“Cruz was heard asking for forgiveness repeatedly while Ramos and a group of others allegedly insulted him and physically attacked him,” one local outlet reported, citing court documents.

Cruz was found, bloodied and unconscious, a mile away in a parked car, and he soon died.

After Cruz was killed, but before Ramos was arrested for the murder, Ramos was due in court for a totally separate assault in Virginia (his fourth assault charge). Ramos missed that court date on June 15 because he was arrested that morning “carrying 17 bags of cocaine at a 7-Eleven,” according to a news report. He was, according to police, high on cocaine at the time.

The next month, July 2022, the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force found and arrested Ramos for the deadly assault on Cruz.

Ramos was charged in August 2022 but released pending trial, and his attorney said he would reside out of D.C. (In fact, he was residing in the Fairfax County jail.) In October, a D.C. judge reversed his release and issued a bench warrant, ordering Ramos detained pending the homicide trial.

Then in December 2023, pending trial, Ramos was again released, this time to home confinement (in D.C.) with GPS monitoring. These terms were loosened in September 2025.

In early 2026, Ramos appeared in court and rejected a plea deal from prosecutors. That’s when Ramos went missing. His GPS monitor died, and he failed to show up to a May 4 hearing. “Mr. Ramos just completely vanished,” the judge said and issued a bench warrant for Ramos’s arrest.

The U.S. Marshals were sent out to find Ramos.

On May 26, they found him in a park in D.C.’s Mount Pleasant. Ramos gave them a fake name. Neighbors began heckling the police for the arrest, and one neighbor apparently came into the park carrying a bat, provoking an officer to draw his weapon. Video of the incident went viral.

Online liberals railed against the arrest, calling it fascism.

By May 28, local politicians learned that this was not some open-container or immigration arrest, but a bench warrant from a D.C. judge being executed by the Marshals, and that Ramos was a fugitive serial offender wanted for homicide.

Nevertheless, one woman who wants to be mayor of D.C. kept up the liberal hysteria.

Just this week, long after it was public that Ramos was arrested by Marshals because he was a fugitive murder suspect, socialist Democrat Janeese Lewis George used Ramos’ arrest as an argument against stricter law enforcement.

Here’s the relevant back-and-forth between the outlet NOTUS and JLG:

NOTUS: A big issue over the last year has been these teen takeovers in places like Navy Yard and the back-and-forth debate over teen curfew zones. Why have you opposed the use of those zones?

Janeese: “We saw a video a couple days ago where [federal agents] were harassing people in Mount Pleasant. Those were adults, but those could have very easily been young people, and I have to weigh the harm and the benefits.”

In sum: A man was charged with beating a man to death, has been arrested on four other assaults and drug charges, and he also skipped out on his trial and went missing — and Janeese Lewis George thinks it’s a shame he was “harassed.”

Quite the mayor she would be.

It’s too bad the games go so late.

The Knicks’ 11-0 run in Game 1 was entirely after 11 p.m. Eastern time. The wild final 77 seconds of Game 2 happened after 11:15 pm.

That’s late!

New York City public schools are in session. The kids watching these games will have to get up early the morning after the games. Also, the next two games will be played in New York City, in the Eastern Time Zone.

If the Spurs’ home games in San Antonio can start at 7:30 p.m local time (8:30 Eastern), the games in New York can surely start at 7:30 p.m. local time. Heck, the games should start at 7 p.m. local time, or even 6:30. Some Californians missing the first quarter because they are at work is far better than some East Coasters missing the fourth quarter because they are asleep.

BASKETBALL AND BASEBALL AFTER BEDTIME

Yes, New York is The City That Never Sleeps. But about 40% of the city is asleep by 11 p.m. on average, according to fitness tracker data.

Most important, though, is the cost to kids. Starting the games late means few little kids will stay up to the end, which means fewer little kids will become lifelong fans. It also means the fans of other teams, and the loosely attached Knicks fans, will find it hard to stay up for the end.

It’s fitting that Packwood’s licentious and unfaithful behavior should hang over his reputation, because it was an abuse of power — he used his position as a powerful senator to prey on more than a dozen women.

