Donald Trump is a cruel creature creating a culture of cruelty fueled by lies backed up my compliance from the MAGA cult

I’ve never seen a more vile and disgusting to watch ad.

Echo opinion by David French published in The New York Times.

By now, you almost certainly know the story. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, posted an ad featuring a malicious attack on Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. The ad starred Acton’s own mother, a woman named Donna Arthur.

The family story here is evil. Arthur married a man named Cledith Arthur, who became Acton’s stepfather. 

Cledith Arthur was indicted when Acton was 12 for raping her. He fled the jurisdiction rather than face charges.

Donna lost custody of her children, and — as Charles Hilu at National Review reported — she has her own criminal history. She was convicted of theft by deception in the 1990s, and accused of animal neglect in 2021.

It’s hard to imagine a more cruel and evil act than raping a child. There is no betrayal greater than the betrayal of a child by a parent. And then Ramaswamy compounded that betrayal by wielding that evil mother as a weapon against her own daughter.

I’m reminded of Sir Thomas More’s famous line in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales!”

But for Ohio, Vivek❓

Long ago we learned that there is no bottom for MAGA, and there is still no bottom to this scandal. If Ramaswamy had a molecule of decency, he would take the ad down and apologize. Instead, he attacked Acton. “It is an ad from our campaign,” he said. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me. She doesn’t allow cameras at her events.”

At a rally in Ohio, JD Vance, the former junior senator from Ohio and a former Marine Corps corporal (same rank as Adolf Hitler held during World War One) and the president of vice in the United States, weighed in, praising Ramaswamy. “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” he said. (JD Vance is a Roman Catholic convert❗ By the way, Adolf Hitler was also a Roman Catholic.))

Vance, of course, is no stranger to malicious lies. He trafficked in the slanderous “Haitians eating pets” stories during the 2024, presidential campaign. There was never any credible evidence supporting those claims, yet he spread them anyway — even as Haitians faced death threats as the rumors metastasized across the body politic.

At the time, Vance told CNN, “If I have to create stories, aka "lies" 🤥 so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” (By the way, to lie deliberately and to admit you are telling lies is a serious sin.)

After Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, denounced the Ramaswamy ad (though he did not withdraw his support for Ramaswamy), President Trump took to Truth Social, condemned DeWine as a “RINO,” and said: “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.’ ”

At a rally, Trump said that he told Ramaswamy to “leave it up and look upstairs and say, ‘Thank you God very much, I appreciate it.’ ”

“I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody,” he said.

If there were a column hall of fame, Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic called “The Cruelty Is the Point” should hold a place of honor. Rarely has a single piece so completely captured the zeitgeist of a movement.

Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer wrote. “It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.”

Serwer wrote those words eight years ago, when cruelty was already central to the entire MAGA enterprise. Trump supporters delight in Trump’s cruelty, of course, but they also engage in their own vile speech and actions as a virtual initiation rite into the MAGA movement — it’s the way that they demonstrate that they have the courage necessary to take on the left.

Indeed, in a Truth Social post, Trump applauded the “courage” of Acton’s mother. Vance, as I said, praised the ad’s “audacity.” (In other word, the audacious lies🤥)

This perversion of the concept of courage is central to the MAGA ethos. In MAGA’s account of history, the Republican Party before Trump was a collection of cowards and quislings — people who knew the right thing to do but refused to do it because they were desperate for the approval of progressives.

That’s the origin of the famous (in conservative circles) “D.C. cocktail party” smear — the idea that conservative convictions crumble the instant that conservatives get access to elite institutions or the moment that they get the first taste of elite approval. I’ve faced this accusation for more than a decade, ever since I said I could never support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.

