That’s what I woke up to this morning. I imagine for my fellow conservatives reading this here newsletter, the question I’d put to you is, “Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy, how was your trip to Dallas?”
This right here is the core reason why we lost:
The GOP has been led by a delusional megalomaniac, and most of us went along with him. There were people like me, who voted for him because the other choice was worse, but still, I voted for him. Many, many others really believed him. Now the bill has come due. All those Republicans lost last night — the worst calamity for the GOP since the 1974 post-Watergate election — almost entirely because of him. Trump actually believed that he was so beloved that he told voters to pretend he was on the ballot. And so, they did. Now look.
We better not ever hear the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” again. The real TDS, from this point forward, is believing that Trump represents any kind of future for the GOP and American conservatism. That died last night. I made this:
Republicans lost because Trump is extremely unpopular. We all know the particular reasons: the Iran War, which Trump launched in violation of his campaign promise of No New Wars, and without ever really trying to convince voters why it was necessary; the massive corruption with crypto and other schemes that enriched his family while most Americans were struggling with the cost of living (goosed by high gas prices, the result of his Iran War); and his inattention to the cost of living. This fantastic ad by the black Democrat who now might just win a US Senate seat from Mississippi (!), encapsulates how out of touch the Trump-led GOP had become. It opens with the GOP incumbent advising her constituents how to deal with high beef prices:
Look at this exit poll data:
As I’ve been warning for months, this has been a repeat of the Orban defeat in Hungary back in May: when most people are struggling in a bad economy, they become enraged when they see politically connected insiders getting rich — and they punish the incumbent. Now Hungary is in worse shape under the Eurocratic authoritarian who replaced Orban, but it’s too late now. There won’t be another national election there till 2030.
Israel and Taiwan are cooked. But what about us? The next two years will be all about Democrats hauling Trump officials before Congress to testify in investigation after investigation. Some of this will be lawfare, but a lot of it will be justified, I bet. The House could easily impeach Trump. They would need a two-thirds majority in the Senate — that is, 67 votes — to convict. The Dems are on track to have 54 Senate votes in the next Congress. How hard do you think it would be to convince 13 GOP Senators to defect, given last night’s results, and the fact that in 2028, there will be 19 Republicans defending their Senate seats?
If the Dems were Machiavellian, they would leave Trump in office to boost their chances in 2028. But Trump being Trump, there’s no telling what he’s likely to do in these last two years. They might feel the need to remove him for the good of the country. And judging by last night’s results, most Americans would agree.
The most stunning symbol of last night’s annihilation is the fact that **Texas turned blue. **Texas, for pity’s sake! If you had to pick the most beta-male candidate to run for Senate in Texas, James “God Is Trans” Talarico would have been your bet. And yet, he wiped the floor with his corrupt challenger Ken Paxton, endorsed by Trump over normie-con incumbent John Cornyn. Maybe Cornyn would have been swamped by the Blue Tsunami too, but the result would have been a lot closer. Trump picked Paxton because Paxton is a MAGA bomb-thrower who pledged undying loyalty to All Things Trump. And MAGA primary voters did as Maximum Leader said. And here we are.
Maximum Leader also saw to it that Lindsey Graham’s seat in South Carolina would be filled by his sister Darline, who has never so much as run for dog catcher, but who could be counted on to be a Trump drone in the Senate. Lo, now SC voters are sending a Democrat to her seat. South Carolina, y’all. Loyalty over competence, loyalty over political viability, loyalty über alles. That’s how we got to yesterday’s crash.
I could go on, but you’ve been watching TV and reading the papers, so you know this. I just want to point out here an underappreciated aspect of last night’s results. It will be impossible to get conservative federal judges confirmed not only for the next two years, but given the magnitude of the Senate losses, likely not until 2033, assuming a Republican is president then, and has a Republican Senate. Think of that, and pray for the health of Justices Alito and Thomas.
More broadly, I brood this morning on what Donald Trump and the GOP Congress have thrown away. They came roaring into office in 2024, with a mandate for major change. Trump started off well, but in my view, the wheels began to come off on April 2, 2025, when the president announced the “Liberation Day” tariffs.
