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The Issues MAGA "Christian" Voters Are Neglecting

If one is a true Christian one must pay attention to Christ's social gospel and the call to aid the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless.  As noted often on this blog right, wing "Christians" and members of the MAGA base totally ignore Christ's gospel message and instead typically cherry pick selective Old Testament passages to malign and dehumanize those they dislike or deem as "others" - typically, gays, women, blacks, Hispanics and non-Christians. Equally disturbing is the allegiance of these self-congratulatory "Christians" to the Felon, a man who embodies the seven deadly sins and remains a key figure in the Epstein files. Rather than base their political actions on Christ's message, these "Christians" are focused on maintaining white privilege, disparaging non-whites, and opposing anything and anyone who challenges their often archaic beliefs that emphasize blind certainty with no room to learn from others.  As noted in prior posts, these right wing/MAGA "Christians" view empathy towards other as a dangerous weakness. Indeed, their hypocrisy - that would make a biblical Pharisee blush - and cruelty has done much to drive the rise of the "Nones", i.e., the religiously nonaffiliated, who have walked away from organized religion, particularly Christianity, entirely. A long piece at The Atlantic looks at the misplaced priorities of these false Christians.  Here are highlights:

Earlier this month the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Willy Rice, called on pastors to “step up” their political activism as the midterm elections draw near. His argument is that many political issues are, at their heart, moral and theological issues that “strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”

Rice named four specific issues: abortion, the redefinition of marriage, transgender identity, and illegal immigration. These are the topics that fundamentalists and evangelicals most often invoke as nonnegotiable biblical imperatives, and they are treated as tests of faithfulness.

The question worth asking is not why Rice and so many other Christians focus on these issues . . . . but why they focus on them to the exclusion of others. The answer might tell us something important about what presently stirs fundamentalists and evangelicals to political action and what leaves them unmoved.

Rice insists that the issues he prioritizes have to do with human flourishing. He believes that Christians have an obligation to speak out about political and cultural matters that intersect with scriptural truth, morality, and a biblical ethic. . . . . there are others on which Rice and many of those who share his worldview have been silent. Why, for example, have pastors and other Christian leaders who insist that they care about human life and flourishing not spoken out against the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, carried out by DOGE, and the disruption of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?

According to modeling estimates by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, in the first year alone these cuts had resulted in more than three-quarters of a million deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. A study in The Lancet projected that if the USAID cuts are not reversed, they could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including some 4.5 million children under age 5. Might not those who claim to be shaped by a Jesus ethic want to speak out and make global development a first-order concern rather than an afterthought?

Bono, the lead singer of U2 and himself a Christian, cited the Lancet study in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Let’s say they’re half wrong,” he said. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish household, anyone of faith, in fact anyone of conscience, would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen as a result of these DOGE cuts? It’s unconscionable.”

The answer to Bono’s haunting question—Who would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen?—is Christians all across America.  Why the silence?

One could ask the same question about other issues. For example, since 1980, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has offered a home to people fleeing war and persecution, many of them Christians. On the first day of his second term, President Trump suspended the program. He then set the refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2026 at a record-low of 7,500, later raising it to 17,500 under an emergency determination but reserving nearly all of those slots for white South Africans, whose claims of persecution are disputed by many independent observers. Meanwhile, Christians facing some of the world’s most severe persecution, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Burma, are largely shut out.

The president of World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization, called the policy “heartbreaking.” He warned that the U.S. has “effectively abandoned” those fleeing horrific religious persecution. Yet very few Christians have said anything about this.

Silence has also been the reaction to the assault on medical research. According to Grant Witness, which tracks the federal government’s cancellations and reinstatements of research grants at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, more than 5,700 NIH grants, with a total value of $15 billion, have been disrupted since April 2025. This includes scores of grants for research on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which touch countless families in congregations all across America.

Why don’t these three issues—saving the lives of the world’s poorest children, offering refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, and advancing the research that brings healing to the sick—occupy more attention of politically active Christians? After all, these are not peripheral concerns; they go to the essence of what mattered to Jesus. He told his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these,” they did for him. He counted welcoming the stranger among such acts, and he spent much of his ministry healing the sick and relieving suffering. . . . . measured by the lives that could be saved, sheltered, and healed, I do think there is a strong case that they belong near the top of any list shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus.

That they so rarely make the list at all shows how deeply the grooves of decades of political activism have been worn. Some issues command instant attention, but others barely register. If Christians were willing to step out of those grooves, even for a moment, they would see how much good could be achieved. Lives could be saved through global health programs, families could find refuge and a new beginning, and cures could come for diseases that inflict suffering on countless people.

So what explains this selectivity in deciding which political issues have a claim on the Christian conscience? The answer involves a complex mix of factors. One is the vivifying effect of being part of a culture war. Many Christians feel that they are engaged in a righteous struggle against a secular culture that they believe holds them in contempt. Some of their concerns are real and held in good faith: about religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, and the health of families. But the culture wars also offer a black-and-white, us-versus-them moral framework that is especially appealing to people who feel culturally displaced. Saving children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t carry the same drama; there is no progressive enemy to defeat. . . . Distance plays its own role too. Many people dying from preventable diseases live thousands of miles away. Global health lacks the emotional urgency of social issues that play out close to home.

Partisanship also plays a huge part. Political scientists such as Ryan Burge and Michele Margolis argue that, for many white evangelicals, party identity now drives which issues feel religiously urgent. “Politics has become the master identity,” according to Burge. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.” Even the teachings of Jesus.

The problem runs deeper than issue selection, though. It extends to how scripture itself is interpreted. Many Christians read the Bible through a set of political and cultural assumptions and then present the results as authoritatively “biblical.” The Bible is used to ratify views held for reasons that have little to do with faith.

