Another Big Job for Democrats: Make Jim Jordan Toxic Across America

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece taking aim at the ridiculous “affordability vs. accountability” debate among Democrats, arguing that they obviously have to do both—and more. Such is the nature of our continuing crisis that, even after these amazing midterms, the Democrats will need to do four, five, six things at once.

For example, they must not train their investigative sights only on the Trump administration. They need to go after bad corporate actors whose misdeeds have nothing to do with Donald Trump: banks and companies imposing junk fees, private equity buying up everything that isn’t nailed down (volunteer fire departments?), health care and farming monopolies, the
Nerd Reich tech companies, businesses that are using algorithms to rip people off and laughing about it. Life isn’t unaffordable only because of Trump’s war. It’s unaffordable because too many corporations are nickel-and-diming people to death, because they know they can get away with it. Elizabeth Warren
gets this, and I hope other Democrats do.

So that’s a third thing. Here’s a fourth: Hakeem Jeffries (assuming he’s the House speaker, which we should assume for now) ought to identify several House members from safe districts who know how to attack and assign them one task and one task only: Make the name Jim Jordan a toxic one across this great land.

Jordan is now the House Republicans’ leader, having won election to the post this week, and he’s one of the most thoroughly odious figures in—well, certainly in Congress today. Is it too much to say in recent American political history?

As we shall see, I think not. The House GOP caucus is a true Murderers’ Row of crypto-fascists who hate every good thing this country stands for. But for wall-to-wall awfulness, it’s hard to top Jordan. It stands to reason that the Republicans decided that he is the man to lead them, because he embodies everything that’s appalling about them.

Specifically, he embodies three traits that have always surrounded corrupt and decadent political movements. The first and plainest is that he hates democracy. We know this because he was up to his eyeballs in the January 6 insurrection. He
attended meetings at the White House in late 2020 with administration figures like Mark Meadows and Stephen Miller, devoted to discussions of how to challenge the election results. On January 5, he
forwarded to Meadows a text message from a right-wing lawyer describing how Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to certify certain electoral votes.

There’s surely more, but we don’t know a lot of it, and we may never know. Jordan initially cooperated with the House January 6 committee chaired by Democrat Bennie Thompson, then he stopped. The committee subpoenaed him—which, as a lawyer and duly elected member of Congress, he had to know was a legal and valid thing for them to do. He defied it. This, despite having issued 91 subpoenas on his own when he was chairing the House Judiciary Committee. It all led Liz Cheney to
remark: “Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives.”

And it led Sarah Longwell, the former Republican who broke ranks and left the party
to found Defending Democracy Together and now leads the important anti-Trump website The Bulwark,
to tell The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein in 2023, when Jordan ran for House speaker: “Nominating Jim Jordan to be speaker is not them acquiescing to antidemocratic forces; it is them fully embracing antidemocratic forces.”

The second trait is his utter aversion to substance. The job of a legislator is to legislate. But the job of a bloviator is to bloviate, and that’s wholly what Jordan has spent the last 19 years doing. As Steve Benen noted in his
righteous smackdown of Jordan this week, the man has “quite literally never passed bill.” Look for yourself.
Here is his official congress.gov page, which lists all legislation each member has under their belt. He’s sponsored four pieces of legislation in his entire two-decade career that have passed the House; none have become law.

Did these efforts revolve around, oh, energy policy or national security or tax policy? Of course not. They concerned appointing a committee on the “weaponization” of the federal government by the Biden administration; demanding that Attorney General Eric Holder investigate alleged targeting of conservative groups by the IRS (a phony Obama-era scandal); holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for defying a House subpoena (!); and expressing the support of the people of the United States for flood victims in Ohio. At least the last one is the normal meaningless stuff that members of Congress do.

That’s it. Nearly 20 years. Even if you relax your standards, eliminate the search filter “agreed to in House,” and just look at the number of bills he’s introduced,
that number is 55. In two decades. Compare that record to Jamie Raskin, his Democratic counterpart on the Judiciary Committee. In a mere nine years, Raskin
has introduced 149 bills. Three times the number in less than half the time. Jordan’s pathetic record is a hallmark of corrupt, fascist parties. The people who rise to the top are pointedly not the people who make some vague attempt to do their jobs. They go on propaganda “news” networks and lie about the opposition.

Jordan’s implacable resistance to doing the actual work of a legislator caught former GOP Speaker John Boehner’s eye, who wrote of Jordan—his fellow Ohioan—in his memoir: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart―never building anything, never putting anything together.”

