Democracy in a Postliterate Society

By Bryan A. Garner

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

The American experiment depended on citizens who could read, think about what they had read, and change their minds when the evidence required it. It made no promise of collective wisdom or civic harmony. It rested on something simpler: citizens had to be able to follow an argument. They needn’t be philosophers. But they have to hold a proposition in mind long enough to examine it. What are its premises? What facts support it? What would count against it?

 

The Founders understood the connection between education and liberty. In a 1787 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson urged that “the education of the common people” be attended to “above all things,” because “on their good sense we may rely” for “the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” Massachusetts’s Constitution of 1780 likewise treated wisdom and knowledge “diffused generally among the body of the people” as essential to preserving rights and liberties. Government by the people becomes dangerous when the habits of judgment aren’t widely distributed.

 

Print gave thought staying power. A speech disappears as it is heard; a page remains. You can read it twice, underline it, compare it with another account. You can find the missing premise, the doctored quotation, the convenient statistic. Print doesn’t make people virtuous. The pamphlet wars of the early republic could be vicious. Newspapers have always sold scandal, libel, and partisan fantasy. Written communication produced conspiracy theories and digital mobs long before video took over the feed. But writing has one great advantage over live performance: you can stop reading it. You can close the pamphlet. Look something up. Ask what the speaker left out. Come back tomorrow. You aren’t required to cheer while the band plays. That pause between stimulus and assent is a small constitutional safeguard.

 

The common school was supposed to produce citizens. Its graduate should be able to read a ballot, a sermon, a contract, a statute, and a political broadside. The 2025 international assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, released in September 2026, found the lowest average reading performance it has ever recorded among its members. Reading scores have fallen 28 points since 2015. The United States’ reading score fell 14 points between 2022 and 2025, to its lowest level since American participation began in 2000. More alarming still, the gap between the nation’s strongest and weakest readers has widened by 50 points since 2015, the equivalent of roughly two and a half years of learning. A citizen who struggles with a serious text will have trouble with a statute, a court opinion, a ballot initiative, or a budget analysis. A headline or clip replaces the thing itself.

 

But the problem isn’t confined to people with weak academic backgrounds. The professional class is drowning in words while doing surprisingly little sustained reading. Lawyers, academics, journalists, editors, executives, and public officials can spend ten hours a day staring at screens. Much of this is necessary. Almost none of it is the same as settling into an argument. The problem isn’t that we read too little. We read too much that demands too little of us. We extract information, answer something, check on something unrelated, move to the next thing. Reading becomes a series of small transactions. The book waits on the nightstand. What gets lost is the habit of staying with a thought after the first reaction has passed. We have plenty of information but less practice with attention.

 

The deeper trouble isn’t simply impatience. Increasingly, we don’t want evidence to complicate the story we’ve already chosen. Evidence can be inconvenient. A document can contain something we’d rather not know. So we dismiss the document or question its author. This habit is especially dangerous in politics, where people increasingly encounter public controversies through fragments: a clip from a hearing, a quotation stripped of context, a headline about a report nobody has read. The fragment becomes the evidence for the judgment. The temptation is obvious. Don’t show us the document. Tell us whom to boo.

 

James Marriott’s recent book, The New Dark Ages, describes a culture in which ideas increasingly travel through podcasts, short videos, and social media rather than books, essays, and newspapers. Writing allowed thought to be stored outside the mind — to be preserved, examined, revised, and built upon. Oral culture can be magnificent. The sermon, lecture, conversation, and great political speech aren’t enemies of intellect. But the new oral culture isn’t Homeric. It’s algorithmic. It rewards immediacy and confidence. A short video can turn a constitutional question into a mood. A viral clip can reduce a complicated policy dispute to ten seconds of sneering, applause, or righteous music.

 

A claim that looks thin on paper can feel substantial when it arrives with a crowd, a familiar face, and the confidence of repetition. Consider the familiar boast that a particular administration has accomplished more than any administration in American history. On paper, the claim demands obvious questions. More in what respect? Measured how? Spoken before an enthusiastic audience, none of those questions is asked. The superlatives accumulate. Repetition begins to feel like corroboration. This isn’t a problem posed by one politician or one party. A political culture shaped by clips, feeds, rallies, and streams will tend to reward performers.

 

There is an old temptation to blame the voters. That would miss the point. Shakespeare’s groundlings weren’t stupid. They laughed, shouted, responded, and sometimes missed the subtleties. Yet the plays gave them something worth responding to. They could hear a claim and encounter a counterclaim. Our own groundlings carry smartphones. The analogy has limits. Books have carried poison as efficiently as wisdom. Newspapers have spread lies. A printed falsehood can be more durable than a spoken one. Print isn’t a moral technology. It is, however, an accountability technology. A page preserves what was said. It can be quoted and checked.

 

So the answer isn’t to scold people for listening to podcasts or watching videos. Nor should we imagine that an earlier age was a golden one of rational citizens. The answer is to recover serious reading as a civic habit. Read the whole opinion, not only the headline. Read the statute rather than the pundit’s paraphrase. Read an argument made by someone you dislike. And read long enough to become uncomfortable. Without that habit, politics becomes a contest in volume. The loudest voice gets the last word, and the crowd supplies the evidence. One of the services a serious book performs is to prevent you from escaping too quickly. A good argument can force you to answer a question you’d rather avoid. It can make you admit that the other side has a point. Democracy doesn’t require agreement. It requires citizens willing to read the terms of their disagreement.

Why Republicans Lost

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, November 06, 2026

 

When it comes to drawing conclusions about why Republicans experienced such a colossal rejection at the ballot box on Tuesday, we don’t have to rely on the vice president’s unnamed “smartest data guy I know” or “another pollster — one of the smartest people I know in politics.”

 

We have this extensive and detailed survey of approximately 100,000 voters in 45 states, called the exit poll. The poll includes in-person interviews on Election Day, and it combines the in-person poll with other methods — mail, phone, and online — to account for in-person, early, and mail-in voters. You know what’s nice about an exit poll? There are no “likely voters” or “registered voters.” We know that everyone who responded was a voter, at least this year.

 

We don’t have to guess what voters were thinking. They told us.

 

“It was the Iran war.”

 

Yup, indisputably, that was a big part of it. When asked, “Thinking about your vote for Congress, how important to you was the war in Iran?” 34 percent answered “crucial,” another 40 percent said it was a “major factor,” 19 percent said it was a “minor factor,” and just 6 percent said it was “not a factor.”

 

The 74 percent of respondents who answered “crucial” or a “major factor” (74 percent) voted for Democrats by a 64 percent to 34 percent margin; among the 26 percent who said a “minor factor” or “not a factor,” 69 percent voted for Republicans, 29 percent for Democrats.

 

The survey also asked, “Did the U.S. make the right decision or wrong decision in taking military action against Iran?” Just 37 percent of respondents said it was the right decision, and 63 percent said it was the wrong decision.

 

In a result that is good news for the noninterventionists in the GOP, when asked, “In world affairs, do you think the United States should take a more active role, a less active role, or about the same role as now?” 28 percent of voters said more active, 43 percent said less active, and 28 percent said about the same. But here’s something a little intriguing. The “more active” respondents preferred Democrats, 74 percent to 25 percent. But the “less active” respondents also preferred Democrats, 63 percent to 35 percent. Only the “about the same” respondents preferred Republicans, 75 percent to 24 percent.