The same passage speaks differently to a person in the fourth century or the 14th century than it does to someone in the 21st century, and it speaks differently to every person in the same pew. In Galileo’s day, Christians read Psalm 93:1—“the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved”—as a literal statement that the Earth does not move, and the verse was invoked against the idea that it orbits the sun.

The same is true of slavery. For most of Christian history, the institution itself went largely unchallenged. Christians criticized particular abuses and particular forms of enslavement, but rarely slavery per se. The most remarkable exception, a fourth-century sermon on Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nyssa condemning slaveholding outright, had little lasting influence. The first denomination to formally condemn slaveholding was the Quakers, in 1776, more than 1,700 years after Jesus taught his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 in part to defend slaveholding, which its founders insisted that the Bible plainly permitted. The SBC took 150 years to formally repent that history. . . . The problem, then, comes not from our reading being shaped by our time and place, which is unavoidable, but from failing to acknowledge it.

None of what I’m arguing here means that all readings of the Bible are equally valid, or that some interpretive approaches don’t bring readers closer to the Bible’s truths than others. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus asked of his followers far better than did Ludwig Müller, the leader of the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slavery were much closer to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount than were those of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian theologian who argued that slavery was part of God’s divinely ordained social order.

A lot has gone wrong in Christian history, and a lot has gone wrong in the here and now. Christianity can be a faith of serrated edges. So many people have been wounded in the name of Jesus. And yet there remains, for those of the Christian faith, the true Jesus—himself a God of wounds, a person of incomprehensible moral beauty who came not to judge the world but to save it. If Christians are going to be active in public life, we would all do well to choose for our master identity Jesus over the gods of this world, who sanctify our political views and the hatreds that fuel them.

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Trump Is Oblivious To Issues Important to Voters

A blogger friend when not referring to Donald Trump as "the Felon" as I do also refers to him as "Dementia Don", a moniker that seems more and more appropriate as the Felon visits numerous red states in an attempt to bolster Republican candidates facing unexpectedly tight races. Indeed, some of the Felon's behavior and statements are downright bizarre such as his current apparent fixation on men's asses even as he says affordability is a "hoax."  He rambles on about his vanity projects, boats that a hamburger cost $5,000 at Mar A Lago, obsesses about transgender individuals, makes up insulting names for Democrat candidates and seemingly wants to talk about anything other than the Iran war that he launched and soaring gas and diesel prices (Brent crude is $114/barrel this morning).  Whether due to dementia or the reality that the Felon lives in a bubble surrounded by billionaires and the ultra-wealthy, the Felon's messaging is not only strange but it totally ignores the economic and financial strains so many Americans are experiencing.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's bizarre closing arguments for Republican candidates, some of whom want nothing to do with him in the final days before the mid-term election on November 3, 2026. Here are excerpts:

Modern political history offers few examples of closing arguments that appear more out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre than what Donald Trump has offered his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan told voters to consider Jimmy Carter’s presidency and ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” it helped turn a tight race into a Reagan landslide. But many stretch-run messages prove deeply ineffective and are quickly forgotten. Ahead of the 1998 midterms, Republicans went all in on investigations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton only to be rebuked by voters. . . . And during the 2018 midterms, Trump and his fellow Republicans tried to stoke fears about an alleged caravan of migrants headed toward the United States, only to have skeptical voters hand the House of Representatives to Democrats. . . . .

This time around, Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” Bill Maher is a “loser,” and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique. That easy-to-mock message has been accompanied by a staggering number of missteps. Just for starters, he’s belittled the impact of his stalled war with Iran, sided with Russia as it continues to pummel Ukrainian cities, defended an attack ad from the GOP candidate for Ohio governor that repulsed other top Republicans, downplayed high energy prices while boasting that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making a freaking fortune,” embraced AI as the nation turns against it, obsessed over White House construction projects, and spent a lot of time talking about handsome men, Husted being just one.

Many Republicans, and even some in Trump’s orbit, don’t quite get it. What has happened, they ask, to the instincts of the man who authored two of the most improbable victories in American political history? . . . . Many Republicans privately tell me that he’s lost that feel. Trump now lives, they think, in a gilded bubble, palling around with billionaires, oblivious to—and, even worse, uncaring about—the problems facing so many voters. His approval rating has slipped to the low 30s. He’s become so toxic that some Republicans in tight races don’t want him anywhere near their state or congressional district, believing his rallies will harm more than help.

Strategists in both parties expect Democrats to take control of the House, while the Senate is a true toss-up—a stunning reversal from the beginning of the year, when the upper chamber’s map looked so favorable for Republicans, and Trump cut a dominant figure. Suddenly, Republicans find themselves fighting to keep Senate seats in deep-red states: Kansas. Alaska. South Carolina. Ohio. Iowa. Mississippi. Texas.

Trump is campaigning across the country, imploring his supporters to turn out for him one last time. But he’s given Republicans next to nothing to run on, and polls show that voters believe his economic policies are failing, his deportation program has gone too far, and his war is misguided. He instead has leaned hard on the political battles of the past, reheating fears about transgender surgeries (from his 2024 campaign), Muslim terrorists (all the way back to 2016), and even communism. . . . One Republican up for reelection who would speak with me only on the condition of anonymity, so as not to alienate the president, put it succinctly: “We may have lost the plot here.”

Many Republicans tell me that their party’s biggest problem just days from the election is that voters feel like Trump hasn’t kept his core promises.

End foreign wars? Nope, there’s a new one in Iran that’s sent gas prices up and depleted the U.S. munitions supply. Plus, Trump has appeared to side with Russia over Ukraine in a conflict he once promised to end in 24 hours.

Bring prices down? Well, the war in the Middle East has made that impossible, as have Trump’s haphazard trade wars, including tariffs on once-friendly trading partners such as Canada and the European Union. And while many Americans are struggling, Trump and his family are growing exponentially wealthier.

