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Margin of Error will bring you more analysis, more guests, more real-time data on this election and the battles to come!

We took a break over the summer because Andrew Wilson was on paternity leave with the new grandchild, but we’re back at it, enhanced, improved, and polished!

We’re tremendously excited about it. It’ll be available not only on YouTube and other platforms, but also as a podcast! Much more to come!

Here’s the first episode:

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Inside:

MAGA’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Week
State Update: The Battleground Board
End of Campaign Spin Patrol
Sign Your Name to the Denial
The 2028 Map Without the MAGA Sun Belt Wall
Strategery: Andy, Put the Money in Florida
Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Ad Campaign
Trump’s Insane Interview
One More Reason To Hate Data Centers

MAGA’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Week

There’s a tell I learned in my old line of work: as election season closes, a campaign that thinks it’s winning talks about the other guy. A campaign that thinks it’s losing spends its days explaining itself, throwing things against the wall, and working too-clever bank-shot attacks.

By midweek of this trainwreck of a week, the MAGA Party was explaining everything...and in politics, famously, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

By Thursday night, they were throwing out attacks so random and niche as to defy imagination, and they were working on 4-bumper bank shots they’d never land.

The money story broke Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reported that Customs and Border Protection paid for the slick Trump spots running during NFL games and on the Sunday shows. Democratic appropriators say DHS moved $20 million into the effort, routed through a CBP account for “commemorative events” and funded with border money from the Big Bad Bill.

AdImpact counted 2,766 airings in a single week. One of the ads is nearly identical to a 2024 campaign spot.

All of them were, frankly, risibly bad.

John Thune told reporters he liked the message, but taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for it, which is about as close as Thune gets to open revolt.

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Every so often, the Hate Machine shows you its inner machinery: how the trolling and social media narrative industry that fuels MAGA actually works. Most days, you see the results, not the gory sausage-making.

As I’ve worked on The Hate Machine’s book draft this year, I’ve collected examples of how it works, and realized the system is so hermetic, so well-oiled that we almost never see the process clearly unless it breaks down.

Tuesday was one of those days.

Yesterday’s trainwreck hearings, in which Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Slackjaw Junction, MO) tried and failed to catch Jack Smith in a perjury trap, give you a roadmap to the Hate Machine’s social media and press operating system. I’ll show you how.

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This post is brought to you free by Incogni — the service I personally use to keep my home address, phone, and family off the data broker sites that feed every deepfake robocall, terror mailer, and 11 p.m. fundraising text MAGA’s final-30-day panic is about to unload on you.

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Earlier this month, Donald Trump, the least popular President in American history, promised to hit 35 competitive races in the final 30 days of the campaign.

You could hear the GOP candidates sucking in their breath and praying, “Not me not me not me not me…”

His opening acts are in places not typically considered purple states: Durant, Oklahoma, on Thursday and Mobile, Alabama, on Friday, two states he won by 34 and 30 points, where both the governor’s and Senate races should be safely Republican. The congressional districts hosting him aren’t exactly competitive, either.

Republican candidates are caught in a trap: they don’t want Trump within 1000 miles of their races, and they can’t tell him not to come.

When the principal is an asset, you put him where the votes are. When the principal is a man whose approval sits at roughly 30-33% in the polling averages, you put him somewhere the arena will be full, the crowd will be loud, and no candidate on the ballot is in any danger of losing.

Durant and Mobile are rally therapy for sad boy Donnie; Mobile in particular was one of his 2016 breakthroughs. The only thing on the line is Donald Trump’s mood, and he needs a trip to the Paramus Mall. He needs the noise from his fading and dying movement more than any candidate needs him. He needs to see the remaining Front Row Joes cheering him madly, while the sparse seats behind him fill with octogenarian Trump stans confused about why the memory care facility shuttle bus dropped them there.

The problems begin when he wanders into states where the races are real, and the first one on the list is mine.

Dinner with Hannibal

On Saturday, Trump announced two Florida rallies for Byron Donalds, which he promised would be “SOLD OUT!” He posted it in a fit of pique after reporting that Donalds had rolled out a new campaign website that dropped the prominent references to Trump’s endorsement, along with the photo of the two of them, from the homepage.

Trump, naturally, took it as a betrayal, a Judas move from a man who once called him “Daddy.” Trump wrote on Trash Social that if Florida believed Byron had dropped him, “he would lose the Election.”

Even slowcoach candidates like Donalds knew that his patron was threatening him. “Embarrass the boss again and the boss will make sure Florida MAGA voters hear about it.”

Donalds’ ludicrously weak-dick explanation was that the site was getting refurbished for the general anyway, and that his team “just got a little busy.” By Saturday morning in Miami Beach, he was telling reporters that “of course” he’d campaign with the president. That’s a full flip in about 72 hours, which is fast even by Byron’s notoriously flexible standards.

