Look, I can’t tell you that everything is going to be OK for us patriots in the midterms. I think it will, but I’m not sure. Nobody knows for sure. What I do know is what the correlation of forces, to my mind, indicates. It indicates another 2022, a year when we Republicans were going to clean up against an unpopular, semi-conscious president. And we did OK. Not great. OK. And it looks to me, from where I sit, from who I’ve talked to, from what I’ve seen, and yeah, from my gut, that that’s the high-water mark for the Democrats. They might do OK. They might get the House by a few seats, and they might cut our lead in the Senate. That’s just my perspective, though. I’ve talked to well-placed optimists and doomers (one who, you know, says we lose the House and 50-50 in the Senate if we are lucky). But I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows.

Let’s look at the big themes, then get down to specific cases. What do the Democrats have going for them? History, for one. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The party in power, especially in a second term, tends to struggle in the midterms. People get tired of the status quo.

The problems add up, the friction and the fog of war slow the progress, and people get bored. That gives Democrats another advantage: excitement and intensity. And boy, are they ever excited and intense about taking us out. They can’t wait to crawl out of their old folks’ homes, cat-overrun condos, moms’ basements, Hollywood mansions, university dorms, and perverted communes to vote out those wicked patriotic Americans of the Republican Party. They would crawl over broken glass to vote against us or at least hire illegal aliens to do the crawling over broken glass that American Democrats won’t do. Every single one of them is going to vote, probably several times.

That intensity leads to their third advantage: the polls. Negative polling can demoralize Republican voters.

But to the extent the polls are not actively bent to support the Democrats (which some of them manifestly are), Democrat intensity skews the polls because Democrats actually answer them. Anecdotes are evidence of nothing but anecdotes, but I like to informally poll fellow Republicans about whether they ever respond to political polling. I never do. And they tell me they never do. I don’t know who the Republicans answering these polls are, but I haven’t met one.

The polling is terrible for us if you take it at face value. It has us losing in places we have no business losing. But I just can’t make myself believe it. The polls don’t fit the fundamentals, and they’re too darn convenient for the opposition. Is that wishful thinking? It may be, but it’s wishful thinking based on polling’s track record of failure. Remember the famous 2024 Ann Selzer Iowa poll that had Kamala three points up on Trump? Trump ended up beating her by something like 13 points. And just a couple of weeks ago, Hasan Piker’s Hamas-diddling puppet Abdul in Michigan was supposed to win by double digits over his moderate (sic) Democrat opponent, but he ended up barely squeaking to victory by a point or so. The polls are wrong a lot, and always in one direction. When’s the last time you found a polling error that favored a Republican? That’s about as likely as finding leftovers in JB Pritzker’s fridge.

Of course, the polls could be right. I don’t think they are. Given the dire unanimity of the current polls, disbelieving them means betting on both the malice and the incompetence of the pollsters. I’ll take that bet, especially when so many are polls from outfits you’ve never heard of, like the “University of College/Pepsi Challenge Public Opinion Survey” or the “Geebo Strategies Online Solutions.”

What do we have in our favor? Well, we have a ton of money. That’s good. Plus, the folks in the know whom I’ve talked to like the strategy of waiting until after Labor Day to really start spending. Democrats have been spending for a while, but traditionally you spend early to create a positive image for your candidate and tear down the other guy. That used to work, but will it work now? This is a very partisan environment. If you’re a Democrat, we already know what we think of you, and all the ads with you and Mee-maw sitting on the porch talking about values you don’t actually believe in aren’t going to change your image as an avatar of a political party that supports crime, communism, castration, and open borders.

We also have Donald Trump, who’s good for turning out our voters. His ability to enrage the other side is already baked in, but he’s going to be out and about everywhere rallying our troops. That’s good. And while the convention was slammed for low ratings, it did what needed to be done. It set a positive tone and motivated our base.

This election is all about turning out our base. We now have a decade of experience getting the kind of voters in our coalition to come out and vote when Donald Trump himself is not on the ballot. We better turn them out. That we can’t is everyone’s big fear. But the base staying home because it’s mad seemed much more plausible when the Democrats were just annoying rather than a threat to our way of life. It’s easy to say, “Who cares?” when, at their core, both parties are composed of people who generally like America and want what’s best for it. But that’s not true with today’s Democrats.

They want to flood us with Third World barbarians, mutilate our kids, take our guns, tax us into poverty, and outlaw normal people. Yeah, there’s an affordability problem, and there’s a crime problem, and there are lots of other problems, but the Democrats caused all those problems, and everyone knows that it’s not like they’re going to fix them. America has become vastly more partisan, and vastly more binary, and I’m thinking that very few Republicans are going to be able to swallow the idiotic notion that we need to show the dumb Republicans among us (and there are a lot of dumb Republicans among us) what-for by allowing the election of a bunch of communist pervert-enablers.

I just don’t think Republicans are going to stay home in droves, much less actually vote for Democrats. I do expect the polls to tighten as we get closer to Election Day, largely because that’s when pollsters have to start thinking about their reputations and will take at least a couple of their fingers off the scale. It always happens.

So, let’s look at the races. There’s just too much going on in the House to go through individually, but our maps will do a lot to limit any damage. The House is going to be tough because we only have a handful of seats in our majority, but some of the folks I’ve talked to were confident about it in private. These people have nothing to lose by telling me what they really think. You can take it or leave it. But while Team Black Pill will get all the regime media coverage, know that there are a lot of GOP guys out there who think we can do OK in the House.

The Senate remains our firewall. We have a 53-seat majority. Democrats need to net four seats to overcome JD Vance’s tiebreaker vote. Let’s ignore the wildcard scenarios, like whether Lisa Murkowski or John Fetterman might switch parties to ensure a majority. Let’s find those four seats, if we can. We’ll start with the seats Republicans are defending. Keep in mind, the polls are negative for Republicans in pretty much all of them.

I’ve talked about Texas and that blasphemous imp Talarico already this week, and for the reasons I set forth, I think we hold it.

With the guy with the Nazi tattoo having been replaced by the guy who has kids with his second cousin, Susan Collins has a very good chance of keeping her seat in Maine. It would be pretty wild for the Maple Syrup State to swap out the chair of the Appropriations Committee for a guy who makes family Thanksgiving dinners awkward with sexual tension. She’s likely to win.

North Carolina is probably the Republicans’ toughest fight, with Michael Whatley struggling against that state’s less masculine version of Abigail Spanberger. Roy Cooper is a straight-up leftist pretending to be a moderate, and North Carolina is a purple state. I think we lose that one, but we shouldn’t give up.