In other words, there are no genuine arguments about policy or morality; there are only two kinds of people: the strong and the weak. (Vance accused Republicans who condemned the ad as “whining.”) Or as Shane Vaughn, a Trump-supporting pastor, said in an online rant defending Ramaswamy: “Quit being soft. Quit being gay. Quit being spineless. Quit falling. We are in a war!” And one way to tell that you’re strong is if the left loathes you. The more the left hates you, the more righteous you are.

In fact, this is a less obvious reason for evangelicals’ continued support for Trump. From a young age, evangelicals are taught that they’ll be hated by the world. They’re taught to prepare for persecution, and when the secular left is angry at them, that’s treated as proof that they’re on the righteous path. It’s a message I heard for much of my life.



In the words of a common saying I’ve heard on the right, “If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.”

As a result, there is a powerful incentive to intentionally trigger outrage. That’s how you establish your credibility. There’s nothing new about this — The Daily Wire, a right-wing media company, has long sold a tumbler that says “LEFTIST TEARS” for example — but with every passing year it gets worse.

A cohort of far-right supporters of Vance, for example, are fond of using the acronym WAGTFKY, which stands for a cruder version of “we are going to kill you,” as a kind of in-group signaling of their own hatred and aggression. They’re living examples of Vance’s own morality. During his campaign for Senate, he made his values clear — “I think our people hate the right people,” he said. 💢😱🤢

And then he put his hatred into practice, in one of the most powerful offices in the land.

That behavior should be self-defeating, and as a potential blue wave looms in November, it might be. Many Republicans are growing very weary of Trump and — crucially — of Trump’s most aggressive supporters. 

One thing that was very clear when I traveled to Texas to report on the U.S. Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is that a meaningful number of Republicans were seething with anger and resentment toward MAGA. They were tired of being bullied. They were tired of MAGA’s corruption. Some were even open to voting for Democrats.

But they were also extremely reluctant to go on the record.

And that shows exactly how MAGA survives. Every act of resistance to MAGA carries a profound cost. The bullies are loud, the good people are often quiet, and when the good people do summon up the courage and decency to decry hatred on the right — as DeWine and many of my friends at National Review have done — they often face the wrath of the president of the United States. They will be the “RINO” in one of Trump’s vicious rants.

Given enough time, every institution takes on the character of its leader. Trump is a cruel creature, he leads a cruel movement, and only the total defeat of both can free the nation from their malign control.

Donald Trump's illegal election interference must be stopped!

Trump Is Sabotaging the Midterms. The Supreme Court Must Stop Him.

To the Supreme Court:  "Where are you❓"

Donald Trump has a long record of threatening rather than protecting the integrity of American elections. 

At his worst, he sought to overturn the 2020, results. 

Trump attempted to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger into reinvestigating the state's 2020, election results, despite being repeatedly told that there was no electoral error. Trump's repeated efforts to convince Raffensperger to find some basis to overturn the election results were perceived as pleading and threatening. At one point on the call, Trump told Raffensperger, "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state."

During the Raffensperger call, Trump falsely suggested that he could have committed a criminal offense by refusing to overturn the state's election results.

Now he is menacing the midterms, with an executive order that would throw voting by mail into chaos if it went into effect.

It is up to the Supreme Court to prevent that. Nearly one in three voters now votes by mail. 

Trump’s order has already sown doubt about whether Americans can continue to trust the Postal Service to deliver their ballots and prompted bipartisan alarm from states and local election officials. The sooner the court puts Trump’s ill-advised directive to rest, the better.

Trump’s order is illegal. He does not have the authority to set the rules for election administration. The Constitution gives that role to the states, with Congress providing oversight. “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations,” Article I states.

As a bipartisan task force said in 2021 in response to a relatively minor executive order from President Joe Biden, “Presidents don’t have much of a role in how elections are run — and that’s a good thing.” Nevertheless, Trump ordered the Postal Service in March to decide which voters would receive mail-in ballots, a decision that states have always made for themselves.

His order is also a recipe for bureaucratic chaos. It would force states to send lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, with each voter’s information attached to a unique bar code. Even minor discrepancies between the information on the list and the information on a ballot envelope could lead to somebody not being able to vote.