For the Donalds campaign, a Trump rally offer must feel a lot like a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter. The table will be beautiful, the wine excellent, and Byron will be the main course.

Donalds can’t afford mistakes now, and these rallies will be ETTD Hall of Fame moments.

We’ve been telling you for months that the illusion of Donald’s massive financial haul had papered over a deeply flawed and corrupt candidate, a man who couldn’t win the GOP primary with Trump’s endorsement and $35 million in primary spending against four nobodies.

Cook Political moved Florida governor from Solid Republican to Likely Republican in August. Last week, Inside Elections moved it again, from Likely Republican to Lean Republican, and Decision Desk HQ shifted it to a Toss-up. The St. Pete Polls survey for Florida Politics had it 44-43 among likely voters, with Jolly winning NPA voters by 12 points in a sample weighted 42% Republican. Change Research had Jolly up 48 to 46, and after $65 million in spending, Donalds sitting at 34 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable.

$65 million bought Byron Donalds a negative favorable rating in a state Trump won by 13. The last thing that campaign can afford is a guest star who reminds voters why they’re angry.

It’s a trap, and Donalds knows it.

If Donalds ducks the rallies, Trump destroys him. We got the preview on Saturday, and that was over a webpage. A skipped rally would get the full Trump Mean Girl treatment, nightly, on Truth Social.

If he says yes, he gets Trump on a Florida stage, live, reminding every voter in the state what the last year has cost them.

Florida gas hit a statewide average of $4.42 on Friday, the highest since May, and the average driver is now paying $65 to fill a tank that cost $44 a year ago. Diesel, which is how everything in this state gets from the farms to the port to the shelf, was at $6.07 on Monday. Truckers and farmers in this state do that arithmetic every morning, and they know Trump’s war and Trump’s tariffs (of which Donalds is an eager cheerleader for both) are why they’re getting financially hammered.

Trump’s visit also tears another wound into Data Center Donald’s campaign. President “Superintelligence” coming to Florida, where data centers are as popular with the voters as a drug-resistant STD bred in Roger Stone’s biolab will remind voters again that Donalds is funded by millions in Big Tech/AI money and that he’s definitely pro-data center. Trump will be unable to resist the issue.

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Data centers are a fiery, political proxy for AI anxiety, economic inequality, overdevelopment and environmental damage; it’s getting worse for him by the week. Jolly has promised a one-year moratorium on new data centers, and his campaign’s ads tell viewers to “Say no to Data Center Donalds.” A July UNF survey found 68 percent of likely Florida voters opposed an AI data center in their own area, with just 28 percent in favor. Donalds has been backpedaling for weeks.

Trump is so far down into the greasy sluice of his mental decline that he can’t backpedal, even for political survival. He’s argued that communities rejecting data centers could end up “backwards and poor,” which is the kind of argument that MAGA influencers would have called elitist if a Democrat said it.

Put that man in front of a microphone in Florida for ninety minutes, and he will say it again, off the cuff, with Donalds standing behind him nodding like a stooge. The ads will have that clip cut, scored, and uploaded before Air Force One wheels up.

A Word From Our Sponsor — And Speaking Of Data Centers, Here’s The Retail Version Running On You

I just spent five paragraphs walking you through Data Center Donald and the trillion-dollar AI industrial complex that bought Byron a negative favorable rating in a state Trump won by 13. Good. Now let me tell you about the retail-scale version of that same economy, because it is not only Silicon Valley billionaires and Palantir contracts. It is a strip-mall operation running on you.

EXPOSED: Your identity sells for less than $1

In the data broker market, personal profiles are cheap.

For a few dollars — or sometimes cents — buyers can access detailed records about real people.

Addresses. Phone numbers. Relatives. Property history.

That information fuels scams, spam, and identity fraud. And now, friend, it also fuels the same “President Superintelligence” campaign apparatus I just described. Every deepfake robocall in a candidate’s voice, every “urgent” fundraising text that hits your mom’s iPhone at 11:47 p.m., every direct-mail terror piece landing in your neighborhood in the final 30 days — every one of those operations bought your file for pocket change and is running the AI-generated targeting on it right now, out of a data center that Byron Donalds’ donors probably built.

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If Trump is going to spend 30 days lighting Byron Donalds’ campaign on fire, the least you can do is not leave your file next to the fire.

Now, back to the trap.

The first Florida “help” is already on the way. The RNC says the Mobile rally is meant to reach voters in Florida’s Panhandle media market too. Enjoy the spillover, Byron.

Please, sir, may I have some more?

My fondest hope is that Trump looks at this schedule and decides it isn’t ambitious enough. I’d love to see him in Maine, where Inside Elections just moved Susan Collins’ race to Toss-up and Democrat Troy Jackson leads in most polling, especially given the recent revelations of Collins’ corruption.