Deport the worst of the worst? Trump’s massive roundups are targeting not just violent criminals or gang members, but also longtime community members, neighbors, parishioners, teammates, and friends with no criminal records. Many Americans have been horrified by the violence unleashed by masked federal agents, especially the killing of two U.S. citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.

That Trump wants to focus on anything other than these broken promises while out on the campaign trail is perhaps unsurprising. At his Monday rally in Corinth, Mississippi, he spent seven minutes—nearly 10 percent of his entire speech—discussing his efforts to redecorate the White House.

The day before—when Trump traveled to a rally in Port Huron, Michigan—the president’s talking points included faulting President Biden for the war in Ukraine; falsely claiming that more oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz than before the war; deeming Norway a “shithouse country”; calling Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate, a jihadist

Trump has also found himself on the wrong side of the day’s top issues. He misses few chances to mock the affordability crisis. Republicans and Democrats alike have swiftly turned on artificial intelligence, blasting the industry’s data centers as loud and expensive, and warning voters that the rapidly developing technology could take away their jobs or even their lives. Yet Trump has refused to regulate AI, knowing that the industry is propping up the stock market. His only nod toward change is trying to rename it “Super Intelligence.”

Last week, Trump loudly supported a controversial ad from the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor. . . . The backlash was fierce and bipartisan; the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, denounced the ad and demanded that it be pulled. Trump not only supported it but also urged Ramaswamy to “say thank you, God, very much” for such political good fortune. Divine intervention or not, several GOP strategists believe the ad could doom Ramaswamy.

The most eyebrow-raising October surprise has been Trump’s unfiltered and rather randy assessments of the male form. . . . . it began when Trump, while rallying for Husted two weeks ago, was first told that the senator had played college football in the late ’80s. Trump was impressed and began publicly ruminating over the next few days about Husted’s physique, including declaring that the senator’s “ass is like a pile of muscle.”

What is more surprising to many around Trump is just how freely he is expressing those thoughts. Any filter appears to be long gone. Then again, there may be simpler explanations: Once the Husted comments went viral, Trump’s rally crowds have come to expect the lines and have begun to laugh along, reinforcing the president’s sense that the material is working. And Trump would rather discuss almost anything besides the price of gas—even Husted’s posterior.

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Ways of Limiting Trump’s Midterm Trickery

Like many I am buoyed by the polls that show races shifting towards Democrats even in red states, but at the same time I continue to have concerns over what tricks and stunts the Felon may try to undertake to subvert the 2026 mid-term elections if Republicans do poorly next Tuesday.  The 2020 insurrection and assault on the U.S. Capitol and the Felon's effort to browbeat Georgia election officials to find him more votes makes it clear that the Felon holds only contempt for the will of the people, always putting his ego and avoidance of accountability above all else.  Should the Felon try to undermine election results, the courts and many state election officials could block such efforts, but as a piece in The Atlantic lays out, it is important that Democrats win races with as large of margin of victory as possible so that the Felon's efforts will be made more difficult.  Hence my constant urging for blue leaning voters to get out, vote early and increase Democrat margins.  We want not only a win, but a significant win in every race possible.  Even a Republican strategist concedes that wide victory margins combined by the high disapproval of the Felon and his policies will make it more difficult for the Felon to spin convincing lies.  Here are article highlights:

For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president is seeking to wield the force of the state to secure an electoral victory for his party. The Trump administration has attempted to undermine the widespread use of mail-in voting; demanded that states hand over voter rolls; threatened to prosecute state and local election officials; refused to rule out the idea of deploying troops or federal agents to polling places; and publicized the dramatic arrests of small numbers of people accused of voting or registering to vote as noncitizens. Many of these efforts have made little headway—either because of the administration’s incompetence, the stubborn lack of factual evidence behind President Trump’s claims of voter fraud, the federal government’s lack of legal authority, or the refusal of courts to go along with Trump’s plans.

But Trump may have a different problem on his hands. Polls show Trump’s approval falling to all-time lows in the weeks before Election Day; the percent of voters happy with his performance has now sunk into the 30s. Democrats, meanwhile, appear likely to retake control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate, which last year seemed well out of reach. The polls could be wrong—and high-profile-polling misses of the Trump era are hard to forget. But if the polling is right, the GOP may be in for what George W. Bush, after a disastrous 2006 midterm, ruefully termed a “thumping.” And a thumping, as opposed to a narrower Democratic victory, could render most efforts to suppress turnout irrelevant, and make it far more difficult to implement any more dramatic effort to rig the results.

To Trump’s endless frustration, elections in America are organized at the state and local level, with little role for the federal government. In a typical midterm year, almost 470 congressional seats are up for grabs across 50 different states. Though a small number of those races are actually competitive, tinkering with the outcome of the votes would still require meddling with a number of different elections, all run differently, in different jurisdictions, under different laws. A strong night for the Democratic Party would make conjuring an ersatz House majority hard for the same reason that a losing sports team is less able to cheat its way to a victory in a blowout.

Tight margins, by contrast, can make an election more vulnerable to efforts to undo the voters’ will. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election relied in significant part on tight margins in some swing states, sometimes with only 10,000 or 20,000 votes deciding the winner.

The memory of January 6, and the entrenchment of the election-denier movement since 2020, has led to speculation—both anxious and enthused—about the possibility of a comparable attack on election results in 2026. If, once most of the results are in, Democrats seem set to eke out a House majority by just a few seats, perhaps committed Trump allies in positions of power could make trouble in a handful of the closest districts. . . . This could create chaos on January 3, when the new House gathers for the first time: What happens if the contested seats are enough to deny the should-be-majority party the votes it needs to select a new speaker and take control of the chamber? Although this isn’t a foolproof trick for stealing control of the House, such a play could make things very precarious very quickly.