Finally, the third characteristic of decaying political movements is scandal, and on this front, Jordan faces allegations that are just this side of sickening. Ohio State University wrestling team doctor Richard Strauss abused—as determined by the university—at least 177 male athletes in his tenure. Some of those athletes were wrestlers. Jordan was an assistant coach during part of Strauss’s tenure. He has denied vehemently for years that he had any knowledge of Strauss’s abuse. A pretty large number of wrestlers say otherwise. As Newsweek
reminded its readers this week, with reference to a 2025 documentary about the scandal: “Former wrestler Dan Ritchie said in the film that Jordan’s assertion that he knew nothing was ‘a flat-out lie.’”

It’s quite astonishing that a party that had a House leader this century who was literally enmeshed in a wrestling scandal—Dennis Hastert pleaded guilty in 2015 to paying hush money to cover up his own abuse of high-school wrestlers, admitting to a judge that he abused an unspecified number of boys—would choose as its leader a man who has such similar charges hanging over him (not of committing abuse himself but of knowing about it and doing nothing). But then, denial of this type is yet another trait of decadent movements.

So there it is. There’s plenty of material. Come January, Jordan will be, after Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the most prominent Republican in America. In the trench warfare that will characterize the next Congress, Democrats are going to have to play hardball. If John Boehner can call Jordan a “political terrorist,” one would hope that the Democrats can. And if Jordan’s approval rating isn’t south of 20 percent in a year’s time, the Democrats haven’t done their job.

Everyone is focused, and understandably so, on the question of how aggressive the Democrats will be in investigating President Donald Trump, his administration, and his enablers. But the actual main question that now confronts America in the wake of Tuesday’s Republican bloodbath is a different, and very simple, one. Will elected Republicans recognize the new reality and begin to return to the planet that the rest of us occupy, or will they continue in their supine servility to the man who brought them to this cataclysmic point—and who will do untold damage to this country and world in these next two years if they don’t help rein him in?

Before we start to answer that question, let’s check its premises, because history overflows with people asking the wrong questions. Its premises are two. First, that we have entered a new reality. Have we? And second, is it in fact Trump who is responsible for the Republicans’ cataclysm?

On the first premise, the answer is an emphatic yes. The election results are so overpowering that they transcend mere politics. This is a cultural change. There are moments in politics when you can just feel a dam bursting, when you can just hear a democratic people collectively screaming, We’ve had enough!

I’m old enough to remember, and honest enough to confess, that 1980 was definitely such a moment. It wasn’t even Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory, though that was evidence enough. It was the flipping in the Senate of 12—yes, 12—seats, with numerous old liberal lions like Birch Bayh and Frank Church losing to no-name Republican contenders who were of a new and decidedly more right-wing breed than Washington was accustomed to at the time. I still remember watching the returns that night and thinking, Hmmm. Something is happening out there that I didn’t understand at all.

On the second question, the answer is—well, it’s an even more emphatic yes. Vice President JD Vance can blame the midterm rout on the Iran war. Please, God, let that settle in as the conventional wisdom on the right, because it will doom them to further failure. This bloodletting happened because of Trump: the war, sure, but also the tariffs, the economy, the corruption, ICE detentions and killings, the hiring of his harlequinade of incompetents, the ballroom, the Reflecting Pool—all of it.

Pollsters are paid to settle on one explanation, so they do what confused pols seeking clarity pay them to do. But the world and people’s brains don’t work that way, especially when a leader insists on making us think about him as incessantly as Trump does. Trump, in his unquenchable sleaze, malfeasance, corruption, and economic incompetence, just became too overwhelming for the average voter. Anyone who thinks this sea change was about anything else is lying or stupid.

Very well. We’ve addressed the premises. Now let us return to the question itself. Now that Trump is about as lame as a lame duck can get, will congressional Republicans finally rise up against him in defense of reality?

It’s the most important question of the moment because, tragically, under the rules of the modern media, Republicans will still have more power to stop him than Democrats will. Yes, Democrats will hold the committee gavels, and Democrats will have more power over subpoenas and witness lists and all the rest when it comes to congressional oversight hearings. That’s real power, and they should—and by most accounts will—use it.

But we must presume that Trump will ignore, and will order all his people to ignore, the Democrats’ subpoenas. Think on it: Can you actually picture Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, or Kristi Noem answering a subpoena to traipse up to Capitol Hill to be grilled about, oh, how they got the addresses of the people they rounded up?

I didn’t think so. The same thing goes for Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump sons, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, dear old Big Balls, and the rest of the mephitic menagerie.

So they’ll ignore the Democrats. Then the Supreme Court will, I think, say no, you can’t do that. Then they’ll say to the Supreme Court, fine, make us. At that point, congressional Democrats will have to decide whether to have them arrested. If Aaron Sorkin were writing this, they’d do it in a heartbeat. But this is the real world, with the real Democrats we’ve come to know.

And so, we will be looking to Republican senators and House members to pitch in and say something. Twenty Democrats inveighing against Trump’s crimes won’t have the moral force with the mainstream media and with the nonpartisan public that one prominent Republican will carry.

Who might those Republicans be? Overall, my hopes are not high. Here, for example, are the current Republican members of the House Oversight Committee, which will be chaired by California’s Robert Garcia, who has promised an energetic investigative agenda. It’s a pretty grim bestiary. Even so, a few of them (and there will be several new members) will come from districts where they’ll fear losing in 2028, and they may be willing to speak up.

Likewise, a few senators who are up in 2028 from suddenly competitive states might play ball: Ted Budd of North Carolina, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Ashley Moody of Florida, who will be defending her seat again (her narrow victory over Angie Nixon was a special election for Marco Rubio’s old seat). And, finally, some of those who want to run for president in 2028 might seek to distance themselves from Trump.

Those are political calculations. Let’s conclude by talking about plain old right and wrong—a pointless pursuit, I know, when it comes to discussing Republicans, but we should still demand it as a standard.

So we look to the Republican members of the House and Senate, and we ask: Are they chastened? Are they humbled? Have they learned anything? Has this historical humiliation finally taught them that lashing themselves to Trump’s flaccid mast is not only foolish and suicidal, but the wrong thing for America? We’ve been told over and over and over for a decade that in private conversations, they know Trump is a fool and a charlatan and a crook. They’re just afraid of him and his power over the base, and they don’t want a primary.

So we end where we began, with the core question that emerges from this Republican Armageddon. Will congressional Republicans find their spines? Will some of them finally do and say what they know to be right? Will they stop sputtering “I’m not familiar with those remarks” as they duck quickly into the Dirksen Building elevator? If they can’t do that now with their dear leader, the lamest lame duck in American politics since at least Lyndon Johnson in 1968, well, then history will be their judge. And so will the voters come 2028.      

It’s been a fierce fight among Republicans for the title of most disgusting monster of this election season. After last week, we do have a hands-down winner: Vivek Ramaswamy, for his ad accusing Democratic opponent Amy Acton of lying about being serially raped when she was a little girl. It is the lowest low in modern American political history. It all makes me hope these right-wing Christians are right about heaven and hell, because if a hell exists as they describe it, Ramaswamy will be down there, playing pinochle with the Tate brothers and Harvey Weinstein.

But it isn’t as if he hasn’t had competition. There is of course Donald Trump himself, who defended that ad—not once but twice—and has pumped out lie after malicious lie about various Democrats. There’s Ohio GOP Senator Bernie Moreno, a late entry on your card, but one who has proven himself a serious contender after his assertion, as rancidly un-American a statement as a senator has made perhaps since Joe McCarthy benighted the land, that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was unqualified to be a senator because he didn’t know Jesus. And, as we round the clubhouse turn, Senator Ted Cruz has made an impressive run with his laughable attacks on James Talarico’s manhood.

Amid all this sewage, one other Republican has stood out. He can’t quite top Ramaswamy after that ad (which Ramaswamy’s now pulled, by the way, after ferocious blowback), but JD Vance has spread toxic waste across at least four different states, and he still has four days to go. The man who decided it was a good idea in 2024 to tell a massive and defamatory lie about the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio—people who at the time, let us not forget, were the then Ohio senator’s own constituents—is back this year with more.

Let’s start in Ohio, and with his defense of the Ramaswamy ad. “I have to admit that I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” the vice president said on October 21, two days after the existence of the ad became known. That was at a press conference. That same day, in a speech in Ohio, he added: “Politics is a tough business. And my message to my fellow elected Republicans is if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.”

The week before, Vance was in Michigan, where he called Abdul El-Sayed “a little bit of a psychopath,” adding: “Abdul El-Sayed, who maybe more than any Democrat running in the nation, has engaged in the kind of explicitly anti-white racial hatred that has become common on the Democratic Party.” And there’s more: “I realize that there’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today. And it’s people who see themselves not as citizens of a common nation fighting for every single person—whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or Black or brown—but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others, and that is how, ladies and gentlemen, you destroy the United States of America.” You know—the way Vance fought for Springfield’s Haitians.

Two days before that, down in Texas, he hinted, obviously with about as much evidence as he had in the Haitians case, that James Talarico is into child pornography. He noted that Talarico, whose expressions of support for trans children are obviously intended to express sympathy for a tiny and powerless group that has been used as a political weapon by people like Trump and Vance and Ron DeSantis, had a “weird focus on transgender kids and drag queens.” “Now you got to wonder what the internet search history of a man like that looks like,” Vance added. “Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t want to find out. Neither do I.”

But perhaps most egregious of all were his comments about Democratic Kansas Senate candidate Adam Hamilton. He is, as you must know by now, the founding pastor of the largest Methodist church in the United States, with some 24,000 congregants and seven different campuses.

Referring to Hamilton’s church’s sponsorship (with many other groups) of a Kansas City Pride celebration, Vance, visiting Kansas back in September, said: “Democrat Pastor Adam Hamilton thinks it’s a sin to be white and a sin to raise cattle and eat meat, but he’s OK with supporting groups that spit on God-fearing Americans and mock everything that we hold dear. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not Christianity. That is left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion. Let’s send it packing in November.”

These comments only scratch the surface. Everywhere Vance goes, he leaves a remorseless trail of moral carnage in his wake. His attack on Hamilton may be the most galling. Hamilton’s church runs massive food banks and performs all manner of community service. In 2024, when Hamilton sensed the country and his parish coming apart at the seams, he launched something he called the Campaign for Kindness. It was described by an NPR reporter at the time as having “all the trappings of the political programming you’re probably sick of seeing—billboards, yard signs, and even TV spots. But instead of candidates or policies, their campaign advertises ethics.” Around 1,600 churches nationwide joined the campaign.

That’s the man Vance is calling divisive. There’s only one divisive person in this story, and it sure isn’t Hamilton.

It’s quite hilarious and telling, by the way, that so many of these attacks carry the subtext—or in Talarico’s case, text—of masculinity. Quite funny, at a time when their hero president is singing the praises of men’s asses. These Republican dudes are the least masculine men in America. When his state was in trouble, Ted Cruz ran away to Cancun. That guy’s about as macho as Fredo Corleone. Roger Marshall sues poor people over a hundred dollars. Ken Paxton looks like he couldn’t lift a bag of charcoal briquets. And I’d bet my mortgage that their Dear Leader, Mr. Bone Spurs, couldn’t do two push-ups.

They are frauds up and down, but arguably none more monumentally than Vance. If there’s an example in modern American political history of a person having sold his soul more nakedly than Vance has, I’m not aware of it.

It’s hard to imagine the Republicans nominating such a mean, soulless, rancidly power-mad person as president—just kidding! They’ve already nominated a mean, soulless, rancidly power-mad person three times. Republican voters, driven by their fake-Christian “values” and their thirst for an antidemocratic strongman who will just fix everything, are capable of anything. The only place where Vance may fall short is that he may not be able to pass himself off as a strongman, which is another way of saying he’s not quite as convincing a conman as Trump is. Which is exactly why his current libels might fail. Let us pray that the man who scolded Amy Acton that “politics is a tough business” wakes up next Wednesday learning that lesson the hard way.

It had to happen. On Thursday, Donald Trump defended that despicable Republican attack ad that everyone is talking about this week, writing on Truth Social: “Vivek Ramaswamy put up a very powerful Ad about a mother saying that her daughter, Amy Acton, who is running for Governor of Ohio, is a liar, and much worse.” And he didn’t stop there! He of course took the side of Donna Arthur, Acton’s estranged mother, who decided to stay married to her daughter’s rapist and is the ad’s “star”: “Frankly, anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor.” And he didn’t stop there, either: “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’”

There you have it. The sickest and most repulsive TV ad in American political history, endorsed by the sickest and most repulsive human in American political history. Once again, Trump drags America to a bottom that most of us didn’t know existed.

But is it really the bottom? Please. There’s always a new bottom with Trump. We’re 12 days out from Election Day. And we’re 73 days out from January 3, when, by custom and in theory, the next Congress will be sworn in and seated—a ceremony whose execution right now seems very much in doubt. There’s time for a dozen new bottoms between now and then.

But this is the bottom we have for now, and it’s worth noting, because it screams at us that there is literally nothing these MAGA Republicans won’t do for power. And don’t be fooled by these headlines about “overwhelming bipartisan denunciation.” Yes, some Republicans have denounced the ad—but if you look at it, it’s not really that many. Ohioans Mike DeWine and Jon Husted did, lest its mephitic stink encircle them (although DeWine added that he still endorses Ramaswamy, so what is that denunciation worth?). But if you google “Republican senators and House members who have denounced the Ramaswamy ad,” you’ll find pretty slim pickings.

The press loves to slap the word “bipartisan” on a story whenever it can, even on the thinnest of justifications. When a group of New Republic editors was discussing this matter on Wednesday morning, one editor said, “Yeah, I see these headlines that say ‘bipartisan criticism of Trump,’ and I look for the Republicans, and it’s one quote from Thom Tillis.”

So: Does it really matter that Meghan McCain denounced the ad? Or even Nikki Haley, who is (for now) retired from politics? Representative Nancy Mace, who has spoken about being raped, laid into it, so at least that’s one sitting non-Ohio GOP pol. I’d imagine there were a few others that I missed, but the outrage has been a long, long distance from universal.

And among right-wing pundits? I admit that I don’t read or watch them much, and spending too much time googling the matter feels a bit like googling how many mass shooters denounced Dylann Roof. So maybe some Fox News host was indeed genuinely outraged, and for this, I (with one hand) applaud them.

But Media Matters for America has collected a number of right-wing commentators who are as pleased as punch about it:

• Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire called it “brilliant, brilliant,” adding: “I think it’s a very, very effective ad. It’s brutal.”
• Newsmax host Greg Kelly: “Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom.” And: “The mother speaks with love here. I believe the mother loves Amy.” And: “She seems like a very nice lady, actually.… Wow, that’s some—the mother, I believe her.”
• Dan Bongino, the podcaster turned FBI honcho turned podcaster: “This is the most destructive political ad I have ever seen.”
• Gateway Pundit’s Wayne Allyn Root: “The more you meet these Democrat candidates, they’re all crazy. They’re all covering up for the fact that they’ve had mental illness their whole life. They’re crazy, whacked-out people.” He also called the ad “absolutely hilarious.”

You might say that this doesn’t add up to much. And perhaps it doesn’t. Maybe Ramaswamy’s polls will tell him that the blowback is too much.

But there exists another possibility. Now that the president of the United States has lent the ad his imprimatur, a day after his vice president did the same, I submit to you that it’s pretty clear what the next 12 days could bring. Trump, Ramaswamy, and JD Vance—the latter two, by the way, were buds when they were at Yale Law together—will keep pushing and pushing this. And the right-wing media, and that segment of it that might have been knocked back on its heels for the first 48 or 72 hours, will collect itself and hop enthusiastically on this toxic train.

I hope Amy Acton and her campaign team are ready for this. A normal person … well, a normal person wouldn’t have made and run that ad to begin with. But let’s say a normal person did. Said normal person would take stock of the revulsion and quietly pull the ad, or scale back the buy, and change the subject to something “relevant” like trans athletes.

But these are not normal people. These are sick, twisted, cruel, sadistic, and psychotic people. That’s five adjectives, which may seem like a bit much, but I chose them with care. They do not care at all that Acton was raped as a 12-year-old girl. They care only about how they can crush her—politically, emotionally, in every way. That’s what makes these people different. They don’t just want to win elections. They want to destroy lives.

And here’s a question that I really hate to ask, but it’s one we must contemplate: What if Ramaswamy still wins? It’s possible. And if he does, it’s hard for us normal people to imagine what kind of attacks will be unleashed for 2028 and beyond if this vile smear works.

It probably won’t work. It probably will backfire. But I hope Acton and her team are not sitting there assuming that Ramaswamy is going to soften his approach. He’s going to start hitting harder on this and other points. And Trump and Vance will have his back. It will be yet another new bottom. But rest assured that it won’t be the last.                     

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. I’m pretty tired of it, though not so tired that my blood doesn’t still boil.

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. Because Attorney General Todd Blanche, you see, suspects that they are not.

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. The president can’t send armed troops to polling places—or at least, the law says he can’t. But he can send them into certain neighborhoods. And the DOJ can send out more such orders, and to much swingier states than California. 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. Barack Obama in 2010, for example, implicitly acknowledged that the economic landscape was pretty barren, but he did try (to no avail) to highlight certain “green shoots” sprouting heavenward. 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.