in Ukraine, has an ongoing military relationship with Iran. But not even Russia and China would benefit were Iran to get a nuclear weapon — hence their history of backing U.N. sanctions resolutions.

 

Here is where the Trump administration has failed badly. It should have been easy to build a strong international coalition against Iran, much as the United States once did against Saddam Hussein. If China and Russia did not join, and helped Iran, for example by providing intelligence on U.S. military sites and activities, that would be all the more reason to build a broad international coalition to collapse Iran’s economy until it abandoned its efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz — and agreed to end its nuclear-weapons program.

 

But that kind of diplomacy seems beyond the Trump administration, which instead insults and threatens allies like Denmark and Canada and has imposed tariffs without considering national security requirements. By now, in late 2026, the chances that Trump could put together such a coalition of like-minded states is gone, destroyed by actions in 2025 and 2026 that have offended and alienated too many countries. So the pressure on Iran — military, economic, and political — will be more exclusively American than it might have been.

 

As we have learned repeatedly, the Iran situation can change overnight. With U.S. elections coming up, Iran may think it can affect the outcome by holding back or by striking now. If Iran’s rulers are truly worried about economic collapse, there will be internal debates in Tehran about whether to pursue serious negotiations or a major new military attack. Given that IRGC terrorists are in charge — instead of officials such as Iran’s president or foreign minister (who seem to favor new talks with the United States) — the latter is more likely. And depending on the targets Iran chooses, our Gulf allies, Israel, or the United States itself may be back in heavy conflict before year’s end.

 

If so, we have to hope that Trump will not repeat the error he made last February — failing to explain the conflict to the American people. A Truth Social post is simply not enough, especially when the president’s rhetoric has been all over the place and the war is so unpopular. This is the other major Trump failure. Thinking back to the first Iraq War, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney together gave powerful and persuasive press conferences, only deepens the sense of what is missing now.

 

Americans know that Iran is an enemy, that a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran’s terrorist regime would be a great danger, and that Iran has been killing Americans for decades. That Trump has failed to win more support for what is at base the right policy in part reflects poorly on Democrats, who (especially in an election year) put partisanship far ahead of national security. But of course it reflects poorly on the administration itself. If the conflict continues — a choice that may be made in Tehran, not Washington — public support will continue to decline unless Trump, or someone else in the administration or the U.S. military, does a much better job of talking to Americans. A further decline in public understanding and support could be disastrous if Trump faces a Democratic Congress, especially as the country moves next year into a presidential-election campaign in which opposition to military action in Iran may become a Democratic rallying cry.

Only Trump Can Do Trump

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

“You don’t turn around the Titanic overnight,” J.D. Vance recently told a rally in Toledo, Ohio. “It takes time to fix what is broken.”

 

He’s right, of course.

 

In fact, it’s been 114 years since the Titanic sank, and I would argue we are no closer to turning it around, never mind fixing what was broken.

 

It reminds me a bit of a joke my dad told every single year at the end of Thanksgiving. We’d be sitting around the table, stuffed to the gills with turkey and the fixings (Mom was a phenomenal cook). My dad would look at the ravaged carcass of the bird and turn to me deadpan: “Jonah, do you think if we got the best doctors in the world, we’d be able to save this turkey’s life?”

 

It also reminds me of this week’s slimy “revelation” that Sen. Lindsey Graham was gay. This hit with all of the shock and awe of being told that Jim J. Bullock is gay. “Not the guy from Too Close for Comfort!? I’ll never watch reruns of Hollywood Squares the same way again.” Given that Graham’s sudden death in July effectively ended his 2026 reelection campaign, this “October surprise” gives new meaning to the phrase “putting the final nail in the coffin” of someone’s political career.

 

Speaking to voters in his home state of Ohio, Vance was trying to blame all of the problems with the economy—real and perceived—on “Joe Biden’s policies” and the Democrats. That’s a hard argument to make when the president of the United States insists “affordability” is a “hoax” and that the economy is going so well that we live in a new “Golden Age.” It’s also a hard argument to make given that inflation was lower on Biden’s last day in office than it is today. The claim is even tougher when you recall that the administration took complete political ownership of the economy with its “Liberation Day” tariff idiocy. On Liberation Day plus one, Vance went on Fox News and declared, “President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction. He ran on that, he promised it, and now he’s delivering.” This was like saying, “The captain said he will tackle the plague of icebergs head-on, and he’s delivering!”

