November 11, 2026
From my perspective, the most reassuring aspect of the Tuesday midterm elections was their confirmation that gravity did indeed still continue to exist.
Beginning very early in his second term, President Donald Trump had undertaken a long series of actions that I regarded as totally crazy, totally crazy in both political and policy terms.
Yet on nearly all those matters, both he and his administration had experienced remarkably little pushback from the opposing Democrats or from the permanent political establishment often known as "the Deep State" or from the media, let alone from his own completely subservient Republican Party, which controlled both houses of Congress.
In sharp contrast, when he had first come into office in 2016, his campaign rhetoric had marked him as an unprecedented bomb-thrower. But he had actually done very little, so little that I only rarely even mentioned him or his presidency in all the many long articles I published during most of those years. I considered him notorious for all his angry Tweets rather than for any policies he actually implemented.
Yet although he did so very little, all those same groups outrageously accused him of being a Russian agent and made his presidency totally miserable from beginning to end, impeaching him not once but twice.
Perhaps having already shot their political wad in such ridiculous fashion, those powerful elements of the American political system were now unprepared to do the same when Trump's behavior really did warrant such reactions.
And that political acquiescence continued as Trump's actions became more and more dangerous. His unfortunate trajectory finally culminated in his massive, unprovoked surprise attack on Iran, whose disastrous consequences resulted in the Republican political catastrophe last week.
According to Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, Trump was the most unpopular president during midterm elections since that publication first began polling on the question more than 35 years ago. But living in his own FoxNews propaganda-bubble and surrounded by eager sycophants, Trump apparently believed otherwise, thinking he was enormously popular, and he loudly urged all Americans to vote as if he himself were on the ballot.
Trump: Everybody knows we had to attack Iran t.co
- Acyn (@Acyn) October 29, 2026
Unfortunately for the Republican party, the voters seem to have actually done so.
A few days ago I published an article that emphasized the enormous scale of the resulting Republican losses. These losses came despite a Senate map that was extremely favorable to the GOP and a House map that had been heavily padded by the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymanders that Trump had outrageously demanded in so many Republican-controlled states.
- President Donald Trump and the 94-Year American Political Flood
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 6, 2026 • 4,400 Words
During my own lifetime, the famous post-Watergate Congressional elections of 1974 have always been ranked as the worst the Republicans had ever experienced. So numerous pollsters and pundits have identified Tuesday's epic political disaster with that notorious historical case. Yet when we consider the overall losses in House and Senate seats and governorships, the current debacle was actually far worse than that.
Depending upon close races still to be decided, the Tuesday results might even exceed the Republican political collapse of 1958. It is possible that when all the dust settles, the 2026 vote could be the worst year for Republicans since Herbert Hoover led his party in the Great Depression Election of 1932.
One crucial difference is that Hoover had merely been unfortunate enough to occupy the White House when the Great Depression began, and he then failed to cure it. But the current Republican political catastrophe was entirely self-inflicted by Trump and his insane policies.
If Trump had instead spent the last twenty months merely playing golf or snoozing away his days in Joe Biden's favorite rocking chair, the Republican Party would probably have avoided almost all of its astonishing political losses.
For decades, Texas had been the most solidly Republican large state, the anchor of the GOP's national electoral map, and no Democrat had won any statewide race since 1994. But despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by near-trillionaire Elon Musk, the Democrats now swept all of them, gaining near total control over the Lone Star state.
The last time that any Democrat had won a statewide race in Mississippi had been 44 years ago when arch-segregationist Dixiecrat Sen. John C. Stennis romped to his 7th Senate term at the age of 81. But this time enough white Mississippi Republicans apparently voted for the seemingly hopeless black Democratic challenger that Scott Colom will very likely be taking the Senatorial oath of office in January.
In Kansas, a candidate who had never previously held elective office easily defeated the Republican incumbent, becoming the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from that state since 1932.