But his corrupt dealings with lobbyists — and his own career as a lobbyist — deserve some attention, too.

Packwood’s own diary entries, which became famous during his ethics hearings, condemn him. He begged lobbyists to hire the wife he was divorcing, so as to spare him the cost of alimony. He also offered legislative favors to lobbyists/donors on multiple occasions. And after he resigned from office, while facing expulsion, he became a Washington lobbyist.

The Oregonian in 1993 reported on the job offers to Georgie Packwood:

“On June 12, 1990, Bob Packwood filed for divorce. The next day, Ronald Crawford, a registered lobbyist, wrote a letter to Georgie Packwood offering her a job.

“The day after that, Lester Pollack, a Wall Street investment tycoon, wrote another letter to Georgie Packwood offering her another job.

“In addition to Crawford and Pollack, job offers came from Steven Saunders and Tim Lee. All were friends of the senator.

“Saunders is a registered foreign agent who represents the embassy of Japan, several Japanese manufacturing firms and the Taiwan Textile Federation. In 1990, the year he offered Georgie Packwood a job, the Japanese government paid him $25,000 to lobby Congress.

“Bob Packwood sided with Japan that year when many members of Congress were arguing for trade sanctions against the country.

“The senator also supported the Taiwanese textile group as a leading opponent of a 1990 bill, eventually enacted, that set quotas and import fees on textiles.”

Politico in 2024 recounted some other details of Packwood-K Street coziness from his time in the Senate:

“In one instance documented in the diary … he pledged to a lobbyist working for Shell Oil that he’d pass a special oil tax bill to thank him for raising campaign cash. ‘Ron, I still hate the oil companies,’ he told the gentleman, ‘but I’ll do you a favor.’”

POPE LEO SAYS ‘SCOURGE’ OF CATHOLIC CHURCH SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDALS CALLS FOR ‘REAL PATHS TO HEALING’

And of course, after resigning from the Senate in disgrace, Packwood became a registered lobbyist for corporate interests and labor unions. The Politico piece was titled “Bob Packwood’s Redemption Story.” That wry headline is fitting because so much of the news media seems to love nothing more than a Republican-turned-lobbyist. See the story of Bob Dole, or all the lobbyists who backed Joe Biden in 2020. It’s like they make up for the sin of being a Republican by becoming a mercenary.

More important, though, were Packwood’s dealings with lobbyists while he was a senator. These were corrupt abuses of power that deserve to live in infamy.

If you read liberal reporters and commentators, the biggest unmet need in the United States is formal childcare.

If you listen to Democratic politicians, you might believe that affordable daycare is one of the top issues out there, and that “universal childcare” is in high demand.

But if you study the polls and read the academic research on this, you will find that formal childcare is not in extremely high demand (outside of the circles of media and political elites, that is).

Most parents do not want the model Democrats and the major media take for granted — two full-time jobs combined with institutional childcare.

What’s more, study after study undermines the feminist claim that mothers are kept out of the workforce by a lack of childcare.

Yes, most parents rely on paid childcare at some point. Yes, single mothers and their children benefit from predictable, affordable childcare.

But despite what Kamala Harris and the New York Times might lead you to believe, we are not a nation pocked with “childcare deserts” with most parents desperately crying for more daycare centers.

Betty Friedan Democrats

Feminist author Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, painting a dark picture of depressed, unfulfilled suburban housewives. Domestic life, feminists of the era argued, was a gilded cage.

The Baby Boomers atop the Democratic Party are stuck in the 1960s and still peddle Friedan’s line. Specifically, they seem to believe that every stay-at-home mom and every mother working part-time is trapped — that every woman in America wants to be working 40 hours per week.

“I think about how many women of my generation just got knocked off the track and never got back on,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a 2020 Democratic presidential debate. “How many of my daughter’s generation get knocked off the track and don’t get back on, how many mamas and daddies today are getting knocked off the track and never get back on.”

A parent who leaves the workforce to spend full-time with his or her child is “offtrack,” in Warren’s view.