 

Adding to the degree of difficulty: The precipitating cause of high gas and diesel prices is an ongoing war against Iran that the administration sprang on the American people with no warning, explanation, or debate. The war was supposed to be of short duration when it was launched nearly 10 months ago, and we’ve declared victory a half dozen times.

 

But what makes Vance’s sales pitch the toughest sale of all is the fact that he’s a terrible salesman.

 

A vast coalition of MAGA activists and rent-seekers is determined to convince everyone that J.D. Vance is a unique political talent and that doubting his claim to a coronation as Trump’s successor is not only politically naïve but ideologically heretical. The chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, Tyler Bowyer, declared, “He’s the clear-cut leader by a lot. This isn’t highly competitive.” Indiana Sen. Jim Banks insisted, “I think it’s inevitable at this point that Vance will be the [GOP] nominee in 2028.” Breitbart’s Matt Boyle: “Vance is clearly the far, runaway frontrunner, and no one else can hold a candle to him right now.” Last year at the Vanceguard Heritage Foundation, Tucker Carlson pronounced, “J.D. Vance is the future, period.” At the recent (disastrous) NatCon event in Jerusalem, Christian right pooh-bah William Wolfe asserted, “JD Vance is the successor to Donald Trump. JD Vance, not Marco Rubio, not Ted Cruz, not anybody else who can throw their hat in the ring.”

 

Vance’s supporters think this is all a show of strength. I see it as a sign of weakness—theirs and Vance’s.

 

In 2022, Vance scored a relatively lackluster victory in the only race he ever ran on his own, in a state where all of the other Republicans on the ballot overperformed him by a wide margin. Running in a state that Trump won by 8 points two years earlier, hypernormie Republican Gov. Mike DeWine won by 25 points. Vance won by 6, after both Mitch McConnell and MAGA dumped millions on his race to drag him across the finish line.

 

Vance seems to think that Trump’s magic comes from being an ass. And to be sure, that is what some people like about him. But most Trump voters think his asininity is an at times regrettable byproduct of what they like about him. As someone preternaturally immune to Trump’s supposed charms, I can’t say I like the guy (growing up in Manhattan made me a bit like the Dread Pirate Roberts developing an immunity to iocaine powder). But I get why some people do. They think Trump is authentic, funny, and bold. (They also love him for his enemies.) I can quibble with all of these things. But I can also recognize the reality of the perception. Being Donald Trump works for Donald Trump. It really doesn’t work for anyone else.

 

Vance thinks he can emulate Trump’s shtick successfully. It’s a bit like me thinking I can dance like Fred Astaire by copying the moves. Politically, Vance looks more like Elaine dancing in Seinfeld.

 

At a recent rally for North Carolina Senate candidate Michael Whatley, Vance vowed that Whatley would “fight back against the fart left.” No one caught it, so he said, correctly, “you may not have even heard that,” then said it was an accident. Then repeated it again. Then railed against the “fake news” because he claimed the media would take it seriously. At another event in Maine, he said, “We have to remember Canada is a state—sorry, Freudian slip. That was actually an accident.” Sure.

 

Trump says dumber and more asinine things pretty much hourly. But when he prattles on about “Dumbocrats” and has to explain his bizarre conviction that most people don’t know that “dumb” has a silent “B” in it, he comes to it naturally. With Vance, everything is forced because his whole persona is forced.

 

That doesn’t mean we don’t get glimpses of the real Vance.

 

Back in the Before Times, I used to argue that Mitt Romney had an “authentic inauthenticity” problem. I feel a little guilty about it, in that I think Romney is a profoundly honorable man who would have made a good president. But I think I was right:

 

As I’ve been saying for years, Romney has an authentic inauthenticity problem; he seems fake, but that’s actually him. Not only does he look like the picture that came with the frame, he talks like a 1920s college president. Maybe it speaks ill of America that voters put so much stock in empathy and authenticity, but they do.

 

Vance’s problem is sort of the reverse. He has an “inauthentic authenticity” problem. There is no real Vance, there is only a theory of power and how to get it. I have to say, Marco Rubio has a similar problem. He desperately wants to be the avatar for a New Idea, and so he chases shiny intellectual objects and embraces them wholeheartedly.

 

The key difference between Rubio and Vance is that Rubio is actually a person interested in ideas, and he’s a very good, and quite likable, politician. Vance isn’t the latter, and as for the former, he’s attracted to ideas about how to get power and how power should be used. As Rubio might say, he’s thumos stripped of honor and virtue. He’s ambition all the way down.   