In Michigan, a 42-year-old Muslim physician named Abdul El-Sayed from an immigrant Egyptian family ran for the Senate despite never having previously held any elective office. Firmly grasping the notoriously lethal third rail of American politics, he campaigned against American support for Israel, and was massively demonized by the more than $250 million spent against him in the primary and general elections by AIPAC and other Israel Lobby groups. Much of the mainstream media was also intensely hostile, harshly accusing him of antisemitism. Yet although his defeated Democratic primary rival urged voters to back his Republican opponent, El-Sayed still won by a very comfortable 7 point margin, a margin that was padded by nearly 60% of the Jewish vote.
So whether we ultimately describe the 2026 midterms as a 68-year political flood or a 94-year political flood, the Republicans have suffered an epic political disaster, far worse than anything in the lifetimes of at least 90% of all of today's Americans or perhaps even 99.8% of our population.
Nearly all pollsters and analysts have now agreed that the Iran War and its economic consequences were by far the biggest factors behind this epic Republican political disaster.
Prof. John Mearsheimer has long been one of our most distinguished political scientists, acknowledged dean of the Realist School of foreign policy. For many months he has been saying that the severe strategic defeat we have suffered at Iranian hands clearly ranked as the greatest geopolitical disaster in our 250 year national history, easily displacing President George W. Bush's ruinous Iraq War at the top of the charts.
Not only did this current war quickly become the most unpopular in American history, but it produced a sense of deep voter betrayal since Trump had been elected on his explicit promise to end our long series of Middle Eastern wars. And as direct result of the conflict, diesel and gasoline prices climbed to historically high levels, severely impacting American consumers.
As the leading figure in American conservative media, Tucker Carlson had been one of Trump's most important political supporters, but he sharply broke with our president over the decision to go to war against Iran.
The day after those devastating midterm results, Carlson released a two-hour podcast, arguing that the election marked the destruction of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party that had followed it over a cliff. He interviewed one of the very few honest Republican pollsters who had been willing to predict the looming disaster, with his show drawing a combined total of well over 5 million views on X and on YouTube .
A day later, he released a 15 minute video appropriately entitled "The Great Betrayal." It quickly attracted 5.7 million views on X and another million-plus views on YouTube :
Around the same time, Vice President JD Vance also went public, boldly declaring that many MAGA voters had broken with Trump and the Republicans because of the Iran War and even implicitly criticizing the American influence of Israel. His very lengthy Tweet has been viewed more than 70 million times, and he cited the findings of the same honest pollster interviewed by Carlson:
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"-whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world ? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn't sharp enough down the stretch. I'm sure that's true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster-one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we'd lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to IsraelOur voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She's also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement-by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, "I told you so": you're right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let's take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
- JD Vance (@JDVance) November 4, 2026
Another pollster-one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we'd lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Under even slightly normal circumstances, any American president who had suffered this sort of overwhelming strategic military defeat followed by an equally overwhelming political defeat at the polls would have reacted by accepting the verdict of the American people. He would have cut his losses and sought peace with the Iranians, winding down a war that had been lost many months ago.
Indeed, back in June Trump had already acknowledged this reality and capitulated to the Iranians by publicly signing a Memorandum of Understanding that accepted all of their main demands. But once our president came under fierce criticism from the Neocons and other elements of the Israel Lobby, he quickly reversed his position.
- Has President Donald Trump Finally Capitulated to the Iranians?
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 22, 2026 • 6,400 Words
As the scale of our humiliating defeat at Iranian hands became more and more apparent, the New York Times and other leading media outlets soon began reporting the dubious, self-serving claims of nearly all our top national security officials. They declared that they themselves had always been very skeptical of attacking Iran and had cautioned our president against believing the Israeli arguments advocating the war.
The one exception was Pete Hegseth, our self-styled "Secretary of War," who strongly advocated attacking Iran at the time and has never expressed any second thoughts on the matter. Instead, he has always loudly told Trump exactly the stories of sweeping American military victories that our president so much wanted to hear.
