Who’s Really On The Ballot In 2026

In 44 days, the people who made Trump’s destruction possible finally face the voters.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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