I’d love a week of Trump in the Columbus suburbs talking about tariffs and the glory of the Iran War, followed by swings through Michigan and Texas. I will personally buy the gas for the motorcade, at whatever it costs that day. By all means, Donald, do a Mike Rogers rally in Oakland County, Michigan.

Down-ballot, the Florida and Texas dummymanders are coming due, and the GOP candidates in those redrawn seats will be washing their hair when Trump comes calling.

When you get clever with maps, you slice your safe voters thin to squeeze out an extra seat or two. That works beautifully in a neutral year and collapses into a wave, like some quantum-observational problem.

Florida, Texas, and Ohio carry 87 electoral votes between them. A 2028 Republican nominee who has to spend real money defending any of the three can’t spend it in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina. The governors matter for more than bragging rights, too. In Florida and Texas, the governor appoints the secretary of state who runs elections. In Ohio, the governor sits on the commission that draws the maps.

The maps after the 2030 census get drawn in 2031, by governors elected in 2030. A Democrat who wins in 2026 goes into that cycle as an incumbent with a veto pen. And since Republicans decided in 2025 that redistricting is now a year-round contact sport, any Democratic governor elected this November also stands in the way of the next round of mid-decade map rigging before 2028. In Florida, the legislature’s supermajority can override a veto, but every override costs votes and time, and a Governor Jolly would make them spend both.

ETTD

I wrote a book about this once, and it still holds: Everything Trump Touches Dies. The rally tour will be its living embodiment for GOP candidates this year. He’s going to show up in places where Republicans are fighting for their lives, talk about himself for ninety minutes, remind voters about the gas and the war and the data centers, and leave the candidate to clean up the mess.

These rallies are a poison pill, and the Republicans in real races are going to swallow it anyway, because the alternative is Trump turning on them in public. Byron Donalds will be on that stage grinning like it was his idea.

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We do not live in that world. Not anymore.

So let me offer a few modest predictions about what happens when the dust settles after November 3rd…and the traps awaiting credulous Democrats.

The Great Awakening of 2026

First, we’ll witness a miracle right after the election: a mass conversion event on a scale not seen since the tent revivals of the Second Great Awakening. People who spent the last two years, and in many cases the last decade, as Trump’s cheerleaders, his fluffers, his apologists, and his enablers will suddenly discover their consciences.

They’ll emerge blinking into the light with a dewy innocence and a look of profound, soul-deep remorse, like a man who wakes up in a Motel 6 with a new tattoo, a hooker rifling through his wallet, and no memory of how he got there.

You know these people. I know these people. Don’t let any of it fool you.

It is all a damnable lie and if Democrats fall for it, MAGA will stab them in the back at the earliest possible opportunity.

You’ll see a parade of contrition.

The senator who “always had concerns,” which he expressed so privately that not one of them ever reached a microphone, a reporter, or a witness, and certainly never got recorded in a roll call vote. The podcaster who spent 2024 telling his audience that January 6th was an FBI psyop, and who will now discover that the Constitution is, in fact, a quite good thing.

The MAGA influencers who say that the party has lost its way and needs a post-Trump vision. The consultant who billed MAGA campaigns at full rate and will soon be on cable explaining that he was actually a moderating influence. The corporate donor who wrote the checks and will now write op-eds about healing and a new era of national unity.

They will come to us wearing sackcloth and ashes, and they will ask for grace.

The temptation, dear friends, is to give it to them. To say “you are forgiven, go forth and sin no more.” To welcome the prodigal sons home and kill the fatted calf. It comes from decency. It’s a very American impulse. We like redemption stories. We like second acts.

That instinct is as natural as it is fatal to the republic.

So here’s the answer to them all: No. Absolutely fucking not.

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The Big Picture: Florida and Texas Are In Play

For most of my career, Florida and Texas were where Democratic hopes went to be quietly put down, and I held the pillow over the face of struggling Democratic candidates more than once. That history generally makes me the last guy in the room to buy Democratic optimism about either state.

This month the political realities, the data, the MAGA candidates’ behavior, and the handicappers dragged me there anyway.

The ratings come first, because the professionals don’t do vibes.

Decision Desk HQ moved the Florida governor’s race from “Leans Republican” to “Toss Up” on Wednesday, with Byron Donalds’ win probability down to 60 percent, an 8-point drop since the start of the month. Cook had already moved Florida from Solid R to Likely R back on August 27, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections have shifted the contest left as well. Why? Because David Jolly is running a focused, smart campaign about data centers, affordability, and insurance costs while Byron Donalds is slowly freaking the fuck out.