 

Vance likes the idea of seizing the assets of enemy institutions and giving the spoils to his team, not because that would be good policy, but because it would be good for him. He had tough love for downscale whites when that worked for him. He now sees them as victims, because that works for him. He was anti-Trump (“America’s Hitler” and all that) when that helped him inchworm up the greasy pole. He became drunk on Trump’s musk when that was the path of least resistance. The most authentic thing about Vance is his appetite.

 

There was no better example than this week when he lambasted Republicans who condemned an ad put out by Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy—a thoroughly Vancian creature himself—in which his opponent’s estranged mother calls her daughter a liar. “I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what … Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” Vance railed. He praised Ramaswamy for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”

 

I haven’t followed Amy Acton’s career or campaign closely. I’m totally open to the idea that she has lied about things that politicians lie about—though behind my pundit’s veil of ignorance I am willing to bet she hasn’t lied nearly so often as Ramaswamy. But the crucial point is she didn’t lie about being sexually abused by her stepfather or emotionally betrayed and abandoned by her mother. That’s the context of the heinous ad recorded by Acton’s mother and pumped out of the sewer pipe that is Ramaswamy’s campaign and political career. Ramaswamy knows that. Vance knows that. And so does Trump.

 

But Trump can get away with scuzzy and indefensible things because he’s Trump. Vance isn’t. Vance’s theory of being the next Trump drives him to show asinine “strength” and shamelessness, without any appreciation for the fact that shamelessness is Trump’s superpower, not a superpower that can be mimicked effectively by being Trump’s Yalie scrivener.

 

It appears that after Vance said Ramaswamy called it out “like it is” about Acton, someone explained to the vice president this wasn’t like force-feeding a fart joke to an audience like a foie gras goose. So he tried to clean it up by saying that Acton was in his prayers and that “[g]etting into the middle of that drama is not something I want to do.”  

 

That horse left the barn, my dude.

 

It’s not quite like promising that there’s still time to turn around the Titanic. But we saw who—and what—Vance really is. And I suspect the hull damage he took this week will become more apparent in the years to come.

Main Character

By Michael Warren

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

As I sat in a folding chair on the tarmac at the Pitt-Greenville Airport on Tuesday night during a rally with Donald Trump and GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley, numerous questions ran through my head.

 

Why, two weeks before Election Day, is Trump campaigning in a state where both parties appear to have already written off the Senate race as a Democratic win? Why, the day before, was he in Kansas, which last had a Democratic senator during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration? And why, on Wednesday, is the president heading to ruby-red South Carolina to campaign for struggling Republican Senate nepo-nominee Darline Graham?

 

There are two answers, neither of which should offer comfort to Republicans clinging to power in Washington. The first is that things really are that bad for Republicans. Candidates like Graham and Roger Marshall, the embattled Kansas senator, need the boost that Trump’s presence can theoretically give to GOP turnout—and they aren’t the only ones. But the second is that, for the most part, Trump is going where he wants to go, where he’s most comfortable, where he can get a reliable crowd to don MAGA hats and line up hours beforehand for a chance to see the man in person. It’s part last-ditch strategy, part vanity tour.

 

“I hope you saw the plane fly right over your head. Did anybody notice?” Trump asked the cheering crowd in Greenville.

 

Let’s be fair. Trump’s schedule since October 1 has taken him to plenty of Senate battleground states, including Texas, Ohio, and Georgia, and he’ll head to Iowa and Michigan next week. And though it feels like he’s checking a box, Trump’s visit to North Carolina in support of  Whatley isn’t entirely pointless, since GOP candidates in two toss-up House races could use the assist.

 

But Trump’s itinerary has also taken him to states that aren’t, or shouldn’t be, in any danger of collapsing under anything but the most catastrophic blue wave: Oklahoma, Nebraska, Alaska, Montana, Alabama, Kentucky.

 

With the threat of a Democratic takeover of Congress and the prospect of a very difficult and unpleasant final two years of his presidency, Trump is doing what he can, in the only way he knows how, to salvage his party’s hopes: holding primetime fly-in rallies that are focused on his favorite subject, himself. In North Carolina, Trump touted Whatley for defending false claims that he won the 2020 election, called out protesters who interrupted his speech as “losers” and “pretty fat,” and encouraged people to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” He also repeated his recent riff on the impressive physique of Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio. (“I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs, and I said, ‘His ass, it’s like a pile of muscle!’”)

 

But it’s far from clear that Trump barnstorming the country to stump for candidates will even help.