 

You could argue that the Trump administration has figured out just the right level of role of activity in world affairs to irk both sides.

 

When asked, which one of six issues is the most important facing the country, just 4 percent said “foreign policy,” but that might be a little misleading, as the consequence of the war in Iran is much higher energy prices, and 39 percent of voters answered “the economy.” But then again, another component of the Trump economic record is the enactment of widespread tariffs and trade wars. And speaking of that. . .

 

“It was the tariffs.”

 

Yup, indisputably, that was a big part of it, too. When asked, “Do you think Trump’s tariff policies have helped or hurt the national economy,” just 21 percent of voters said they had helped, 66 percent said they had hurt, and 12 percent said they had made no difference.

 

When asked, “Do you think Trump’s tariff policies have helped or hurt the economy in your area?” the numbers weren’t any better. Just 14 percent said they had helped, 64 percent said they had hurt, and 22 percent said they had made no difference. There is really no way to look at these election results and exonerate the tariffs and trade wars.

 

It was a less specific question, but almost two-thirds of voters (63 percent) said they thought “higher than usual prices” were “more because of Trump’s policies” and just 37 percent thought they were more “because of factors outside Trump’s control.”

 

“It was ICE and immigration enforcement.”

 

Yeah, that was a contributing factor, too. Fifty-eight percent of respondents told exit pollsters that the Trump administration’s actions on immigration enforcement had gone to far. Another 20 percent said they had “not gone far enough,” and 22 percent said they had “been about right.”

 

Asked whether they approve or disapprove of the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement is handling its job, 40 percent said approve, 60 percent said disapprove.

 

Sixty-one percent said immigrants to the U.S. today do more to help the country; 39 percent said they do more to hurt the country.

 

On that list of six issues to prioritize, 14 percent answered “immigration,” and within that group, 89 percent voted for Republicans, 10 percent voted for Democrats.

 

One minor bright spot for the GOP: Asked which party is better able to handle immigration, 41 percent said Democrats, 43 percent said Republicans.

 

The exit polls indicate that the 2026 electorate was 73 percent white, 9 percent black, 10 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian, and 5 percent identifying as “other.”

 

Throw away that “changing demographics mean Republicans can’t win” crap. In terms of demographics, this isn’t that different a country than it was two years ago, when Republicans were winning the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives. And nationally, the electorate was almost three-quarters white! The GOP wipeout was not because minorities and immigrants flooded the polls. It was because just about every demographic, including whites, wasn’t happy with the past two years of Republican governance.

 

Now, with that said, if there’s a widespread perception that your party plays footsie with white nationalists, a whole lot of minorities aren’t going to want to vote for you and will want to vote for the other party. If your party’s leader has dined with Nick Fuentes at his home, if your convention speaker keeps talking to guys who argue Hitler wasn’t really the villain of World War II, if you nominate a candidate who rages about Indian-American University of Texas students after the Longhorns beat Ohio State . . . what do you think is going to happen? Why would you think Republicans would do well among minority voters if figures associated with Republicans keep telling minority voters that they hate them?

 

“The Republicans stayed home.”

 

Eh, not that much; when asked to identify themselves by party, 35 percent of voters told the exit pollsters said Democrat, 32 percent said Republican, and 33 percent said independent. Two years ago, 31 percent of exit poll respondents identified as Democrat, 35 percent identified as Republican, and 34 percent said independent. That’s definitely a shift, but it’s not a huge shift; each party and the independents make up about a third of the electorate from year to year.

 

“Republicans flipped to the Democrats.”

 

Eh, a little. Eight percent of self-identified Republican men and 5 percent of self-identified Republican women said they voted for Democrats, while just 2 percent of self-identified Democratic men and just 1 percent of self-identified Democratic women voted for Republicans.

 

No, the much bigger factor was that independents started voting for Democrats in much larger numbers. Two years ago, 46 percent of independents voted for Donald Trump — actually slightly less than the 49 percent who voted for Kamala Harris, but enough to keep it close and make up for it in higher GOP turnout. This year, independents split in favor of Democrats, 58 percent to 38 percent.

 

In addition to party ID, the exit poll asked about ideology; 26 percent of voters identified as liberal, 41 identified as moderate, and 33 percent identified as conservative. Those self-identified moderates voted for Democrats over Republicans by a two-to-one margin.

 

Twenty-four percent of respondents considered themselves “MAGA,” 75 percent did not.

 

Eighteen percent of respondents considered themselves “a democratic socialist,” 81 percent did not.

 

Eighty-four percent of voters said that neither they, nor anyone in their households, were a member of a labor union.

 

Nine percent of respondents were first-time voters.

 

Just 22 percent of voters were parents with children under 18; 78 percent were not.

 

Eight percent of voters identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. More than half of voters, 52 percent, said they think “support for transgender rights in society” has “gone too far.” Just 26 percent said it had not gone far enough, and 22 percent it has “been about right.”

 

Considering how more than half the electorate has the more Republican-leaning position on transgender rights, but Republicans still got wiped out from coast to coast, we can conclude that many voters may agree with the GOP on this issue, but they don’t vote based upon it. It’s a second-tier issue at best.

 

Also, indisputably significant numbers of Americans did vote as if Trump himself was on the ballot. While 40 percent said president was not a factor in their vote for their representative in the House, 44 percent said it was “to express opposition to Donald Trump,” and just 16 percent said it was “to express support for Donald Trump.”

 

In the exit poll, Trump’s approval rating was at 37 percent, with 63 percent of respondents disapproving. Just 27 percent said he had “improved economic conditions in the U.S.,” while 66 percent said he had “worsened economic conditions in the U.S.,” and just 7 percent said he had no impact on economic conditions.

 

Eighty-nine percent of respondents said that the cost of living was “crucial” or a “major factor” in their vote for Congress. When asked what President Trump prioritized more, 62 percent answered, “his own personal interests,” while 38 percent answered, “the country’s interests.”

 

Finally, when asked, “would you say Donald Trump has the mental capability to serve effectively as president?” 43 percent said “yes,” 57 percent said “no.”

A Transactional President Faces the Wrath of a Transactional Party

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 06, 2026

 

The red walls have fallen. The president’s coalition has collapsed. In January, the GOP will be reduced to a rump in Congress. Then, for the first time in 16 years, Democrats will occupy a majority of the nation’s governors’ mansions. At the crucial but often overlooked state legislative level, Democrats flipped dozens of seats and captured control of twelve chambers. Democrats took the “trifecta” in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin while breaking the GOP’s control of the levers of government in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas.

 

A conventional political mind might be humbled by the sheer scale of this electoral rebuke, but the president and the courtiers he has surrounded himself with understand power better than they do politics.

 

Possessed with an acute sense of their own vulnerability, the White House is attempting to rally the only people who still look to Donald Trump’s political operation for guidance. And they’re going about it the only way they know how: through fear and coercion.

 

“The White House delivered a warning to conservative groups on Thursday: We’re watching you,” the Wall Street Journal’s Philip Wegmann reported. In a post-election memo to more than 3,000 conservative organizations, the Trump White House outlined the president’s achievements in his second term. But it concluded with a warning. “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations,” read the memo’s final sentence, highlighted in yellow for emphasis.

 

That’s a threat, and it is in keeping with how this administration cultivates relationships with Capitol Hill (which is to say, it doesn’t). But for the better part of a decade, no threat was necessary because the consequences associated with getting on the president’s bad side were manifest. Irk Trump, and he will kill your political career. In your place, some other more pliant figure with an “R” after their name will rise in your stead, enjoying all the benefits of political power and influence that might have been yours.

 

We have no indication yet that the president has lost his near-mesmeric hold over the Republican primary electorate. He can still make or break political careers within the GOP — at least for the next two years. But he can no longer promise that the Republicans who do not earn his imprimatur will miss out on the chance to govern the country. That avenue is foreclosed. The keys that unlock Republicans’ access to federal office are no longer Trump’s alone to command. They never will be again.

 

Wegmann’s reporting dwells on the simmering insurrection that the president’s memo sought to preemptively put down. The enervated remnants of the conservative movement, inside and outside the halls of power, have rained opprobrium down on Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, for squandering the mandate they engineered for themselves in 2024. John Cornyn, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney; these are the scattered remnants of a defeated army. Why should anyone care what they have to say?

 

But that’s all up in the air now, isn’t it? The conservative remnant is not arguing from a place of power. The core of their argument against the Trump era is that it has been an exercise in power alone. The GOP, they say, has fixed itself to the whims of one man — a man who has done many good things in his time, but whose caprice left the party bereft of an organizing principle. The party is unmoored from the things that are timeless and fixed. It has no core ideology. Its standards change with Trump’s mood.

 

Donald Trump’s fans — even Trump himself — have argued that Trump’s contempt for ideology is what has made him such a potent force. He is unconstrained by self-limiting constrictions to which those beholden to ideology shackle themselves. But without victories, the president’s muscular posturing retains none of the power it once had to intimidate the GOP into submission.

 

Those who say that Trump has remade the GOP in his image are right. He is not an ideological guy. Rather, he’s tactical and transactional. Well, now so, too, is the Republican Party. And what, exactly, has Trump done for them lately?

The Jerk Store

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, November 06, 2026

 

I’m struck by the fact that the candidates who scored the biggest upsets in Tuesday’s marquee races all seem … nice?

 

“Nice” feels like the wrong word to describe a bunch of politicians. (“Seem” feels like the right one.) And it doesn’t apply to every winning Democrat, lord knows. Troy Jackson, who unseated Susan Collins in Maine, sure doesn’t seem nice. Mary Peltola, the favorite in Alaska’s Senate race, does a convincing impression of being nice, but the truth appears otherwise. Abdul El-Sayed demonstrated formidable retail skills en route to victory in Michigan, but “niceness” wasn’t one of them.

 

Even so, they’re exceptions to the rule. Most of this week’s splashiest successes came off as pleasant, relatable, unmalicious people: James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa in Texas, Rob Sand and Josh Turek in Iowa, Adam Hamilton in Kansas, Scott Colom in Mississippi, Annie Andrews in South Carolina, David Crowley in Wisconsin. No one who runs for public office in this country can fairly be described as “normal,” but this group is as close as 2026 America will realistically get.

 

Is it a coincidence?

 

It might be. I meant what I said on Wednesday, that this week’s tsunami shouldn’t cause us to reconsider Americans’ tolerance for postliberalism. If the past 21 months had played out the same way except for the Iran war and the gas crisis it caused—the same corruption, the same presidential abuses of power, even the same tariffs—my guess is that only Crowley (and maybe Talarico) would have won among the Democrats I named. Voters don’t give a fig about being led by “nice” ethical people, we discovered two years ago. They care about prosperity, and if they’re convinced that a party led by abject scumbags is more likely to deliver it, that’s the party they’ll choose.

 

The “niceness” of the victorious Democrats this year mattered only insofar as it complicated the GOP’s effort to distract voters from the cost of living by demonizing the left as the greater of two evils. Or at least, that’s one theory of the results.

 

There’s another theory. Maybe, after 10 years of electing jerks, Americans have tired of it.

 

Off the top of my head, the only major Republican candidate this year who stood out as pleasant, relatable, and nonmalicious, i.e. “normal,” was Iowa’s Ashley Hinson. (Collins too, I suppose, if you want to call a five-term Senate incumbent “relatable.”) By and large, the party of Trump was, well, the party of Trump. From Vivek Ramaswamy’s infamous attack ad to J.D. Vance’s gay-baiting to the all-hands-on-deck demagoguery against El-Sayed to every single thing about Ken Paxton, the GOP campaign was a parade of vicious goblins offering sociopathy in lieu of the prosperity that voters had been promised in 2024.

 

It’s conceivable that a lightbulb flickered on above the heads of the great and good American people at some point over the last year and a half. What if corruption, cronyism, abuses of power, and economic incompetence were inevitable results of handing a political blank check to the worst people in America in the last presidential cycle? What if electing jerks tends to produce terrible government that makes voters’ own lives materially worse, such that “niceness” and relatability are now important credentials in political candidates?

 

If that’s what happened this week, then the election was more of a catastrophe for Republicans than anyone has realized.

 

“Ruthlessness in pursuit of cultural dominance has become the unspoken credo of Trumpist populism,” I wrote in my first newsletter for The Dispatch in 2022. Unabashed ruthlessness became the cardinal virtue of Republican politics in 2016 and was rewarded repeatedly in the years since with primary victories by GOP voters and twice with the presidency by the wider electorate. Having rebuilt their identity around it, those on the right awoke on Wednesday to the terrifying possibility that ruthlessness has become a serious liability in general elections. Ten years of Trumpification capped by the debacle of the past two has, perhaps, turned swing voters decisively against it.

 

If Republicans conclude that being gleefully, amorally cutthroat is now an obstacle to gaining power rather than a path to it—that is, that ruthlessness is incompatible with electability—-what will it do?

 

Is the GOP’s jerk store about to go out of business?

 

Hegseth.

 

We might get a hint about the answer as soon as next week.

 

Enthusiasm for impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has picked up since Rep. Thomas Massie moved a resolution to that effect in the House earlier this fall. “Many Republican lawmakers and allies alarmed by Tuesday’s wipeout are moving swiftly to pin blame for the election results on Hegseth,” CNN reported yesterday, with multiple sources telling the outlet that they expect the resolution to pass if Massie reintroduces it. Which he’s promising to do when the House returns from recess Monday.

 

Hegseth is going to be impeached, it appears—but he can survive that, as his boss did twice. The lame-duck Republican-controlled Senate might choose not to take up the House’s impeachment articles, leaving it to the incoming Democrat majorities to revisit the matter next year if they like. And if the Senate does take them up before power changes hands, Democrats would need no less than 20 GOP votes to convict, a tall order even after the tsunami.

 

The defense secretary isn’t worried about Congress removing him. He’s worried about the president removing him, which explains the PR campaign he launched yesterday on social media.

 

Trump has reportedly begun quizzing aides and confidants about whether Hegseth should be fired. “Somebody’s gotta take the fall, and Pete is moving to the top of the list,” one official told Axios after Tuesday’s disaster. The calendar is what it is: If the president waits until next year to create a vacancy atop the Pentagon, Democrats will have veto power over his nominee. If Trump drops the axe now, Republicans can confirm his preferred replacement before yielding power.

 

If you’re Pete Hegseth, is there anything you can do to dissuade the president from firing you? There is, actually: You can fight.

 

“A disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democrat allies, has … dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly, just like they tried against President Trump twice,” Hegseth said yesterday, direct to camera in a video posted on Twitter. “Why do the Democrats and the deep state radicals really hate us? Because we tore down their sacred cows one by one, and without apology,” he boasted, naming diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as “a Marxist ideology built to destroy us” that he had “crushed.”

 

The caption to his video read “At the War Department: We Stand. We Fight. We Defend the Republic.” A number of his fans and/or cronies echoed that message on Twitter in a certainly-not-astroturfed propaganda campaign.

 

Pete Hegseth is a man on an island. Normie Republicans want him out because he ravaged the military’s leadership and cheerled a war that brought about the electoral apocalypse. Postliberals want him out because they need a way to convince Trump worshipers that neocon warmongering is bad without disparaging their hero, the president, which makes Hegseth an ideal scapegoat for them. Trump wants him out because someone needs to take the blame for this week’s calamity and it isn’t going to be him.

 

The only way off that island—maybe—is for Hegseth to emulate the defiant bravado that the president has demonstrated every time he’s faced potentially career-ending adversity. The Access Hollywood tape, electoral defeat in 2020, multiple criminal indictments, even an assassination attempt in 2024: The key to rallying the right-wing base behind you in a fraught moment is to fight, fight, fight. That’s how you demonstrate the indomitable, unbreakable political will for which ruthlessness serves as a proxy for Republican voters.

 

Never apologize. Never second-guess your decisions, even (especially!) when they’re indefensible. Sneer in the face of your antagonists. Stand. Fight.

 

Hegseth’s social-media campaign is a wager that righties still find ruthlessness so intoxicatingly galvanizing post-tsunami that they’ll side with him against any Republican who tries to remove him—including the president, whose grip on the party has never been weaker than it is now. If grassroots chuds raise an outcry against Hegseth’s prospective impeachment, Trump might fear that firing him will be seen as doing the Democratic enemy’s dirty work for them. He’s not fighting anymore, the base will say of its idol. He could lose his grip on them completely.

 

The jerk store is still in business, Hegseth is betting, and he’s so confident about it that he’s willing to test his own political strength among rank-and-file Republicans against Donald Trump’s. We’ll know soon whether he’s right.

 

2028.

 

Before Tuesday, the possibility of Hegseth running for president in 2028 seemed preposterous. But not meaningfully more preposterous than placing a Fox News weekend host in charge of the U.S. military.

 

The logic of his potential candidacy was, not surprisingly, also based on ruthlessness. Despite the heavy Iran baggage that Hegseth would obviously carry into a general election, there was a chance that Republican voters might gravitate toward him in a primary simply because he’s the most repulsively amoral authoritarian in the field. He loves war crimes! He wants to execute people on camera! He tried to throw the libs in jail for telling soldiers to disobey illegal orders! He fights.

 

Win the GOP nomination and, thanks to knee-jerk zombified partisanship, you’ve got no worse than a coin-flip’s chance of winning the general election no matter how much baggage you’re toting. (That was the lesson of 2016.) Or so it seemed before this week.

 

That’s no longer true following an electoral beating so ferocious that it changed the map for several cycles to come. Republican voters have no choice now but to weigh electability heavily in choosing their next presidential nominee, as one more drubbing like Tuesday’s would hand Democrats the White House and a filibuster-proof Senate majority. Nominating a fascist frat bro whom Americans know as the face of the Iran war has become too comically preposterous even for a faction as unserious as the modern GOP, as everyone except Newt Gingrich understands.

 

But who, then? If our theory from earlier is correct, that swing voters have developed a significant preference for “nice” candidates over jerks, Republican voters will need to take that into account in choosing a successor to Trump. How will they reconcile Americans’ desire to be governed by normal-ish leaders with their own desire to be governed by cutthroat lizard people? Where’s the sweet spot in balancing electability and ruthlessness?

 

The three most likely nominees in 2028 all answer that differently.

 

J.D. Vance suddenly has a momentous electability problem, which may cause him to lean more heavily on ruthlessness to try to appeal to Republican primary voters. He’s the one official in the Trump administration who’s stuck riding this rocket all the way into the ground: Cabinet members come and go, but it would be unthinkable for the vice president to resign before the term is up. However bad the next two years get, and they’re going to be very bad, Vance will need to convince the GOP base that it’s still worth nominating him.

 

His electability case will rest on his universal name recognition and his awkward efforts to wash his hands of Trump’s most toxic policies. But rather than bother trying to convince Republicans that he’s their best bet in a general election, I suspect he’ll borrow a page from Hegseth’s strategy this week and try to impress them with unapologetic contempt for postliberals’ cultural enemies. Lots of public sparring with El-Sayed; lots of just-asking-questions ruminations about the necessity of an alliance with Israel; as much demagoguery about immigrants as he can get away with.

 

Vance will max out on tribalism to compensate for his dearth of electability, then try to cobble together a lesser-of-two-evils pitch against the Democratic nominee in the general election.

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will offer the opposite to Republican voters, leaning more heavily on electability and less on ruthlessness. He has the great advantage of being untainted by employment in the Trump White House and will present himself as a fresh start for the GOP. (A report circulated this week that the White House is eyeing him to replace Hegseth at the Pentagon, which is like inviting someone in a lifeboat to climb aboard the Titanic.) To further boost his general election appeal, he’ll likely ease off some of the polarizing culture-war fights that made him a star on the right. On Wednesday, for instance, he criticized the GOP for running so many anti-transgender ads this year when the era of “peak woke” had clearly passed.

 

DeSantis will run on competence, the effective executive whose ruthlessness mostly takes the form of ruthlessly enacting right-wing policies into law. (He drove that point home, too, in interviews this week.) He’ll offer Republicans a do-over of 2024: They can nominate a capable populist while disgorging themselves of the Trump administration’s immense baggage in the process. Whether the right will give him a hearing in 2028, when he’ll be “old news” after having been out of office for more than a year, is anyone’s guess.

 

Then there’s Marco Rubio, the slipperiest member of the kakistocracy that produced America’s worst electoral disaster in more than 50 years.

 

The secretary of state assured the New York Times yesterday that he’s always planned to serve until the end of the president’s term, but Bloomberg reported a day earlier that he’s thinking of leaving, and no wonder. Quitting now would give Rubio a leg up on Vance by leaving him blameless for whatever insanity unfolds over the next two years. He’d end up with the best of both worlds, arguably—next to DeSantis in the lifeboat, however belatedly, but also universally known to voters by dint of his two years of service at the State Department.

 

Rubio would be the “all things to all people” option for Republicans in 2028. He’s ruthless enough to have become one of Trump’s most trusted deputies, the point man for America’s rapacious looting of Venezuela’s oil industry. But he’s also the closest thing the Cabinet has to a relatable, normal-seeming human. I’d never call him “nice,” but he rarely stoops to the sort of gutter demagoguery that postliberals speak as their native tongue. He’s positioned himself as the proverbial adult in a government of troubled children, the most electably trustworthy figure in the ranks.

 

And as the GOP’s most prominent Latino figure, nominating him would be an olive branch to the millions of Hispanics who obliterated Republicans at the polls on Tuesday.

 

Rubio’s political identity can be summarized as in, but not of, the Trump administration. He’s enough of a reptile to have joined a den of vipers—yet, unlike his colleagues, seems not to have sustained any hard bites. It’s remarkable to me how much distance he’s created between himself and the hugely unpopular war that sank his party this week despite nominally being the diplomat in charge of ending it. Somehow “America First-er” J.D. Vance is more closely associated in the public imagination with the Iran debacle than Marco Rubio is.

 

The anti-war tribalist, the domineering technocrat, the above-the-fray henchman: Vance, DeSantis, and Rubio are three different blends of ruthlessness and electability for Republican voters to choose from as they contemplate the post-tsunami viability of jerks. I’m excited to see how supporters of the president, who responded today to a generational drubbing by dialing the ruthlessness waaaaay up, decide.

Welcome to the Hasan Piker Era of American Politics

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 06, 2026

 

Zohran Mamdani forced a chuckle at Fox News Channel host Shannon Bream’s mere mention of the name Hasan Piker. The political commentator embraced by the socialist left when the political costs were minimal recently criticized the New York City mayor for becoming overcautious in office. Mamdani’s response would show just how radical he remains.

 

When Bream rattled off a greatest-hits list of Piker’s inflammatory, anti-American remarks, Mamdani assured her those were “all things that I disagree with.” And yet, said the mayor, “I think that it’s important to both be able to be confident in your opinions and be able to have a conversation with those that you disagree with, those that you agree with.”

 

After all, Mamdani continued, “If you just surround yourself with people who echo everything that you say and think, you’re going to just end up at home looking at a mirror.”

 

That sounds reasonable as long as you don’t think about it too hard. If, however, you parse the mayor’s comments, you realize he’s claiming that no views are toxic enough to disqualify their expostulators from participation in polite discourse. Even prudent dissociation represents some ugly species of epistemic closure. But Mamdani doesn’t really believe that. He has no problem criticizing outlooks he opposes, and he is happy to anathematize their proponents.

 

What’s more, the results of the 2026 election undermine whatever coalitional logic there might have been before November 3 that could have convinced more sensible Democratic office-seekers to keep their views on Piker to themselves.

 

Democrats just engineered an electorate that was 16 points more Democratic than it was Republican. The GOP lost among men, women, independents, Hispanics, degree-holders, suburbanites, and almost every other demographic that cumulatively contributes to a winning coalition. The Democratic Party is now a majority party. They do not need to cultivate marginal personalities and their audiences. It is not out of prudence that Mamdani — arguably the party’s most popular elected official — has declined to cast Piker into the wilderness. Indeed, prudence would call for it.

 

What are we left to conclude but that Mamdani likes what he hears from Piker — or, at least, wants to court the support of those who do?

 

Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed can be expected to be even more provocative now that he no longer has to pretend he has no affinity for the “streamer” to whom he arguably owes his Senate seat. Not that Michigan’s junior senator or, for that matter, New York City’s mayor have much of a choice in the matter. Piker will not quietly moderate his views, and he will not shut up about them. He can be expected to continue to agitate from the sidelines, and there will soon be a substantial socialist caucus in the House and Senate that also believes America deserved 9/11 and that bringing “unrest and violence to America” is desirable.

 

The Democratic Party’s allies in legacy media are busily dismissing the concerns around the radicals headed to Washington as so much right-wing paranoia. It’s the moderate Democrats who won the night, they say. It is true that, for at least the next two years, the size of the Democratic Party’s majorities will make it easier for leadership to sideline the socialist left.

 

But the second the GOP repairs its reputation with the voters it lost, those moderates will be the first to go. The socialists, meanwhile, entrenched as they are in the darkest of dark-blue districts and states, will be around for a very long time. They are bound and beholden to both Piker and his audience, and it’s not a small audience.

 

“He now counts 3.1 million followers on Twitch, 2 million on Instagram, 2 million on YouTube, 1.9 million on TikTok and 1.7 million on X,” NBC News reported. “On election night, Piker’s stream drew 1.75 million hours of watch time, the most of any individual streamer, according to Streams Charts, a company that tracks livestreaming across major platforms.”

 

The cast of characters who argue that you cannot have bananas because of the crafty Jews hold the reins now. Welcome to the Hasan Piker era of American politics.

The Man in the Empty Gray Suit

By Will Swaim

Saturday, November 07, 2026

 

Seventy days before California voters would send Xavier Becerra to the general election as the Democratic candidate for governor, the former state legislator, former congressman, former attorney general, and former U.S. secretary of health and human services couldn’t even score an invite to the state’s marquee gubernatorial debate stage.

 

The March 24 forum at the University of Southern California was supposed to be the campaign’s first major televised confrontation in a freewheeling governor’s race. Eight leading Democrats, none of whom you’d likely remember except for the worst of reasons (Eric Swalwell, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer), shivved one another for the right to succeed Gavin Newsom. In pre-debate polling, Becerra languished near the bottom of the field. Democratic officials feared that the crowded field might julienne the party’s vote so thoroughly that two Republicans would advance from California’s open primary.

 

USC and its television partner, ABC7, offered to help solve the Democrats’ problem, producing a candidate-selection process dressed in the recondite language of the academy: “a social scientific candidate-viability formula,” developed by USC professor Christian Grose. So, you know, science. In ordinary English, it simply ranked candidates by polling and fundraising.

 

Six candidates made the cut. Becerra was not among them. And he was furious.

 

He accused USC and ABC7 of rigging the election: Grose’s formula, he claimed, excluded every Democrat of color, whereas one lower-polling white candidate qualified on fundraising alone. “My father used to tell me of the days when he would encounter signs posted outside establishments that read ‘No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans Allowed,’” Becerra wrote in an open letter to USC President Beong-Soo Kim. “USC’s actions may not seem so transparent. But you have deliberately chosen to selectively filter the voters’ view of the field of gubernatorial candidates in what all observers characterize as a wide-open race.” At a news conference, he urged the invited candidates to boycott what he called “a biased process.”

 

The racialized pressure campaign worked — sort of: Members of the state legislature joined the protest, and, when some invited candidates signaled their DEI bona fides and threatened to stay away, USC abandoned the debate altogether. That certainly filtered the voters’ view of the field. A few weeks later, in the June primary, Becerra was the top finisher. And this week, he was elected California’s 41st governor, beating Steve Hilton, the state GOP’s latest solid but sacrificial offering.

 

Somewhere between USC’s conclusion that Becerra wasn’t important enough for a debate stage and the voters’ decision to make him governor lies one of California’s stranger political stories.

 

Xavier Becerra is California’s Zelig, a man who shows up in or near every important event but rarely plays a real part — or, worse, plays a disastrous one. And he rises, Becerra does. For more than 30 years, he has floated through Democratic politics leaving fewer footprints than Bigfoot. After just 18 months in the state legislature, he entered Congress in 1993 and stayed for twelve terms. He left only when Jerry Brown appointed him attorney general after Kamala Harris left that post for a seat in the U.S. Senate. He left the AG’s office when Joe Biden tapped him to run the Department of Health and Human Services during the Covid and migration crises. After all that, as recently as that debate fiasco in March, nearly half of California’s likely primary voters didn’t know enough about Becerra to have an opinion, according to a poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

 

In the Beginning

 

Xavier’s father, Manuel Becerra, was born in Sacramento and raised in Tijuana. He returned to pick vegetables in California’s Central Valley before finding steadier work in construction. However bad California may have been for Manuel, life in El Norte apparently beat the alternative. Despite little formal education, his Mexican-born wife, Maria Teresa, worked as a clerical employee. The couple saved enough cash to build a modest home with their own hands.

 

Xavier was born in Sacramento in 1958, the third of the Becerras’ four children. His recollection of his childhood echoes the biographies of tens of millions of immigrant American families: “We didn’t have much, but we always ate well.” He was the first in his family to attend college. He earned degrees in economics and law from Stanford, where, according to family lore, he applied only after retrieving an application discarded by another high school student. Whether apocryphal or polished by repetition, that story captures a poor family’s ascent from poverty to an American dream. Becerra also emphasizes his Catholicism: “I was raised in a Catholic home, and we would get up early on Sunday mornings to go to Mass,” he has said. “My faith is a big part of who I am today.” When he announced his campaign for governor, he recalled his parents leveraging “little more than hope and determination” and finding “the California Dream” — a place where hard work could buy a home, educate children, and leave the next generation better off than the last.

 

Becerra said he was running because that dream had vanished. He did not acknowledge his 35-year career in a Democratic political machine that has made California infamous for dysfunction — a state marked by the nation’s highest living costs, heaviest tax burdens, and worst poverty and education results. His diagnosis of the problem emphasizes inequities, attacks on civil rights, and corporate abuses. His prescription, invariably, is more government. Missing are the free markets, faith, thrift, responsibility, and bourgeois virtues that propelled his own family. Becerra proposes to restore California’s lost promise by expanding institutions that have presided over its decline. His parents came seeking opportunity, not government services. Their son seems to believe the two are increasingly the same thing. On Tuesday, it seems California’s voters agreed.

 

The Long March

 

Becerra entered Congress in January 1993. Bill Clinton had just taken office; Ronald Reagan was alive; California Republicans still won statewide elections; Google did not exist; Mark Zuckerberg was eight. Over the next 24 years, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi became House speakers, America fought two wars, and California cycled through four governors.

 

Like one of those anonymous Soviets who appeared atop Lenin’s Tomb every May 1, Becerra advanced steadily through all of it and left few traces that he was ever there. Yes, he earned a seat on Ways and Means, a House committee that, when mentioned in news reporting, is almost always preceded by the adjective “powerful.” And he chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the late 1990s, at a time when it was still bipartisan; thanks to Becerra, it wasn’t bipartisan for long. In December 1996, he traveled to Cuba for a sit-down with Fidel Castro. During that meeting, Becerra never asked Castro for a meeting with political dissidents or suggested that free elections might be a good idea way for El Comandante to signal his affection for real democracy rather than the uniparty that still runs Cuba. Alarmed by Becerra’s cuddly performance, the caucus’s two Cuban-American Republicans — Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida — resigned. Henry Bonilla of Texas followed within a year. After Becerra, the Latino caucus was cleaved into partisan squads.

 

Besides meeting with Castro and (however unintentionally) purging the Latino caucus of Republicans, Becerra produced just one other political win in Congress. It remains for nearly everyone but Becerra the most memorable moment in his otherwise anodyne congressional tenure.

 

Send Lawyers, Guns, and Xavier Becerra

 

In the early 1990s, Carlos Vignali, the son of a wealthy Los Angeles auto-body entrepreneur and Becerra donor, emerged as (in federal investigators’ description) the financier of a cocaine pipeline supplying Minneapolis. Prosecutors said the operation moved roughly 800 pounds of cocaine from Southern California to Minnesota, where it was cooked into crack and sold on the city’s streets. After a two-year investigation, agents armed with court-authorized wiretaps listened as Vignali and his associates spoke in code, referring to cocaine as “love.” Prosecutors argued that the recordings showed Vignali was not merely associating with traffickers but directing them. The federal jury convicted him on three felony counts, and U.S. District Judge David S. Doty sentenced the then-25-year-old to 15 years and eight months in federal prison.

 

In any similar situation, a parent might have sent the judge a muffin basket and a letter begging for mercy. Instead, Vignali’s father cobbled together one of the most politically connected clemency campaigns of the Clinton years. The roster of supporters read like a directory of California Democratic power: Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, future L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, state legislator Richard Polanco, L.A. County supervisor Gloria Molina, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca — and Congressman Xavier Becerra. By his own account, Becerra first contacted Alejandro Mayorkas, Clinton’s U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, to ask whether this was the sort of case that merited clemency. Mayorkas, in turn, contacted the Minnesota U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Vignali. Prosecutor Todd Jones reportedly warned Mayorkas that Vignali was “a major player” in drug trafficking and said of Becerra’s proposed involvement, “Don’t go there. [Vignali] is bad news.”

 

Becerra persisted, lobbying the White House as late as January 19, 2001, Clinton’s last full day in office. Minnesota prosecutors opposed clemency, and Becerra acknowledged that he had never independently fact-checked the family’s account. He advanced his case for clemency in explicitly racial terms: Clinton’s intervention was necessary because “justice is not yet blind to color in America.” On January 20, Clinton sliced the baby in half, commuting Vignali’s sentence.

 

Becerra would likely prefer that he be remembered for his legislative work. He introduced 121 bills and resolutions in the House, mostly immigration proposals and commemorative measures. His first, in 1993, proposed a commission to investigate civil rights abuses by immigration agents along the Mexican border — an early expression of his party’s current zeal for policing the immigration police. The following year, he joined other state and congressional Democrats to oppose Proposition 187, California’s voter-approved initiative that would have denied many public benefits to illegal immigrants. (Democrats’ thinking about the issue has changed over time: In the 1990s, liberals depicted California’s Proposition 187 as an illegal state intrusion into immigration policy, a purely federal responsibility. These days, as California pursues its own immigration goals, Democrats want us to understand that it’s the state’s Tenth Amendment right to deal with illegal immigrants in whatever way it chooses.) Only one of Becerra’s bills became law: naming a Los Angeles post office after Nat King Cole.

 

He went to Washington hoping to change the country. After nearly a quarter century, Becerra had won a commutation for a convicted coke trafficker and changed a post office sign — the latter thanks to a Republican, President George W. Bush.

 

‘Intellect, Knowledge, and Temperament’

 

When California Attorney General Kamala Harris left Sacramento for the U.S. Senate in 2016, Governor Jerry Brown chose Becerra to replace her. But the “intellect, knowledge, and temperament” for which Brown praised his appointment led Becerra onto a different political path. As California’s attorney general, he found his true calling: suing Donald Trump. He was like one of those six-armed Hindu gods: By the time Trump left office, Becerra’s Justice Department had filed more than 120 lawsuits against the administration. Some raised substantial constitutional questions about immigration, but even those looked like evidence that Becerra’s real goal was to make federal immigration enforcement as difficult as the law would permit. Becerra’s position was remarkably consistent: Immigration enforcement deserved greater scrutiny, deportation deserved greater resistance, and the federal government had no business asking prospective immigrants whether they could support themselves in the United States.

 

Other anti-Trump lawsuits were voyages into the mundane. Surfing the liberal anxiety about climate change, Becerra sued to block the administration’s relaxation of Obama-era federal standards on light bulbs and dishwashers. On the final full day of Trump’s first term, Becerra was filing lawsuits to block the sale of faster washing machines and dryers. The president was leaving Washington; California’s attorney general wanted to make sure Americans couldn’t leave the laundry room.

 

Trump, Trump, Trump

 

Suing Trump left AG Becerra with no time to address instances of high-profile corruption emerging closer to home. The state’s top cop ignored the impact of Harris’s enthusiasm for the kind of social justice projects embodied in Proposition 47. That statewide ballot initiative, passed by California voters in 2014, reduced many felonies to misdemeanors. By the time Becerra was in office, the bitter fruit was evident everywhere. In the before times, vagrants arrested for drug possession might have been given a choice between rehab and prison; following Proposition 47, in the absence of a threat of imprisonment, they chose a short jail stint followed by release onto the streets where they engaged again and again in the thievery that kept them alive, if only just enough. Homelessness exploded, but Becerra ignored the scale of fraud in the government programs intended to help. A state audit could not track the $24 billion that Governor Newsom had spent while Becerra was suing Trump. Only recently — and, ironically, because of Trump’s rigor on the issue — has the state admitted the shame of widespread fraud in its lavish welfare programs.

 

Those same state auditors had also warned that California’s unemployment system was uniquely vulnerable to fraud. Along with all other state leaders, Becerra ignored them. During Covid, criminals exploited the system’s weaknesses on an enormous scale. An estimate by California’s Employment Development Department later put what it called “ineligible payments” as high as $55 billion. Most of that money disappeared into the bank accounts of international crime gangs tied to foreign adversaries — including Russia, China, and Iran.

 

Other governors, too, shut down their states during Covid, but Newsom did it with zeal — and with Becerra’s essential assistance. Having repeatedly challenged Trump’s exercise of executive authority, Becerra proved enthusiastic about executive power when Newsom wielded it. He defended Newsom’s sweeping restrictions on churches, schools, businesses, and even beaches and parks, arguing that public health justified extraordinary limits on constitutional freedoms. “No one is entitled to endanger the life of someone else,” Becerra declared in April 2020. His lawyers defended California’s prohibition on indoor worship until the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, in February 2021. In San Diego, Team Becerra persuaded an appellate court to reverse a judge’s order allowing restaurants to reopen. Yet when thousands gathered in California’s streets that summer during the George Floyd protests — often defying those public health restrictions amid rioting and looting — Becerra made no effort to charge them. Instead, he turned his attention to investigating police. The contrast was extraordinary. A congregation gathering to pray posed a public health threat demanding state intervention; thousands gathering to protest police misconduct prompted an investigation of the police. Becerra’s conception of civil liberties appeared to depend less on the liberties at stake than on whose liberties needed defending.

 

What to Do with Xavier?

 

Joe Biden airlifted Becerra out of Sacramento in March 2021, just when California’s attorney general most needed rescuing. After four years of making headlines by suing Trump, Becerra landed one of Washington’s biggest jobs: secretary of health and human services, with an enormous budget, some 80,000 employees, and responsibility for helping steer the nation through Covid. The appointment, announced three months earlier, came as a surprise to almost everyone, including, it seems, to the president himself. Biden’s preferred candidates had fallen away, and the incoming president was so unfamiliar with Becerra that he mangled his name — “Ba-CAR-ee-ah,” which sounds like a lettuce-borne stomach illness. Despite the fact that Becerra had no experience running a public health agency, the Senate confirmed him on March 18, by a vote of 50 to 49.

 

Within months, his new Democratic colleagues were wondering what to do with him. By January 2022, senior Biden administration officials were privately discussing replacing him. The Washington Post, relying on interviews with 28 administration officials, advisers, and experts, reported that Becerra had failed to coordinate the government’s pandemic response. One senior administration official complained that he was taking “too passive a role” in the administration’s defining crisis. Dr. Eric Topol, a prominent Covid researcher, said he was “like a ghost” and demanded that he “step up or step aside.” The White House worked around Becerra, transferring pandemic management to Jeff Zients, who dealt directly with Anthony Fauci and other officials nominally under Becerra’s supervision. The health secretary had become a spectator at — a specter in — his own department.

 

The administration’s immigration crisis proved even more humiliating. Biden’s border policies produced an influx of unaccompanied migrant children, overwhelming the shelters that Becerra’s department was supposed to supervise. White House Domestic Policy Adviser Susan Rice demanded faster action. Becerra resisted changes that he considered risky and reportedly demanded written presidential authorization. Rice grew increasingly frustrated. According to a February 2024 Axios investigation, she privately called Becerra an “idiot” and a “bitch-ass.” During one cabinet meeting in which Biden himself was berating Becerra, Rice reportedly slipped a note to Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, the man who had served as Becerra’s go-between in l’affaire Vignali: “Don’t save him.” (Rice’s spokesperson denied the account.)

 

But it would be unfair to suggest that Becerra accomplished nothing at HHS. He helped New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier win the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Beating Secretary Becerra like bongo drums, Dreier found that more than 250,000 unaccompanied migrant children had entered the country over two years, that Becerra’s HHS had been unable to reach more than 85,000 of them in follow-ups, and that children as young as twelve were found working in slaughterhouses, food-processing plants, auto-parts factories, and on roofing crews. Worse, Dreier documented repeated warnings about the problem that had reached Becerra’s department — and, in some cases, Becerra himself. When Representative David Kustoff confronted Becerra with the 85,000 figure at a congressional hearing, the secretary disputed the Times’ characterization. Becerra might have blamed his boss, the president, for flooding the nation with hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, including those children. Instead, he explained — in terms familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Department of Motor Vehicles — that HHS was not responsible for migrant children once it handed those kids over to sponsors.

 

Becerra’s liberal critics nearly lost their minds when reporting revealed that HHS entrusted children to sponsors it had inadequately vetted. The HHS inspector general found that safety checks were never carried out, sponsor records were often incomplete, and follow-up calls weren’t made on time. Agency employees had warned that pressure to clear shelters — pressure from someone higher up the HHS org chart — compromised children’s safety. When Senator John Cornyn of Texas asked Becerra for an explanation, the secretary — defender of the poor, the tired, the huddled masses — responded, “We do not have jurisdiction. We cannot spend money on things we do not have jurisdiction over.” Translation: Once Becerra’s department handed over a child, what happened next was somebody else’s problem.

 

Go West, Old Man

 

Becerra left Washington in January 2025, his tenure marked by White House infighting, the migrant-child crisis, and blistering reviews from fellow Democrats. Then came a campaign-finance scandal that might have derailed someone without Becerra’s invisibility cloak.