Hegseth's continued enthusiasm for the lost war hardly surprised me. As I've repeatedly emphasized, Hegseth is a totally unqualified, incompetent, heavily tattooed drunken rapist. His outrageous public statements and actions have successfully monopolized media attention, thereby allowing his nominal subordinate, a notoriously secretive Jewish private equity billionaire named Steve Feinberg, to operate in the shadows as he has always preferred. Hegseth's lack of ability ensured that even his efforts at illegal insider trading proved a dismal failure.
I'm not sure of the last time that any major power ever placed its military under the authority of someone such as Hegseth, and I suspect that even the overwhelming majority of Third World countries would balk at such a doubtful personnel decision.
However, I do think that Hegseth might have fit in very well as Secretary of War to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in the popular 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy.
Both before and after the war began, many of our top generals and other senior Pentagon officials expressed very grave concerns about the decision to attack Iran and some of the proposals for expanding the war. As a result, they have regularly been fired by Hegseth, constituting by far the most sweeping purge of the military top ranks in our national history, with more such commanders removed than in all previous presidential administrations of the last 100 years combined.
But when questioned before Congress, Hegseth was unable to explain why he had fired all those top generals.
🇺🇸Hegseth: "I don't know the number"
"You dont know the number?It's eight. Why did you fire them?"
🇺🇸Hegseth: "At the pleasure of the president..."
The Senate controls all promotions in the senior ranks of the armed forces, and with an overwhelmingly Democratic incoming majority, many top generals will probably shift their positions or go public with their true views. Hegseth's widespread purges have made him an enormous number of enemies in those ranks, so the military knives might soon come out for him and other members of the Trump Administration.
Although he was defeated in his primary, Rep. Thomas Massie plans to reintroduce his bill of impeachment against Hegseth when the House reconvenes in December, and given the massive losses now suffered by his fellow Republicans, he will probably have an easy time attracting co-sponsors. The many bitter enemies that Hegseth has made among Republican Senators will likely lead to his conviction and removal, further humiliating and crippling what remains of the Trump Administration.
Given that Hegseth has been so closely identified with our militarily and politically disastrous Iran War, there had naturally been a widespread assumption that his head would be the first on the chopping block after the bloodbath of the midterms. Indeed, there were widespread reports that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was urging Trump to fire him.
But oddly enough, this has not happened. Instead, in his public interviews Trump fully reaffirmed his support for Hegseth, whom he declared was "doing a very good job" and was a "great warrior," saying "I have every intention to keep him."
Trump is obviously quite unpredictable and prefers taking unexpected, contrary positions, while often doubling-down when he has seemingly been defeated. But even so, I still found his continued enthusiastic support for Hegseth quite mystifying.
However, my puzzlement was diminished when a sharp-eyed blogger discovered that Hegseth has long been a close friend and ally of Stephen Miller, the fiercely combative Trump aide who has now replaced Wiles as Trump's new chief of staff.
The blogger reported that media story, adding his own bolding:
Miller is known to keep long hours in the White House, colleagues say, and often calls deep into government agencies to issue edicts. Several staffers said he knew far more about the details of certain agencies than Wiles, and often used that to outmaneuver others. He is deeply involved in shaping his public image, working closely with the White House press office, people familiar with the dynamics say.
He has also become a central focus of socializing in Trump's orbit. His wife, Katie Miller, a former Trump White House staffer, regularly throws parties and dinners at their residence on a military base, attracting cabinet and White House officials. They live near Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and they socialize with him and his wife, Jennifer Hegseth, a former Fox News producer, according to people familiar with the matter. He has forged tight relationships with leading administration figures, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Less is known about his relations with Vice President JD Vance.
The blogger also noted that this helped explain several recent Tweets featuring Hegseth and Miller, and other media outlets suggested something similar.
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Miller had been the longtime protege of the late David Horowitz, one of America's fiercest political champions of Zionism and the State of Israel. As the Trump official in charge of our immigration enforcement policies, Miller had probably been responsible for the very high-profile wave of ICE raids and street abductions targeting legal foreign residents who had publicly criticized Israel.