Tracking ballots via bar codes can have benefits when election officials have sufficient time and funds to set up a system. It allows voters to see how their ballots are moving through the mail. But, Trump’s rushed order is pretending to solve a problem that does not exist. He claims it will prevent voter fraud, which is vanishingly rare in the United States.

Rather than making elections more secure, the order would inject turmoil. Many jurisdictions would need far more time than they have to comply with the new rules for a November vote. And while the Postal Service has had a stellar record of delivering ballots quickly, it has no experience or expertise in making decisions about the appropriateness of sending ballots to millions of people. It has already been struggling this year with timely ballot delivery.

A Postal Service employee’s whistle-blower report became public this month, warning that the new system could reject an entire batch of ballots, numbering in the thousands, if even one bar code did not scan properly. Anybody who has used a self-service counter at a supermarket understands how common bar code problems are. The whistle-blower raised “grave concerns” that the change could cause major disruptions.

The order could lead some voters who request mail-in ballots not to receive them, while also slowing the election process. “There is a low but nonzero chance that in a state with a nail-biter congressional election, someone will discover 50,000 ballots at the post office on the Wednesday after the election,” said Charles Stewart III, the director of the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab. The risks are biggest in states where most voters now vote by mail, including California, Colorado and much of the rest of the West. The numbers are also significant in Maine, Michigan and Ohio, where Senate races are tight, as well as Pennsylvania and other states with close House races.

During the decade that Trump has been at the center of American politics and spread lies about supposed voter fraud, he has repeatedly failed in his efforts to corrupt voting. Voter turnout in the past two presidential elections was higher than in any other in at least 40 years, and his illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 result failed. This executive order, however, has the potential to alter the midterm elections unlike anything else he has done.

Whether Trump's illegal order will help his party win in November is not clear. Rural districts, which tilt Republican, are more likely to lack the equipment needed to comply with the Postal Service’s rule. But urban districts, which lean Democratic, could also struggle, given their size, and there is reason to think the Trump administration may target them unfairly, given its record. It is uniquely unsuited to be trusted with fairly overseeing elections. In any case, the partisan implications of Mr. Trump’s order should not matter. It is wrong because it could prevent many Americans of any political affiliation who are eligible to vote from doing so.

It already has caused some Americans to begin wondering whether they should shift from mail voting — which has been convenient and reliable — to in-person voting. Some may end up not casting any ballot as a result. Others who would prefer to vote by mail may go to the polls on Election Day, contributing to long lines, which can also reduce turnout. The president’s executive order is a direct threat to this year’s elections.

Lower courts have twice blocked the order in response to lawsuits by voting rights groups and more than 20 states. Last month, the Supreme Court lifted that ruling on procedural grounds, saying that the litigation was premature because the Postal Service had not issued a rule to carry out the order. The service finalized the rule late last month, and the case is now awaiting the justices’ decision.

They should act quickly — within days. This Supreme Court has stood up to Trump’s election interference before, refusing to hear his allies’ appeals to overturn the 2020 election. But the six Republican-appointed justices have in other cases been naïve about his pattern of illegal, anti-democratic behavior. They have too often imagined that they were dealing with a president who would follow their rulings in good faith. This case presents a classic example. By refusing to rule so far, the Supreme Court has allowed confusion about the midterms to spread.

Nothing is more important to democracy than free and fair elections. Our country has built a system in which Americans can have confidence. Trump is trying to wreck it. The Supreme Court must protect it.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have zero regard for human life. Both men have exhibit a creepy attraction for killing people

Facing the Death Penalty:  The cases of Christa Pike and Nidal Hasan show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one. Published in The New Yorker,  Amy Davidson Sorkin.