This is happening in a state where registered Republicans still outnumber Democrats by more than 1.5 million. A Democratic-aligned Change Research survey has Jolly-Graham leading Donalds-Avila 47 to 44, with Donalds at 34 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable despite spending $65 million. Discount the sponsor all you like. Sixty-five million dollars that buys you a negative favorability rating is a campaign problem no pollster invented.

Texas is worse for them. In the Senate race, Cook has moved the contest to Toss-Up, and Nate Silver’s model now puts it at Lean Democrat, giving Talarico roughly a 70 percent chance. The latest poll has Talarico up 50-44 over Paxton.

On the governor’s side, Cook downgraded Abbott from Solid to Likely Republican on August 20, and Emerson has Abbott’s job approval at 46 percent with 49 disapproving. The polling is noisy, to be sure, but can you imagine if Greg Abbott goes down because of Ken Paxton’s drag on the ticket? Mmmm…MAGA tears.

It gets worse for Texas. The chances of the failed dummymander, the Talarico win, and an Abbott loss are becoming greater by the day.

An NPR/Marist poll that Hinojosa’s campaign is trumpeting has her ahead 49-46, while a Mason-Dixon poll had Abbott up 48-41 in early September. A three-term incumbent with a war chest the size of a small nation’s GDP should not have noisy polling in late September, but here we are. Given the power of the Texas governor, if this race goes Democratic, it’s absolutely seismic.

Even the Florida Senate race, which everyone wrote off, is twitching. Sabato moved it to Safe Republican the day after Angie Nixon won the Democratic nomination, citing

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In a few moments, one of them is going down. Oh, the whole herd won’t fall, but the predators always get the slow ones, the dumb ones. And MAGA has a lot of slow, dumb candidates this year.

Welcome to the Republican Party, six weeks before the midterms.

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On Friday, Donald Trump, America’s first President with an ego as delicate as a Faberge egg, announced on Trash Social that he was “proud” to ban CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House for the crime of “FICTION and LIES,” which is how he describes any sentence that does not end in a lavish fellation of his latest disaster, scandal, crime, or pratfall.

On Saturday morning, Betsy Klein, Akayla Gardner, and Cheyenne Haslett showed up for work and had their hard passes confiscated at the gate like they’d been caught shoplifting MAGA hats from the White House gift shop. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” he added, which is the kind of thing a man says when he’s enjoying himself.

He was enjoying himself. That’s going to end soon, and this article is a list of strategies to make what’s already turning into a media disaster for Trump even more painful and humiliating.

Asked about it later in the Oval, he offered this: “You need a free press. You need a fair press and an honest press. They purposely write negative news.” Translation: you may have a press, provided it’s the kind I like, which is the definition of a press in exactly the oppressive regimes’ places where we used to build radio transmitters to broadcast into.

This isn’t a media strategy. This is a tantrum engineered by Odd Job Cheung and First Lady Natalie Harp, and it hands the American press the single best story they’ll get all year, if they have the spine to run it right.

You’ll pardon a Cold War throwback, but this is Vremya but with less editorial independence.

If you didn’t spend the Cold War reading Radio Liberty transcripts for fun, Vremya was the Soviet Union’s 9 p.m. newscast. Every night, the same thing: Brezhnev pinning a medal on somebody, a tractor factory in Sverdlovsk exceeding its quota, a stern segment on American unemployment, and the weather. It still runs today in a slightly slicker package.

Bad news did not exist. When Chernobyl melted down, Vremya gave it fourteen seconds, well down the rundown. The audience knew it was garbage. They watched it anyway because there was nothing else on, and then, when the lights were out, secretly listened to the BBC and Voice of America on shortwave to find out what had actually happened.

That’s the model. State-run Trump media where the Golden Age is now and forever and the Dear Leader is the wise and powerful Forever President, a state broadcaster covering Trump the way a golden retriever covers a tennis ball; eagerly, with lots of slobber.

The White House already planted the seed back in May: the White House Wire, a taxpayer-funded knockoff of the Drudge Report that aggregates Fox, the Daily Caller, and the administration’s own posts under all-caps headlines. Actually, it’s a ripoff of Danny Bongdildo’s eponymous Bongino Report, a weak-dick imitation of Drudge that went nowhere fast.

Drudge, the O.G. aggregator, rightly laughed at White House Wire.

The White House’s “new media” briefings feed their hand-picked influencer types, held in a separate building where the actual reporters can’t wander in. The in-house video shop cranks out Trump-as-pope and Trump-as-Jedi AI-slop memes at an industrial scale, all so First Lady Natalie can show Donald they’re doing the work.

Which brings us to last night’s TrumpTV announcement.

MAGA’s constant bleating about imaginary communists has always been projection. It wasn’t enough that Fox, OANN, Newsmax, CBS, and far too many in the mainstream media were obedient stenographers of Trump for over a decade. Now, he’s cutting out the middleman. Why let CNN film the president when the president can film the president?

