Commentary Culture Investigations

The Media Hall Monitors will tell you that the Bari Weiss-run CBS News is “MAGA-aligned”, despite there being absolutely no evidence of any such alignment. What evidence does exist points to the contrary: an ongoing commitment to fluff Democrats whenever possible. Consider this…report on what Election Day “looked like,” in its entirety, as aired on the CBS Evening News on Wednesday, November 4th, 2026: WATCH: CBS continues to find new ways to gush over the blue tsunami midterm. This time via a social media mashup of exuberant voters. The media bros will of course say this is “mAgA-cOdEd” pic.twitter.com/LdKfqi22Y3— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) November 5, 2026 TONY DOKOUPIL: And of course Election Day is more than data, more than numbers, it’s democracy and history and one day when we don’t just argue about our shared future, we get to decide it. Here is what that looked like yesterday.POLL WORKER: The polls are now open!VOTER: There is nothing that’s going to keep me from voting. I would have swam here if I had to. VOTER 2: I always vote. Always.VOTER 3: It’s a serious time right now.VOTER ON 4: Behind every vote tonight was an ordinary person. People with bills to pay, children to raise, people who are struggling, and they came out, and they showed up, despite all of that.DOKOUPIL: They showed up through long lines, bad weather, and for one woman, even labor.POLL WORKER 2:The contractions were coming about every 5 minutes, but she was determined to get that ballot cast.DOKOUPIL: Exercising a right fundamental to our democracy.VOTER 5: I’m trying not to get emotional. For the first time, I am going to vote.DOKOUPIL: With emotions of all sorts at election parties across the country.VOTER 6: Thinking for the first time in years it’s not doomscrolling, it’s hopescrolling.DOKOUPIL: And historic winners.BYRON DONALDS: We are still red.DEB HAALAND: I stand before you as the first Native American woman elected governor!DOKOUPIL: Inspiring the next generation.VOTER 7: Keisha Lance-Bottoms won! She’s one of us.VOTER 8: I woke up a happy American today, you know what I’m saying? We voted for humanity yesterday.DOKOUPIL: And we’ll do it all again in two years.I don’t recall any such gushy montage airing on the newscast immediately following the 2024 presidential election, but here we are. Other than the mention of Florida Governor-Elect Byron Donalds, the lone Republican, the whole thing played like a thinly-disguised victory montage of triumphant Democrat voters.Notice the progression: people saying they’d vote, undeterred, through obstacles and inconveniences. The woman in labor getting out there to vote. Then the emotional venting. “Hopescrolling.” The historic firsts, and then the post-election female exuberance that closed out with “we voted for humanity.”The segment was little more than a thinly-disguised victory montage that could well have been put out by a campaign, followed by “THANK YOU.” The Media Bros promised us a radical shift at CBS. Instead, we get repackaged Obama-era-reminiscent emotional slop. “MAGA-aligned, my eye.

Earlier today, Melissa and I had a long discussion about what happened Tuesday night on our absolutely perfectly-named Continuing Crisis podcast. I’d direct the reader to it for a longer discussion of what happened, if you’re interested in thoughts on that; it’s here:

The Continuing Crisis with Mackenzie and McKay: The Midterms Were The Ass-Kicking Republicans Deserved with hosts @MelissaTweets and @TheHayride https://t.co/vMBf1bwhJ5
— The American Spectator (@amspectator) November 4, 2026

So instead of going through a blow-by-blow of what happened, which you can find elsewhere (and honestly, why would you even want to?), I’ll try to keep this as short and painless — no, not really, nothing about this is painless — as I can.
Three golden lessons and three silver linings. You can come up with more if you want, and feel free to dump them into the comments.
Iran? You’re Doing It Wrong
We might be the first country in the history of the world that went to war with another world power essentially on a goof.
Yes, that’s a flippant way to describe how the Iran War went, but what I mean is that in the past there was always at least a political pretext laid for launching into a war. For example, when we went to war with Spain, it was “Remember the Maine!”, though the evidence that the Spanish blew up out ship in the Havana harbor was thin to nonexistent. The Spanish–American War was actually pretty awesome, all things considered, in that we won the thing and in doing so we got the Philippines and Puerto Rico and more or less uncontested hegemony over the Western Hemisphere that we didn’t do the greatest job of preserving. So it was 100 percent in our interest to get that thing going as a young, muscular nation ready for heavyweight status in the world’s ring, and yet even then we came up with a solid pretext the newspapers sold to the American people as a proper casus belli.