Tolerance (or intolerance) for the death penalty, as it is carried out in the United States, has been sorely tested twice during recent weeks. On September 30th, the state of Tennessee bungled its attempt to kill Christa Pike, who survived two injections of pentobarbital. Eight days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gleefully invited the nation to tune in, via live stream, for the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, scheduled for December 3rd. It took another week for Donald Trump to call off the broadcast, amid an uproar. He said, in a Truth Social post, that, though he thought a live stream would send a useful message about America’s strength, he accepted that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch.” He made it sound like a programming preference, not a moral one.

Pike’s botched execution did not result in Tennessee looking strong. Though the event was not public, there were watch-rooms connected to the death chamber. In one sat May Martinez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer, who was nineteen years old when, in 1995, Pike, then eighteen, beat and killed her, with the help of two teen-age accomplices. A group of journalists, designated as “media witnesses,” sat in another. At 7:26 P.M., according to the journalists, a black curtain fitted to a large glass window was pulled back, and they saw Pike strapped to a gurney. Prison personnel had already set I.V. lines and left the chamber to begin the flow of pentobarbital from yet another room.

Through a microphone, the journalists listened as Pike spoke what were meant to be her last words—about love—and sang with her Buddhist spiritual adviser. Then they heard her ask if her arm was supposed to hurt as much as it did—as if her veins would burst. She raised her head and kicked her legs, knocking a sheet off the gurney. At 7:46 P.M., the curtain was closed. It was opened three minutes later, presumably so that the witnesses could see the effects of a second, backup dose. What they saw was a woman who was clearly alive.

At 8:05 P.M., the curtain closed again, but the microphone stayed on, leaving the journalists with the sound of Pike’s labored breathing and snoring. When, at 8:53 P.M., they were finally told to go, they were pretty sure that Pike was not dead.

“I cannot emphasize enough how much of whatever just happened happened behind a closed curtain,” Steven Hale, of the Nashville Banner, said at a press conference afterward. In the days that followed, more details came out. Before the curtain opened, according to Pike’s lawyers, medical workers had struggled with the I.V., using at least seven needles. A working theory is that a line was misplaced, or that a vein was blown, causing the pentobarbital to spread into the surrounding tissue. Pike’s lawyers had warned, in court filings, that she had blood and circulatory conditions that put her at risk for precisely this outcome. (They have also argued that sexual violence Pike endured as a child should have weighed more heavily in her sentencing.)

Lethal injection is the most common method of capital punishment in the U.S. And yet, according to the Associated Press, I.V. problems have derailed more than half a dozen executions since 2009, including one in Tennessee this past May. Pike’s case stands out because the execution team proceeded with the injection of pentobarbital anyway. The level of recklessness in that decision will no doubt be a focus of the investigation that Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, has ordered. Lee delayed other pending executions, but he has not yet said if the state will try again to kill Pike, who was unconscious for several days before waking up in a hospital, confused and in pain. It’s unclear if she will fully recover. Last week, it emerged that even the call from the prison for an ambulance was mishandled. Pike’s lawyers have described what happened to her as torture. An unanswerable question is how the night might have ended had no one been watching.

There is a distinction, of course, between insisting on witnesses and staging a spectacle. Hegseth promoted the live stream in an interview with Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer, on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist, shot and killed twelve fellow-soldiers (one of whom was pregnant) and a civilian at Fort Hood, in 2009, ahead of a deployment to Afghanistan. “No-brainer. Execution by firing squad,” Hegseth said. “And we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” There hasn’t been a public execution in the United States in almost ninety years. Hasan is confined to a wheelchair; he was paralyzed as a result of the firefight that ended his shooting spree. He has said that he wants to be a martyr, and one of the many problems with Hegseth’s plan was that it might have helped him get his wish. But the more profound issue was the grubby death-cult revelry that a live stream would entail.

