Every year, at this time, we all come together, set aside politics, and focus on those who are struggling. This year, I have again partnered with Hungry For A Day to buy Thanksgiving meals for those in need. A $40.00 donation will pay for a full Thanksgiving meal for a family of four. They’ll get a turkey, sides, and pie. Hungry For A Day works with food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens across the nation to make this happen.
But they need our help. Please consider any donation, large or small, to help families put a real Thanksgiving meal on the table this year.
How do you raise a difficult conversation after a bad week, but a necessary conversation? I don’t know, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Love God and love your neighbor is not bad advice for a Christian. In fact, God commands it. It is not bad advice for a political party either. Most religions phrase the golden rule in the negative, but Christianity flips it into the affirmative and goes further — you treat others well even when they never return the favor. The political version is simpler: be kind, not cruel.
Voters have punished cruelty from both parties, and two years ago, they threw Democrats out for their own brand of it. Democrats put illegal aliens ahead of American citizens and criminals ahead of their victims. They demanded that Americans believe the economy was good while Americans were struggling. They defended the mutilation of children and normalized mental illness instead of getting people into treatment. They renamed problems to claim they had solved them, so the homeless became the unhoused or urban campers rather than the feral drug users and schizophrenics the Left insisted were no threat to themselves or anyone else. Voters rejected all of it for normal behavior and normal policy.
Unfortunately, the right could not just be normal. It took normal policy and made the process cruel. Republicans came into 2025 promising to secure the border and deport the gang members, drug dealers, and violent criminals who had poured into the country. The White House turned a campaign against criminals into a dragnet, and Hispanic American citizens started carrying their passports to prove they belonged here. When federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, I defended ICE because I thought voters would back law enforcement. I was wrong. Most Americans saw cruelty and overreach.
Crossing the border illegally is a crime, but a competent administration separates illegal crossers from the murderers, rapists, and drug dealers and prioritizes deportations for the latter before those who are not, outside of the crossing, criminals. This administration stopped making that distinction. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was only after the First Lady complained that people she knew were being arrested and deported that the President began telling aides Stephen Miller had gone too far, crossing from common sense to cruelty. It should not take a personal connection to the First Lady of the United States for an administration to appreciate what its policies do to people.
If you defend how the policy was implemented, that is your choice. But a majority of Americans will keep rejecting you and those like you. So you better figure out a way to achieve what you want without coming across like an a—hole.
Ted Cruz, now the last statewide Republican in Texas, offered 𝕏the best autopsy of the election. Hormel sold one hundred thirteen million cans of Spam last year, nearly as much as it sold during all of World War II. Americans made more than seventy-five million paid plasma donations this year, which means two hundred thousand people a day have been putting needles in their arms to buy groceries.
Meanwhile, the President was gold-leafing the Oval Office and building a ballroom. The day after the election, instead of owning the defeat as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama did after theirs, he held an event in the new ballroom to sign a beam. In 1992, Democrats beat George H.W. Bush by calling him a good man who had been in Washington too long. In 2026, they called the President a bad man who was cruel and out of touch, and it worked.
Then there was Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad in Ohio. Amy Acton, now the governor-elect, was removed from her mother’s home at twelve after abuse that included molestation by her stepfather. Ramaswamy’s campaign put that mother in an ad attacking her daughter. When decent Republicans objected, Ramaswamy doubled down, the Vice President defended the ad and attacked Republicans who objected to it, and so did the President. MAGA swung into action and doubled down on it.
After the Supreme Court said majority-minority districts could be ended, Republicans engaged in mid-decade redistricting to eliminate black voting districts. White voters across the South joined a record-high black turnout to reject the scheme. Had Republicans in Indiana and South Carolina stood with MAGA, the Indiana GOP would have been wiped out and half of South Carolina’s congressional Republicans would have been. Across the South, from Georgia to Texas, those fired up black voters and white voters tired of hurting economically joined Hispanic voters to throw out the GOP. Though Georgia had not redistricted, black voters in Georgia were furious and swarmed the polling.
In Texas, after Bo French targeted American kids who had brown skin for cheering on the University of Texas’s win against Ohio State, MAGA again defended it. Social media accounts run by the Trump Administration amplified the attack on those kids — kids whose families had done what these people wanted by assimilating so much they were wearing stetsons and Texas orange.
Cruelty was on the ballot, it had an R next to its name. Voters rejected it.
And after the election, when it turned out that the election was seventy-four percent white, MAGA turned further against immigrants and blamed non-white voters for the GOP defeat. They demanded even more deportations. They attacked Republicans who objected. They claimed immigration had suddenly turned Texas blue two years after Donald Trump had won the state with the Hispanic vote and won nationally with forty-eight percent of the Hispanic vote. Suddenly, because of Tuesday night, it was safe to demonize them.
Republicans still broke the economy, and they would have lost seats regardless. It would not have been nearly this bad, however, had they not come across as the very monsters they claimed to loathe.
The good news is that this is fixable. The President is term-limited, and a party that stands for secure borders, free markets, and basic decency toward its neighbors can win again in two years. The party and its elites have to start by treating the American people the way they would want to be treated.
The data consistently shows that Americans, including Hispanic Americans, support President Trump’s immigration policies. The very same data shows that Americans, and Hispanic Americans in particular, found the implementation of those policies cruel and turned against the GOP. A final sign that this is fixable is that the election came out exactly as I and many, many others across parties and ideologies said it would. Democrats turned out at presidential-election levels, and Republicans turned out at midterm levels. In two years, Republican turnout should rise, and Republicans have an opportunity right now to move away from the processes and behaviors that strike Americans as cruel and out of touch.
For those of you who believe it was the war and only the war that cost the GOP the election, who do you fire for launching a war that was conducted in a half-assed manner with a missile shortage?
Who do you fire?
Notice, readers, how so many of the people who say it was just the war have offered, so far, no one to be fired. And these people demand we all admit it was the war and never want to acknowledge that tariffs played a big(ger) role on Tuesday night.
The President has moved on to blaming you for Tuesday. It is never his fault. He only gets the credit. Compare his social media post on Wednesday to that of Thursday.
Blaming the voters is a recipe for further disaster for the GOP.
Meanwhile, the President is going to designate the Oval Office as a protected historic site so his successors in office cannot remove the gold leaf or bring the grass back to the paved-over Rose Garden.