If you read * Regime Change*, the excellent, deeply reported book about the second Trump administration by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, you learn that there was no well-considered plan for the tariffs. Team Trump just threw things at the wall to see what would stick. The tariffs upended the economy, and while things eventually calmed down, the fact that Trump operated on “gut instinct” (their words) was how he would make many decisions going forward — including the fateful decision to launch the Iran War.
In interviews about their book, Haberman and Swan said during the first Trump administration, the White House had people in it who put brakes on the president, for better or worse. In the second term, they said, everybody around Trump was all-in. In one sense, it’s good to have a united team, but yesterday’s vote reveals the cost of surrounding yourself with an echo chamber — a cult of personality that considers Trump a Man of Destiny who can do no wrong. Well, I don’t think we will be hearing the term “playing 4D chess” any longer. Trump got high on his own supply.
Yesterday’s vote was primarily a vote against Trump and MAGA. I don’t think it’s an endorsement of the Democratic agenda. A friend and reader of this newsletter has been in Texas these past two weeks on a business training program. He and I spoke last night. He said that Talarico’s TV ads have all been focused on bread-and-butter issues, like the cost of living. He also reported that one of his trainers is a crusty 83-year-old conservative who has been joking about the crazy libs. But when the trainer put on a YouTube video to explain some principle to the students, a Trump spot appeared before the video started. The old Texas man — who by rights should have been MAGA to the marrow — barked at the screen, “Oh, shut your damn mouth already!” Many such cases.
To put it another way, I don’t think national conservatism per se failed; I think Trump failed. Americans did not suddenly become open borders, pro-trans, Woke 2.0-ers overnight. They just lost faith in Trump and the GOP leadership — a crowd that has had both the executive branch and the legislative branch for two years, but has done far too little with it. All those good executive orders Trump signed? How many of them were turned into law by the GOP Congress? Now there is no GOP Congress.
I’m not sure if or how the new Congress can override them, but certainly if a Democrat is elected in 2028, they’ll all be gone with the stroke of a pen. This is the risk of thinking you can rule by decree. We on the Right are about to pay the cost of Trump’s complete lack of interest in legislation, just as we are going to pay for his inattention to doing the normal work of politics in a democracy, and attempt to convince the people that breaking his “no new wars” promise was necessary.
Trump somehow thought that he was so beloved that he could get away with anything. Almost one year ago, the MAGA online influencer Mike Cernovich (1.4 million followers) paid a visit to the Imperial Capital, 𝕏and tweeted:
Yeah, that held up well. So too this from last December:
I voted straight Republican yesterday, because I fear the Democrats more than I loathe the Trump Republicans (or, to be precise, what they have become, as I too would have voted for Trump in 2024 had I been in the country). But you know what I hope? That the Democrats haul every one of these corrupt bastards before Congress and make them answer for what they’ve done. If the Dems can establish that rich people paid for Trump pardons, then impeach the hell out of Trump. I’m sick of it. We on the Right have nothing to lose now by standing up to Trump over this.
You know who comes out of yesterday looking good? Retiring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Florida was one of the few states that did not succumb to the Blue Tsunami. DeSantis, who was my first pick for GOP nominee in 2024, based on his proven anti-woke conservatism and well-established competence, 𝕏had this to say yesterday. It’s worth watching. True, DeSantis is not a riveting speaker, but I think we’ve all had just about enough of entertaining pied pipers who lead the GOP off a cliff.
DeSantis is a Republican who, despite lacking charisma, lives in reality. Given the tectonic scale of the MAGA defeat, the potential 2028 presidential runs of J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio are now seriously in question. DeSantis is not tainted by the failures of Trumpism. (It is personally sad, even tragic, to me that Vance’s presidential hopes are now in real trouble because of what happened yesterday, a result that came about in large part because of a war he strenuously opposed behind the scenes.)
Here’s the most frightening part of all this. When Peter Magyar turfed Viktor Orban out of office in Hungary, he set about dismantling everything in the Orban system, including changing laws with his parliamentary supermajority to forbid Orban from running again. What he — and Donald Tusk in Poland — set about doing, with the full support of the Eurocrats in Brussels, is to make sure no nationalist conservative can ever come to power again. They call it “saving democracy.” We should expect the same thing in the US now from the victorious Democrats, who are too good at using the mechanics of governing to let this opportunity go to waste.