 

“We’re f—ed,” one seasoned GOP operative told me when I asked him recently about Trump’s appearance in that operative’s state. “I don’t think rallies work anymore.”

 

Maybe, but Trump is giving it the old college try. Republicans have a lot to blame on Trump as a dismal midterm election looms—his ill-conceived tariff scheme, his ill-conceived war with Iran, his ill-conceived maximalist approach to immigration enforcement—but they can’t say the president isn’t showing up for the party in the final stretch of the campaign.

 

But my source raises another question: What good is showing up to do these rallies anymore, and at the eleventh hour? Plenty of Republicans with their eyes on the future say they’re worried it’s just not enough to make up for Trump’s lack of party-building over the last two years. It’s not just the subpar Senate candidates Trump has backed–-from Whatley to Ken Paxton in Texas to Mike Collins in Georgia—though it is certainly that.

 

It’s also the slow crumbling of GOP infrastructure and institutional memory as old party hands have fallen away or been actively turned out from local committees in favor of more loyal, but less experienced, Trump fans. For years, GOP operatives have fretted to me about how volunteers and activists show a lot less interest in the grunt work of winning campaigns, like phone banking and door-knocking, in non-presidential years. Another operative recently complained to me that this loss of expertise at the precinct level is having long-term effects on the future of viable Republican candidates.

 

“It used to be that you worked your way up the local political ladder. You brought some kind of expertise, even if it was just party loyalty and years of groundwork. You paid your dues,” this operative said. “Today those things count against you. Primary voters want outsiders with extreme rhetoric, and expertise, experience, and education are seen as drawbacks. The result is weaker general election candidates who will lose races unnecessarily.”

 

That’s not to say Trump hasn’t built up any important party institutions. The Trump-aligned super PAC known as MAGA Inc., for instance, is putting up a considerable amount of cash in the final days to get out the vote by way of digital ads on social media. That sort of crunch-time expenditure may be worth a lot more than any number of fly-ins by the president. But super PACs come and go with the election cycles, and they’re only as strong as the principals who back them and the donors who fund them.

 

Another question came to mind as the sun went down and I waited with a few thousand dedicated MAGA fans on the tarmac. What is the closing message for the Republican Party in these midterms? In his remarks in Greenville, Whatley said some stuff about standing up to the “woke mob,” lowering costs, creating jobs, and preserving the American dream. He warned against empowering radicals like Zohran Mamdani (the mayor of New York), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a congresswoman), and Hasan Piker (an anti-American left-wing influencer) by electing North Carolina’s center-left former governor, Democratic Senate nominee Roy Cooper.

 

But all of that doesn’t seem quite right. The real message, the final argument Republicans are making as they try to hold on to power, could be seen on a pair of massive signs and a giant screen erected around the stage: “Make America Great Again,” the old standby the president has been delivering for 10 years straight.

 

The details are different, specific to the state and the news and the whims of the president in the moment, but the song remains the same. The 2020 election. The “Dumbocrats.” Fake news. The beautiful border wall. The low cost of gasoline (back during his first term, of course).

 

“The oil is going to get down to where I had it. I had it down to $1.85 a gallon, and I’ll have it down to that number,” Trump said in Greenville.

 

The only message, as it has been for a decade, is Trump. And as electoral disaster looms for the GOP, the party is only beginning to grapple with what the message will be afterward, on November 4 and in the months and years to come.

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.

They Wrecked Eisenhower’s World

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

Sometimes, the god of metaphors smiles on a writer.

 

I am an Eisenhower man. I would write “an Eisenhower Republican,” but I am not a Republican, and Eisenhower Republicans went the way of Chelonoidis abingdonii many years ago. I once made the case for Eisenhower as a political role model in a cover story for National Review, the conservative magazine that was launched in opposition to Eisenhower-style Republican politics as much as in opposition to the New Deal and postwar progressivism. I like Ike.

 

The contrast between Dwight Eisenhower and Donald Trump—and his coterie of fools, cretins, incompetents, drunks and drug addicts, grifters, deviants, and seditionists—could not be sharper.

 

Before D-Day, Eisenhower quietly composed a handwritten note taking personal blame for the operation’s failure—he was smart enough to know that success was uncertain and that he might not be in a position to talk about it afterward; Donald Trump, a dog-ate-my-homework guy if ever there were one, takes personal responsibility for precisely nothing. Eisenhower led Allied forces to victory in World War II and at the time of his retirement outranked George Washington (who received a posthumous promotion in 1976), but he was buried in a standard-issue soldier’s coffin and lay in state with no decorations on his field jacket except his two distinguished service medals and the Legion of Merit; Trump is a draft-dodging coward currently hard at work building himself a triumphal arch like some kind of limp Caesar.  