The plan, brilliant in the minds of morons like Stephen Chung and First Lady Natalie Harp, is already shitting the proverbial bed.

Here’s the problem with state media, and it’s the same problem in Moscow, Caracas, Havana, Beijing, and Budapest: it only works when there’s no alternative. Vremya had a captive audience. Trump doesn’t. He’s launching an agitprop station to an ever-shrinking, aging base who feels under attack from his very policies and decisions.

Trump can’t survive without the cameras

Think about who we’re dealing with: Trump obsessively watches cable news for hours a day, calls network owners and reporters to complain, and obsesses over ratings. First Lady Natalie spoon-feeds him loving coverage from rando sites with names like RealTruthTrumpUltraMAGAEagleForumNewzBlaster.ru and he’s deeply addicted to glowing coverage.

He’s been at war with a free press, and damn near won it, but this is his Stalingrad, his bridge too far…if only the media will take this moment and strike a blow for press freedom.

Attention is oxygen for Donald Trump. Every strongman in history who nationalized the news did it so people would stop looking around for any other information.

Because a ban only works if the banned outlets change their behavior.

If the networks keep running his clips, keep cutting live to the Oval every time he decides to opine on a dog show, and keep treating a Truth Social post as breaking news, then he gets exactly what he wanted: control of the feed at no cost.

If they don’t, he’s a man yelling into a room he emptied himself. Yesterday’s disaster on the South Lawn, in which we saw an episode of “Old Man Yells At Clouds,” was a hint at how to break him.

So here’s the plan.

Every network, every wire, every paper, every independent journalist has a roadmap. Here’s how to strike a blow for press freedom, starting now.

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The great conceit of Trumpism, and of Trump himself, has always been that it was an ideology of strength led by a man of strength. With every passing day, nothing could be further from the truth. Raw destruction, institutional arson, and an addition to chaos and conspiracy aren’t strength. They are the tools of low, weak men.

One thing we know about weak people is that they are often cruel. No man of strength and character abuses women. No man of honor builds a world of lies to prop up his empire of grift. No leader of integrity governs by caprice and ego.

Trump is, at the end of the day, a man of the lowest conceivable character, and it took a decade for the rubes he fleeced to wake up to it. The shamelessness they once enjoyed so much, the lib-owning, the performative rage-baiting, has turned to ashes in their mouths.

My God, the wreckage is magnificent. Ozymandian. Look on his works, ye MAGA, and despair.

I say all this to set the stage for a question I know some Democrats have been wrestling with.

“Should we say Trump on the ballot? Is there a risk to agreeing to his framing of the issue? Why, oh why, can’t we talk about policy instead of Trump?”

My God, Democrats. Wake up and smell the burning of Rome.

His ego, a thing of cosmic dimensions, leads him to insist that, of course, he is. Every race is about him. Every race has always been about him. Ask him. He’ll tell you for ninety minutes.

MAGA is having a moment of bitter reality. None of what Trump has accomplished in his campaign to damage and destroy this country would have been possible without the enablers. The enablers are who we face in 44 days.

The good news is that Trump’s broken brand and his declining (yes, we broke 30%, folks and it’s still declining) popularity are a boat anchor chained around the necks of these villains.

The struggle is spreading for them, wider and deeper. I spent thirty years on those campaign conference calls, so believe me when I tell you what this means: Republican consultants and pollsters increasingly keep their cameras off during Zoom calls with campaigns. They’re worried. They’re fearful of what’s coming. Nobody wants the candidate reading their face when the new numbers go up on the screen.

The easy ride is over. For years they coasted on the shallow assertion that Democrats were monsters of one kind or another: communists, socialists, trans, lizard alien overlords, pedophiles, elites. Pick your flavor. All of it has faded in potency and relevance, because voters are now living inside the damage these enablers caused. It’s hard to sell a long-haul trucker on the imaginary risk of commie lizard people when he can’t afford to fill his truck.

Donald Trump started a foolish trade war, a tariff regime that has wrecked whole sectors of the American economy. Susan Collins didn’t start it. Neither did Mike Lawler, or Rob Bresnahan, or Byron Donalds.

But they enabled it. They knew what it would cause. They knew exactly how wrong it was, how damaging it would be, and how its painful consequences would land on their own constituents in their own states and districts. They cared more about Trump than the people who sent them to Washington. They were willing to cause any amount of pain to Americans to spare themselves the pain of Trump having his delicate, fragile snowflake ego dinged by even the slightest critical word.

And until the panic of 2026 set in, they were silent. Obedient. Dogs in human form, showing their bellies and tucking their tails while Trump whipped them.