For those reasons, I had vaguely assumed that Miller had been a supporter of the Iran War. But now I have discovered his apparently very close ties to Hegseth, the foremost advocate of attacking Iran and someone still fully committed to continuing the war, regardless of the terrible political consequences. So perhaps Miller's role behind the scenes had been far greater than I realized.
As the same blogger noted, according to the Wall Street Journal there is now a fierce internal debate within the Trump Administration over whether to wind down our failed Iran War or double-down and reignite it, launching major new attacks against that country. Hegseth is the leading internal advocate of the latter policy, and Miller's elevation to his very powerful new position suggests that Hegseth's camp may have gained the upper hand over the critics such as Vice President Vance.
With the midterms over, President Trump's advisers and foreign allies have been racing to shape his decision on whether to end the Iran war or reignite it.
...
Another camp, which includes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper, have supported a return to major combat operations during recent briefings on military options, U.S. officials said. Several hawkish outside advisers have called Trump since Election Day to make the case that his legacy depends on forcing Iran to surrender its nuclear program, which would allow the president to boast the political sacrifice was worth the cost, U.S. officials and another source familiar said.
...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is still pushing for renewed strikes.
...
Hegseth and Cooper have spent weeks making preparations for major combat operations. They have advised Trump that resuming attacks—this time targeting Iranian energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities and missile and drone arsenals—is the only way to make Iran surrender its nuclear material, U.S. officials said.
Just before the election, Tucker Carlson had reported that the Trump Administration was strongly considering launching a nuclear strike against Iran, with his lengthy Tweet on that topic viewed almost 100 million times. Although I had expressed hope the the terrible losses the Republicans suffered at the polls had now taken that dire possibility off the table, I may have spoken much too soon.
Within the Trump Administration, one of the leading arguments in favor of attacking Iran had been the highly successful raid on Venezuela a few weeks earlier, a raid resulting in the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and the subjugation of the new political leadership to American control.
Trump had been persuaded that the assassination of most of the top Iranian leadership followed by a few days of heavy bombing would quickly achieve a very similar "regime change" in that country, reducing Iran to an American vassal state led by a newly installed puppet government.
Miller had been the most prominent administration defender of the attack on Venezuela, notoriously clashing with Jake Tapper on CNN in a fiery exchange, in which Miller ridiculed any notion of international law and advocated the most extreme sort of "Might Makes Right" ideological doctrine.
Tapper: "We went into the country, and we seized the leader of Venezuela..."
Miller: "D*mn straight we did!! We're not going to let tin-pot communist dictators send…
Miller and his wife had also been among the most enthusiastic advocates of the American seizure and annexation of Greenland from our longstanding ally Denmark.
Based upon Miller's own bold public pronouncements, I am sure he endorsed and encouraged some of the remarkable statements that Trump had made around that same time in a wide-ranging two-hour interview with several New York Times journalists, heavily covered across the world:
And he said that he did not feel constrained by any international laws, norms, checks or balances.
Asked by my colleagues if there were any limits on his ability to use American military might, he said: "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."
"I don't need international law," he added. "I'm not looking to hurt people."
So considering all these facts, I strongly suspect that Miller had probably played a pivotal role in convincing Trump to launch the Iran War, which has obviously turned out to be much less successful than his earlier Venezuela project.
Indeed, although I never focused on it at the time, the likelihood of a looming attack on Iran was almost implicit in an article I'd published soon after the American raid on Venezuela.
- The Trump Doctrine: "They Have It. We Want It. We Take It."
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 12, 2026 • 7,200 Words
Since I'd never paid much attention to the first Trump Administration, I'd barely been aware of Stephen Miller prior to 2025, and I'd only mentioned him on a single occasion.