When the Atlantic a few years back suggested that some mothers leaving the workforce this decade might be doing so voluntarily, Washington Post columnist Elaine Olen groaned. “Give. Me. A. Break.” It was just a “a lousy old myth about moms” to suggest that “many of these women are better off for cutting their (paid) work hours and downscaling their professional aspirations in favor of tending to family responsibilities.”

The unstated assumption is that all women, including all mothers, want to be working full-time jobs, and that the unavailability of decent affordable childcare has trapped mothers at home with their children.

This assumption is undermined by the bulk of the academic research on the question.

Specifically, married mothers in America are not kept out of the workforce by the lack of daycare. Increasing the supply of daycare does not induce them into the labor force. The studies demonstrating this are many.

“Maternal Labor Supply and the Introduction of Kindergartens into American Public Schools” was a study by economist Elizabeth Cascio published in the Journal of Human Resources in 2009. Because different states rolled out universal Kindergarten at different times, she was able to study whether moms went back to work if Kindergarten was available to them. Her conclusion: “I estimate that four of ten single mothers with no younger children entered the work force with public school enrollment of a five-year-old child. No significant labor supply responses are detected among other mothers with eligible children.”

In other words, married moms are not induced back to work when no-cost 8-to-3 childcare is available.

More recent studies by the same economist had similar findings: High-quality, affordable taxpayer-backed pre-school seemed to really help poor families, but the only real effect on wealthy families just saving them money. In that paper, she cites another study finding “no statistically significant positive impacts of a child’s eligibility for state-funded preschool on his or her mother’s chances of working.”

A massive study published in the American Economic Journal in 2024, headed by Princeton economist Henrik Kleven found “the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.”

“What about women who do not work?” Kleven and co-authors asked. “Are they facing constraints that prevent them from increasing labor supply?”

The answer was no: “Only a small fraction of surveyed women say that they feel constrained by the supply of institutional care. What is more, the fraction is no larger in districts with low levels of child care provision than it is in districts with high levels.”

The economists explained this in the most economist way possible: “If child care constraints are not preventing mothers from improving their career trajectories, then what is? Evidence … points to the potentially important role of preferences and norms regarding maternal care: An overwhelming majority of women (70-80%) report that they do not work, because they have a preference for taking care of their children.”

Again: Mothers are out of the workforce because mothers want to be out of the workforce so that they can be home with their children.

These findings are reflected in public polling.

Most parents do not want to work full time, according to a recent poll by the New America Foundation.

Meanwhile, 49% of parents say they want themselves or their spouse to be the primary childcare provider. At every age, more parents say they would rather look after their child than put their child in formal childcare. Only 30% of moms say they want to work full time, the New America study finds.

Only three percent of voters say that childcare costs are imposing a burden on their household.

What’s going on, then?

Childcare is a small issue for voters, it doesn’t have a huge effect on the economy, and most parents don’t want two 40-hour-per-week jobs and formal daycare. So one wonders: Why are Democrats and the media so insistent on this model?

The first source of this disconnect is the professional feminist liberal bubble in which the elite media lives. The Americans most likely to prefer two full-time jobs and institutional childcare and to find it impossibly expensive might be New York Times reporters and editors.

They are in a household with two college degrees and maybe two masters between them. Work for them is not merely a source of money but also a source of meaning. They are left of center politically and disproportionately female. They grew up around the like-minded and now live and work among the like-minded in New York or Washington. They frankly don’t know any stay-at-home moms.

BIG LABOR’S CHILD CARE RACKET

The bigger culprit is probably special-interest politics. Democrats want to subsidize childcare in part because that means subsidizing their political allies.

Pay close attention when Democrats talk about childcare. They always talk about supporting “the care economy.” They want more people working in childcare, higher pay for those workers, and government subsidies bolstering that pay.

Universal childcare will bolster the public-sector unions, which are big supporters of Democrats. It will not help parents.

She concluded: “The second group all got on a boat and went to America.”