Dan Sullivan in Alaska has to contend with Dem dirty tricks like ranked-choice voting and a doppelgänger on the ballot. It will be tough. I think he holds – a lot of Alaskans depend on oil, and the Democrats want to end the industry. But it will take money and effort.

Jon Husted is allegedly struggling in Ohio against leftist retread Sherrod Brown. The same is true in Iowa, with Ashley Hinson against Josh Turek. Both of these are red states. It’s hard to toss out an incumbent like Husted, and Hinson is a strong candidate. It’s going to take money and work, but I think we pull it off and keep both seats. There is also some crazy talk about Democrats expanding the map to Kansas and Florida. That’s just not going to happen, and if it does, it’s such an apocalypse that nothing else is going to matter anyway.

Now, the best defense is a good offense. What states are we going to take from the Democrats? Jon Ossoff is getting the full-court press from the regime media in Georgia; he’s an even more beta Beto, but they do like young, glib, good-looking guys. He’s up against Mike Collins, who’s a good old boy, and who I’ve gotten to know a little from interviews. The dude is smart. He ran a trucking company. When you talk to him, he doesn’t talk to you in hack clichés. He talks about money, organization, getting out the vote, and what matters. Do not underestimate him the way a lot of people seem to. Governor Brian Kemp, who backed somebody else in the primary, just decided he wanted to remain a viable GOP candidate in 2028 or later and has endorsed Collins. Let’s see if he turns his formidable Republican machine out to snatch that Senate seat; if he does, that makes him viable in the future. If Kemp can’t help recapture the seat, what good is he? In any case, we have a decent chance in Georgia, but let’s be conservative and assume we don’t; though if we do, that destroys all the Democrats’ dreams once and for all.

In New Hampshire, John Sununu seems to have a decent shot at beating Chris Pappas, who’s another Spanberger Democrat who talks moderate but would vote left. New Hampshire is a purple state, and they do elect Republicans. The name Sununu still means something there. Again, my conservative nature tells me that it’s more likely than not that we lose, but if we win, oh boy.

In Minnesota, Michele Tafoya is running against a lunatic, pervert-loving communist woman in a state that elects lunatic, pervert-loving communist women of all genders. But enough about Tim Walz. We’re probably not going to win this one, but there’s that outside chance.

And then we come to Michigan, where Mike Rogers, a straight-up veteran patriot, is going up against Abdul El-Sayed, a straight-up Islamist communist who makes AOC look like William F. Buckley. Here we’ve got a real opportunity, and I think it’s more likely than not that the good people of Michigan are going to want to be represented by a resolutely normal guy rather than a guy who dreams of imposing socialist sharia on a country he despises. I think we win this one.

So let’s tally it up. I think we lose one we had, and I think we gain one we didn’t. I think we have a couple of other pickup opportunities in purple states, but it’s hard for me to see them picking up any in our red states. It could happen, but I don’t think it will.

So I put the Senate at 52 to 54 GOP.

This is just a snapshot just under seven weeks from the midterm election. That’s an eternity. Anything can happen. And anything probably will happen.

Kurt’s next action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is out for presale now! Read Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic series, including the latest “Panama Red,” and follow Kurt on X @KurtSchlichter!

Kurt Schlichter

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has suggested that churches and family members of refugees could sponsor and fund people’s relocations, as he calls for an end to federal welfare benefits for refugees, some of whom remain on benefits long-term.

Paul appeared on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show” Tuesday to discuss separate lawsuits filed by major American cities and 22 states over a pending rule that seeks to prevent immigrants who would be dependent on government assistance from entering the U.S.

“We actually have laws on the books that [say] if you come here illegally, you’re not supposed to be eligible for a host of welfare programs for five years,” Paul said.

“Some of the [ways] that people have gotten around this is by coming [on] refugee status,” he added. Paul noted that refugees are exempt from the federal government’s five-year waiting period for certain means-tested benefits and cited statistics showing that about 85% of Somali refugees who went on welfare when entering the U.S. are still on welfare before calling for changes to federal law.

Paul highlighted legislation he introduced that would “eliminate all welfare for refugees.” The bill, titled the End Welfare for Noncitizens Act, would prohibit the use of federal funds to provide benefits to refugees, asylees and illegal immigrants from obtaining federal funds under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Paul insisted that under the bill, “You can still come to this country, have someone sponsor you, have a church sponsor you and they take care of you.” He mentioned another option would be to “have a family member sponsor you and they take care of you. That’s the way it historically was. That’s the way it should be.”

“We should not have any welfare for immigrants, and it should not be a beacon to the world to come here and get free stuff,” he proclaimed. Paul also discussed documented welfare fraud before characterizing the welfare system in the U.S. as a “terrible system” where “the federal government funds it and the state governments police it,” asking, “if you’re policing something you don’t pay for, do you really care if it’s wasted?”

Paul accused Democrat-run states of using the welfare system to “bribe people to get their vote.” According to Paul, “They say ‘here, you can all have welfare and we’re not going to check to see whether you need it or not or whether you’re stealing it because Uncle Sam, the federal taxpayer, is going to pay for it.’”

Paul asserted that the federal government should shift responsibility for both funding and oversight of welfare programs to the states.

“I propose that we shift this all back to the states so that the payment and the policing would be at the state and they would bankrupt themselves if they didn’t police the system,” he said.

While Paul’s bill itself hasn’t received a vote in the Senate, Paul previously offered an amendment that would have eliminated funding for refugee and entrant assistance. The amendment was rejected in the Senate.

Twenty Republicans joined Democrats in rejecting an amendment to the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026 that would have eliminated funding for refugee and entrant assistance.

Paul’s appearance on “The Will Cain Show” and his push for an overhaul of the welfare system, along with his call for churches and families to assume responsibility for sponsoring refugees, come as a new rule published in the Federal Register is slated to take effect Friday.

The rule seeks to reverse a Biden-era policy that the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Homeland Security alleges “limited the public benefits that DHS could consider in a public charge inadmissibility.”

Federal law declares that “Any alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for a visa, or in the opinion of the Attorney General at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.”

A lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday by New York City, Chicago, Santa Clara County, California, San Francisco, Seattle and King County, Washington, alleges that the new rule violates the Administrative Procedure Act and would have adverse economic impacts. The plaintiffs are seeking to have the rule set aside.

The states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin as well as the District of Columbia filed a separate lawsuit making similar allegations in the same court Monday. Both complaints are asking for a federal court to set aside the new rule.

In a statement posted on X Monday, DHS reacted to the lawsuits by asserting that “Sanctuary states are terrified they will lose federal funds because hundreds of thousands of illegals and noncitizens might remove themselves from American welfare programs.”

Condemning the “ideological contortion required by left-wing leaders to justify their defrauding of the American taxpayer at the hands of illegal criminals,” DHS stated that it had “heard for months that illegal aliens weren’t using these very same programs” before asking, “Which is it?”