We have 47 years’ worth of justification for kicking the shit out of Iran’s disgusting jihadist tyrants. But the mood of the American people is not and was not in favor of another war in the Middle East, and almost nothing was done to rally the folks around the flag before we went in.
It’s unseemly to make these kinds of criticisms when the cannons are hot. But now that they’ve gone cold — it would be insane to go back into Iran now that the IRGC has essentially captured Congress — it’s worth saying that failing to justify this war before going in, and then failing to finish the thing off before football season, wasn’t just a mistake but a betrayal. It showed a profound arrogance and disrespect for the American people that the war was launched without our consent.
We should never go to war again without a formal declaration. Special operations here and there, fine, in certain circumstances that’s useful and necessary. But any military action that involves significant troop mobilizations simply has to follow a congressional declaration of war and the attendant debate and public consent.
Exit polls showed that 74 percent of the public said the Iran war was critical in their decision. Of those, 62 percent were against the war. Never, ever, ever let that happen again.
And I’m somebody who thinks there are transformational benefits to taking out that regime and it might well be worth the price of a lost midterm election if that’s the ultimate result. Except the Iranian regime has not fallen, and will not fall as a direct result of the war, and one major reason is that the mullahs now know, or at least believe, that the American people lack the will to finish the job on them. So do the Iranian people, who will not put their necks on the chopping block.
And it’s also fair to say that while we have all the sympathy in the world for those oppressed people, they’ve allowed that regime to spread terror and mayhem in their name for 47 years and done nothing about it — and as such, they aren’t worthy of the American blood and treasure spent to free them of the mullahs to date. I know that’s not a nice thing to say, but it’s true, and it’s what all those people who flipped from R to D from 2024 to 2026 are saying.
Wanna Be a Populist? Better Walk the Walk.
While the Iran war might be the shiniest Trump-related cause of the midterm disaster, let me give you something a little deeper. Which is that Trump’s big draw has always been that while he was a rich kid made richer rather than a real Horatio Alger story, he always had the common touch and he engendered loyalty from working-class and ordinary Americans because nobody saw him as a blue-blood. He had the outer-borough accent, the fact that he carried himself as boastful and braggadocious gave him more of a common touch, and the fact that everything about him was always so messy actually worked in his favor — people saw him as a flesh-and-blood guy rather than some invented, packaged commodity, and that meant his populist approach had credibility.
But when you take office and you don’t pay that off by providing abundance for your people, it wears thin. Trump didn’t create the sky-high prices of everything in America; Joe Biden did that, and the geniuses who brought you Bidenomics are going to be running Capitol Hill for at least the next two years and probably the next six, which proves that you can’t count on the innate intelligence of the American voter. But beyond passing the Big Beautiful Bill, which appears to be kicking in as a growth engine, there has been next to nothing ordinary Americans can sink their teeth into as directly making life better in this country.
This isn’t all Trump’s fault. Tomorrow I’m going to have to do a whole other column on John Thune, whose hopefully short-lived term as the GOP’s Senate caucus leader rivals New Coke and Ishtar for status of worst disaster in the history of the marketplace. Thune’s caucus did absolutely nothing to provide legislative relief for an American public loudly demanding something be done about prices.
But other than a lot of nibbling around the edges to try to paper over the effects of the war and fuel prices, not to mention the inflationary effects of a $2 trillion deficit, Trump hasn’t tackled this administratively. Not in any way that people believe has worked for them.
It’s easier to be a populist on the left; you just raid the treasury and dole the money out to the folks. To be a populist on the right, you have to show the folks you’re getting the bureaucrats and the lobbyists out of their way so they can live their best lives. Instead, Trump allowed himself to be the billionaires’ best buddy in the public’s eyes — and he hasn’t delivered accountability for the bad guys. No indictments for Ilhan Omar, too many illegal criminals still in the country, nothing on the Epstein johns, and so on.
A populist delivers both blood and treasure. Trump had the means to deliver them, and didn’t. I could say more, but I trust you get the gist of it.
Old and Tired
When Steve Spurrier decided to quit as the head coach at the University of Florida, leaving more or less at the top of his profession — Spurrier later had a not-so-successful stint coaching the Washington Redskins and then a decently successful stint at South Carolina — he said something that ought to be universally understood about running an organization of any significance.
Spurrier said “After 10 years, your jokes aren’t funny anymore.”