Roger Marshall in Kansas, Ashley Hinson in Iowa, Ken Paxton in Texas, Mike Rogers in Michigan, and Ashley Moody in Florida will all watch the farm economies in their states get wrecked by the rising price of diesel and fertilizer, courtesy of Trump’s ill-starred war with Iran. It’s a war every one of them backed, run by a clownish, drunken oaf of a Defense Secretary the senators among them voted to confirm.

Collins, Marshall, and Moody voted to confirm RFK Jr., too. Now they sit uncomfortably, wondering why measles, a disease this country had beaten, is back with a vengeance, killing Americans and harming American children, some of them for life. They can stop wondering. They did that. Their names are on the roll call.

A Word From Our Sponsor — Because The 44-Day Sprint Is About To Get Personal

I just walked you through the roll call. Collins, Marshall, Moody, Hinson, Paxton, Rogers, Lawler, Bresnahan, Donalds. You know exactly who to hold accountable in 44 days.

Here is the ugly other half of that ledger. They, and the panicking consultants I just described sitting in that cameras-off Zoom room, have made a roll call too. Yours. It contains your home address, your phone number, your family members, and your voting history, and they are about to spend the next six weeks running the ugliest, most desperate voter-targeting operation of your lifetime out of that file.

Someone just looked you up. You had no idea.

A researcher at Consumer Reports — someone whose job is online safety — typed her own name into a search engine. Her home address, age, and phone number were sitting there, on data broker sites she’d never heard of. No hack. No breach. Just her name in a search box.

Yours is there too. Right now. Available to an ex, a stranger, anyone who decides they want to find you.

Or the RNC targeting vendor stitching together the 44-day terror-mailer list. Or the deepfake robocall vendor working off a bank of scraped Democratic donor phone numbers. Or the “voter integrity” operation looking for a naturalized citizen to hassle at the wrong precinct. Or the private-sector opposition researcher Blanche’s DOJ crew hired last month to run a Comey-seashells number on a school-board member somewhere in Pennsylvania.

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Take yourself off the list before the final 44 days start. This is the cheapest political investment you’ll make this cycle, and the one with the shortest payback window.

Now, back to the reckoning.

None of this could have happened without their obedience. Without their endless acquiescence, their lying to the American people, their disregard for the consequences of their votes and their voices, locked in step with Donald Trump on every issue at every moment.

So I speak for most Americans when I say this: on Election Day, Trump’s minions and slaves, the valets to a mad king, to autocracy, to violence, to conspiracy, to the ludicrous pretensions of a wannabe dictator, are most certainly on the ballot.

The next 44 days will try America over and over again. He will make sure of it.

But as you watch the Republican candidates for office at every level, from U.S. Senate to governor to Congress all the way down to the local mosquito control board, know what your vote does.

Taking them off the battlefield, sweeping them off the chessboard, branding Trump’s name across their foreheads and sending them home with it, guarantees that his last two years in office are the living political hell he deserves.

It does one more thing. It makes the men and women who made him possible finally understand your anger, your rage, and your refusal to let America be abused by this man and his movement for one more minute.

This post was brought to you by Incogni. 44 days. Sweep them off the chessboard — and take yourself off their mailing list while you’re at it. Get 55% off an Annual Plan with code RICK55.

I am writing this from a hotel room twenty-odd floors above Victoria Harbour, in a city that feels electric and vital and wild. You cannot imagine its scale. The skyline has over 900 skyscrapers, and feels almost unreal.

Money crackles in the air. For MAGAe obsessed with screaming about the CCP, it strikes me that a city with 5 Louis Vuittons and a crackling entrepreneurial culture is hardly a commie hellscape. Part of that is that Hong Kong is still a Special Administration Region. I’m here for a speech and a conference, with the beautiful Renee along for the adventure.

It’s been a busy few days, as you can imagine, but poking my head back into the world 13 times zones aways was a shock. The world is off the damn rails.

My tolerance for crazy is calibrated on a logarithmic scale most people never have to use.

This week seemed determined to break the upper boundary of the scale. This morning, catching up on news I joked with Renee that all that’s missing is the death of Archduke Ferdinand.

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Inside
A Quarter Century Since That Day
Trump’s Most Egregious 9/11 Lie
Florida Is Changing
The AI Panic Is Rising…and Justified
The War Is Going…Badly
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A Quarter Century Since That Day

Twenty-five years after September 11. The words don’t do the span of time justice.

A quarter of a century. Twenty-five years since the worst terrorist attack in our history, and twenty-five years in which this country should have learned something. Not everything. Nations rarely learn everything. But something.

I have thought hard about how to write about this day, and I keep arriving at the same unwelcome place. There is an elephant in the room this September 11th, and it is this: the terrorists won. Not on that morning. Not in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Fallujah.