Ryan Foley, Christian Post

At a demonstration against the GOP-controlled Congress, a decidedly anti-Trump crowd has a Democrat’s name on its mind: Sen. John Fetterman.

“I voted for him. I donated money to his campaign,” said Vick Lindquist. “I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the back as a Pennsylvanian. It’s very — I can’t even put it into words. I’m so disappointed in him.”

In his 2022 campaign against Mehmet Oz, Fetterman was hailed as a progressive willing to buck convention, campaigning in what would become his Senate uniform of a hoodie and basketball shorts. While in office, he’s grown increasingly isolated from his party, in part over his votes for several of President Trump’s cabinet nominees, his resolute defense of Israel and his frequent appearances on Fox News, where he bemoans the far-left wing of his party.

His seat comes up for re-election in 2028 — a date some of his constituents say can’t come fast enough.

Middle East conflict

Fetterman traveled to Israel and met with Netanyahu despite blowback on the left

“He doesn’t seem to want to do the job, at least based on everything that his ex-aides are telling us,” said Rod Dougherty of the Lehigh Valley. “He should pack up his bags and go.”

Dougherty was nodding to a recent Wall Street Journal article that reported Fetterman has skipped hearings, missed meetings with constituents and shown a general disinterest in the day-to-day responsibilities of being a senator.

NPR has not independently verified the reporting and his office did not respond to a request for comment. In an interview with CNN, Fetterman dismissed the Journal‘s reporting as “lies, half-truths, innuendos, smears and anonymous.”

Long-simmering frustrations

Discontent among his base has been brewing for some time.

“Initially, I was very excited about Fetterman,” said Ren, a Democrat in southeastern Pennsylvania who voted for him. She spoke on condition that NPR only use her first name, citing concerns about sharing her political beliefs publicly in what she sees as an increasingly partisan and dangerous climate.

“You really felt like he was fighting for you. And he was a non-conformist — obviously with his wardrobe, but also just very outspoken in a progressive way.”

She said her frustration came to a head when Fetterman voted alongside Republicans last year to end the government shutdown. At the time, Democrats were holding out their votes in a bid to renew expiring health care subsidies.

“I was really disappointed with his decision. I feel like he’s betraying Democratic Pennsylvanians and independents who support him,” she said. “I regularly write emails to his office and the last email I sent says, ‘please step aside and let someone else have your job who will do the job as they’re elected to do.’ And he’s not doing the job that he was elected to do.”

Sergio Cea is the political director for Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He said he hears frequently from voters about their frustration with Fetterman.

“It’s something that makes my work very hard because as an organization that tries to endorse candidates with populist messages, more and more what I’m hearing from people at the doors is — how can I trust this person you’re supporting? I don’t want to get another Fetterman,” Cea said.

Surprise spot at GOP convention

Fetterman has developed a friendship with Sen. Dave McCormick, his GOP Pennsylvania counterpart. The pair recently formed a joint fundraising committee — a rare form of bipartisanship that raised eyebrows. Fetterman even filmed a video introduction for McCormick at the recent GOP midterm convention in Dallas.

“I’m a commonsense Democrat. I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life,” Fetterman said in the video.

Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, R-Pa., was at the convention and said he was surprised by Fetterman’s appearance.

Politics

Fetterman, already at odds with his party, makes surprise video for GOP convention

“But at the same time, Sen. Fetterman and Sen. McCormick have a great working relationship that is very well known. I would think that’s what you want as a state when you have elected officials from two different parties — that they would work together well,” he said. “What I’m most surprised by is how angry Democrats are with the fact that one of their members wants to work in a bipartisan fashion with somebody else. To me, that is exactly what we should be doing.”

The video sparked outrage among Democrats.

“It’s a big strategy for this election for Republicans — they say ‘common sense versus communism’ or ‘common sense versus crazy,'” said Christopher Beem, managing director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. “[Fetterman] said words that directly fit with the Republican strategy for ’26. That’s bad for Democrats.”

‘I’m not going to be a Republican!’ 

A common refrain among many frustrated Democratic constituents is that if Fetterman is going to have a cozier relationship than they’d like with GOP lawmakers, he should make it official and switch parties.

In May, Fetterman addressed this directly in a Washington Post op-ed, saying he’d be a “terrible Republican who still votes overwhelmingly with Democrats.” He has since said he would switch if the Democratic Party became the “anti-Israel party.”

But his declarations haven’t stopped him from getting peppered with the same question. On Tuesday, he exasperatedly told a reporter on Capitol Hill, “I’m not going to be a Republican!”

Pennsylvania state representative and House majority whip Mike Schlossberg said people suggesting Fetterman switch parties are overlooking the political reality.

“His votes are pretty much in line with our party, maybe a little bit more conservative and a little bit more pro-Trump — but Pennsylvania is a swing state and I don’t actually have a problem with his votes,” Schlossberg said. “I have a problem with how he’s chosen to advertise himself and the disrespect that he’s shown to Pennsylvania voters in doing so.”

Many of Fetterman’s policies are solidly in the Democratic platform, like supporting abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, expanding healthcare and raising the federal minimum wage.

“So let me get this straight. The guy who flew the LGBTQ flag, who ran around advocating for the legalization of marijuana — he’s going to be welcome in the Republican Party? Anybody who thinks that has been smoking too much of what Sen. Fetterman wants to legalize,” Schlossberg said.

Outrage spills into state politics 

Fetterman’s Democratic constituents aren’t the only ones up in arms in Pennsylvania. State and local Democrats say the senator isn’t part of the intense campaign effort to make the case for Democrats up and down the ballot in November.

“He has been nowhere,” said State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who ran against Fetterman in the Senate primary. “Frankly, I’m not sure his presence would be welcome to begin with.”

Allegheny County Councilman Dan Grzybek voted against Fetterman in that primary, but went on to knock on over a thousand doors to get him elected in the general election.

“I can’t think of a single event that I’ve seen John at since he was elected in 2022,” Grzybek said. “We can’t find you anywhere, we can’t get assistance from you — but yet you can go on Fox News, you can fly out to Israel multiple times, you can appear on Bill Maher — how is this helping Pennsylvanians?”

He added there was broad support for Fetterman after he had a stroke ahead of winning his seat, and a later hospitalization for clinical depression at the start of his term.

“Folks were extremely sympathetic to Sen. Fetterman and what he went through with his stroke and the mental health concerns he had following his stroke,” Grzybek said. “It was really only after that point, whenever he was casting votes and engaging in rhetoric that was very contrary to the values in which he ran on — that’s when folks started to get disenchanted with him.”

Lori McFarland, chair of the Lehigh County Democratic Committee, said although Democrats “have had it with him,” there’s no coordinated push to get Fetterman to leave office.

“Right now, we have a more immediate election in November – but I do believe that we have some really strong people that are interested in primarying Fetterman come 2028.”

Barbara Sprunt, NPR

The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) recently estimated that the gap between unmarried and married men under the age of 40 continues to widen—with 15 million more bachelors than husbands between the ages of 20 to 39 in 2025.

The gap has widened by 12.4 million since 2000, when the gap between married and unmarried stood at 2.6 million.

IFS also reports, according to a General Social Survey, 11 percent of young adults in the early 2000s said they were “not too happy.” That percentage is now at 26 percent. During the same period, the number of married men ages 20–39 dropped by 15 percent.

Leading the unhappiness charge are single men, who are either postponing or rejecting marriage, or not perceived as a suitable marriage partner by single women because of various societal changes.

This is a serious problem for American society.

In his book, “Men and Marriage,” (an expanded edition of his 1973 work “Sexual Suicide”) George Gilder wrote: “Men lust, but they don’t know what for; they wander, and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete, but they forget the prize; they spread seed but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory but miss the meaning of life.”

Brad Wilcox of IFS agrees with Gilder: “Such men are more likely to be lonely, prone to deaths of despair and unhappy. It’s never good for a society to have large numbers of unattached, dispirited, and unhappy young men.”

A Wall Street Journal article from last year titled, “American Women are Giving Up on Marriage,” touches on several reasons why women are not getting married—whether it be trouble finding a suitable man or choosing a career over marriage.

Disillusioned with the current state of what they perceive to be suitable and available men, they say they are more content with singleness than their male counterparts. A commonly heard complaint is that in their search of a suitable man to marry, they are only finding a world of “man-children.”

So, why has this happened? Why are there so many unmarried young men and why are women having a hard time finding a suitable partner in what would seemingly be an abundant harvest?

First, many of these young men have no idea of what it takes to be a husband or father because they had no one to model that for them. This is just another symptom of the breakdown of the family, a culture of divorce, and a society that has economically awarded single parent families while placing financial burdens on traditional two-parent families.

Secondly, especially among working class men, the jobs that would have traditionally provided for a family have either not kept up with inflation, or in some cases, simply disappeared. In addition, our educational system is no longer providing the needed training for these men to enter the workplace and succeed. Meanwhile, the number of men attending college, the ticket to good paying and stable jobs, continues to decrease.

Finally, numerous voices in our culture have sent a message that women can succeed without having a husband—“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” as the saying goes. But when men are not marrying, there is a ripple effect that impacts all aspects of our society.

For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of children born outside of marriage has risen from 33.2 percent of all live births in 2000 to 39.5 percent in 2024. This means a much higher percentage of young people are growing up in single parent households. And single parent households are often more dependent upon government assistance, with boys who grow up without a father often ending up failing socially and economically.

Those numbers also indicate that we’re hurtling toward a demographic disaster. Married couples not only provide a nurturing environment for children but also are more likely to have children.

It is not that young men have given up on marriage. Pew Research reported in 2023 that 74 percent of teenage boys want to be married someday. The problem is that many have no internal road map or GPS to help them get there.

As a society, we need to equip these young men with the skills, personal discipline, and sense of purpose to make them “marriage material.” It is a time for us, as a society, to return to a time when men have purpose—to be faithful husbands, loving fathers, and good providers.

This is going to be a long process, and it will require a long-term societal investment in affirming healthy, traditional two-parent families with engaged fathers who model such discipline and purpose to their sons. Boys do not have a choice when it comes to the families they are born into, but adults can make the right choices to help them flourish and thrive.

Men, women, and our society will be much better off as a result.

Timothy S. Goeglein, Epoch Times

The Iran war could reshape the midterms as Democrats, Iran’s regime, dissidents, and Kurdish rebels weigh the political and military stakes of the next 50 days.

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 17, 2026

Many narratives swirl around the U.S. war with Iran as the November 3 midterm elections loom.

The Left is giddy with confidence that Democrats may take control of Congress. It is therefore planning a circus of impeachments, lawfare, and investigations to neuter the last two years of the Trump administration.

High gas prices and the current unpopularity of the Iran conflict, coupled with the historical reality that the president’s party has lost seats in Congress in 39 of the last 41 midterm elections, have convinced Democrats that they could win enough seats to cut off funds for the war.

Yet the elections are still seven weeks away, and the sheer number of known unknowns ensures an uncertain outcome.

Every side is now gaming the midterms.

The Democrats believe the unpopular war can at last halt Trump’s momentum and are already declaring it all but lost.

The Iranian theocracy agrees.

It will do its best to ratchet up tensions with a series of October surprises in hopes that Trump loses control of Congress and the United States reverts to familiar Democratic policies of ending sanctions and downplaying Iran’s race toward nuclear weapons.

Its leaders also remember Barack Obama’s “hands-off” policy when a million Iranians took to the streets during the Green Revolution of 2009. Then-President Obama remained silent as thousands of protesters were jailed and killed.

As for Trump, he remains enigmatic and says only that the war will likely end shortly after the midterms.

Trump could simply mean that Iran is on the ropes and the regime cannot survive much more than two months.

Or Trump may be hinting that after the midterms, regardless of who controls Congress, he will be free of electoral pressures and able to resume military operations to accelerate the theocracy’s ongoing economic ruin.

But it is often forgotten that two other groups may also be gaming the midterms with October surprises of their own—and in quite different ways.

If Iranian dissidents—35,000 of whom were killed by their own government in January—believe that a Democratic takeover of Congress would benefit the murderous regime they hate, then they may face very different deadlines and renewed incentives to resist.

The embattled opposition, suffering existential food and energy shortages, might conclude that if the regime is tottering in October, this may be its last chance to overthrow it before Democrats restrain Trump and spare the hated mullahs.

The same mindset might be embraced by some 10–15 million restive Iranian Kurds, who periodically resist the theocracy in Tehran.

If they, too, believe that ascendant post-midterm Democrats might defund the current American strikes against the theocracy, or that Trump will eventually be pressured into ending American involvement, then they may see overthrowing the hated regime as a now-or-never proposition.

The point is not what might actually happen if the Democratic opposition controls Congress or otherwise pressures Trump this fall to end the conflict.

The key, instead, is the perception that it would.

There are still more known unknowns.

This remains a strange conflict in which almost no news emerges from Iran. The United States has used no ground troops. There are no embedded correspondents. Western media are largely barred from Iran unless they regurgitate theocratic propaganda.

Thus, no one knows the true extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear, industrial, and military complexes.

Nor do Westerners know precisely how much the new sanctions, secondary boycotts, strangulating blockades, and frozen foreign assets have further weakened an already crippled regime—and driven a starving, fuel-starved, and furious populace to desperate measures.

It is understandable why the bloody popular uprisings of early 2026 failed against an oil-rich Iran whose half-century-old, half-trillion-dollar military-industrial complex was still largely intact.

Not now.

The theocracy is now vastly diminished after months of Israeli and American bombing and crushing new sanctions. Moreover, the desperate regime has continued to murder dissidents in the months since the failed uprising of January 2026.

In sum, the Iranian conflict is one of the strangest wars of the modern age.

The Iranian regime has suffered terrible material and financial damage.

Its nuclear program is likely in ruins, and its original command-and-control leadership has been destroyed.

The people detest it. The Kurdish minority loathes it. Conditions on the ground are dire, with terrible shortages of food, medicine, and fuel.

The resistance may sense that the Trump administration would double down on kinetic force to finish off the wounded regime if a mass popular uprising emerged and needed support from the air.

Taken together, these possible October surprises before the November midterms could make the next 50 days the most volatile in modern memory.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved its first interest rate hike in more than three years and indicated another to come, as part of an effort aimed at combating inflation brought on by spiraling oil prices and other factors.

In a move that markets widely anticipated, the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee voted 12-0 to increase its key interest rate by a quarter percentage point, or 25 basis points. The move brought the overnight funds rate to a target range of 3.75%-4%.

“Inflation remains elevated,” the committee said in its brief post-meeting statement. “Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal. The Committee will deliver price stability.” Despite a raft of conflicting recent statements from policymakers, markets had priced in a better than 90% chance that the FOMC would approve the increase, though there was chatter about the possibility of multiple dissents.

Persistently high inflation readings coupled with statements from Chairman Kevin Warsh a few weeks ago had convinced Wall Street that the Fed would OK its first rate increase since July 2023. Updated projections the committee released Wednesday showed that a strong majority of officials think another hike is possible later this year.

The dot plot grid of individual officials’ expectations indicated that 16 of the 18 participants – Chairman Kevin Warsh has chosen not to submit a dot since taking the position – expected another hike, with four of those seeing two more as possible. Two participants expected the committee to stop at one hike.

However, there are no increases penciled in for subsequent years, with one cut each indicated for 2028 and at least one for 2029. Officials also nudged up their expectations for inflation this year. They see the headline personal consumption expenditures price index at 3.7% and core excluding food and energy at 3.4%, both 0.1 percentage point higher than the last update in June. The Fed doesn’t expect to reach its inflation target until 2029, though it sees both measures dropping off sharply in 2027 – 2.3% for headline and 2.5% for core.

The committee had been on hold all year and was expected to stay there, until the tide began turning towards a hike in late August. The Fed rarely only moves once, as policymakers generally eschew incremental moves when they think inflation is too high and needs elevated rates, or when growth is too slow and the Fed tries to boost demand with lower rates.

While the move was expected, the rationale behind the hike was unusual. The Fed generally looks through the kind of inflation the economy is experiencing now, with the higher fuel costs from the Iran war and the lingering impacts from tariffs. However, officials in recent days have weighed the cost of continuing to look through the price increases, particularly in light of a stabilizing labor market. The committee lowered its outlook for the unemployment rate to 4.1%, down 0.2 percentage point from June.

The worry now is that the duration of the energy prices could raise inflation expectations and start to spread through the economy. Economists also see expanded investment in artificial intelligence as a potential inflationary factor. Also, the “transitory” episode from a few years ago is still fresh in policymakers’ minds, as Fed officials thought the supply-and-demand shock from the Covid pandemic eventually would fade. Instead, inflation readings hit 40-year highs before the Fed decided to act.

In July, the debate generated considerable dissent on the policy view, with three FOMC members voting against the decision to hold, preferring instead a quarter-point hike. At this week’s meeting, 2027 was a fairly close call, with eight officials pointing to another hike, six seeing the funds rate holding steady and four envisioning cuts. Markets already have been pricing in higher rates across the spectrum. Treasury yields have been surging. The 10-year note has risen about a quarter percentage point since Warsh’s remarks at the Fed’s Jackson Hole, Wyo., symposium on Aug. 28. The benchmark is up about a full percentage point since its February low. The 2-year note, which is most sensitive to rate expectations, has seen even sharper gains.

Borrowing costs are on the move as well. A 30-year fixed rate mortgage has soared to 7.19%, up some 38 basis points since the Jackson Hole speech and more than a full percentage point from a year ago, according to Mortgage News Daily.

Jeff Cox, CNBC

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced eight articles of impeachment Tuesday against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, accusing him of exceeding constitutional and congressional limits on U.S. military action in Iran, Yemen and Venezuela.

Massie introduced the resolution on the House floor, where he spent more than an hour outlining allegations ranging from violations of the War Powers Resolution to unlawful military strikes and retaliation against a U.S. senator.

The first three articles focus on the administration’s war with Iran. Massie argues the conflict began without a congressional declaration of war or other statutory authorization and alleges Hegseth continued military operations despite congressional efforts to end U.S. involvement.

Massie also accused Hegseth of continuing hostilities beyond time limits established under the 1973 War Powers Resolution.

Other articles target the Pentagon’s conduct in military operations against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. Massie alleges the administration improperly substituted military force for traditional law enforcement and failed to adequately protect civilians.

Another article concerns Operation Absolute Resolve, the U.S. mission that resulted in the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Massie alleges Hegseth lacked constitutional or statutory authority for the operation.

Massie also accused Hegseth of retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., over Kelly’s participation in a video urging military personnel to reject unlawful orders.

The eighth article challenges U.S. military operations in Yemen, alleging Hegseth initiated hostilities without congressional authorization and failed to comply with War Powers reporting requirements.

“In all of this, Secretary Hegseth abused the powers entrusted to him as Secretary of Defense by subordinating the constitutional limits on the use of military force and the laws governing the conduct of hostilities to his own policy objectives,” Massie said.

American Greatness Staff

The FBI has now released its eighth tranche of files on Thomas Matthew Crooks — the 20-year-old who came within an inch of killing Donald Trump in Butler, Penn. Like the earlier drops, this one is 181 pages of interview summaries, invoices, evidence logs, and internal communications from FBI Pittsburgh. It’s heavily redacted, and 95 pages are withheld outright. In June I went through the fifth tranche, and found that the redactions said more than the visible text. What survives the redactors is still stranger than most of what you’ve heard about this case on television. Here’s what stood out to me.

1. The FBI had the ladder a week before Wray said it wasn’t found

On July 24, 2024, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Judiciary Committee: “We did not find the ladder at the scene.” He added that the Bureau did not believe Crooks used one to reach the roof.

A 302 in this release, dated July 17 — a full week before that testimony — records that a private citizen found a ladder and a long-gun bag “just inside the wooded area” of an empty lot beside the Village Square Mall in Bethel Park, along with two empty 20-round ammunition boxes. Inside the bag was Crooks’ Clairton Sportsmen’s Club membership badge, ID number 1133 [1927–1929].

So Wray’s statement was accurate in the narrowest possible sense: the ladder was not at the scene in Butler. It was 40 miles away in a wood lot — and already in FBI custody — when he chose those words. Nobody on the committee asked the follow-up, because nobody knew to.

The recovery itself is weird. The citizen didn’t leave the items where he found them. He loaded the ladder and the bag into his pickup and drove them to the parking lot of a Crowne Plaza hotel, where the Evidence Response Team photographed and collected them. As they finished, a “slim piece of black plastic, with potentially a button on one side” fell out of the tailgate. The citizen said it wasn’t his. Agents bagged it as evidence. The file doesn’t say what it was. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1928 — ladder and long-gun bag collected at the Crowne Plaza

2. The FBI was looking for a second phone

Four days later, on July 21, a special agent and a supervisor walked a linear search pattern across that same area — coordinates given to six decimal places — and rummaged through a dumpster “for a phone believed to be associated with Thomas CROOKS” [1920–1922].

They also searched a second location, an apartment complex on Library Road, because its coordinates were “saved on CROOKS’ phone,” and reviewed a funeral home’s security cameras covering the road outside it for the morning of July 13.

They found nothing. But the search only makes sense if investigators believed a device existed that they did not have. Crooks’ primary Samsung was recovered from his body. Elsewhere in the file, evidence item 1B40 is a separate Samsung containing a year of texts and calls ending in July 2023 — so the Bureau had at least two of his phones and was, a week after the shooting, hunting for a third. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1920 — dumpster search for a phone associated with Crooks

3. Someone who looked like Crooks walked into a gun store 120 miles away — with two men

Every witness in this file, family included, says the same thing: Crooks did everything alone. He went to the range alone, bought ammunition alone, had “no friends in general.”

Then there is Keystone Armory in Edinboro, Penn., two hours north of Bethel Park. The store called FBI Pittsburgh itself to report that on May 25, 2024, a “person of interest who resembles the shooter” spent about an hour browsing the store “accompanied by a white male believed to be around his mid 30’s and another older white male with a gray beard.” The lookalike bought 20 rounds of 7.62x54R — Mosin-Nagant ammunition — with a MasterCard at 12:41 PM [1933–1936].

The timing is plausible. Crooks was booked into a 5 PM carbine class in Mars, Penn., that same day; Edinboro to Mars is a comfortable drive. The store handed over its surveillance video. The release contains no follow-up 302 confirming or ruling out the identification, and no indication anyone identified the two men. Either it wasn’t him, in which case the file should say so — or it was, in which case the “lone wolf with no friends” story has a hole in it. The Bureau hasn’t felt obliged to tell us which. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1933 — Keystone Armory tip, Edinboro (lookalike + two men)

4. A stranger on the range the day before

On July 12, the afternoon before the shooting, Crooks was at the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club rifle range. He signed the log at 2:45 PM; the cameras show him arriving at 12:45. The club’s officers told agents the footage “shows CROOKS talking with another, unknown club member on the range. This member was the only other person on the rifle range” [1851].

He shot two guns that day: his AR and “an older military style rifle” — which, if you’re keeping score at home, is the kind of gun that fires 7.62x54R.

Agents photographed the unknown man and his vehicle off the club official’s phone, then ran DMV checks on every name on the sign-in sheet. Whatever came of it is not in this release. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1851 — Clairton range; unknown club member with Crooks

5. The contents of the gun bag

Alongside the sling, gloves, earmuffs, and safety glasses you’d expect in a rifle bag, agents inventoried a Stanley 12-foot tape measure, a red Sharpie, a Hyper Tough stapler, and a box of light-duty staples [1928]. Make of that what you will; the agents didn’t.

6. Four encrypted Belgian email accounts, and two foreign governments

An analyst reviewing Crooks’ phone found it had repeatedly accessed Mailfence — described in the file as “an encrypted email service hosted in Belgium” — between April 15 and July 8, 2024, across what appear to be four separate account IDs [1947–1948]. On July 15, two days after the shooting, FBI Counterterrorism sent formal “Foreign Dissemination Requests” to two governments, names redacted, asking for “any and all records” on accounts found on the device [1972–1982]. Rep. Mike Waltz later said the accounts traced to Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany. What those governments sent back, if anything, is not here.

7. The Deputy Attorney General personally authorized something

A five-page 302 dated July 19 opens: “per authorization by the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, as conveyed by the Office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania,” two FBI officials “accessed the [redacted]” pertaining to Crooks [1896]. The rest of the five pages is black. Thirteen further pages were pulled from this release as “Referral/Consult” — bureaucratic shorthand for records that belong to a different agency. Which agency is not stated.

Whatever DAG-level sign-off was required to look at, it wasn’t a Samsung or a gun-club sign-in sheet. Those didn’t need one.

8. The father’s account

The interview with Crooks’ father gives us more of an idea who his son was. Thomas, according to his father’s FBI interview, talked to himself constantly, and more so after community college — “moving his hands and speaking to himself.” At night his parents heard what “sounded like he was dancing and whispering.” Two or three times a week he paced the house. His father joked with him about hearing voices; Thomas answered, without anger, that there were no voices, he was just talking to himself. He had recently bought a chest rig and ceramic plates. He bought ammunition online “going from website to website until he found a site that would sell to him.” And, perhaps most relevant: “THOMAS not known to write, and no writings or manifestos were found.”

The father learned his son was the shooter from two CNN reporters, who called him before the police did. A neighbor was contacted by a New York Times reporter before the FBI knocked [1795]. The press beat the Bureau to Bethel Park.

9. The anti-Trump story falls apart

A classmate had told a task-force officer that Crooks made anti-Trump statements. Her lab partner, interviewed a week later, said “she couldn’t have gotten it more wrong,” that he was “very upset” the claim had been passed along, and that Crooks never once discussed anything personal [1938]. Another classmate described him as the smartest person in the room, unable to tolerate small talk, and — on seeing the news — thought it was “analogous to having a course with Lee Harvey Oswald” [1894].

10. Somebody else paid for the cremation

This one isn’t in the FBI file; it landed the same day I was finishing this piece. The New York Post reports that Crooks’ cremation was paid for by an “anonymous donor.” The source is a note at the end of an FBI summary of an interview with Crooks’ father — part of a trove of records the Bureau handed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley for his own Butler inquiry, which the Post obtained. The information, the document says, appears to have come from the family’s lawyer. An addendum notes the father was “retired” and the mother on leave from work, which the Post reads as the family being unable to cover the cost; elsewhere in the same records the father describes himself as “unemployed” at the time of the shooting. The Post couldn’t reach him.

I flagged the cremation itself in June. The FBI released Crooks’ body to his family on July 23, 2024, ten days after the shooting, and the family had it cremated. Nobody told the Butler County coroner, nobody told local law enforcement, and when Rep. Clay Higgins showed up on August 5 to examine the remains on behalf of the House task force, he found that “on J23, Crooks was gone.” The Bureau’s response at the time was that releasing a body to next of kin is routine, which is true, but beside the point: it is not routine to do so while a congressional investigation into that body’s final afternoon is under way.

What’s new is that the family didn’t pay for it. Someone else did, and that someone doesn’t want to be named. Perhaps it was simple charity for a family in the worst week of its life; the father was out of work, the mother on leave, and there are worse things to spend money on than sparing them a bill. That would be a kind thing to do, and an easy thing to say. It would also be easy for the Bureau, which wrote the note, to say who it was. It hasn’t. One correction to the record

Crooks’ last ammunition purchase at Allegheny Arms was not in the morning, as widely reported. Store video shows him entering at 1:32 PM on a system the store admits runs 17 minutes slow — real time roughly 1:50 PM, minutes after his father says he left the house at 1:45 [1862]. He asked for five- and ten-round magazines. The store had none.

For the record: what the fifth tranche already told us

This release doesn’t stand alone. When I went through the fifth tranche in June, the striking thing wasn’t anything the FBI said; but rather everything unsaid. Roughly 150 pages in a single release were withheld not under any FOIA exemption but as “Sealed Pursuant to Court Order” — a seal the Department of Justice has never identified by court, proceeding, or party, in a case with a dead shooter and no charged co-conspirator. Two witnesses were interviewed at the Cranberry Marriott the evening after the shooting, and every substantive line of both 302s was blacked out “per ICE,” which is not an agency that asserts exemptions over ordinary domestic witnesses. A rally-goer described to agents two unidentified men on the AGR perimeter in the hour before the shooting — one screaming at spectators from a red Chevy pickup, the other in fatigue pants with a camera bag walking into the AGR building — and the file showed no sign either was ever identified. And four days in, the Counterterrorism Division had already pivoted from investigating the shooter to monitoring the public’s reaction to him under the “domestic violent extremist” framing, tool name redacted.

Put the two tranches together and the same question keeps asking itself. The fifth release had two unidentified men on Meridian Drive; the eighth has two unidentified men in a gun store in Edinboro and an unidentified man on the range in Clairton. The fifth had 150 pages under an unexplained seal; the eighth has a five-page memo that required the Deputy Attorney General’s sign-off and is entirely black. Each tranche adds a detail that doesn’t fit the lone-wolf account, and each tranche is missing the pages that would explain it. What this adds up to

None of this proves a conspiracy, and I’m not claiming it does. What it proves is that the public account of this case has been shaped as much by what officials chose not to mention as by what they said. The ladder existed and was in evidence when the Director said it wasn’t found. Investigators were hunting for a phone they never disclosed. A store two hours away reported the shooter with two companions, and the file goes silent. A five-page memo needed the Deputy Attorney General’s permission and is entirely blacked out.

Two years on, the FBI has still not explained any of it. The documents suggest it could. Whether it will depends on whether anyone with subpoena power reads them.

Tom Elliott

These days one reads fewer stories proclaiming the turning of the tide in the Russia-Ukraine war. There are also fewer tweets from Donald Trump threatening Iran with imminent destruction.

Now that the noise has receded, it is a good time to listen. I am not hearing of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. What I am hearing instead is the thud of Russian jackboots marching deeper into the parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that Vladimir Putin does not yet control.   

Meanwhile, in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Houthis have taken control of the strategic port city of Mokha. The city lies just to the north of the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. So far, the Houthis have not been able to interdict shipping through the Strait, as Iran did in the Strait of Hormuz. But since capturing Mokha they have also seized Perim Island, in the middle of Bab el-Mandeb, putting them in a far stronger position to threaten passing ships. If they succeed in closing the Strait, Iran and its allies would control the main maritime bottlenecks of the Middle East. 

That spells economic peril for the West. Before the war, the vast majority of oil produced in the Arabian Peninsula traveled through the straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Right now, about 400,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian oil flow through Bab el-Mandeb per day, only a small fraction of production. And after the Houthis captured Mokha, the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, is back to around $100 per barrel. This is not the short, sharp oil-price shock that the markets had anticipated when the Iran war started. Leon Panetta, who was director of the CIA under President Obama, now warns of a “forever war”, with no signs of it being resolved one way or the other.  

Economists and central bankers have neatly divided the economic consequences of the war into three scenarios: baseline, adverse and severe. I would describe the situation we are in today as adverse, heading towards severe.  

A crude oil price of $100 translates into higher prices for petrol, diesel, heating oil, kerosene and other downstream products. A severe winter could lead to heating gas shortages in Germany, for the country’s storage tanks are already at record-low levels. A $100 oil price is not one at which our Western economies function smoothly.  

It is a price, however, at which the Russian economy functions very well. And oil, ominously, is what links the two wars. The longer the war in Iran lasts, the greater the financial boost for Russia, whose main exports are oil and gas. As a result, an unwelcome scenario presents itself: the US loses its war against Iran, and Ukraine loses to Russia. 

Most wars do not end in outright victories or defeats. My central expectation for both is a messy draw: some dirty deal that would leave Iran charging money for passage through the Strait, with Trump and his business associates getting a cut. For Ukraine, I would define a draw as Russia keeping its presently occupied territories and obtaining assurances that Ukraine will stay outside Nato. But the odds of a bad outcome, from a Western perspective, are shortening.  

For one, there is clearly a risk that other European countries might be drawn into the war — just as there is an escalation risk in the Middle East. The two wars could also fuse into a broader Eurasian conflict that acts as a proxy war between the US and China. 

And I doubt that the aging societies of Western Europe have the stomach for a sustained fight. These countries are having to borrow money to meet their defense spending targets. Nor do they have an excess of young men eager to fight the Russians in a war that could later involve the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. In the event of war, our massive wealth and income redistribution systems would have to be painfully cut back, with millions thrown into immediate poverty. 

It is easier, then, to send money to Ukraine without committing troops. Ukraine has received hundreds of billions of pounds in military and financial support from the West, but Russia has still managed to outspend it. Russia hit a short recession earlier this year but is now recovering, in part due to the rise in the oil price. 

At the same time, the US, and by extension Ukraine, is suffering from a shortage of interceptor missiles used to take down incoming missiles and drones. Despite its formidable military capabilities, the US is not geared up for a long war. Its weak link is the supply chain. The same is happening in Europe, where decades of running down defense spending have taken their toll.  

Britain has an army of 75,000 troops, a force so depleted that it could only “seize a small market town on a good day”. These are the immortal words of General Sir Richard Barrons, a former military commander and co-author of the UK’s recent defense review.  

what makes us so certain we can stop Russia winning in Ukraine? The Russians, too, are brimming with confidence. They are so confident of victory right now that they are no longer even interested in peace talks. 

When Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, visited Vladimir Putin last week, it turned into a toe-curling embarrassment. Putin was happy to receive them and hear their sycophantic praise. But he did not appear in a hurry to cut a peace deal, and the commentary in the Russian media about the visit was caustic. Dmitry Drize, a political commentator at Kommersant FM, wrote: “The visit followed the standard formula — arrival, restaurant, reception in the Kremlin… One would really like to see something more.” 

We have clearly moved beyond the period of US-Russian rapprochement marked by the Anchorage summit between Trump and Putin in August last year. At the time, Russian elites fell over themselves in their praise for Trump. No longer. Putin has the look of a man who thinks he can win.  

He has miscalculated before and may do so again. His invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a shambles. But the Russian army regrouped, and Russia is today in a stronger position than its opponent.  

For many in the West, though, the idea of a Russian victory is still too painful to contemplate. If we treat something as unthinkable, we do not think about it. But underestimating your enemy is exactly how you lose wars. Even after four and a half years, I do not understand the strategic objective of Western support for Ukraine. I am not questioning the principle, but I fail to see what exactly the intended purpose is in concrete strategic terms. 

One of the few in Europe who pretends to have a strategy is Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister. His words do not reassure me. He once defined the strategy as one of exhausting the enemy, much as the Allied Powers defeated Germany in World War I. But the situation today is not comparable. Russia has not hit critical energy shortages as Germany did back then. The idea that we would win an endurance contest against Putin when oil prices are high seems over-optimistic. 

Last week, Sikorski claimed in a separate interview that the EU economy is nine to 10 times larger than that of Russia. This is not merely a false statistic; it is a Napoleonic-scale misjudgment of the size of Russia. Measured in dollars, the EU is indeed much bigger. But because Russia has been cut out of the dollar markets, that’s not a smart way to look at relative size. The best way to compare ourselves with a country like Russia, China or Iran, especially for military purposes, is purchasing power — literal bang for the buck. On that metric, the EU is three times as large as Russia. And even that does not tell us what we need to know, because the EU is spending only a tiny proportion of its economic output on helping Ukraine, whereas Putin is spending a lot more.  

The military metrics tell no more flattering a story. The EU has 1.3 million active military personnel, approximately the same as Russia. But in terms of military production, Russia beats the EU hands down. For example, Russia produces 3.4 million large howitzer shells per year, substantially more than the EU’s projected annual capacity of two million. This is true for many other weapons categories as well.

Back in March, Trump said the White House expected the war to last for four or five weeks. But historians have seen that kind of delusion before. When Germany started World War I in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm confidently told his troops: “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Today’s equivalent is the assertion that Russia and Iran are easy to defeat because we are so much richer than them.

The bottom line is that Trump has no strategy for the Middle East, just as Europeans have no strategy for Ukraine. We are rich and creditworthy enough to keep supporting Ukraine and battle Iran a little longer. But in either case I struggle to see a path to victory, for we are not willing to put our money, and our troops, where our mouth is. 

Wolfgang Munchau

Katherine Schaffstall

Updated Tue, September 15, 2026 at 2:06 PM EDT

The brother of the now-notorious holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy‘s murder mistrial is speaking out, revealing why he believes his sibling voted the mom criminally responsible for killing her three children.

“I don’t think religion had anything to do with it,” the anonymous juror’s brother told the New York Post on Tuesday, September 15, disputing online claims that Catholicism impacted the holdout juror’s decision. (The holdout male juror has decided to withhold his identity from the public following the high-profile case’s controversial mistrial ruling.)

“[He] looked at the case, and he made the call,” the brother continued. “For me, that’s how I would do it. I would just listen to the case with all the evidence, and go from there.”

The sibling then acknowledged that the holdout juror’s decision was met with mixed public responses.

Lindsay Clancy’s Defense Team Breaks Silence After Judge Declares Mistrial Amid Deadlocked Jury

“His choice was good for some people, but not good for other people,” he said, adding that both his sibling as well as the rest of his family have been scrutinized in the wake of the trial. On September 4, Judge William Sullivan ruled a mistrial in the case after jurors were deadlocked 11-1, failing to find Clancy guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity for killing her kids Cora,5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023.

“My family cannot leave the house,” the brother claimed, adding that their critics “are leaving notes at my mother’s house.”

“They won’t leave us alone and we don’t know anything,” he continued. “People have been calling me, like, crazy.”

Throughout the course of the seven-week trial, the defense argued that Clancy should not be held criminally responsible for the killings — which she admitted to — due to her documented mental health struggles, including postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder.

The prosecution argued that she should be found guilty regardless of her documented mental health issues, claiming she was capable of differentiating right from wrong at the time and engaged in the premeditated murder of her children.

The prosecution has not publicly announced if it will retry the case at the time of publication.

While the trial made national headlines, the brother revealed he did not know his sibling was on the jury until the case ended in a mistrial.

We didn’t know. That’s why I was shocked,” he said. “He didn’t tell us anything.”

Lindsay Clancy Asks Judge to Declare Her Not Guilty After Mistrial in Murder Case

While the holdout juror has not come forward following the trial, his past has come under scrutiny. It was revealed that the man, who comes from a Haitian immigrant family, was arrested in 2021 after he allegedly attacked his then-wife over the couple’s crying infant. The charges were later dropped.

Four years later in 2025, he was accused of beating the teenage nephew who called police on him during the alleged domestic violence attack, according to court records viewed by the outlet.

The juror was issued a restraining order against the nephew at the time he was picked to serve on Clancy’s jury. The order expired during the trial.

Several of the other jurors have since come forward to reveal they are not sure why the holdout juror refused to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, particularly after he allegedly admitted to having reasonable doubt.

“There were several times I would ask him to show us, like, evidence or, you know, describe a witness testimony that helped to prove what he was saying, and he couldn’t,” juror Nick Dargie told ABC News on September 9. “There wasn’t a single piece of evidence or witness testimony that he used to prove why he was thinking the way he was, which is why we ultimately sent in that note.”

He added, “Otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with somebody having a completely opposite opinion. That would be a hung jury. That is our justice system.”