Donald Trump has been in presidential politics for 11 years now. He’s 80. The man’s energy is boundless. He’s a freak of nature to be as vibrant as he is at that age. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that he’s been in the spotlight of culture and politics since the 1980s, and that’s a degree of longevity nobody can sustain. I’m not criticizing him; I’m just stating the nature of things. Eventually you will wear the public out. And Trump has.
A lot of this, again, isn’t his fault. They stole his first term from him with those scurrilous Russia allegations and a fake impeachment over a phone call about the Bidens’ Ukraine bribes, and then there was the 2020 elections and the irregularities around those, and then there was the lawfare and the assassination porn and the three attempts on his life. The adversity he’s been put through is almost biblical. But while you can’t help but admire the man’s toughness, his expression of it isn’t graceful; it’s caustic and undisciplined.
That wears people out. Eleven years of it on the political scene is more than anybody could sustain. We don’t just have Trump Derangement Syndrome, we have Trump fatigue.
There is no way to fix this other than distance. We may come to see him as the guy who held back the storm as long as he could and apres Trump, le deluge. Or we might see him as setting the stage for an American renaissance with policies and strategies that pay off big after this midterm. Both are very plausible.
But right now he’s a spent political force, and we always knew he would be. Nobody could survive intact trying to maintain the presence he’s had. Look at Greg Abbott, who’s been Texas’ governor for three terms, ran for a fourth and got told “No” by the people of Texas.
Your jokes lose steam after a while. And when everything is the greatest ever and nobody’s ever seen anything like it, eventually it isn’t and yes they have, and it’s boring.
But there are silver linings. Here are three.
They’re Gonna Get It Good and Hard
It’s a silver lining for the GOP, but not the country as a whole, that the public is going to find out very soon what it just elected.
Get ready, Mr. and Mrs. America, because Temu Obama Hakeem Jeffries as your Speaker of the House is going to be a shitshow you can’t even imagine in your political experience.
The House of Representatives is going to look like something out of a dystopian novel. To date, when Democrats have run that place — at least in modern times — it’s been Nancy Pelosi doing it. Pelosi was awful, but she was competent. And she did her best to rein in the worst excesses of her caucus  — most of whom were pretty typical Democrats of yore.
That’s not this crowd.
You can’t keep any discipline with these freaks who are going in, not just in the House but the Senate. This is a Star Wars cantina scene full of the behavioral pathology and hardcore mental illness of the Democrats’ worst base elements, and the ringmaster of this circus has an IQ matching the thermometer on a breezy Southern California afternoon.
It may take some time, maybe not that long, but the public will spit these people out. And in the meantime Trump will be able to rehabilitate himself and his party to an extent by vetoing the crazy bills they send him.
Opposition political parties who win midterms have to be very careful, because they’re then getting an audition for additional power. And that audition has two facets — the performance of the party’s leadership, and that of the individual at the state or district level.
This is going to suck. See it as an opportunity.
Look Who Lost, and Who Didn’t
The interesting thing is that if you look at what will return to Capitol Hill on the GOP side, compared to what’s going away, you actually have a substantially improved party. Sure, it’s smaller, and that’s a problem, but your brand just got considerably better without some of the people who were carrying it.
Darline Graham, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn. I could list a bunch more on the House side. These were not the leading lights in the party. Most of them were drags on the brand we had to apologize for. With the collapse of Trump as the standard bearer for the GOP, the House and Senate members the party fielded this year had to fend for themselves, and the ones who did that successfully are now in a position to move the party forward.
It’s too bad Thune wasn’t up for reelection. He would have lost. He needs to be drummed out of his job as minority leader in the Senate and new blood needs to go in to replace him.
And new blood is the order of the day heading into 2028. This is a good thing. Other than Trump, who now fades into irrelevance as a lame duck president, the Republicans will be the fresh faces and the Democrats will be the people responsible for the gridlock and dysfunction in Washington.
It’s good to be the hunter. It’s also good when your politicians are generally liked by your voters. That’s what’s left after an asskicking like the Republicans took on Tuesday, and, again, that’s an opportunity.
1982 and 1983
One of the things I said in the Continuing Crisis podcast segment above is there is a relevant callback to Ronald Reagan’s time in office to consider here.
In 1982, Reagan’s GOP took a hard clobbering in the midterm elections. There were lots of jokes about Reagan being a clown and a disaster because the economy was reeling from the effects of Paul Volcker’s tight money and Reagan’s attempts to deregulate the economy. But those effects were growing pains; by 1983 the U.S. economy grew by an astonishing SEVEN PERCENT, and by 1984 America was cooking with gas. Reagan won 49 states in the 1984 election.
