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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.

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The Bill for Trumpism Is Coming Due

The Felon campaigned in 2024 promising to balance the federal budget and to eliminate the national debt by the end of his second term if re-elected. Like everything else that spews from the Felon's mouth, these were lies - surprise, surprise - and the Felon is causing the national debt to explode, in no small part to thanks to the ridiculously described "big beautiful bill" that lavished tax cuts on the very wealthy and slashed benefits to everyday Americans while throwing a few meager bread crumbs to a small percentage of the non-wealthy.  The soaring federal debt is driving up both the costs of federal borrowing to service the debt and, equally bad, driving up mortgage rates and interest rates in general.  Meanwhile, the Felon's illegal tariffs and trade wars  - and most significantly the Iran war - have caused gasoline diesel and consumer prices to soar.  Instead of "making America great again", the Felon has made the nation poorer, more economically isolated and caused former allies to plot futures less reliant on the USA.  Indeed, the damage being done must put a huge smile on Vladimir Putin's face.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the bill coming due for the incompetence and wrong priorities of the Felon and his enablers. Here are highlights:

“BALANCED BUDGET!!! DJT” Donald Trump posted that promise on February 7, 2025, the 18th day of his current presidential term. During the 2024 campaign, he had promised even more: the elimination of the entire national debt in a single term of office.

Trump insisted that he could reach his budget goals without disagreeable spending cuts. At a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in July 2024, Trump pledged to make “not one penny” in cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He repeated that “not one penny” promise countless times through 2024, including in the Republican platform. Instead, he proposed eliminating deficits and debt with magic money from growth, from crypto, and—above all—from tariffs.

Basic budget math contradicted Trump’s fantasies. The United States imported about $3.3 trillion in goods in 2024. The budget deficit for that year was about $1.8 trillion. To imagine that tariffs could eliminate the budget deficit required believing that the Trump administration would impose a 55 percent tariff on all imports—including oil, natural gas, and electricity—and that consumers would pay this tariff without altering their buying behavior at all. That was all obviously absurd.

But there was a Plan B to balance the budget! Let Elon Musk do it! . . . . This adventure not only likely violated the Constitution but also almost certainly worsened the deficit. DOGE reduced the IRS auditing staff by nearly one-third. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the ensuing collapse in federal enforcement efforts will cost the Treasury more than $860 billion in revenue over the next decade.

Fast-forward to the present. The budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 is Next year’s deficit is likely to be even bigger. about $2 trillion, or about $160 billion more than in Joe Biden’s last complete year as president.  . . . . On the current trajectory, total debt could reach $45 trillion by 2028. . . . an extra $10 trillion in debt is the cost of just four years of Trump’s fiscal recklessness.

Some highlights of how this record was achieved: In 2025, Trump and the Republican-led Congress passed a tax bill that made the 2017 tax cuts permanent—and added more tax reductions on top of them. The tax legislation will directly reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the coming decade.

Trump’s biggest budget idea was to substitute tariffs for other government revenue sources. This plan proved not only economically unrealistic but also illegal. Tariffs are taxes, and taxes must be voted for by Congress, according to the Constitution. . . . The Supreme Court confirmed this basic rule in February 2026. . . . The situation will continue to get worse.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced income taxes on Social Security benefits, and Trump’s inflation has driven increases in Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment. The Social Security trust fund is now projected to be exhausted in 2032, forcing either big tax increases or big benefit cuts.

An early warning that Trump’s monetary promises should not be trusted came at that same 2024 St. Cloud rally where Trump promised no cuts to Social Security, when Trump stiffed the town with $209,000 in event fees. As the midterm elections near, Trump has accused the Democrats of threatening the country’s economy with socialism and communism. Yet his administration has managed to wreck the country’s finances worse than any government in U.S. history, without the excuse of an economic crisis or a successful major war. October 1 marked the start of America’s fiscal new year. A new Congress will face a new fiscal reality.

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A Blue Wave Will Not End America's Oligarch Problem

The mid-term election is less than two weeks away - I have already voted early - and the amounts of money being donated by the super wealthy, including Elon Musk who I view as a menace to democracy, to mostly Republican candidates is off the charts.  These billionaires and ultra-wealthy donors are in effect trying to buy candidates and the election, demonstrating the flawed ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which insanely held that corporations are "persons" with free speech rights, including the right to spend enormous amounts of money in elections. That ruling needs to be reversed, although that would nor rein in malevolent actors like Musk.  With luck - and assuming the Felon does not try to declare martial law or other illegal election interference - a blue wave will sweep Republicans from control of both houses of Congress and some measures can be taken to rein in the Felon's lawlessness and blatantly corrupt efforts to enrich himself, his slimy family members, and the wealthy willing to pay what amount to bribes in pay to play free for all.  Unfortunately, as a piece in The New Republic lays out, a blue wave will likely not be enough to stop billionaires and oligarchs from attempting to buy elections. Here are article highlights:

The candidates favored by billionaires and industry backers almost certainly won’t do as well in the midterms as they did two years ago, when the favorites of Elon Musk and other superrich individuals won numerous races, including the presidency. But big money is still warping American elections, putting weak candidates on equal financial footing with stronger ones, making politicians from both parties beholden to the rich instead of their constituents, and blocking more populist policies. There is little doubt that Democratic victories this fall will put the United States on a better footing, but our democracy ultimately can’t thrive if a class of oligarchs can use their wealth to dominate the political system.

Judicial rulings, mostly notably the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, have eliminated most restrictions on campaign spending by the wealthy and corporations. Each subsequent election cycle since, companies and billionaires have upped their political involvement, in terms of both raw dollars and the aggressiveness of their efforts. The 2024 cycle represented something of an inflection point. About 20 percent of campaign donations to candidates and political donations, more than $3 billion in total, came from billionaires and their immediate family members, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Six individuals or families donated more than $100 million, led by Elon Musk, who spent an estimated $290 million. He funded a get-out-the vote operation in swing states, the kind of organization usually built by candidates or political parties.

All six of those families backed Republican candidates. That spending helped the GOP win the House, Senate, and presidency.

Meanwhile, numerous companies funded super PACs and other campaign committees, usually to defeat Democratic candidates and boost Republicans. Perhaps the most notable was the cryptocurrency industry, which donated more than $40 million to a super PAC to oust a critic of the industry, then-Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio.

This year, billionaires have already donated at least $1.7 billion. Of that, $1.2 billion (69 percent) has gone to help Republican candidates, according to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Musk alone has pumped in at least $366 million, according to the Times. Cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, Big Tech, and online betting companies have spent at least $294 million this cycle, according to Public Citizen.

Unless something very surprising happens, all of that spending won’t deliver the government that the rich and big corporations want. Democrats will almost certainly win the House and reduce the GOP ranks at the state level. They may win both houses on Capitol Hill and trifectas in states where a majority of Americans live.

But even if we have a blue wave, the corporate and billionaire spending will have mattered. How? First of all, this spending is almost certainly limiting Republican losses. Democratic candidates in House and Senate races are vastly outraising their GOP opponents.

Such fundraising advantages could lead to Democratic candidates running vastly more television ads and having much better get-out-the-vote operations than their Republican rivals. But conservative-leaning billionaires and corporations are pumping tens of millions of dollars into helping these Republican candidates, essentially leveling the playing field, as my colleague Emma Janssen explained in a piece Tuesday.

Billionaire spending can’t prevent a Democratic wave, but can limit its extent. Much of this billionaire and corporate spending is in traditionally red districts and states like Texas and Iowa, as polls suggest that Democrats could win this year in places they usually don’t. . . . .If Republicans keep control of the Senate and/or Democrats win a fairly narrow majority (220–229 seats) in the House, this billionaire and corporate spending will have been a huge asset to them.

And that’s not just an anti-Democratic story but an antidemocratic one, as well. The concept of “one person, one vote” doesn’t really exist when some individuals donate more money to campaigns than thousands or even hundreds of thousands of other Americans combined. Our campaign finance system has never been particularly democratic. But it’s more democratic for a candidate to raise $30 million from 30,000 or 300,000 people than just one.

In addition, the staggering spending by Musk and other billionaires essentially guarantees that the politicians who win with their financial backing will do their bidding in office.

And it’s not just Republicans who are beholden to the superrich. Democrats are accepting huge sums from the rich too. Democrats correctly argue that they shouldn’t unilaterally disarm and allow GOP candidates to get massive spending from conservative-leaning billionaires while liberal-leaning billionaires remain on the sidelines. And unlike in federal races, Democratic hopefuls in gubernatorial and state legislative contests are often being vastly outspent by their GOP rivals. So in the last few weeks, Democratic operatives and campaign operatives have urged big donors to get more involved—and they have.

Wealthy Democrats like Bloomberg are wary of the party embracing more populist policies, such as wealth taxes and more stringent regulation of big companies. Democratic candidates and the party overall are gun-shy about adopting progressive economic views in part because they know it will cost them financial support from big donors and therefore make it harder for them to win elections. . . . . It is both a democracy problem and an electoral one (voters support populist economic policies) that liberal billionaires can effectively veto progressive policy and personnel.

But their veto powers are surprisingly vast. Labor activists got a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of billionaires on the ballot in California. Whatever your views on the proposal itself, the debate over this policy shows the democracy problem caused by billionaires. With massive donations from the superrich, the opposition to the wealth tax has raised more than $330 million to convince Californians to oppose Proposition 40. The pro–wealth tax side has raised $33 million. That’s not a fair debate about the merits of a wealth tax—it’s the rich drowning out the message of their opponents.

Progressive ballot initiatives across the country nearly always have to overcome opposition from the superwealthy. And that’s distressing because ballot initiatives are often the only path to populist economic policies in red states and even blue ones. State legislators and governors often won’t advance policies that their donors don’t like. But as California is showing, the superrich can block ballot initiatives too.

The good news is that hundreds of millions of dollars from Elon Musk and other conservative billionaires probably won’t prevent an anti-Trump backlash. The bad news is that billionaires and big corporations still have a hold, and often a veto, in both parties. America can have an oligarchy or a democracy—but not both. When Democrats next have national power, they must restrict the political power of billionaires, even including the so-called liberal ones that help put them in power.

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The Felon Has Betrayed the Western World Order

A decade ago Hillary Clinton warned all of us about the Felon's allegiance to Vladimir Putin and the Felon's actions of the last week have made it perfectly clear that the Felon places loyalty to Putin above all else, including America's national security and the interests of the American public.  Between his supposed deal to buy Russian diesel supplies - which is performative for his base and low knowledge voters and will not reduce domestic diesel prices - and the lifting of Congressionally imposed sanctions on Russia, while threatening Ukraine and European allies, it is becoming impossible to ignore the reality that the Felon is a Russian asset.  Historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted "how much more evidence is necessary to assess that Trump has undermined U.S. national security and is working for Russia? And how much longer will Republicans in Congress continue to protect him as he does it?" Indeed, payments for Russian diesel supplies will throw Putin an economic lifeline and aid Russia in funding its war against Ukraine and aid to Iran - a nation the USA is at war with.  A piece in The Atlantic goes so far as to accuse the Felon of allying America with Russia and against the western world order that has lasted since the end of WWII.   Here are column highlights: 

In the past week, the [Felon - or is Traitor better?] president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.

In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.

Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests—and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.

Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world.

The [Felon's] president’s aides are scrambling to explain why this capitulation to Russia isn’t exactly what it looks like. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when pressed by a reporter, said that the administration would “assess” the impact of the Graham Act after a 60-day period. This was nonsense: The executive order includes no such timeline, and no one seriously believes that the administration is running numbers to decide whether sanctions are a good idea.

Rubio was joined in his excuse making by a handful of desperate Republicans who tried to cast Trump’s decision as some sort of tough-love patriotism.

Some conservative commentators, including Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who writes for National Review, expressed considerably more rage. McCarthy wrote on Saturday that Putin is on a “quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy,” and that “President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.” As a lawyer, McCarthy surely did not choose those words at random. Aid and comfort are part of the criteria in Article III of the Constitution of the United States that define treason.  McCarthy called for “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

Trump’s decision has nothing to do with American national security. His de facto alliance with Russia is a sordid arrangement rooted in his own fears and hatreds.

First, Trump knows that Republicans are almost certainly facing a beating in the midterm elections, in part over the price of gas—a spike caused by the kind of war in Iran that he promised during his 2024 campaign to never start. He is desperate to do anything he can to lower the price of gas, and because he does not seem to understand how the international economy works, he may well believe that some janky diesel deal with Russia will alleviate high fuel prices in the United States. (It will not, although it will certainly help some Russian companies.)

As Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister of the United Kingdom, put it this weekend: “Donald Trump has shown himself as a person to be repulsive; as a President of the United States to be a disgrace to his own people as well as to his international responsibilities. We all know his actual reasons for this are a grubby attempt to win a few more votes in the midterms by trying to get oil prices down.” The result, Rifkind rightly added, is that Trump will now be “directly responsible” for the deaths of Ukrainians who will die while Putin uses the Russian alliance with America to continue the fighting.

But even if the American economy were in better shape, Trump’s history with Putin suggests that he was never going to allow the sanctions in the Graham Act to be enforced. Trump’s suspension of the law is a signal to Ukraine, to Russia, to Europe, and to America’s NATO allies that the Trump White House and Putin’s Kremlin are now on the same side.

Occam’s razor suggests a more direct explanation: Trump is a weak man who is intimidated by stronger and smarter men. His humiliating relationship with Putin is different only in degree from the way he interacts with other authoritarian leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un . . . Trump posted a whiny screed on his Truth Social site in which he pleaded with the public to understand how overmatched he is against Putin.

Consider what the American president just told the entire world: Please don’t interfere in my relationship with a murderous dictator, or he might help the country that America’s men and women in uniform are fighting at this very moment. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet—yes, that’s still the United States right now—is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran. Nothing better illustrates just how weak a supplicant Trump has become in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.

Trump engages in this kind of personalized diplomacy in part because he believes himself to be—against all evidence—a master dealmaker. But the greater irony, considering how much he rails against globalism, is that he also behaves this way because he is in fact a globalist himself. He does not view the world as a collection of sovereign nations; he sees it instead as territories run by mob bosses. The weaker ones, especially America’s allies, can be abused and threatened at will. The stronger godfathers, including America’s dedicated enemies, are peers and thus treated with respect. The interests of the innocent millions in those countries are of no consequence. What matters is what’s good for Trump, his underbosses, and his family.

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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.