The mess I have returned to

I left for vacation with the President promising the country peace through J.D. Vance’s plan with Iran. I came home to bombs falling on Iran again and the President telling anyone who will listen that he knew all along the Vance plan was a joke.

Let me deal with Iran first. I continue to support the effort in Iran, even as the President cannot seem to make up his mind how to proceed. There is no clean exit from the Iran problem. The mullahs do not want an off-ramp; they want a bomb. Every plan that treats Tehran as a reasonable negotiating partner ends the same way, with the regime pocketing the concession and enriching the next batch of uranium. The only way out is through. That is not the same thing as American boots on Iranian ground, and anyone who tells you those are the only two options is either lazy or selling something. The way through is full Israeli engagement, backed without apology or hesitation by the United States. Israel knows the target set. Israel has the will. What Israel has needed, and what this President keeps rationing out like a man paying a ransom in installments, is an ally who will not wobble the moment a poll moves.

And now, as if he set out to prove the point, the President says he is going to suspend any further strikes because Iran, he assures us, might want a deal. Might want a deal. We are well past silly here and into foolish. Iran does not want a deal. Iran wants a bomb, and just about everyone who looks at that regime with clear eyes knows it. Everyone, it seems, except the one man whose finger is on all of this. He is beclowning himself. He looks like a coward, and he is managing it at the exact moment our allies grow more and more convinced we have started a war we have no stomach to finish.

And that gets to the real problem, which is that the President is not running a foreign policy. He is running a clock. He has been stringing the Iranians along right up to the midterms, dangling talks and then bombing and then dangling talks again, because chaos he controls is worth more to him than a resolution that might tank markets temporarily. The trouble is that voters can see it. He has handed the Democrats momentum they could not have manufactured on their own.

And do not let anybody sell you on the idea that this is a war happening safely on the far side of the world. The New York Times reported this weekend that Iranian hackers have been going after the computer systems that run our water utilities. The same regime that chants death to America is feeling around for the valves and the pumps that decide whether the water coming out of your kitchen faucet is safe to hand your children. This is exactly what people mean, or ought to mean, when they say a regime like this one cannot simply be managed and lived with. Tehran is not content to menace Tel Aviv. It is reaching into Macon and Toledo and every little water district in between, and it will keep reaching for as long as we let it believe there is no real price to pay.

Our own allies are starting to lose faith that we can actually win this thing, which is a far deeper problem than one rough week of headlines. The United Arab Emirates walked away from OPEC and threw its lot in with us. The rest of the Middle East, some of it out loud and some of it under its breath, signed on to this war believing America would see it through. Then they watched us dangle and dither and pull our own punches. You do not get many chances to ask proud and nervous nations to bet against Tehran and put their own necks on the line for American resolve. Waste this one and you have not merely lost a war. You have handed the whole region a reason to go shopping for a steadier partner, and the partner standing right there with an open checkbook and no conscience about how it gets used is China. Every week this President spends running his clock is a week Beijing spends making its pitch.

Now look at the Senate map. The GOP is behind in Texas. Read that sentence again. Texas. Republicans are behind in Ohio, a state that was supposed to be settled. The Democrats will keep Georgia and they are on track to flip North Carolina. Every Republican I talk to waves this off with the same line, that the Democrats will never win Texas, and maybe they are right. But “never” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, and the last people who told me a state could never flip were the same people who lost Alabama to Doug Jones, convinced the people of Alabama would never reject a popular Christian judge. A confident party does not have to keep reassuring itself out loud.

To be sure, it is not all bad news for Republicans. Michigan might drift the other way if Democrats go with the Islamic socialist terrorist sympathizer, and the Democrats may well lose it. Susan Collins appears likely to win in Maine, having gone from being challenged by a Nazi turned Communist to a man in a sexual relationship with his cousin. But that is cold comfort when your own President, and a significant portion of your base mimicking the Democrats in picking terrible candidates, are the reasons your safe states no longer feel safe. You do not get credit for holding the storm doors shut when you are the one who opened the window.

While all of that was going on, the right spent its weekend at war with itself over three words: the common good. It is an old phrase. Aristotle reached for it. There is nothing wrong with it, rightly understood, because every serious political tradition, the American one included, cares about the good we hold in common. But that is not why it is suddenly everywhere. It is everywhere because the Vice President and the online army that defends him have decided individualism has gone too far and that we all need to dissolve ourselves into the collective, which they have taken to calling the common good.

It is no secret that Patrick Deneen is one of the philosophers whispering in the Vice President’s ear. What is less known is who Patrick Deneen has been. This is a man who once advised Al Gore, who warned us about peak oil and a coming environmental apocalypse that never arrived, and who has waved away both the Soviet Union and Communist China as not really communist nations. This is a man who has openly rejected the American founding and James Madison’s constitutionalism as a mistake in need of correcting. So forgive me if I do not take my lessons on the common good from a man who has been wrong about nearly every large thing he has touched and who regards the Constitution itself as one of his errors to fix. Here is a good short read on the matter. Also, my friend and my editor at World, Andrew Walker, a Christian ethics professor and nerd with terrible music taste, is probably the person you are going to want to start reading on the topic.

The fight over what the common good means is a real fight, and a worthy one. But it cannot be allowed to distract us from the men trying to win it. Strip away the Aristotle and the Latin and the footnotes, and a good part of the post-liberal camp arrives at the same address: they want a strongman, and they believe the Constitution is a relic. They will not always say it that plainly. But it is what they mean, and we should have the sense to hear it.