Even some supporters of capital punishment, including a number of Republican lawmakers, seemed repelled by the prospect. In recent years, only a few countries have been known to conduct public executions, notably Iran and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, of the thirty-eight nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only two—the U.S. and Japan—regularly carry out death sentences at all. (China, which is not in the O.E.C.D., does, too.)

The Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual punishments”; the Supreme Court has long said that the death penalty is permissible, even as it has gradually tightened its standard. In 1988, for example, the Court banned the death penalty for crimes committed by someone under the age of sixteen. The Justices only raised the age to eighteen in 2005. But such adjustments, welcome as they are, cannot conceal the essential brutality of the enterprise; the Pike and Hasan cases show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one.

When Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, was asked about Hegseth’s live stream before Trump called it off, he said, “No one has to watch.” In the age of TikTok and autoplay videos, that’s simply not true. But Mullin’s reply also seemed to convey a hope that no one would notice the actions and the character of this Administration, with officials, such as Hegseth, who appear unashamed of their worst instincts. One can’t always look away. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 26, 2026, issue, with the headline “Death Watch.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must defend and support American alliance with President Zelensky in the Ukraine

The United States’ support for Ukraine in its courageous struggle against Russia’s unprovoked war has been abruptly transformed from alliance to hostility under Donald Trump’s misguided leadership and dangerous, self-serving policies.

Echo opinion letter published in The New York Times.

Claiming U.S. national interest, Donald Trump turned to berating the heroic President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for daring to defend his country. But, after years of American support, Trump is abandoning Ukraine to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, whose mission is destruction without compromise.

Incredibly, an American president is collaborating with an autocrat who shows neither restraint nor remorse in bombarding innocent civilians and obliterating infrastructure.

Trump’s removal of punitive sanctions on Russia and his shameless castigation of Mr. Zelensky for continuing his fight signal Trump’s intention to avoid interfering with Putin’s efforts to achieve victory.

For decades the the United States has been a reliable defender of democracy and its values. But, under Donald Trump, our nation has  improbably become closely linked to an autocrat whose determination to absorb Ukraine back into his sphere is ruthless.  Trump’s wrong-minded appeasement is no doubt making that task much easier.

From:  Roger Hirschberg in South Burlington, Vermont

Donald Trump has no bottom to his disdain for law or the people who he decides to trample on in his campaign angry screeds

Echo opinion letter published in the Reading-Eagle a Pennsylvania newspaper:

Donald Trump relies on a malignant combination: dismantling our Constitution and vital institutions, creating a culture of fear, uncertainty, anxiety and polarization.

Trump believes the Constitution, laws, courts, and moral human decencies do not apply to him; comes across as a narcissist, compulsive liar and bigot and is corrupt and vindictive. 

Donald Trump mocked the disabled and Senator John McCain’s torture, called immigrants vermin and garbage and Black people “low IQ.” He has been found guilty or liable for fraud, sexual abuse and defamation. He called January 6, 2001, a “day of love” and pardoned those responsible for the insurrection.

We have a system in which the president is the military commander-in-chief, can pardon those who break the law on his behalf and is protected by an ineffectual impeachment process. Supreme Court decisions expanded presidential powers and immunity to an uncontainable point. Federal and state lawmakers and other government officials are betraying their constitutional oaths.

Trump executes his authoritarian agenda via denial, hypocrisy, ignorance, fear, hate and chaos; fomenting violence; denying constitutional and human rights; manufacturing enemies, scapegoats, crises and conspiracy theories; attacking the media; spreading disinformation; suppressing dissent and truth; rewriting history; denying science; undermining and attacking free elections; using blackmail; and the cooperation of the Cabinet, Congress and officials in his administration.

Abraham Lincoln said, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” We must hold Trump and his minions legally and morally accountable for their illegal actions.

From: Ward Becker in Maxatawny Township,  Pennsylvania

Does anybody in the White House have the courage to read the New York Times editorial board to stupid illiterate Donald Trump? IDTS

Trump has encouraged voters to pretend he is on the ballot for the November 3, midterm elections, and this time we can agree with his political advice. 😝

Echo❗ New York Times must read Editorial Board❗

Americans should be thinking about the corrupt Trump administration when they vote for members of Congress and state officials.