But the bigger the majority secured by Democrats, the more difficult it would be for Trump to shave that majority down—the more clerks to convince, warrants to secure, and court rulings to dodge, all over the country. “If there is a House majority in either direction that is 20, 30 seats, I think the likelihood of an attempt to engage in some kind of shenanigans around January 3 is way less than if the majority is two or three seats,” Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center commented recently on a preelection panel convened at UCLA’s law school.

Other tricks are also less effective when the vote swings heavily in one direction. For example, Trump’s unprecedented push for explicitly partisan off-cycle redistricting may net only a few extra GOP seats rather than the double-digit gains Democratic strategists had once feared.

Political constraints matter too. Any scheme to steal the House for the GOP would depend on the willingness of congressional Republicans to vote in lockstep, with no defectors—something that the current fractious House Republican caucus can barely manage. Already, though, Republicans spooked by Trump’s bad poll numbers have begun distancing themselves from him on the campaign trail as they fight to hold on to their seats. . . . If the GOP loses the House, how many Republicans concerned about their own political careers would be actually inclined to adopt the fringe message of an ever more unpopular lame-duck president?

Trump will be hard-pressed to fight against “a clear loss, coupled with the expectation of a clear loss,” Bob Bauer told me. Bauer—a longtime Democratic lawyer who played a central role in the Biden campaign’s fight against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—now focuses on bipartisan election-integrity work, alongside Ben Ginsberg, an election lawyer known for his past work representing the Republican Party. In 2020, Bauer said, the additional days required for the presidential race to be called after the polls closed helped fuel Trump’s claims of fraud. But now, broad public dissatisfaction has aligned with dismal polling for the GOP and a growing anticipation among both politicians and the press that Republicans will do poorly. “It would be very difficult in these circumstances, if things turn out that the Democrats do well, for him to suddenly announce that he was denied his landslide by vote rigging,” Bauer told me.

Just because such a scheme would be implausible does not, of course, mean that Trump won’t try it. Last week, the Justice Department filed a bizarre lawsuit seeking to preemptively block Alaska from certifying the results of its Senate race—but only if Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses. (“The legal argument is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen,” wrote the law professor Derek Muller in an analysis of the case.) DOJ also continues to pursue litigation seeking to force California to set aside mail-in ballots to voters whom the federal government claims to have identified as noncitizens. These cases are sloppy, tardy, and almost certainly doomed.

In a wave election, some races will still be close. They may just be in different states or districts—mostly, more Republican ones—than in a year with more typical political geography. House seats in deep-red areas across the country may be newly up for grabs. In the Senate, races in Texas and Alaska stand out as potential flash points. “Any close race in the Senate is going to be hotly, hotly contested,” Bauer told me.

In the final weeks before the midterms, election experts have seemed notably calmer than some of the the anxious rhetoric around Trump’s potential subversion of the vote might suggest. Eight experts interviewed by The New York Times (including Bauer) voiced worries about possible upheaval but overall confidence that officials are prepared to protect the integrity of the elections. The nonprofit publication Votebeat likewise surveyed 31 authorities on election administration and found the group to be wary but “cautiously optimistic” that the midterms will go smoothly. If the elections pass without serious disruption, a hefty margin of victory for the Democratic Party could be partly why. But the fact that such a margin may be needed to avoid chaos is itself sobering. In a healthy democracy, the opposition party should not have to win by enormous numbers to ensure victory, and voters should be able to trust that even a close election will be free and fair.

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The Felon Has Failed: Time to Hold Him to Account

We are a week from the 2026 mid-terms and Republicans are playing defense in states that a year or even six months ago were not expected to be in play.  Meanwhile, to Democrats' delight, the Felon is urging voters to vote as if he is on the ballot even as his disapproval numbers are approaching 70%.  The main editorial in the New York Times lays out all the ways the Felon has not only broken his 2024 campaign promises but has damaged the nation's economy, isolated America on the international stage and trapped the nation in yet another ill-conceived Middle East war that has gas prices soaring (Brent crude is at $115/barrel currently).  The column also examines the total failure of congressional Republicans to rein in the Felon and his destruction of public buildings - think the East wing of the White House - and arbitrary firings of thousands of federal workers and misappropriation of funds.  The Felon may be the principal bad actor, but congressional Republicans have either rubber stamped his misdeeds and nomination of incompetent individuals to cabinet positions - think Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. - refused to take any measures to demand accountability.   The take away is that Republicans deserve an electoral wipeout which hopefully happens a week from today. Here are jighlights:

[The Felon] Trump has encouraged voters to pretend he is on the ballot for the Nov. 3 midterm elections, and this time we can agree with his political advice. Americans should be thinking of the Trump administration as they vote for members of Congress and state officials.

Voters should keep in mind Mr. Trump’s failure to keep his campaign promises, his attempts to undermine American democracy and his flagrant corruption. They should be thinking of the Republican Party’s acquiescence to this abuse of power, and they should hold Republicans accountable. Today’s Democratic Party has plenty of flaws, including a disappointing failure to present a coherent agenda of its own. Nonetheless, Democrats offer the only alternative this year to the damage that Mr. Trump and his party have inflicted on the nation. A vote for a Democratic candidate is the best way for Americans to repudiate the Trump administration’s performance over the past two years.

If Democrats retake both houses of Congress, and more state governments than they now control, it will tell the world that Mr. Trump does not represent most Americans. It will demonstrate that a country that starts to slide toward autocracy can move back to normalcy, as happened in Hungary this spring. Most important, it will create a desperately needed check on Mr. Trump during his final two years in office.