 

Eisenhower was a mediocre student at West Point but excelled in math and history and had serious intellectual interests throughout his life, reading everything from the Greek and Roman classics to Carl von Clausewitz; Trump cannot write a grammatical sentence in his native language. Eisenhower was a first-rate card player; Trump went bankrupt, more than once, owning casinos. Eisenhower was a serious negotiator whose greatest diplomatic triumph came not during his presidency but during his military career, a miraculous exercise in “managing up” to keep Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle more or less on the same page; Trump cannot get any meaningful legislation through a Congress controlled by his own party and instead tweets contemptuously at the Supreme Court when the justices remind him that, unlike de Gaulle, the U.S. president cannot quite rule by decree. Eisenhower was a model of duty and patience, spending 16 years as a major unable to win a promotion to higher rank in peacetime—the same number of years it took him to go from his next rank to being elected president of the United States; Trump has the discipline and attention span of a toddler who has just swallowed a two-pound bag of pure sugar. Eisenhower sent the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock against his own political interest in order to bring lawless segregationists to heel; Trump sent lawless masked homicidal goon squads to Minneapolis to terrorize the city for the crime of electing Democrats. Eisenhower was modest about his intellectual endowments but served ably as president of Columbia University; Trump thinks that he is an expert on artificial intelligence (and everything else) because he had an uncle who taught physics. Eisenhower presided over several budget surpluses and an average federal deficit of less than one-half of 1 percent of GDP; Trump’s first term saw the largest deficit ever recorded, which might be explained away as a COVID-era exigency, but his second term has seen deficits climbing back toward COVID levels and exceeding those of any year of the pre-COVID era going back to World War II.

 

And, of course, Eisenhower was served by able, patriotic subordinates who made the wrong call from time to time but were serious men: John Foster Dulles, Herbert Brownell Jr. (architect of the Civil Rights Act of 1957), Walter Bedell Smith, etc.; Trump is served by the likes of television personality Pete Hegseth, who cannot quite decide whether his next gig should be social-media influencer or president of these United States—and who may not understand at all that those are different jobs.

 

Hegseth, the hilariously incompetent, imbecilically strutting secretary of defense who imagines a testosterone-enhanced military that looks like something dreamt up by Tom of Finland, would like to be thought of as a great commander on the order of Eisenhower. To help him along in his preposterous Generalissimo Walter Mitty fantasy, he requested that a globe that had belonged to Eisenhower be moved to his office. (God knows what he planned to do with it.) The globe was old and fragile (like Hegseth’s boss) and the specialists who would normally handle relocating such an artifact had been furloughed by the administration Hegseth serves. But Hegseth imagines himself to be a man of action—though not in Iran, not in Ukraine, not really anywhere beyond the cushy wall-to-wall carpeting of his natural environment—and so he sent people who didn’t know what they were doing over to move the globe like a couple of college students loading up a secondhand sofa on a U-Haul, ripping a hole in the globe in the process.

 

Maybe Hegseth just wanted to make the map of the world more semiotically accurate by giving it a big ugly gash made by clumsy Americans.

 

The postwar global order was in no small part the creation of Dwight Eisenhower, who secured the U.S. victory in World War II, served as the first supreme commander of NATO, and helped to implement the Marshall Plan before expanding on it as president. Trump has helped to fan the flames of war in Europe by his shameful sucking up to Vladimir Putin, wrecked NATO by threatening repeatedly to invade the sovereign territory of another NATO country, and heedlessly gutted U.S. support of allies and programs serving U.S. interests around the world. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has helped to advance an approach to the world that veers from the criminal (kidnapping the Venezuelan dictator, murdering seafarers in the Caribbean and elsewhere) to the catastrophic (Iran, Ukraine, etc.) The Trump administration has been reduced to begging (“like a dog,” as Trump would say) Moscow to help the president buy a few midterm votes with the promise of cheap Russian diesel. Eisenhower helped to rebuild a world crippled by war and economic catastrophe; Trump et al. have undone the better part of a century’s work securing American interests and prosperity by bringing war, inflation, humiliation, and dishonor to everything they touch.

 

As a literary matter, it was practically inevitable that Hegseth would tear up Eisenhower’s globe. The god of metaphors is not mocked.