Voters should keep in mind Trump’s failure to keep his campaign promises, his attempts to undermine American democracy and his flagrant corruption. 

Voters 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. 

Nevertheless, the 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 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.

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 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 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, 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.

It is worth taking a moment to review the records of both Trump and congressional Republicans since he returned to office in January 2025.

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. 

Trump 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 appointed inept sycophants to oversee crucial government functions, including law enforcement, national defense and public health. He sought to disenfranchise large numbers of voters, claiming fraud that cannot be found, and championed an extreme new approach to partisan gerrymandering. 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, 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 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 evil 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.(By the way, that's 12 zeros❗)

Trump created a culture of corruption and avarice with no precedent. He pardoned political cronies, violent felons among them. He 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. In 2025, alone, Trump's business empire earned 💲2.24 billion, nearly two-thirds of it from cryptocurrency, which Mr. Trump’s executive branch is supposed to be regulating.

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, though it is vastly worse than Hunter Biden’s schemes of familial exploitation, which Republicans rightly denounced.

A determined Congress could have tried to prevent the two presidential decisions most responsible for the inflation that has imperiled Republican political prospects: starting a war against Iran and imposing tariffs on global imports. Republican leaders didn’t even try. A handful of Republican legislators joined Democrats in passing resolutions against the war, but party leaders opposed the efforts and made sure they remained toothless.

Republican majorities in the House and Senate do not even seem to care when 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 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. In the face of a power-grabbing president, they have mostly shown cowardice. The Constitution envisions the legislative branch as the first among equals in the government’s power-sharing system; James Madison said that it “necessarily predominates.”

This Congress 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 Trump’s assertions of executive supremacy. Having signed on to Trump’s cult of personality, a vast majority of congressional Republicans are now loath to break with it, fearing the president will destroy their political careers and subject them to harassment, as he has done to others in the party.

Trump has become so unpopular that this year’s elections appear likely to be competitive across much of the country, including traditionally red Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas. But even Americans who live in reliably blue or red areas should feel motivated to vote.

Beyond Congress, governors and state legislatures can also play an important role in constraining Trump’s authoritarian impulses. They can block his calls for extreme partisan gerrymandering, his efforts to restrict mail voting and his election meddling. Local officials can push back against the abuses of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They can go to court to block his illegal funding cuts and usurpations of state authority. They can act in the interest of the people even as Trump pursues his own interests at public expense.

If any Republican officials on your ballot have consistently stood up to Trump on these matters, you should consider rewarding their political courage. In most state and local races, though, constraining his overreach will require voting Democratic. There are now 23 states where Republicans control both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s seat; several of those “trifectas” are at risk, including those in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and New Hampshire.

When a democracy begins to slide toward autocracy, legislative elections offer the most significant potential turning point. If voters endorse the new regime — or the party in power manages to subvert the popular will — the slide can accelerate. If voters successfully reject the regime, democracy can begin to recover. The United States will be stronger if the 2026, midterms are such a turning point.

Even if Trump’s party loses badly, the country will face enormous challenges. Our political system, with its gerrymandered districts and unrepresentative Senate and Electoral College, was insufficiently democratic even before he weakened it. Our economy is grossly unequal. The planet is warming. China and Russia are newly aggressive. Artificial intelligence presents a threat that may define this century. Still, the best hope for addressing these challenges is a functioning government, rather than one befouled by corruption, incompetence and abuse of power.

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.

Trump has dominated American politics for more than a decade, and the Republican Party has been his eager accomplice in degrading the nation’s ideals. The American people have a chance over the next week to speak in a clear voice. If they do, they can allow the nation to glimpse the end of the Trump era and the start of something brighter.