This European founding myth for the United States of America concisely captures our nature as self-starters and mavericks. It points towards the spirit of individualism.

But our most common founding myth — specifically the story of the folks who all got on a boat to flee Europe — carries a different lesson. The Thanksgiving story is not a tale of individualism, but of community. We celebrate the Pilgrims by breaking bread together at a large table, and we tell tales of how families working together overcame adversity and tamed this land.

As much as Little House on the Prairie paints a picture of the rugged frontiersman blazing his own path, Norman Rockwell paintings show an America made up of tight-knit small towns and little platoons.

If you can hold these two competing visions together, you can understand America as she turns 250 years old. American culture is one of individualism embedded in an extraordinary network of civil society.

When Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831 to study our 55-year-old democracy, he found the most important thing was not the makeup of our government or the details of our laws, but the sprawling organic web of our voluntary institutions.

“There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America,” Tocqueville wrote.

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” he remarked with astonishment. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.”

In cases where the French would rely on the government, and where the British would rely on the wealthy lord, we Americans relied on ourselves. This was not a solitary self-reliance, but a communal one. If there was a problem, Americans wouldn’t ask for permission; we would band together and solve it.

Today’s ideological divides make it easy to miss this fundamental truth about America.

Progressives rail against our overly individualistic culture, name capitalism as the root of all evil, and jump unthinkingly to the conclusion that government is the answer.

They divide life into the private sphere and the public sphere — and by “public” they mean government-run. If an individual or a family cannot handle something on its own, the state must be the solution.

Conservatives make the same mistake from the opposite angle. They understand the evils of socialism, and they value liberty. As a result, they deride “collectivism” and hold up the individual as the antidote.

But the enemy of the overbearing state is not the individual. It is the little platoon.

When we become too atomized, the proper prescription is not more government, it is more civil society.

And we have become too atomized. America’s strength is the strength of its communities: Our religious congregations, our neighborhoods, our Little Leagues, our bowling leagues. For 60 years, American civil society has been shriveling, as famously documented by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone.

Without this scaffolding of intermediate institutions, American democracy doesn’t work as well. We become more isolated as individuals, and in response, we expect more from the central government.

If you wonder why socialism is so popular among Generation Z, blame our declining communitarianism.

It really is not good for man to be alone. It really does take a village to raise a child. When Americans don’t find that village in society, we are more likely to turn to Washington, D.C.

It turns out hyper-individualism and over-centralization are not opposite errors, but are two sides of the same coin.

At the same time that young people become more socialist, a lot of America — left and right — is becoming excessively individualistic. The pandemic made isolation more normal. Tech makes it easier to fulfill our needs without human interaction. Today’s liberal feminism rejects marriage and parenthood. Some parts of the Right, meanwhile, dig deeper into a leave-me-alone sort of conservatism.

AMERICA 250: AMERICA HAS BEEN BLESSED WITH GREAT LEADERS

Individualism needs community, and community needs individualism. Unchecked individualism leads us to Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature. All-enveloping community leads us to stagnation and repression. America’s strength has been blending these two forces.

Ours is the greatest country in the history of the world because we are pioneers and rugged individualists who rely on one another and lift up one another.

Back in the Woke Era (2014 to 2024), fare evasion was nearly a cause celebre. The history of this period needs to be recalled regularly lest tomorrow’s liberals claim it never happened — pretending it’s some right-wing fever dream.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, in early 2018, said he wouldn’t prosecute turnstile jumpers, and cops noted this included those with more than 50 offenses.

When subsequently some cops got into scuffles with unruly turnstile-hoppers, hundreds of New Yorkers protested the enforcement of subway fares by hopping the turnstiles en masse. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) praised the gate-hoppers as civil rights heroes.

“Arresting people who can’t afford a $2.75 fare makes no one safer and destabilizes our community,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “New Yorkers know that, they’re not having it, and they’re standing up for each other.”

Squadmate Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) promoted “decriminalizing fare evasion” nationwide as part of her “People’s Justice Guarantee.”

And in the nation’s capital, the Democratic city council in 2019 overrode the Democratic mayor’s veto to pass a bill that, in effect, made Metro fares optional. The American Civil Liberties Union praised the council: “With today’s vote, the Council sent a clear message that it is committed to progressive criminal justice reform that dismantles the systemic racial and economic injustice that has only harmed our communities.”

The result was predictable.

New York’s MTA lost more than $1 billion due to this policy, as fare evasion more than doubled and maybe tripled, up to about $700 million in 2022 alone. Stabbings and other violent crimes spiked in 2021 and 2022, because while some fare evaders are just poor folk or sneaky kids, some significant portion is a criminal up to no good. Letting criminals waltz into the subway isn’t great for subway safety. “Virtually every criminal is a fare evader,” MTA chairwoman Janno Lieber said.

In the district, the story was similar, and the cost of fare evasion at least doubled over the Woke decade, from about $20 million to $40 million or $50 million.

But peak woke has passed, and some cities are reversing.

The district’s Metro spent tens of millions to install harder-to-hop turnstiles, and the newish Metro chief, Randy Clarke, has gotten very tough. In Spring 2026, Metro began cracking down on the freeloaders on the bus, where historically one-third of the passengers have skipped the fare. In the last week of May, Metro said, the agency issued 740 fare-evasion tickets and made 46 arrests.

Wherever authorities are taking steps to actually require fares from all riders (as in San Francisco as well), crime and disorder have fallen markedly.

It turns out that preventing theft is a good idea, and celebrating theft is a bad idea!

But the tech bros building the artificial intelligence products aren’t the root of the problem. They are, for the most part, just capitalizing on the fundamental error of our time, which is our deeply flawed anthropology.

We don’t know what a person is anymore.

Technology can steer us into error and make our bad anthropology worse, but only after we’ve already tossed out the good map.

As Leo put it in Magnficas Humanitas, “The key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it.”

Listen closely to the folks in Silicon Valley hyping AI as a replacement for human labor. You can detect their unstated view of humans: They see us as computers.

And if we are mere computers, we are poor specimens. Compared to their large language models, which can “recall” anything ever written, we are ignorant and bad at math.

We are, of course, not computers. But again, we need to avoid blaming this error entirely on Silicon Valley. The tech industry has, to some extent, just inherited an older mistake. Modern man has, over the past few decades — without noting the shift — come to think of the human person as essentially an intellect. Our flesh and bones are seen as accidental baggage, even a curse.

Elites holding to this view of the person adopt (but don’t usually say aloud) the opinion that intelligence equals virtue. Far worse is the unstated premise that productivity equals value.     

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed,” Pope Leo warns, “it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.”

Rapid technological growth creates “a risk that individuals will be evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce,” Leo writes.

Today’s elites, in and out of the tech world, really do seem to believe that a person is only as good as his measurable contributions to the world. This is almost tautological to the secular materialist mind.

I have had elite students tell me they couldn’t imagine starting a family because they owed it to the world not just to graduate from their Ivy League college, but also to go to law or business school and then gain material success. When I suggested that loving one’s spouse and raising a child might itself be worthwhile, they dismissed that as impossibly sentimental.

Again, here we can detect an unstated anthropology: The achievement-oriented, heavily-educated American or European sees herself primarily as an individual. Her interactions with others are not relations but transactions — fully consensual, limited, contingent.

Modern man sees himself as a free-floating, atomized bundle of rights. The Christian view upheld by Pope Leo is different: Man is fundamentally a relational creature, an embodied creature, a familial creature. Our bodies, our families, our relationships are not accidents or adornments on our true selves. They, as much as our intellects, make us who we are. What’s more, we exist in a place — a physical place. Who and what are physically around us shape our individual identity, even if we didn’t choose those things.

Our relationships with other people aren’t merely means to getting what we want. Relationships are good in themselves. This is lost on the modern mind, and so our policymakers try to make policies that make us less dependent on one another — as if dependence is a weakness. More profoundly, perhaps, our Big Tech masters of the universe make tools aimed at liberating us from interpersonal relationships.

Here, the threat from AI is obvious:

“The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking,” Leo writes. “Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: THE MYTH OF GREEN CHINA

Robert Nisbet last century defined the alienated individual as the person who “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.”

AI is merely a tool. But it’s a tool with which we can’t be trusted unless and until we fix our mistaken understanding of who we are.

Command economies often harm the planet. Consider the legacy of the Soviet Union or Pol Pot. And look at modern-day China. Why this pattern? For one thing, when the political elite get control of the economy, they will use it for selfish purposes rather than for the altruistic purposes they promise.

If you give politicians control of the economy, they will make themselves rich and entrench their own power. Anything “green” they do will be incidental.

Check out these two recent updates on Green China:

In short, China is massively increasing its emissions (while its population shrinks!), but using a bogus formula to claim that it is getting more energy per CO2.

This might surprise you if you read the American media, which are constantly telling us that China is greening the planet (while Americans are destroying it). Here are three (of about a hundred) such stories in recent months:

• “The United States lags far behind China in the race for clean energy technologies.”
• “How China, not the U.S., became the main climate solution story in 2025”
• “China’s Accelerating Green Transition”

This assertion — China good, U.S.A. bad — survives amid all the contrary evidence, which is enough to make one wonder if the Americans peddling it are really interested in green energy or in other parts of China’s governance structure.

As I wrote, “For some of those singing Xi’s praises, the real virtue of China is not how green its people are, but how red.” That is, a lot of U.S. environmentalists use the “climate crisis” as a lever to abolish capitalism and change the whole nature of American society.

Maybe the green stuff was just an excuse to increase state control of the economy. This isn’t a new insight. Folks have long called environmentalists watermelons: green on the inside, red in the middle.

But when you consider China is leading the world in building new coal-fired power plants and is leading in emissions and emissions growth, you might get even more cynical about supposed redness for the sake of green. The green seems never to appear.

The bigger lesson here, though, is not about deception or dishonesty, but about the nature of power.

RED CHINA’S GREEN FICTION

Imagine that every environmental activist and politician pushing to ban coal and take over the energy industry really is motivated by saving the planet. Posit that any socialism in the green world is merely instrumental to getting cleaner air and water and less global warming.

Now consider what the Chinese Communists do and don’t do with their control over the economy: They don’t reduce coal usage, and they do fudge their emissions ratios. They also do increase their military spending, subsidize politically connected companies, and reinforce their own personal grip on power.

Power corrupts. That’s just as true for the tree huggers. If the greenies get their way here, we’ll become a little more like China.

One supremely harmful dogma of wokeism that went mostly unnoticed involved the primacy of “boundaries,” the virtue of “cutting toxic people out of your life,” and the act of going “no-contact” with people who were forcing you to do “emotional labor,” or something.

You can see the hints of Maoism and Stalinism in this severe intolerance and this willingness to treat inconvenient people as non-people. Woke feminism and gender ideology, meanwhile, hold individual autonomy as the highest good, and so they reject the unchosen. Thus, parents, siblings, and uncles, to whom you never consented, should probably be discarded.

This message sank in. Nearly 40% of adults now say they are estranged from a close family member, according to a recent poll. Where a parent and child have gone no-contact, the child was the one who cut off contact twice as often as the parent.

The vibe has shifted, though, in the post-woke era.

After a decade of erecting higher boundaries, protecting their own peace, and refusing to do uncompensated emotional labor, progressives are starting to realize that maybe it is not good for people to be alone. Maybe self-care is not the key to happiness. We need to care for other people and, in turn, be cared for by others.

The 2014 to 2024 flood of articles such as “How Strong Is Your Cut Off Game: 5 Steps To Removing Toxic People” has abated.

For instance, the left-leaning explainer site Vox spent the woke era promoting boundaries but now warns that “‘protecting your peace’ can kill your friendships.” Frictionless relationships might be meaningless, the young progressives are learning.

Kristen Bell, one of the most successful actresses of the past 25 years, is a liberal Democrat whose parents were divorced and who says her mother’s religiosity strained their relationship. She speaks the language of boundary-building autonomy-worship, but now she’s warning about the excesses.

In a recent Ted-Talk-combined-with-podcast, Bell waxed on about protecting her energy and warning the audience against being people pleasers, but then she shifted gears and made a pitch for actually dealing with other people.

“Annoyance is the price we pay for community,” she said, shocking the audience. “We’re not supposed to be the same. We’re supposed to be different. You’re supposed to be annoyed with Uncle Randy at dinner, because he has some archaic point of view.” He probably goes to church or something.

“Uncle Randy sucks,” she continued for laughs to her liberal audience. “But you have him over for dinner once in a while. … That’s like the four times Uncle Randy gets some community. So make the chicken and listen to him.”

Then Bell and the podcast host mocked the once sacrosanct ideas of “cutting people out, “going no contact,” and declaring “this is not a healthy relationship for me.”

MAKE THIS THE SUMMER OF FAMILY PRICING

“Come on,” Bell pleaded. “Then you need to expand your capacity.”

From woke to “love your neighbor.” That’s progress.

Republicans are on the verge of collapse, and it’s mostly President Donald Trump dragging them down.

This may surprise the observer who just watched Trump knock off a handful of dissidents in Indiana’s Republican primaries and Sen. John Cornyn in Texas. But Trump is less popular with voters than he has ever been.

Why?

Part of the problem is standard mid-term woes, especially for a second-term president. Part of the problem is Trump’s ill-considered war in Iran and the subsequent increase in gas prices. Trump family self-enrichment probably pays a role, too.

What does it mean for the GOP?

It likely means a tsunami election in the 2026 midterm elections, with Democrats taking the U.S. House and gaining seats in the U.S. Senate while also winning state-level elections. (For instance, they might gain a governing trifecta in Pennsylvania.) Republicans should also be worried about today’s bad vibes carrying over to 2028.

Through the floor

“Low ceiling, high floor.”

That was the conventional wisdom about Trump throughout his first term and in the beginning of his second term.

The pollster Ipsos made exactly that claim in October, suggesting that while Trump would never be loved by a significant majority of the country, he had a “floor” that was just higher than 40%. Bad events (such as the government shutdown) didn’t seem to drive down his approval ratings, Ipsos noted. At that point, about 44% of the country approved of his job performance, and since his 100-day honeymoon period ended, that number hadn’t wandered more than a point from 45%.

This year, though, Trump has fallen through the presumed floor.

The RealClearPolitics average of Trump approval polls puts him at 39.8% (with a disapproval of 58.1%).

Pollster Nate Silver puts Trump’s approval at negative 19.1 percentage points. “About 48 percent of Americans strongly disapprove of Trump’s job performance,” Silver notes. “Just 21.7 percent strongly approve of the job he’s doing, while another 17.2 percent only somewhat approve.”

Trump’s disapproval is higher than his approval even in Texas.

Zoom out, and you see a broader negativity.

One year ago, in late May 2025, Americans were almost as likely to say we were on the right track (44%) as the wrong track (51%). That 7-point gap has steadily grown for 12 months, and it’s now a 26-point gap, with 60% saying “wrong track” and only 34% saying “right track,” according to the RCP average.

Consumer confidence fell this past month to an all-time low in the University of Michigan’s measure. Gallup’s economic confidence index fell to the lowest level since the peak of Bidenflation.

This collapse in economic confidence is concentrated among independents and Republicans who are iffy on Trump, noted John Carney, the economics correspondent at Breitbart (and my older brother).

“Back in mid-February, the Economist/YouGov poll found that 58 percent of registered Republicans said the economy was getting better, and just 18 percent said it was getting worse,” John noted. “That gives us a net positive score of 33 percent. In the most recent poll, taken on May 15-18, the net positive has fallen to just two percent.”

What has happened since mid-February? For one thing, Trump inserted the U.S. into a war of choice in the Middle East, something Trump had avoided doing his first term — and something that brought down the GOP two decades ago.

Iran’s retaliation included blocking passage into or out of the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz. This has sent gas prices skyrocketing, to $4 per gallon or higher for nearly two months. The national average is currently at $4.40 according to AAA.

Midterm meltdown

Trump, of course, will not be on the ballot in 2026, and cannot seek a third term in 2028. So the main casualties of his cratering popularity will be Republicans running for Congress, governor, state legislature, and other public offices.

When pollsters ask voters whether they intend to vote Democratic or Republican for Congress, Democrats come out way ahead. Democrats are dominating in the generic congressional poll right now, at 49% to 41% in the RCP average. (At least three major pollsters have put Democrats at or above 50%, which is rare, historically.)

Democrats’ lead of 8 points is way up from their 2-point lead back in October. It’s also a far larger lead than either party has held in late May of a midterm election year, according to RCP historical data. For comparison, in 2018 during Trump’s first term, Democrats had a 4-point lead in May and proceeded to gain 41 seats in the House. It’s twice as bad for Republicans now.

Some of the key U.S. Senate races have recently shifted at least slightly in Democrats’ favor. For instance, the Carolina Journal has been polling the North Carolina Senate race for months. Last September, Democrat Roy Cooper led Republican Michael Whatley by 4 points. By November, it was 8 points. In the May survey, Cooper led by 11.

Similarly, in New Hampshire, Democrat Chris Pappas seems to be slowly expanding his poll lead over Republican Chris Sununu.

If Trump’s popularity and Americans’ view of the economy continues downward, these negative trends will become more visible. It’s possible Democrats, despite an unfavorable Senate map, could take over the upper chamber in the 2026 elections.

Again, some of this is unexceptional.

Barack Obama and George W. Bush both took second-term midterm drubbings — Republicans took the Senate and expanded their House majority under Obama in 2014, and Democrats took both chambers in 2006 under Bush.

But a Year Six disaster is not inevitable: In 1998, under Bill Clinton, Republicans gained zero Senate seats and actually lost five seats in the House.

Back in 1986, under Reagan, it was mixed: Democrats retook the Senate, made modest gains in the House, but actually lost a net of eight governorships.

How are midterms reflected in the following presidential election? There’s no clear historical answer on this.

After the 2006 and 2014 drubbings, the party doing drubbing continued its winning ways and captured the White House two years later. Two years after the minor drubbing in 1986, Republicans held the White House. Two years after the break-even elections of 1998, Republicans won the White House (just barely).

All that is to say that the 2028 elections will be determined more by nominee strength than by party. But in 2026, Republicans may not be so lucky.

The midterm elections are typically the president’s report card, and voters are not happy with the work Trump is turning in.

Only about 30% of voters approve of the Iran war, and even fewer approve of how he’s addressing the cost of living — which was the biggest single issue in the 2024 elections.

How much can we blame the war with Iran?

A big reason people liked Trump in both the 2016 primary and through his first five (non-consecutive) years in the White House was that he avoided the pitfall of every post-Cold War president from Clinton to Obama: Trump didn’t enter the U.S. into a war of choice that was distant from U.S. interests.

Then, on Feb. 28, without congressional authority, Trump ordered the military to assassinate Iran’s leaders and attack its territory. Trump promised it would be over quickly, but now the war is three months old, and gas prices are not coming down.

The war and the gas prices resulting from it are a big reason for taking economic optimism, for sure. They also likely contribute to Trump’s and the GOP’s falling approval ratings. But the bad polling trends for Republicans and Trump generally started late last year, before the attack on Iran. The right-track-wrong track numbers started souring last May.

BLUE WAVE OR RED WALL? REPUBLICANS HOPE A FAVORABLE MAP CAN COUNTER TERRIBLE CONDITIONS

It’s reasonable then to suspect that Trump’s other problems — including stubborn inflation (aside from gas prices) and his family’s sketchy business dealings — are harming the GOP. This pre-Iran trend also suggests that the numbers won’t simply reverse if the Strait of Hormuz reopens and gas prices fall.

The Republican Party’s problem is deeper than gas prices, and so things won’t get better before November. The only question is whether things get worse.