Take a moment to imagine how Washington could change if Democrats win control of the House of Representatives. Mr. Trump’s legislative ambitions will be largely ended; he will not be able to pass more tax cuts that worsen the national debt. Democrats can instead use must-pass spending bills to restore money that was improperly cut from Medicaid, schools, scientific research and disease prevention. And Congress will finally have committee chairs who seek to exercise their constitutional duty to hold the president and his appointees responsible for their actions, through the use of hearings, subpoenas and more. Even if Mr. Trump and his aides illegally defy subpoenas, the House can summon corporate executives and others who have enabled him.

If Democrats take the Senate, they will be able to do more. As the body that confirms nominees for top administration jobs and the judiciary, the Senate can stop Mr. Trump from appointing unqualified cabinet members like Todd Blanche, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ideologues like Russ Vought. Senators can insist on federal judges who, while surely conservative, will uphold the law. Many judges appointed by previous Republican presidents have honorably done so in recent years, but some Trump appointees have failed to meet this basic standard. The Senate’s confirmation role will be particularly important if any Supreme Court vacancies arise in the next two years.

Regardless, Mr. Trump will almost certainly continue to do damage in office. He will issue executive orders and conduct foreign policy, and he may defy congressional authority in ways that violate tradition or the law. Yet the difference between a government completely run by a political party in thrall to him and a government with an empowered opposition is profound. Americans now have an opportunity to register their displeasure with his conduct, and they should seize it.

In a 21-month span, he has done more harm to democracy and the rule of law than any other president in the modern era and perhaps longer than that. He has broken his oath to defend the Constitution by trying to rewrite it on his own. He has refused to honor Congress’s power of the purse and misused national security laws for political ends. He has defied federal court orders on Medicaid funding, deportation orders and more. He has dismantled the Justice Department’s legacy as an impartial enforcer of federal law, turning it into an instrument of retribution against his adversaries while canceling investigations into his allies. He has appointed inept sycophants to oversee crucial government functions, including law enforcement, national defense and public health. . . . . He has physically besmirched the White House by demolishing the East Wing and financing a garish renovation with donations from wealthy allies.

In foreign affairs, Mr. Trump has wasted lives and military resources on a miscalculated and illegal war with Iran, a strategic blunder that has forced a global retreat of American power. He has left the United States less prepared for future conflicts. He has left the United States isolated and vulnerable, by alienating longtime allies. He has weakened Ukraine in its heroic fight against Russia and cozied up to President Vladimir Putin.

On the economy, his policies have raised the cost of living, contributing to a decline in real wages. Interest rates are up. Economic growth and job growth are down. He has handed out billions to the wealthy and large corporations, leaving the rest of us with the tab, through a national debt that now exceeds $40 trillion.

He has created a culture of corruption and avarice with no precedent. He has pardoned political cronies, violent felons among them. He has used the levers of power, including regulatory oversight and diplomacy, to bring in billions of dollars of profit for his family business and his closest supporters.

What has the Republican-controlled Congress done to rein in these abuses? Virtually nothing. With only a few exceptions, the Senate has approved inept cabinet members and agency heads and then stood by as they rounded up legal immigrants, brought ludicrous criminal charges against political opponents, depleted the military of top talent and spurned the scientific consensus on the need for vaccines.

No congressional committee has demanded an accounting for the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, which is leading to needless misery and death in other countries. Nor has Congress fought back against the shrinking of other federal agencies that it created and that the Trump White House unilaterally defunded. No committee has investigated the Trump family’s enrichment and self-dealing . . .

The Republican majorities in the House and Senate do not even seem to care when Mr. Trump casts aside laws that they passed themselves. In September, Congress passed a bill enabling tighter sanctions on Russia’s energy exports, and the president signed it. When he later changed his position and said he would not enforce the sanctions, only a small number of Republicans objected, none of them in leadership.

The current Congress is the second least productive on record, passing fewer bills than any other save its immediate predecessor, the 118th Congress, in 2023 and 2024, when Republicans also controlled the House. The most significant piece of legislation that the 119th Congress passed is the law that Mr. Trump insisted be called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In truth, it is mostly a handout to the wealthy, which worsens both the national debt and economic inequality.

The Republican congressional candidates on the ballot this year deserve to pay a price for both the damage their party has done and the damage it has failed to stop. . . This Congress has enthusiastically ceded its power. It is Congress that has the power of the purse, the power to declare war, the power to determine who enters the country, the power to levy duties and tariffs. Its current leaders have instead become bystanders to Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive supremacy.

Only voters can provide a counterweight. They have a chance to demonstrate next Tuesday that dereliction of constitutional duty can likewise end a politician’s career.. 

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Republicans' Crude, Craven, Cruel Tactics Aren't Working

We are on the home stretch for the 2026 mid-terms and things are definitely not playing out as Republicans envisioned a year ago or even six months ago.  The Felon has record disapproval levels yet continues to tell voters to vote as if he is on the ballot - a gift to Democrats. And then there is the host of unfit Republican candidates, some of who won their primaries with the Felon's endorsement that are faring far less well as they face the general election.  Adding to the Republican desperation is the reality that the only signature legislation past during the Felon's second regime is the misnamed "big beautiful bill" that rewarded the ultra-rich with huge tax breaks while screwing over millions of everyday Americans and throwing a few crumbs to lower income retirees and those working for tips.  In short, boasts of "cutting taxes" are falling on deaf ears, especially as oil and gas prices surge again (Brent crude is currently almost $117 per gallon). Some of the GOP political ads underscore Republican desperation, a prime example being Vivek Ramaswamy add against his opponent Amy Acton that has drawn bipartisan condemnation and is causing venues to cancel events for Ramaswamy, not wanting anything to do with the potential backlash from those infuriated and/or disgusted by the ad.  Other races show desperation such as a Northeast North Carolina congressional race where the GOP candidate has a bitter looking white woman claiming the Democrat incumbent "signed a bill allowing men into women's bathrooms."  The irony is that there are zero cases of transgender individual sexually assaulting but a half dozen or more cases single every week of pastors and youth ministers indicted for sexual assault of minors.  A column in the New York Times looks at the situation:

In my column last week, I wrote about the Democratic Party’s dramatic change of fortune in the race to control the Senate. The expectation at the start of this election cycle was that Republicans would hold the chamber easily and, depending on the course of events, even expand their majority.