Because here is where the theory meets the practice.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the President has a fundraiser who goes to major corporations and demands donations for the President’s pet projects. The message underneath the ask is not subtle. Pay up, or the President turns his attention to you. That is not fundraising. That is a protection racket with better lawyers. We used to have a word for a government that shakes down businesses and rewards friends while punishing enemies. The word is kakistocracy, and it does not become something nobler because the man in question has an R next to his name.

Then there is Todd Blanche, twisting in the wind because the President cannot let go of a slush fund. Blanche told the Senate the anti-weaponization fund is dead. The Senate, to its credit, will not confirm him until it actually is dead. And it is not dead, because the President will not kill it, because the President never met a source of leverage he was willing to surrender. So now the President is reportedly considering pulling Blanche’s nomination altogether. Blanche is left holding a promise his boss refuses to keep.

And here the President should think like the politician he claims to be, because he is walking into a trap of his own making. If he yanks Blanche’s nomination and parks it until after the midterms, he does not make the problem go away. He hands the Democrats a fresh line to run on. It writes itself: the President pulled his own nominee rather than give up a fund he wants to use to transmit taxpayer dollars to political supporters, including those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 (you know they will rev back up that argument). That is not a confirmation fight anymore. That is another exhibit in the corruption case Democrats are already building, right alongside the fundraiser shaking down businesses, his crypto wealth, his children’s investment schemes, his cabinet members getting rich off the system, etc. etc. etc. The President will have handed it to them for free with a month to spare.

Pull back and look at all of it at once. A foreign policy run as a bluff. A fundraiser running a shakedown. A nominee hung out to dry over a slush fund. And a set of court intellectuals building the respectable case that the one document standing between the American people and a strongman is outdated. In his first term, the President was surrounded by men and women who were there to serve for the good of the country and who, sometimes, pushed back on him and restrained his worst impulses. Now he is surrounded by yes men and women who let him give in to those impulses with minimal pushback, lest they lose their seat at the table.

The President supplies the appetite. The post-liberals supply the permission slip. Both, in the end, are asking you to believe the same thing, which is that power in the right hands does not need to be limited.

That is precisely what Madison did not believe, and neither do I. Madison built a Constitution for men and not for angels, because he knew the difference and knew we would keep electing the former. Greed, ambition, the hunger to win the fight for its own sake — the founders assumed every bit of it and built a machine to check it. The common good is not found by handing a good man unlimited power and hoping he stays good. It is found where it has always been found, in a free people who govern themselves under a law that binds the powerful too.

And understand why all of this matters, because the alternative to a corrupt and flailing Republican Party is not some gentle return to normal. It is the Democratic Socialists, and they are rising. In Michigan, the socialists’ pick has taken the lead in the Democratic primary for Senate. Further down the ballot, in a Michigan congressional race, a genuinely serious pair of Democrats, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink and former Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam, are splitting the reasonable vote while the socialist William Lawrence surges, and Lawrence has surged hard enough that Maasdam is now pulling his own ads to try to consolidate the field against Lawrence. Read that again. A former ambassador and a former Navy SEAL are being run over by a democratic socialist in Michigan, and it is happening right now.

The Democratic Socialists are a real threat to your freedom and not a punchline, and if the Republicans cannot get their act together, cannot clean up their own corruption and stop beclowning themselves abroad, they are going to hand the far left a surge straight into Congress. That does more than stall the President’s agenda and drag us into a permanent cycle of impeachment, though it will do both of those. It hands a growing foothold in the national government to people who, exactly like the post-liberal right they claim to despise, have decided the Constitution is illegitimate and the American system is rotten at the root. That is the horseshoe closing. The socialist who wants to abolish the Senate and the intellectual who wants to retire Madison are pointing at the same building and calling for the wreckers. They only disagree about who gets the corner office in whatever they put up in its place.

In New York, Mayor Mamdani released the names and home addresses of all the city’s wealthy residents. These people are vilified by the Left and condemned by the two Democratic Senators Vice President Vance says he appreciates the most — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The release, which, after the fact, the Mayor claims was “in error,” much as the Left accidentally released tax returns in error, puts a target on the back of, ironically, Mamdani’s wealthy white supporters. This is by design as the Democrat Socialists grow in strength and need fear and intimidation to silence dissent. The GOP, running on ineptness and corruption claiming they will stop the commies, are not giving me a reassuring feeling that normal Americans may just sit it out and await the consequences of doing nothing.

I have said before that character is destiny in politics, and that voters eventually get a good look at a man’s character, whether he wants them to or not. The President spent the summer showing them his. In November, the voters will show the President theirs. If it goes poorly for the GOP, they can always scream the election was stolen because the SAVE America Act did not pass, instead of actually understanding what happened.

Lastly, both Max Miller in Ohio and Cory Mills in Florida deserve the Graham Platner treatment by the GOP. In a situation where GOP control is tenous, at best, every candidate matters. Miller is credibly accused of spousal abuse. Mills is accused of, among other things, revenge porn. And there appears to have been political pressure to stop an investigation into him.

Both men should drop out. If the Democrats can force out bad candidates, the GOP should too before it is too late.

Welcome home to me. I’m back behind the microphone live at noon eastern today, nationwide. By the way, here is my current list of stations. We’ve grown incredibly in the past few months and am now on the radio from San Diego and LA to Palm Beach and Hartford, CT.