In that article I noted that mainstream media outlets and liberal activist groups treated the contents of our website as so exceptionally dangerous and terrifying that they went to tremendous lengths to avoid ever mentioning it in any of their articles or publications. Some of the resulting contortions were so bizarre that I suspected the ADL had issued a strict edict to this effect, and as a consequence of that absolute prohibition, Stephen Miller survived a major attempt to purge him.
In my lengthy analysis of the true history of World War II, I described what I called "the Lord Voldemort Effect," explaining why so much of our mainstream source material should be treated with great care:
In the popular Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort, the great nemesis of the young magicians, is often identified as "He Who Must Not Be Named," since the mere vocalization of those few particular syllables might bring doom upon the speaker. Jews have long enjoyed enormous power and influence over the media and political life, while fanatic Jewish activists demonstrate hair-trigger eagerness to denounce and vilify all those suspected of being insufficiently friendly towards their ethnic group. The combination of these two factors has therefore induced such a "Lord Voldemort Effect" regarding Jewish activities in most writers and public figures. Once we recognize this reality, we should become very cautious in analyzing controversial historical issues that might possibly contain a Jewish dimension, and also be particularly wary of arguments from silence.
However, even dread Lord Voldemorts may shrink from an even more dreadful Lord Voldemort of their own, and I think that this website falls into that category. The ADL and various other powerful organizations may have quietly issued an edict that absolutely forbids the media outlets they influence from mentioning our existence. I believe there is strong evidence in favor of this remarkable hypothesis.
Among Trump's surviving advisors, Stephen Miller provokes some of the most intense hostility, and last November the SPLC and its media allies made a concerted attempt to force his resignation based upon some of his private emails, which had promoted several controversial posts by Steve Sailer. The resulting firestorm was discussed on this website, and I analyzed some of the strange anomalies:
Just as might be expected, the whole SPLC attack is "guilt by association," and Ctrl-F reveals a full 14 references to VDare, with the website characterized in very harsh terms. Yet although there are several mentions of Steve and his writings, there is absolutely no reference to this webzine, despite being Steve's primary venue.
Offhand, this might seem extremely odd. My own guess is that much of the material we publish is 10x as "controversial" as anything VDare has ever run, and many of my own personal articles, including those that have spent over a year on the Home page, might be up in the 30x or 40x potency range. Moreover, I think our traffic these days is something like 10x that of VDare, seemingly making us an extremely juicy target.
Now admittedly, I don't know that Miller fellow, but the horrifying VDare post that Miller supposedly shared was actually republished by VDare from this website. And that would surely have made it very, very easy for the SPLC to use the connection as a opening to begin cataloguing the unspeakingly horrifying list of transgressions we regularly feature, easily expanding the length of their attack on Miller by adding another 6,000 words. Yet the silence has been totally deafening. Puzzling...
Here's my own hypothesis...
As everyone knows, there are certain "powerful groups" in our society that so terrify members of the media and political worlds that they receive the "Lord Voldemort Treatment," with mainstream individuals being terrified that merely speaking the name would result in destruction. Indeed, the SPLC is one of the primary enforcers of that edict.
However, my theory is that even those dread Lord Voldemorts greatly fear an even more dreadful Lord Voldemort of their own, namely this webzine. The SPLC writer knew perfectly well that mere mention of The Unz Review might ensure his destruction. I'd guess that the ADL/SPLC/AIPAC has made this prohibition absolutely clear to everyone in the media/political worlds.
Given that Miller's main transgression was his promotion of posts originally published on this website, the media could have easily associated him with the rest of our material, much of which was sufficiently explosive to have almost certainly forced his resignation. Yet when the journalists and activists weighed the likelihood of destroying Trump's most hated advisor against the danger of mentioning our existence, the latter factor was still judged the stronger, allowing Miller to survive.
- Ideological Purges and the Lord Voldemort Effect
- Stephen Miller and the Lord Voldemort Effect
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 14, 2020 • 3,900 Words
Although I'm surely just reacting to their joint decision to shave their heads, I've always noticed a surprising resemblance between Stephen Miller and longtime ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt.
New Trump Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt