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Will Cheating, Lying, and Dividing Fail Republicans This Time?

For years since I left the GOP over 25 years ago, Republican candidates and strategists have relied on cheating, lying, and dividing citizens - usually on racial and culture war issues - to win elections by duping voters into voting for falsehoods and against their own best economic interest.  This has been the norm in Southwest Virginia and other rural areas in Virginia that vote Republican even though GOP policies have harmed them.  Currently, a number of rural hospitals in Virginia (which are typically the largest employer in their area) are facing possible closure due to Medicaid cuts under the "big beautiful bill" and GOP candidates are waving the bogeymen of blacks, gays, Muslims and "communists" to frighten these same voters into voting once again against their own best interests.  At the federal level, the only significant legislation out of Congress has been (i) the aforesaid "big beautiful bill" - which harmed literally millions while giving huge tax cuts to the super wealthy, and (ii) funding for ICE to further terrorize undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. Throw in the Felon's war of choice against Iran and the soaring prices it has ushered in and GOP truly has little to run on.  Hence the current efforts to cheat, lie and smear Democrats, and trotting out the GOP's favored bogeymen to divide and frighten gullible and Kool-Aid drinking voters.  Given the GOP abysmal record over the last two years, hopefully these efforts fail this election cycle.  A piece at The New Republic  looks at the campaign of lies, division and, of course, efforts to cheat:

We’re two-plus weeks out from Election Day. Republicans are in a dead panic and taking the wildest of swings. Maryland Representative Andy Harris, who is as close as we have in the United States Congress to an actual, bona fide fascist (I know that’s saying a lot, but Harris’s father served in a pro-Nazi paramilitary unit in Hungary toward the end of World War II, and Harris himself veritably worshipped Viktor Orbán), tried to blame diesel prices on the Democrats. He got laughed out of the room. Democratic candidates who are barely really liberal are suddenly not just socialists but Communists. And it practically goes without saying that they’re all gay.

This kind of scaremongering has been a part of Republican campaign strategy for my entire life. I hit my first Little League baseball the same year Richard Nixon launched the Southern Strategy, his dog-whistling and race-baiting campaign to carry the South in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey. I was a young man when Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, touting “states’ rights” and making a point of doing so not far from the spot where three civil rights workers were killed by the Ku Klux Klan 16 years before.

But these kinds of moves used to be only part of a Republican campaign. Once upon a time, Republicans did try, sometimes, to advance forward-looking ideas, or something resembling that. Reagan had his optimism; Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America; George W. Bush, his global democracy agenda. At the very least, these Republicans understood that the scare tactics had to be dressed up in the finery of something resembling a positive vision for the country.

But that was then. Now the scare tactics are the whole package. The GOP of 2026 is stripped of all artifice. It’s down to its essence. The closing days of this campaign will feature three trajectories from the GOP. They’re going to try to cheat. They’re going to lie. And they’re going to try to win on grotesque and open bigotry.

First, the cheating. This is all about suppressing the vote and trying to convince Americans that noncitizens are going to be casting votes by the thousands or even millions (OK, this involves a dose of bigotry too). On Thursday, Todd Blanche’s Justice Department sent a letter to California and Los Angeles County demanding that they prove—within 48 hours, mind you—that some 20,000 voters are citizens.

The Trump administration has tried this before. Very recently, in fact. Just last month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged that there were 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada. He then whittled that down to 185 names (heck of a whittle!). DHS said it had confirmed that these 185 were noncitizens. Nevada looked into it. Every one—every single one—was a citizen.

It’s impossible to predict how else they’ll try to cheat between now and November 3. At Democracy Docket, which you should be checking between now and Election Day if you aren’t already, they’re tracking dozens of voter suppression lawsuits. And Axios reported on Friday that MAGA activists are pushing the Trump administration to prepare to declare martial law.  . . . We can be sure that the administration has thought of things we haven’t.

Next comes the lying. Of course, cheating of the sort described above is lying, but I mean a different kind of lying. I mean here the kind of lying Trump does at his rallies, about how great the economy is, how “hot” America is; and the lying House Speaker Mike Johnson does, about this Congress being the most productive in 80 years.

All politicians from both parties offer up to voters their version of reality. But they rarely say the naked opposite of reality. . . . But no one has ever done what Trump is doing. There’s no sign it’s working—in fact it’s probably making things worse because you just can’t tell people the sky is blue when it’s full of clouds.

What’s amusing is watching Republican candidates across the country try to walk this tightrope. Some gently break with him, as Maine’s Susan Collins and Michigan’s Mike Rogers have done on tariffs. But most defend them or try to change the subject. Some still blame the economy on Joe Biden. And all of them, having voted for the Iran war, just pray that that subject doesn’t come up.

And finally—the dividing. It’s JD Vance hinting not so subtly that James Talarico is gay. Rogers and others, including Trump, talk about Abdul El-Sayed being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. On a debate stage this week, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins slipped in a reference to Jon Ossoff’s “friend” El-Sayed, for no apparent reason other than to be able to scare viewers with a Moozlem name. And of course the flood of dehumanizing anti-trans ads continues apace and will continue through Election Day.

This is what they’ve got. And it’s what they’ve got because it’s who they are. Oh, plus they have hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of dollars, much of it from a small handful of people—like real-life supervillain Elon Musk—who want to own the government. It’ll be pretty depressing if it works.

And if it fails? It will upend decades of conventional wisdom about how Republicans can win and about voters’ susceptibility to such campaigns. And that may mark the start of a new and at least marginally less cynical and less hateful and less stupid era in American politics. And it will be made all the better by the fact that it will have been brought on, ironically enough, by the stupidest and most cynical and hateful man in recent American political history.

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MAGA Just Wants to Watch People Die

I for one never believe the media storyline that voters cast their votes for the Felon over economic concerns.  Yes, some would claim that was their motivation, but the reality in my view is that the Felon's mainstreaming of racism and hatred of perceived foes - typically, non-whites, gays, and non-Christians - and greenlighting cruelty were the real attraction.  Many were looking for scapegoats to blame for their lost white privilege and restrictions on abuse of others.  Only too happy to embrace this regime of cruelty and hate filled  policies have been evangelicals and "conservative Christians"  who care absolutely nothing about Christ's social gospel message and cherry pick Old Testament passages to justify their hatred of others. Through ICE's lawless operations, the destruction of alleged drug runner boats (no evidence has ever been produced to back up these allegations), cuts to foreign aid, young children ripped from parents and being deported, and now the Felon's doing Putin's bidding against Ukraine, the one constant is the abuse and death of those the MAGA base dislikes. Worse yet, both MAGA and the Felon seem to revel in the cruelty.  Collectively, it is a damning indictment of the MAGA base and alleged "Christians" who have shown their true colors. A piece at Salon looks at this joy at the harm and death of those they deem "other":

For a sizable chunk of its existence, the United States has been remarkably effective at manufacturing death at scale. In the years since World War II, as steel production slowed and agriculture became one big subsidy, untimely ends became one of the few things you could still expect the U.S. to make itself. 

The business of bomb-dropping boomed through economic downturns and outsourcing pushes. NAFTA and the Great Recession couldn’t put a dent in America’s output of explosive ordinance. The lack of a military draft or a requirement to declare war kicked the death factory into overdrive, with defense budgets growing every year. The death toll in Iraq reached one million in the same year that Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Decades after the televised spectacle of the Vietnam War, after which the Pentagon restricted what media outlets could cover, multiple wars in the Middle East were presented as a bloodless spectacle on cable, with shock-and-awe filmed and broadcast on CNN from a safe remove. In the rare instances where Americans were forced to see the deaths of Iraqi civilians up close — such as the infamous 39-minute “Collateral Murder” footage which was released by Wikileaks in 2010 — it turned public opinion against the wars permanently. That revulsion was one small part of the establishment backlash that put Donald Trump in the White House. 

But something has shifted in the ensuing years. The same president who decried “American carnage” in his first inaugural address has inspired an unusual bloodlust in his MAGA base, offering up real-world violence in lieu of a prosperous economy or lower gas prices. Whenever his public approval ratings have flagged, most notably when voters rejected his 2020 re-election bid, Trump has stoked his base with calls to violence.    

He eventually won that second term four years later, a sign from the universe that there would be no real consequences for reveling in violence. Since then, Trump has shown an extreme lack of care for the brutal — and sometimes deadly — effects of his policies. Worse still, many of his supporters seem to hunger for more bloodshed, celebrating each new instance of a Trump policy ending in death. 

Some of this was to be expected. Americans are remarkably skilled at compartmentalizing the bureaucratic ways U.S. actions lead to deaths globally. When Elon Musk’s inartful Department of Government Efficiency cuts to government funding and the Trump administration’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development started racking up a body count, the mood within the MAGA coalition was more indifferent than celebratory. But Trump and his messengers have a tendency to make everything more crude and less abstract.

That’s why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when administration officials shared footage of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. . . . . Given the appetites he has built up among his supporters, it shouldn’t have shocked us to see them cheer the strikes on alleged drug runners. Former conservative fighters against government overreach — the sort who once lamented the deaths of militant separatists like LaVoy Finicum and Vicki Weaver — praised Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they killed protesting citizens. Republicans who warned about government tyranny for years celebrated scenes of people being snatched off the street and into unmarked cars. Third-party deportations, intentionally cruel detentions and partnerships with black-box prisons, like the notorious CECOT in El Salvador, created the conditions where deportees will inevitably die. 

The only consistent thread in these examples is a desire to see people they don’t like get hurt or killed. . . . But it’s not enough for the MAGA movement to witness death in the real world. The growing conservative media market is filled with examples of people — mostly non-white or non-Christian — meeting grisly ends. . . . . The Daily Wire’s bloody “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is set on the campus of a similarly anonymous liberal arts college, and it luxuriates in bloodlust. Blue-haired liberals get their throats slashed while gay men are thrown from buildings. . . . In that context, Pete Hegseth’s recent call for a public execution is hardly strange.

Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was initially supported by Trump. But on Thursday, following widespread outcry that spanned the globe, the president announced on Truth Social that he was calling off the broadcast. Still, he still half-supported the aborted snuff film, saying that it “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM.”

Trump’s supporters didn’t need to wonder if he was drawing a line at broadcasting a grisly death. Earlier this week, the president shared footage featuring the last moments of a man who was killed by a tiger in a U.K. zoo. He followed that up with an AI-generated video that struck a celebratory tone, showing Trump chasing away a tiger while remaining unharmed. 

On the other side of a computer screen, his MAGA base must have been laughing along.

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Russia Was Losing; Now Trump Betrays Ukraine

It is becoming increasingly hard to ignore the fact that by all appearances we have a traitor and Russian asset occupying the White House.  The Felon is now openly working to aid Russia - a nation that is aiding Iran in the Felon's war of choice - and threatening America's long time allies across Europe. If we had a Congress with a spine - hopefully the mid-term elections will bring a desperately needed change - some of the Felon's transgression might be contained. Unfortunately, a present we have the Felon actively seeking to support Russia's war against Ukraine. As a column in the New York Times notes, part of the Felon's animosity against Ukraine stems from the Felon's impeachment for his efforts to coerce Ukraine into creating lies about Joe Biden.  Part of it also stems from the Felon's corruption and greed that Vladimir Putin is pandering to by promised trade and mining deals if Ukraine is defeated.  And then there is the continuing suspicion that Putin has dirt on the Felon that may range from money laundering and other crimes to the potential that Putin has the complete Epstein files. The bottom line is that the Felon is aiding an enemy and betraying allies.  He needs to be restrained or, better yet, removed from office the sooner the better.  Here are column highlights:

It’s horrible to have to type these words, but the [Felon] president of the United States is throwing Vladimir Putin a lifeline. He is turning the American government against Ukraine, funding Russia and — perhaps worst of all — playing directly into Putin’s theory of victory.

There’s no other way to understand [the Felon's] President Trump’s actions since Friday. There’s a lot to cover, so hang with me. But the bottom line is that a sequence of events that began with his announcement on Oct. 9 that the United States had agreed to purchase potentially millions of tons of diesel fuel from Russia may be culminating in a near-total betrayal of the Ukrainian people.

The purchase, justified by Trump as bringing down diesel prices in the United States, isn’t nearly enough to meaningfully move America’s immense diesel market. It could, however, put roughly $4 billion into the Russian treasury — cash that it can use to fund its war in Ukraine or to help prop up its ally Iran.

What came after the deal was even worse than the deal itself. On Sunday, Trump decided to protect his investment. He declared — all on his own — that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy cease-fire.” Ukraine had been conducting a remarkably successful series of strikes deep inside Russia aimed at Putin’s oil industry. The attacks have been so effective that they’ve raised doubts as to whether Russia would even be able to deliver the agreed upon amount of fuel to the U.S.

Trump’s cease-fire announcement came as a surprise to both nations. He wasn’t announcing an agreement; he was trying to coerce compliance — including, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, by also threatening to cut off intelligence sharing.

Consider that for a moment. Trump wasn’t announcing a deal at all. There was no deal. He made it up and then demanded that both nations do what he said.

How did the two nations respond? Ukraine complied with Trump’s demands. It paused its successful energy strike campaign. . . . . Russia had different ideas. On Monday night, Russian munitions slammed into six Ukrainian energy sites, plunging parts of the city of Izyum into darkness. And then on Tuesday night, Russia struck Ukrainian energy sites once again, this time deluging Kyiv with missiles and hitting Kyiv’s Combined Heat and Power Plant 4, one of Kyiv’s “key energy facilities,” according to Zelensky.

Most ominously, on Monday and Tuesday night, ballistic missiles slammed into Kyiv, with no meaningful warning at all. Zelensky said that Ukraine had not received the usual warnings that it gets from its partners, most notably the United States. . . . . And then, to make matters worse, news emerged on Wednesday that the Pentagon-funded version of Starlink, called Starshield, was being throttled for Ukrainian forces. It was dropping connectivity for objects moving at speed, crippling its use by many Ukrainian drones.

If we want to understand what is really going on, we can’t look at these events in isolation. They’re occurring just as Russia has escalated its so-called gray zone attacks on our NATO allies. Gray zone attacks are acts that are just below the threshold for open war. The aim is to frighten and destabilize allies (and alliances) without triggering a direct conflict with NATO that Russia would almost certainly lose.

In July the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report chronicling a staggering array of Russian gray zone attacks. For example, the International Center for Counterterrorism and Globsec has documented “151 confirmed Russian-directed industrial sabotage incidents in Europe between February 2022 and February 2026.”

In addition, “Russian-linked drones have forced repeated airport closures across Europe and even penetrated Estonian and Polish airspace in September 2025.” Russia has also used a Baltic Sea shadow fleet to damage “Nord Stream pipelines, the Estlink 2 power cable and at least 11 undersea telecom cables.”

How do all these events fit together? First, we have to understand Russia’s evolving theories of victory in its war against Ukraine. Russia began with a failed blitzkrieg — an attempt to take Kyiv in a matter of days, if not hours. The initial attack resulted in a stunning Russian defeat. It suffered catastrophic losses on the outskirts of Kyiv, and a Ukrainian counteroffensive later in 2022 clawed back much of the territory that Ukraine lost in the opening days and months of the war.

Then Russia changed tactics. It tried to turn the battlefield into a kind of meat grinder — a war of attrition designed to slowly but surely destroy the Ukrainian Army and capture the entirety of the Donbas region of Ukraine. . . . .Then something surprising happened: The Ukrainians revolutionized warfare with their drone operations, and Ukraine started grinding down Russian forces, to the point that Russia is now losing more soldiers than it can easily replace, and — as the Institute for the Study of War reported on Tuesday — “Ukraine has retaken significant territory from Russia in 2026, and at the theater level has nearly zeroed out Russian gains for the year.”

In fact, according to the institute, “Russian forces have only made a net gain of about 100 square kilometers thus far in 2026, thanks to Ukrainian counteroffensives, which have liberated at least 1,046 square kilometers.” . . . “Ukraine is taking away its fuel,” Petraeus said. Russia is “one of the world’s largest oil producers,” and yet “increasingly, that doesn’t mean that Russians can find gasoline.”

In addition, Ukraine’s strike campaign has been so effective that it has sunk roughly 300 Russian vessels in the Black Sea and surrounding areas, and it has isolated Crimea so effectively that “they’re essentially starving Crimea of fuel, refined fuel products and other important commodities,” Petraeus said.

But Ukraine still needs Western support. American interceptor shortages have left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian ballistic missile attacks, and the country still depends on European aid, on American intelligence and on American weapons it’s able to purchase with European funds.

Remove that support, and Russia has a chance to win the war. It may well be Putin’s last hope, short of total national mobilization, to defeat Ukraine.

So now you see the game and the part that Trump is playing. Everything he’s doing now is exactly what Putin wants. Putin has brilliantly manipulated Trump using a meaningless injection of diesel fuel into the American market (designed to play well in the midterms) to portray himself as Trump’s friend and to drive an even bigger wedge between Trump and Zelensky.

But that’s not all. As my colleagues in the newsroom reported this month, Trump’s negotiations to end the war also include lucrative oil deals that “would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.”

And there’s something else in play. Trump has long held a grudge against Ukraine and Zelensky — for the dumbest reason imaginable.

It’s easy to forget the 2019 Trump-Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment. There have been so many scandals since that it hovers at the edge of our memories and can feel small compared with, say, Jan. 6. But it wasn’t. It was a big deal then, and it’s a big deal now.

As a result, when Putin appeals to Trump, he can not only dangle lucrative business deals in front of Trump’s team but also exploit existing animosity that is rooted in the fever dreams of Trump’s bizarre imagination. Zelensky is an enemy; Putin is a potential friend.

And what of the gray zone attacks against Europe? As Petraeus told me, “These are probes. They are intended to intimidate, disrupt, test individual countries and the alliance collectively.”

The purpose, according to Petraeus, is to “complicate the flow of assistance to Ukraine and even discourage it and create public anxiety, test to see where the alliance’s real red lines are. Perhaps drive a wedge between some of the countries that are a bit soft on Russia, if you will.”

In Trump’s second term, the United States is far worse than unreliable. It’s becoming unhinged. It threatens its allies and begins trade wars with its closest friends, and now the combination of corruption and conspiracy drives an American president into the arms of one of our most dangerous enemies.

This is not America first; it’s Trump first. If Putin prevails, rest assured that it will not be Ukrainians alone who pay the price.

The Felon is betraying all of us.

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