Trump isn’t Reagan and this isn’t the America of the 1980s. Still, we’re showing a 3.4 percent GDP figure for the third quarter and some predictions have the fourth quarter showing growth as high as 5 percent. The labor market is starting to look up in significant ways, the housing market is beginning to deflate — which has good properties and bad ones, but right now the big pain point is the inability of young families to buy a house and so deflation may be a net positive — the amount of capital investment into the economy is utterly astonishing, and there is a whole lot of discussion going on about reindustrialization of America.
The Democrats are not going to be able to take credit for any of this if the U.S. economy blasts off in 2027 like it did in 1983. If nothing else, Trump sure as hell won’t let them. And if all anybody knows about is James Talarico’s weird sex habits and Abdul El-Sayed’s Muslim Brotherhood family ties (probably after they put him on the Senate Intelligence Committee) while they’re earning $75k plus paying off college debt in entry-level compensation at the new plant down the road, the sailing will get a lot smoother in 2028.
None of this stuff addresses some of the real underlying problems that made Tuesday’s fiasco possible. We still have poison in our cultural institutions and the donor class on the Republican side is stubbornly refusing to invest in addressing that. We have a GOP full of atrociously incompetent political consultants who can’t make a decent message to save their lives. We have a population that is less entrepreneurial than ever, and that’s a major limit on our ability to grow ourselves out of the debt and deficits that debase our currency.
And on and on.
But this is one election cycle. A country is neither built nor ruined in a midterm election. The fight continues. Get smarter, get stronger, and get back in it.
READ MORE:
Here Come the Court-Packing Democrats
The Midterms Were the Ass-Kicking Republicans Deserved
A Modest Proposal Explaining the Midterm Rout

Twenty-one weeks’ gestation is very early.
A baby typically weighs about a pound, sometimes less, and is no longer than a banana. If he were born, his chances of survival would be less than 1 percent. And yet, snug in his mother’s womb, he’s living out some quite interesting days. He can hear his mom’s voice and her heartbeat; he has opinions about the last hamburger she ate; and he’s started kicking around so vigorously that she can probably feel him. 
One baby, Nash Keen managed to survive after being born at exactly 21 weeks and 0 days — he has a Guinness World Record to prove it. Unfortunately, most babies are simply not big enough to make it at this age. The breathing tubes have to fit, and sometimes the babies are just too small. 
Despite all the evidence we have that these tiny humans are very much alive, citizens in three states just voted to protect women’s “right” to end their unborn children’s lives. 
Four states had abortion on the ballot on Tuesday. Virginia and Nevada were voting to enshrine abortion in their constitutions, although abortion was already legal in both states through at least 24 weeks. In Missouri, voters were considering whether to repeal a constitutional amendment that makes abortion legal and to replace it with an abortion ban that would have included limited exceptions. Finally, in Idaho, voters faced a proposal to repeal the state’s abortion ban in favor of legalizing the procedure up to fetal viability. 
By 9:01 p.m. last night, the Associated Press had already called the ballot measure in Virginia. The amendment passed, and it wasn’t even close. Sixty-two percent of voters wanted the “reproductive rights,” including the “right” to abortion, enshrined in the state’s constitution. Mothers will be able to abort their children through the second trimester, and third trimester abortions will be legal if doctors determine the patient’s mental or physical health is at risk or that the baby won’t survive. 
In Nevada, election results for Question 6 were similar. Sixty-three percent voted to enshrine the “right” to abortion up to the point of fetal viability or in cases where the pregnancy poses a risk to the life or health of the mother. Meanwhile, Missouri rejected the proposal to remove a constitutional amendment voters approved in 2024 protecting abortion. That proposal would have also added to the state’s constitution a ban against providing “gender-affirming care” to minors. 
Idaho, where voters opted to keep the state’s near-total abortion ban, was the only pro-life win of the night. 
That win is pretty remarkable given the circumstances. 
Idaho’s abortion ban is among the strictest in the nation. Abortions are only legal when they must be performed to save the life of the mother, and exceptions made for rape and incest are incredibly limited. The very exceptions we’re told must be granted generously in order to make the pro-life position palatable to most Americans aren’t granted that way in Idaho. 
And yet, when offered a choice between that ban and a proposition that would allow a mother to kill her child until that the child could survive outside the womb, voters chose the former. Why?