 

Between February 2022 and September 2024, three longtime Democratic insiders siphoned roughly $225,000 from one of Becerra’s dormant campaign accounts. These insides were Sean McCluskie, Becerra’s longtime chief of staff; Dana Williamson, a former Becerra campaign adviser who became Governor Newsom’s chief of staff; and Sacramento lobbyist Greg Campbell. According to federal prosecutors, the three routed the money through consulting firms and disguised the payments as compensation to McCluskie’s wife for a job she never performed. The money helped make up for the pay cut that McCluskie had taken to follow Becerra to Washington. All three have pleaded guilty.

 

Prosecutors have consistently treated Becerra as a victim, not a conspirator. But the case took an intriguing turn when Williamson’s attorney, former U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, told reporters that McCluskie had repeatedly assured Williamson that he had discussed the arrangement with “his boss.” Scott said Williamson believed that Becerra had approved it, while acknowledging that he had no idea whether McCluskie was telling the truth. Prosecutors have never alleged that Becerra knew about the fraud. Indeed, their filings describe McCluskie and his accomplices misleading him about the payments.

 

How could three close associates siphon nearly a quarter of a million dollars from Becerra’s account over two years without his knowledge? Becerra says he thought the payments were for legitimate account maintenance. But California’s governor oversees a bureaucracy vastly larger than a dormant campaign committee. Voters might expect him to know where money goes, what trusted aides do, and when someone steals from him.

 

California once produced governors who transformed the state. Pat Brown built dams, aqueducts, highways, and universities. Ronald Reagan reshaped American conservatism itself. Jerry Brown repeatedly reinvented himself and California’s government. Even Newsom, whatever you think of his malignant policies, has pursued an ambitious and unmistakable vision of what California ought to become.

 

Becerra’s vision, despite his three decades in government, is hard to identify. As a candidate for governor, he offered a program of almost heroic mediocrity. Californians pay the nation’s second-highest electricity rates; Becerra proposed a “power hour,” giving “qualifying households” two hours of free electricity in the middle of the day, when solar power is plentiful. Steve Hilton rightly called it “disqualifyingly stupid.” California regulations have strangled housing supply, making housing costs the nation’s highest; Becerra promised to build 40,000 stalled homes but, when pressed for specifics, said, “I would prefer not to run on inflated promises.” California’s high-speed-rail project is tens of billions over budget, years beyond its deadline, and just lost its executive director; always believing that the problem belongs to someone else, candidate Becerra promised to sue the Trump administration — even though the state already sued Washington for more federal money before abandoning the court case as a sure loser. And to ensure that Californians share in the AI boom, he floated the idea of having the state buy shares in technology companies — then seemed to wish he could swallow his words, offering unenthusiastically that his proposal “wouldn’t be totally far-fetched.” After 35 years in government, Becerra’s governing philosophy remains unchanged: Give government another chance, preferably with more money.

 

He has built no institutions, advanced no distinctive governing philosophy, and left little bearing his signature. His talent is to occupy institutions built by others, adapt, and move on. That proved enough to make him governor. In a state where Democrats enjoy an overwhelming electoral advantage, Becerra won the highest office without ever having inspired much enthusiasm or even name ID, even within his own party.

 

Such a victory tells us something about California’s political monoculture. A system that rewards party loyalty over accomplishment, longevity over leadership, and ideological reliability over imagination will eventually produce candidates who have perfected those virtues. Xavier Becerra did not create that system. He has simply mastered it. And today, after a majority of California pulled the lever for Becerra, he looks like — what’s his name? That guy atop Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow on any May Day in the 1980s? That guy in the gray greatcoat with just a bit of cheek visible beneath the gray ushanka? Becerra’s that fella.

Power, Corruption & Lies

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, November 05, 2026

 

Yesterday, the Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan reported a quote from a (one assumes Vance-associated) “National GOP operative” licking his wounds after the Scanners-like spontaneous cranial explosion of the Republican Party, inflicted on Tuesday by an electorate unleashed by the psychic powers of the ballot box. “People will try to overcomplicate this, but its really simple: This is 100% because of Iran. It’s all in the data and has been since a week after the war started. The economic anxiety is directly correlated with the war. We got our asses kicked because of it.”

 

Would that it were really that simple. We all know why operatives like these wish to fob responsibility for this wipeout off on the sole aspect of Trumpism they are willing to venture even partial opposition to. But Trump’s job approval ratings tell an unmistakable story: His approval numbers only begin to crater in April 2025, once “Liberation Day” was announced.

 

The story of the initial collapse of the Trump administration must — no matter how much some may approve of the policy — therefore be a story about a broad tariff regime instituted with imperial arbitrariness and open abuse of constitutional powers, not one of the Iran war. Our misbegotten Middle Eastern adventure in March 2026 is only where the bottom truly dropped out, the breaking point where Senate seats like South Carolina and Mississippi finally came onto the board. But there is much more to it than that.

 

The administration was underwater and had been rejected by the voters long before then, and one of the most important (and least discussed) reasons was that Americans of all stripes have become disgusted with the naked, celebratorily selfish corruption that Trump and his administration have come to be synonymous with. A full 90 percent of voters in exit polls cited “corruption” as one of their crucial voting issues — and they weren’t thinking about Somalians in Minnesota.

 

Never before has a United States presidential administration been so openly engaged in corruption both public and private, nor reveled in it with such unanswerable abandon. Why mention the Harding or Grant administrations as watchwords for graft anymore, with Trump’s list growing ever longer? This is a man who inaugurated his second term in office by purchasing a 49 percent stake in a UAE-based cryptocurrency venture named World Liberty Financial, accepting a new “Air Force One” jet from the Qataris, and issuing a pardon to the Chinese founder of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange — which he now trades on. What was he going to do to top that, let a Russian oligarch pay for his son’s wedding just before taking a pointless oil bribe to switch sides in the Ukrainian war?

 

All around him, those in his administration seem to be taking similar cues: Kristi Noem’s operation at the department of Homeland Security, conducted primarily through the auspices of her secret lover and informal bagman Corey Lewandowski, is only the most prominent example. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s trashy plays at bribery chased her out of the ambassadorship of a country notorious for its shady business practices. And — in a headline perfect for the week before the election — former Trump lawyer (and now mysteriously married) Alina Mildon (nee Habba) used her presidential connections to snag a $50 million pardon deal for a client. Trump’s reaction? Outrage — and a demand that she donate at least portion of it directly to his “presidential library fund.” Trump, like Don Fanucci in The Godfather II, must be allowed to “wet his beak,” and get at least a taste of what others are taking under his name.

 

It’s the inescapable omnipresence of Trump’s corruption — the way it governs his view of the world, infects his underlings, informs the way he conducts foreign policy even — that has fatally inured his MAGA followers to the effect it has had on everyone else. While it may be the tariff regime and the Iran war that ultimately brought Trump down, what made it impossible for him to recover was the in-your-face, omnipresent stench of his corruption: When fused with Trump’s performative cruelty and forever-online distractability, it solidified the image of him of an over-the-hill crime boss fading in Lear-like dotage — not Tiberius on his island resort of Capri so much as Al Capone rotting away with VD on his private Florida resort.

 

If voters believed Donald Trump to be a virtuous yet hapless man — say, a modern-day Jimmy Carter — the GOP’s base would not have rebelled against him the way they did on Tuesday. But there is no point in keeping faith with a president clearly uninterested in keeping faith with you.