After all, just to maintain the status quo, Democrats had to defend incumbents in states that President Trump won handily. And to have any chance at a majority, they would need to defeat at least one incumbent — Susan Collins of Maine, for example — and overcome the Republican Party’s home-field advantage in at least two states. A tall order if there ever was one.

But thanks to a set of Trump’s bad decisions — from his authoritarian occupations of American cities that enraged liberal voters to a war in Iran that has angered swing voters and independents with inflation and high prices — Democrats have turned what was supposed to be a bad Senate map into one where they stand a real chance of winning a decently sized majority in the chamber.

But while the fundamentals determine the overall shape of the electoral landscape, candidates and campaigns play a meaningful part in the final outcome. And it is in the realm of candidates and campaigns that I want to remark on two particular aspects of this campaign season.

The first is the wide gap in candidate quality between the Republicans and Democrats. In race after race, Democrats have managed to recruit and advance candidates who are well positioned to capitalize on changing political circumstances. Even if he were not facing off against Ken Paxton, an experienced but still strikingly weak candidate, James Talarico would still be an impressive recruit. He is a natural communicator — whose seminarian background and personal faith have been a great asset in winning over Texas voters — and he has proved to be both nimble and aggressive, able to hold Paxton’s feet to the fire despite facing an onslaught of cash from outside groups and actors, like Elon Musk.

You could say similar things of Adam Hamilton in Kansas, perhaps the surprise candidate of this cycle, who is running a competitive race against the Republican incumbent, Roger Marshall. . . With his moderate politics, Hamilton has successfully presented himself as a bipartisan figure, with support from prominent Republicans in Kansas. It also helps that Marshall, a doctor, has struggled in the face of revelations that he took harsh and punitive action against his patients, dragging them to court for trivial amounts of money.

Other Democratic candidates, such as Josh Turek in Iowa, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Troy Jackson in Maine, have also successfully capitalized on the Republican Party’s worsening electoral position.

 As for the Republicans, the opposite appears to be true. There are a few candidates in the field who may well outperform the fundamentals, like the Iowa Senate nominee Ashley Hinson. Michele Tafoya in Minnesota also seems to be keeping up with her opponent. But beyond them, Republicans are working with candidates who are just not up to snuff. In Georgia, Mike Collins has been marred by his associations with white nationalists and other extremists, and is headed for a crushing defeat in his race against the incumbent, Senator Jon Ossoff. Darline Graham in South Carolina is barely ahead of her Democratic opponent, and again, this is South Carolina. The aforementioned Ken Paxton is such a lackluster candidate that he may well deliver the Texas Republican Party its first statewide defeat for federal office since 1988.

Perhaps the most striking example of a candidate ill-equipped for a competitive race is Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio. . . . Perhaps the fact that Republicans were not anticipating a competitive year is how Ramaswamy managed to win the nomination. Either way, he is currently poised to lose to the Democratic nominee, Amy Acton.

In apparent desperation, the Ramaswamy campaign commissioned an advertisement featuring Amy Acton’s mother. The two have not seen or spoken to each other since 1978. As a child, Acton testified against her stepfather, who was charged with sexually abusing her. . . . Acton’s mother calls her daughter a liar, someone who “lies about her past.” The evidence says otherwise. To give one example, documents released by Mahoning County officials in Ohio corroborate Acton’s claim that she lived in a tent as a child.

The Ramaswamy camp, which includes fellow Ohioan JD Vance, thinks the ad is effective. But it’s been condemned by people on both sides, including the state’s Republican governor, as crude, craven and cruel. There is a chance, as well, that it blows back on Ramaswamy, undermining his campaign in the critical final stretch of the election. . . . As it is, Ramaswamy’s gambit may well drag down the entire statewide ticket.

We’re still 10 days away from Election Day, so I’m not going to make any grand pronouncements about the outcome. But I will say that if Republicans do lose the Senate, and if they lose it badly, it will be a testament to one of the most striking political dynamics of the Trump era.

No other Republican is able to mimic Trump’s particular style of politics. And while Trump’s endorsement is a powerful force in Republican primaries, the president does not actually have a great track record of picking candidates who go on to win general elections.

Trump is in absolute command of the Republican Party, but outside of his own victories, he has steered it, more often than not, into troubled electoral waters.

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Is the Felon's Repudiation Finally at Hand?

Oil prices have soared this past week - Brent Crude id almost $117.00/barrel - and the stock market dropped almost 600 points yesterday over fears the Iran war is about to heat back up. Both are the result of the Felon's misguided war of choice against Iran that continues to disrupt oil shipments in the Middle East and has encouraged the Houthis to increase attacks against Saudi Arabia.  Meanwhile, the Felon is barnstorming in red states where races were never expected to be competitive and telling audiences to pretend he's on the ballot. Which, if one is a Republican candidate, is the last thing one wants as the Felon's unpopularity his continued to rise and he becomes increasingly toxic. Elon Musk - an evil actor in my view - has thrown over $445 million to GOP candidates in an attempt to buy the mid-term elections with questionable results based on current polling.  Stunningly, the Felon seems oblivious as to his own toxicity yet many fear what he may attempt if the Republicans lose control of both the Senate and House of Representatives.   As a piece in The New Yorker examines, perhaps (if we are lucky) we are the cusp of the Felon belatedly being repudiated and seen for the incompetent, greed driven, and nasty individual that he truly is.  Shock at the gas pumps is a daily reminder to voters of the Felon's failed policies as are ever rising grocery and heating oil costs.  Here are article highlights:

Is this, finally, the repudiation of Donald Trump? In decades of covering American politics, I cannot think of a midterm election which has more directly posed that question about a President—never mind one where all indicators point, ever more starkly, to a straightforward answer: Yes.

As Trump has barnstormed around the country this fall, he has reverted to the playbook he tried in his first midterm campaign. “Pretend, please,” he says wherever he goes, “that I’m on the ballot.” As always, he wants this to be the Trump, Trump, Trump election. The problem for the [Felon] President is that that’s precisely what it is shaping up to be—and, with only days left before his November 3rd reckoning, Americans overwhelmingly do not like him, his policies, or his party.

By just about any metric except the obscene, record-setting amounts of cash that Trump and a small circle of billionaires are spending to save the Republicans’ Senate majority, this fall’s contest looks like the wipeout that so many have predicted (and so often been embarrassingly wrong about) since Trump first entered politics 4,146 days ago: historically low approval ratings, an unpopular war with Iran that has led to high prices and surging inflation, corruption so flagrant that two-thirds of Americans now believe he is profiting off the Presidency. Most notably, Trump’s sagging popularity is not just with Democrats and independents but with many Republicans in red states whose unwavering backing has, time and again, saved him during this insane past decade in American politics.

In the final Times poll of the election cycle, Democrats had an eleven-point advantage in the generic ballot, which is four points higher than in 2018, when the Party picked up forty-one seats and regained the House. As for the issues driving voters, the Democratic pollster John Anzalone summed up the current state of the race. “Democrats lead on everything,” he wrote on X after the Times poll was released. “Like Literally Everything!”

The result has been an entirely unexpected series of tossups in the American heartland, where control of the Senate—once seen as unattainable by Democrats given this year’s map—may be decided in states such as Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas, none of which have elected a Democrat to that chamber in decades. . . . In the race for the House, where Democrats need to pick up only three seats, the Party is seen as a virtual lock to win.

Republicans began panicking weeks ago, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in states they once reckoned on winning comfortably and all but withdrawing from previously competitive Senate seats in places, such as North Carolina and Georgia, where Trump won decisively just two years ago. On Monday, Trump will campaign in Mississippi—staunchly Republican Mississippi—where the Senate seat is now officially “in play.” As for the House, “exceedingly grim” G.O.P. insiders have been telling reporters for weeks that they are braced for a midterm blowout.

“The economic center of the American electorate is collapsing on Republicans,” Greg Strimple, a Republican pollster, declared on Tuesday. His new joint survey with a Democratic colleague for the Cook Political Report found Democratic Senate candidates narrowly leading in Iowa, Ohio, and Texas—all states which voted three times for Trump. According to Strimple, “Voters are so upset with the lack of leadership on reducing their cost of living, they appear willing to propel Democrats to upset victories in reliably Republican states despite the fact that Democrats are less popular than either President Trump or Republicans. The level of voter discontent is truly unprecedented.”

Trump may never have been President at all if not for the [Democrat] Party’s fatal overconfidence about him, in 2016. In the final two weeks before that election, with some national polls giving Hillary Clinton a seemingly insurmountable double-digit lead, her doomed campaign did not even bother to send the Democratic nominee to the decisive battleground state of Wisconsin, instead looking to expand the map to traditionally red states such as Arizona and Utah. Even in 2018, when Democrats did come back from Clinton’s defeat with a strong performance, the split decision—with Republicans keeping the Senate even as Democrats won the House—meant that Trump was unlikely to face real accountability or meaningful constraints from Congress. It was seen as a rebuke, not a Presidency-ending repudiation.

The point here is that winning in American elections is about expectations as much as who claims more seats. . . . . Now, even though polls show that control of the Senate remains up for grabs, with key races all within the margin of error, the baseline has shifted. As a Democratic friend said to me the other day, “I’ll be disappointed if we don’t win the Senate that I did not expect to win a month ago.”

There is also the question of what lesson the parties take from the election. In 2022, Democrats bought their own spin about how successfully they’d held off a red wave, convincing themselves that losing the House by only five seats and holding on to a bare fifty-one-seat majority in the Senate was a great victory.

After Trump’s 2024 win, Republicans believed a political realignment of such importance had taken place that they undertook an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting designed to blunt the Democrats’ advantage going into this year’s midterms. At the start of this year, that redistricting looked like it could help them gain as many as a dozen seats; now, with many 2024 Trump voters turning against the President in places such as South Texas and Florida, the net effect might be as little as one seat.

But, as the election that might spell the beginning of the end of Trump’s long, strange hold on the American electorate finally looms, it’s not the hubris of the victors or the inevitable flood of bad punditry that has me most concerned. It is, as always, the President himself.

Ever since he returned to office, Trump has been hedging against the possibility of a midterm embarrassment by preëmptively attacking the results, questioning the legality of mail-in voting, pretending there is an epidemic of illegal noncitizen voting, and threatening to mobilize the considerable federal resources at his disposal on Election Day and beyond. The Times found that he has publicly cast doubt on the elections on more than seventy per cent of the days since his second Inauguration took place, with recent comments focussing on “rigged polls,” which he said, “have ALWAYS underestimated MAGA.” In the post-2020 world, is there anyone among us who thinks we should not take these threats seriously?

In private, many Democrats (and I’m sure plenty of Republicans, too) self-soothe with talk of a blue wave that will be too big to rig. No less a stolid figure than the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is so alarmed about this complacency that he warned the public this week of the “meaningful risk” that Trump might seek to interfere with or outright “usurp” the election results. I have no doubt that, if the President who was willing to unleash a mob on America’s Capitol rather than concede defeat sees a way to try, he will.