Idaho abided by the polling. Back in 2023, a Gallup poll discovered that, while some 69 percent of Americans supported legalizing abortion through the first trimester, Americans support for abortion dropped off dramatically once a woman hits week 13 of her pregnancy. Just 37 percent of poll respondents said abortion should be legal during the second trimester.
If Proposition 1 had passed in Idaho, abortion would have been legal up to “fetal viability,” or the point at which a baby has a “significant likelihood of sustained survival outside of the uterus without extraordinary medical measures.” While it’s not entirely clear what “extraordinary medical measures” would have meant practically, it seems safe to assume that abortions would have been legal well into the second trimester. Idaho voted as the polls predicted.
Frustratingly, that’s not at all what happened in Nevada, Virginia, or Missouri. In all Nevada and Missouri abortion is legal until viability (a baby born at 24-weeks’ gestation has a 42 to 59 percent chance of survival, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) and in Virginia’s case, a baby can be killed without limitations until the third trimester.
Jordan Boyd argued at the Federalist that the problem was that voters were duped into agreeing to something they didn’t actually want via vague ballot language. That seems possible, but perhaps we can’t just blame cynical wordsmithing. 
It’s notable that in all four states where abortion was on the ballot this election, voters effectively chose the option that most closely resembled the status quo. 
Of course, we shouldn’t walk away from this election convinced that overturning the status quo is impossible — after all, Missouri voters had to overturn the status quo to pass the pro-abortion constitutional amendment back in 2024 — we should walk away knowing that it’s difficult. But if it means saving the lives of babies like Nash Keen who’ve not yet reached “viability,” it’s worth every penny spent and every loss at the ballot box.
READ MORE:
Here Come the Court-Packing Democrats
A Modest Proposal Explaining the Midterm Rout
The Midterms Were the Ass-Kicking Republicans Deserved

Xavier Becerra, California’s governor-elect, is on record that he would finish the state’s high-speed rail project “on budget and on time.” He seems to have missed what the current governor said about the project.
“It’s a $68 plus billion project they just announced two months ago, went up another billion just for this new 130-mile first phase,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom back in 2014. “We started with 33 billion, and it went to 96.” The bonds would “double the cost” to taxpayers and there was no private sector money. Therefore, “the facts seem overwhelming that this project is not going to materialize in our lifetime.”
If Newsom lives to 88, the current age of recurring governor Jerry Brown, the project would be completed in 2055. Since the official completion date was 2020, it’s hard to know what Becerra meant by “on time.” On the budget and management side, news came in shortly before the election.
Ian Choudri, CEO of California’s high-speed rail project, resigned last week in the wake of a report revealing close to $600,000 in travel expenses “unrelated to state business.” Choudri was hired in 2024 to head a project that would empower Californians to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about two hours, at speeds of 200 mph.
Nearly two decades after the “bullet train” project was launched in 2008, no track has been laid and not a single passenger boarded. The original cost of $33 billion has now soared to $126 billion, possibly more. Californians have a right to know where all the money went.
The main beneficiaries of the high-speed rail project “are not California residents but consulting firms that bankrolled the ballot measure,” note Christopher Rufo and Kenneth Shrupp of City Journal. “The scheme is straightforward: the contractors back the bullet-train boondoggle and shuffle money to politicians.” They direct money to firms to perform endless environmental reviews.
As Rufo and Shrupp learned from official documents, those reviews include dogs sniffing for lizard scat, the counting of bumblebees, digging burrows for mammals and so forth. An “overhead tube” to limit the “acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds,” cost a full $119.4 million. As the authors conclude, California’s high-speed rail project is “a massive gravy train,” built “not to move people but money, for as long as possible — with taxpayers footing the bill.”
Gavin Newsom carried his original skepticism into the governor’s office. “The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long,” Newsom said in his first state of the state address. “There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.” That was soon forgotten and Gov. Newsom became the project’s biggest supporter.
In January of 2025, the governor joined Ian Choudry near Bakersfield, where he proclaimed “we’re moving into the track-laying phase, completing structures for key segments, and laying the groundwork for a high-speed rail network,” and so on. Nearly two years later, Choudry is gone, no track has been laid, and not a single train is running.
On the other hand, high-speed rail still works well for the movement of money, and that could explain continued support from Newsom and Becerra. If California taxpayers believed the Golden State will be the same as the old boss, it would be hard to blame them.
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. 
Image licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.