In recent weeks, the data-obsessed political analyst who tweets as released loads of documents and videos from within Democratic and progressive circles, discussing their plans to overhaul the system and make it Republican-proof. You can read them all at her website. Most of the docs and videos are publicly accessible, but it took a highly-focused nerd like her to dig it up and put it together. It’s all about causing a Color Revolution in the US. Rather than spend the next hour or two summarizing her findings, here’s Grok’s summary. Read it closely — and, if you want to explore the documents and videos, go to her website.
The core claim is that after DOGE shuttered USAID, former staff from its Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) office formed the Democracy Renewal Group. They developed a plan called Renew American Democracy (RAD), coordinated in part through Renew to Thrive (R2T). The goal, according to the materials, is to apply the overseas “democracy assistance”/color-revolution playbook (used in places like Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004) inside the United States: prepare for scenarios in which the federal government (under the Trump administration) is declared illegitimate, then use the resulting crisis as an opening for structural redesign of American governance (“Build” in their “4 B’s” framework of Block / Bridge & Belong / Build).
Red lines and illegitimacy criteria: Private working groups defined triggers (e.g., invocation of the Insurrection Act against protesters, “election meltdown” meaning widespread public rejection of results, attempts to delay seating of officials). Crossing these would shift practical legitimacy toward Democratic governors, enable non-cooperation by states, and open the door to transitional governance or a “Third Continental Congress.” Options papers addressed to governors were referenced.
Coordinating structures: The United Democracy Alliance (UDA), described as a low-profile “big tent” or “galaxy” of blocking/protest and lawfare groups (including Indivisible, 50501, MoveOn, No Kings, and others), coordinated mobilization. National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A, ~1,600 former military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials, led by Rear Adm. Michael E. Smith, Ret.) was credited with operationalizing aspects of it and running situation-room monitoring. Erica Chenoweth (associated with the “3.5% rule” for nonviolent regime change) is linked to the conception of UDA under a Horizons Project “Big Tent” initiative. Horizons Project features prominently in coordination.
Federal workers and internal “blocking”: Discussions of consulting current federal employees on how to obstruct agency actions during “emergencies” (with instructions not to put it in writing). The Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (formerly Federal Workers Against DOGE) partnered with RAD on a Nationwide Deliberation Campaign aimed at a “People’s Proposal” of structural reforms or constitutional amendments.
Planning exercises and foreign input: A January 15, 2026, RAD/DRG emergency-scenarios exercise involved many groups. July 2026 sessions brought in foreign actors with experience in “international community assisted transitions.” Materials also discuss pre-seeding media narratives, foreign recognition of successor governments, and tabletop exercises treating U.S. midterms like third-world elections.
Funding and broader ecosystem: Part 9 analyzes foundation grants (2016–2024) showing aligned funding across “lanes” (movement groups, election response, election officials, state/local government, global work). Democracy Fund (Pierre Omidyar) spans multiple lanes; Ford Foundation is prominent for strategy groups. Overlaps with groups involving Marc Elias, Norm Eisen/State Democracy Defenders, PolicyLink, and others. The series frames this as decentralized “shared epistemology” or “no conductor, same sheet music”—actors with differing motivations converge on structural reform without a single mastermind ordering every step. Billions in philanthropic and related funding over years built civil-society capacity.
Electoral strategy: Part 11 links “independent” Senate candidates Dan Osborn (NE) and Brian Bengs (SD) to the network, with talk of electing enough independents to deny either party a majority and extract concessions for reforms (ranked-choice voting, open primaries, Article V ideas, etc.).
Trust-engineering (Part 14): The final pre-election drop focuses on how narratives, “independent” media, civil-society networks, and messaging are used to shape public trust so that protests and legitimacy claims appear organic. It notes plans for narrative control regardless of midterm outcomes and highlights a “danger period” of roughly November 3–January 3.
If you think this is paranoia, you’re extremely naive. **None of this takes away from the fact that Trump and the GOP lost this election because of their own fault. **This loss gives the Left a tremendous opening. There will now commence a deep, complex, mostly unseen plan to re-engineer American democracy from the ground up. Viktor Orban understood early on that this is what George Soros and his allies (including USAID) were trying to do in Hungary. He was called an antisemite (Soros is Jewish) and authoritarian conspiracy theorist for it. *But he was right. *
Now we have to face the same kind of thing in post-Trump America — the cost of Trump and the GOP bungling the la…