Most of all, I am sure of this: Trump remains who he has always been. He has never publicly accepted blame for anything, and he will not start now. There will be no course correction, no pivot to the center.  . . . . The worse Trump and his Republicans fare on Election Night, the more we should worry about his response. Repudiated Trump may turn out to be the most dangerous Trump of all.

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Evangelicals and the Empathy Gap

Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience.  Most would believe empathy is something true devout Christians dedicated to Christ's social gospel should value and  favor.  Yet having followed evangelicals and the Christian Right - who continue to be the strongest and most loyal supporters - for more than three decades, the reality is that this segment of society rejects empathy towards others and cheers on the Felon's regime that exults in cruelty towards those it dislikes, dehumanizes millions of citizens,  and has green-lighted open racism and hatred towards those labeled as "other."  A new survey by Public Religion Research Institute confirms that evangelicals reject empathy more than any other religious grouping and in some cases describe empathy as "dangerous".  This rejection of empathy is in keeping with evangelicals and "conservative Christians" who view anything that might challenge or cause members to perhaps rethink beliefs as a threat to be stomped out.  In many instances, in my view, this far right "Christians" are the antithesis what what true Christians should be, a reality underscored by their blind allegiance to the Felon and his brutal regime.  A piece at Religion News looks at the survey findings:

A new survey from Washington, D.C.-based Public Religion Research Institute has found a new dividing line among Americans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections: empathy.

According to a PRRI report released Tuesday (Oct. 20), Democrats (84%) and Independents (70%) are more likely than Republicans (53%) to see empathy as a benefit to society. Forty-three percent of Republicans see empathy as a danger if it leads society away from God.

The report, based on a survey of 5,200 adult Americans, also found that about two-thirds of Americans see President Trump as a potential threat to democracy, and some of the faith groups that supported the president in the 2024 elections are losing their faith in him.

While Americans are split over the issue of immigration, with Republicans and white evangelicals supporting the idea of mass deportation of people in the country without legal authorization — a view held by only a quarter of Americans overall — everyone agrees the economy is going in the wrong direction (76%).

And almost no one wants to repeal women’s right to vote — a topic that has become popularized by Doug Wilson, a spiritual adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The issue of empathy made headlines in January 2025, when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde spoke during an interfaith prayer service at the Washington Cathedral on Inauguration Day about the need for mercy and empathy. President Trump and Vice President Vance were in the audience for the service.

It has also been a matter of growing public debate, said Robert Jones, founder and president of PRRI. Jones said researchers have been tracking the public conversation about empathy, which began among evangelicals with a blog post from conservative author Joe Rigney in 2019, and spread to influencers like Allie Beth Stuckey, who wrote the book “Toxic Empathy,” and Canadian professor Gad Saad, author of “Suicidal Empathy.” More mainstream evangelical voices, like Albert “Al” Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, have also expressed concerns about empathy.

That led PRRI to ask in this new survey if Americans see empathy as a benefit to society or a threat. Researchers found what Jones called a partisan “empathy gap” among Americans.

Religious groups were also split. At least two-thirds of most major religious groups said empathy “is a foundational moral value for a healthy society,” as did 83% of religiously unaffiliated Americans. White evangelicals were the least likely to name empathy as a foundational social value (42%), and more than half of white evangelicals (54%) said, “empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.”

By contrast, white Mainliners (73%) and white Catholics (66%), both of which, like white evangelicals, have supported Donald Trump in past elections, still see empathy as important.

“It tells you that this language has now become the majority view inside of white evangelical circles,” said Jones. “They really are on an island by themselves on this question.”

Among other findings, PRRI found that the GOP has lost ground with voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election. In 2024, just over half (51%) of Hispanic Protestants viewed the president favorably. That has dropped to 31% in 2026, according to PRRI. About half of White mainliners (48%) approve of the president, down from 57% last year. Half of white Catholics (49%) approve of the president, also down from 57% in 2025.

When PRRI asked Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 if their opinion of the president had changed for the better or the worse over the past two years, more than two-thirds (68%) said “for the worse.” Among Hispanic Protestants, 70% said their opinion of Trump had worsened since 2024.

Researchers also found that religious Americans are divided over the upcoming mid-term elections.

“Among those who are registered to vote and plan to vote, white evangelical Protestants (68%) and white Catholics (51%) are the only religious groups with majorities who would vote for the Republican candidate,” according to the report.

Hispanic Protestants (44%) and white Mainliners (43%) prefer Republicans to Democrats, but neither party has the support of a majority in those faith traditions, PRRI found.

“By contrast, strong majorities of Black Protestants (76%), the religiously unaffiliated (63%), other non-Christians (56%), Jewish Americans (52%), and Hispanic Catholics (48%) say they would vote for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate,” according to the report.

The survey found that immigration remains a dividing line among Americans. . . . . Overall, more than half of Americans (59%) support a path to citizenship, while a quarter (24%) support deporting immigrants in the country illegally.

According to the report, “Around seven in ten Hispanic Catholics (77%), Black Protestants (73%), Hispanic Protestants (70%), and unaffiliated Americans (68%) support allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens, followed by majorities of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (55%), members of other non-Christian religions (55%), white Catholics (54%), and Jewish Americans (54%).” . . . . evangelicals are split, with about half (48%) supporting deportation, while 44% support a path to citizenship.

Among the survey’s most provocative findings: More than half (57%) of Americans agreed Donald Trump is “a potentially dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.” But a third agreed Trump is “a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”

Researchers also asked a second question that has emerged among conservative evangelical influencers — the idea of repealing the 19^th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the denomination to which Hegseth belongs, has promoted that view, saying every household should have only one vote — and that men should make that vote as leader of the household.

Most Americans (87%) opposed repealing the 19^th Amendment, PRRI found — and that view is consistent across religious groups, Jones told RNS in an interview.