They won later, and they won here, and the man who handed them the victory was not a jihadi.

Try a thought experiment. Imagine Osama bin Laden somehow alive today and imagine him looking at America in September of 2026.

He would see a nation caught in a foolish, destructive war in Iran. He would see a country wrenched from crisis to crisis, panic to panic, corrupt scandal to corrupt scandal.

He would ask the only questions that ever mattered to him. Is America stronger in the world, or weaker? More respected, or not respected at all? A nation with strong alliances, or a nation with none? A country people look up to, or one they disdain?

He would know the answers. So do you.

The worst thing bin Laden could do to us, the very worst, was to murder three thousand innocent people in a grotesque and terrifying attack. His movement paid a ferocious price for it. He personally took a couple of rounds to the head for it, and rightly so.

And nothing he accomplished that day, and nothing in the many mistakes America made in the long war that followed, came anywhere close to causing the position we find ourselves in today.

I am not sure Donald Trump could even parse the question of whether the world now looks more like the one bin Laden wanted or less. Nothing coherent would emerge.

But the world Trump has built in a mere nineteen months of his second term is chaos, economic calamity, and a nation more divided than it has been in living memory. It is a world in which Americans are on a long downward slide, looking abroad and seeing other countries stronger, safer, better at the things that make a life livable and a future certain. It is a world our worst enemies could not have imagined twenty-five years ago.

If you were bin Laden, looking back across that long arc, you would think to yourself: the infidel is now led by a man who will do more of my work than I ever could.

The canonical purpose of terrorism is to terrify. To produce a spectacle that alters the public soul. September 11 did that.

But terrorism depends on something more than fear. It depends on division, on paranoia, on anger. It depends on a story told to the people who will become suicide bombers, and the story goes like this. You are oppressed because of them.

Who “they” are hardly matters; capitalists, Jews, the Great Satan, whoever is convenient. They have hurt you, or people like you, or your family, or some part of your world. They are so evil and so powerful that the only way to defeat them is to follow the most extreme leader you can find, and to do things you know would never be permitted in a morally bounded society.

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

The psychology by which terrorist movements recruit, manipulate, and convert ordinary men into pilots on a September morning bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the conversion of Americans into MAGA. I am not saying every Trump voter is an al-Qaeda terrorist. I am saying they have become perfectly comfortable with the belief that there is a “they” causing their problems, that a radical leader is the solution, and that radical action is demanded.

The people who would like Donald Trump to be a king, who would prefer America to be a monarchy or an autocracy, are, in many cases, extraordinarily wealthy and extraordinarily powerful, seated in the highest ranks of government, business, and technology.

They do not look at this country the way the country looked at itself in the days after the attack. They do not want you unified. They do not want you at peace with your neighbors. They do not want you living in a land where the law, the Constitution, and those quaint old things we call norms and institutions still matter. They want you beset with fear, constantly on edge, waiting for those people to come and get you. The villain's identity morphs and mutates as needed. It tends to be brown in their minds, but fungible.

And so all the sacrifice of that terrible day has led us to a world where the terrorists won, and where we have committed to a war against Iran that will breed a hundred years more of them.

Bin Laden was a Saudi, shaped by a strain of Wahhabism that feared modernity above almost everything, that suspected the royal family loved its Western playthings too much. He was not entirely wrong; modernity does alter societies, and not always for the better. But he was produced by a climate and a moment that could last.

His theory of the case had the structure of the Underpants Gnomes. Step one: attack America. Step two: unclear. Step three: caliphate. He never had a compelling case for how to truly destroy America.

What he ran into instead was a certain American resilience, and a problem he never solved. The Americans he cast as intruders in the land of the two holy sites were also the Americans delivering food aid to Africa and vaccinating children against diseases that had killed them for millennia. As much as you could hate us, there was an attraction to America, to its freedom and liberty and opportunity, that no amount of theology could erase.

When he attacked us twenty-five years ago today, we still had a reservoir of goodwill in the world. Our NATO allies invoked Article V for the first and only time in the alliance’s history. They rushed to our side, and they died next to us in cold mountain passes and searing deserts and every damned place in between.

None of that exists today. Not the alliances, not the unity, not the shared shock and horror at what had been done to us. The terrorist in chief has broken them deliberately, systematically, maniacally.

I had left New York the year before. I worked for Rudy Giuliani for a long time, back when that name meant something different, and I lived in the city for years. I was supposed to be up there that week. Plans changed. I didn’t make it.

But my friends were there, including people I loved. Several of them did not survive the day. I had friends at the Pentagon who did not survive the day either. A lot of the ones who lived were different afterward, forever, and you cannot blame them.

When I went to work at City Hall in the winter of 1998, I would take the 4-5-6 down from my apartment on 81st between First and Second, and when I came up out of the station and walked toward the office, I would see the Twin Towers every morning. I am no modernist. I do not love modern architecture. But I looked up at those buildings in absolute awe, every day.

When they came down, the first thing in my head was: where are my friends? I was calling everyone I knew and loved. I reached a few, thank God. One of them was running down the stairs, and he did not yet know what had happened to the North Tower. He knew there was a fire in the building. That was all.

I got up there as soon as we could travel. Near the site, the fence outside St. Paul’s Chapel was covered in missing posters. I watched two men helping a little old lady out of a cab. She had to be in her eighties or nineties, and she stood looking down that row of faces. A son? A daughter? A husband? I never knew. I could not stand there long. It held the whole tragedy of that day in one small frame.

What I also saw was resilience. My friend John Avlon wrote a brilliant essay for City Journal called “The Resilient City,” and he was right. The love of their fellow man that you did not expect from the cliched, canonical New Yorker was there in awesome quantities.

Something happened right after the attack that we have never recaptured. It was not just anger. It was coherence. The country knew who it was.

Yes, you can nitpick every decision of that day and every decision that followed. You can say Bush was stupid. Fine. You can say Giuliani shouldn’t have put EOC in WTC 7. Fine. Our reach and our grasp were very different things, and I do not begrudge anyone who critiques the wars. But there was a moment, and there was a path, and even if the path we could have stayed on it a little longer. We have never had that unity since. Perhaps the night bin Laden was killed, you could taste a little of it in the air again. Perhaps.

The anniversaries have ticked past. The young firefighters are the old firefighters now. The young cops on that scene are old cops. The people who escaped those buildings have watched for twenty-five years as the damage bin Laden wanted to inflict on us was compressed into the last couple.

We are not safer in this world, and that is not because of George Bush or Barack Obama or Joe Biden in Afghanistan or Iraq. Count every mistake you like; there are plenty. But what bin Laden dreamed of was an America alone, divided, dispirited, defeated. He did not get it from the attack or even from the long GWOT.

He got it from Donald Trump.

Somewhere in hell, bin Laden is thinking to himself: “I didn’t have to do any of it. I could have just waited for this guy.”

MAGA will be outraged over the comparison of the two titans of evil. Too bad.

Trump earned that comparison. He earned it by what he has done to this country.

We are not, right now, a United States of America. We are not, in aggregate, good people right now. Seventy-seven million of us voted for this. They wanted it. Fifty million of them probably still like it a great deal. We are led by a man who has done more damage to this nation than Osama bin Laden could have imagined in his most fevered prayers.

There are children in the world now who do not remember that day, and in some ways that is a blessing. They do not remember the buildings coming down, or the shock, dread, and confusion. Time erases the sharper edges of pain even for those of us who do remember it with a punishing, crystalline clarity. Time makes other things seem more important. There were still people alive on September 11, 2001, who remembered Pearl Harbor, another day of absolute shock and terror, and of unity and love. There are very few of them now.

It is tempting to believe we would respond the same way if we were attacked like that again. I am not sure we would. That is the tragedy of this moment, and in some spiritual sense it rivals the damage of the day itself: the knowledge that we have been deliberately broken, deliberately divided, deliberately weakened, torn apart for one man’s ego and corruption and venality.

I believe in America. I believe in this big, fucked-up, wonderful nation in ways I cannot always express. I believe in its greatness, not the synthetic red-hat garbage version of greatness sold by you know who, but the real thing: our strength, our resilience, our compassion, our willingness to seek justice and to be our best selves. I think of Father Mychal Judge. I think of Terry Hatton. I think of Barbara Olson.

I think of the friends I lost and the ones who came back changed. I think of the unity that emerged that day as the only salutary note in it, and of the families who carry a generational burden the rest of us can only imagine.

Nothing about that day should be forgotten. I know that is a harder assignment every year. But this anniversary is both a tribute to the country we were and a warning about the country we have become.

I pray that twenty-five years on, we have not lost our way back to what we can be.

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Donald Trump’s Castro-esque speech in Dallas last night was one for the Trumpian Ages.

It was not, of course, a masterpiece of rhetoric, persuasion, or leadership. It barely rose above his usual grunting call-and-response with the base. But it deserves a place in the archive as a specimen of end-stage dictator dementia, a final splatter of primate feces flung from the golden cage of the White House adult memory care center.

As I wrote last night at the new Substack, Trump was the capstone speaker at the RNC 2026 Fyre Festival Trumpapalooza, as he will be tonight, and tomorrow night, and every night until the sun cools to a cinder. Trump eternal: the old lies joined by new lies, the shoutouts to the Front Row Joes, the ritual cursing of the Fake News.

And it was terrible.

I don’t mean that only as a Trump critic, though I yield that title to very few. I mean it

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