Iowa is flashing a giant red warning light for November



On Tuesday, Iowa House Republicans were shown polling that should scare the hell out of them.

The warning, as it was relayed to me, was stark: If you represent a district Trump carried by 15 points, you may still be within the margin of error. If you represent a Trump +10 district, you may already be under water.

We need to save our own country before we save anybody else. America first cannot become America eventually.

And this environment could end up being worse than the “thumping” of 2006.

I slept on whether to share this publicly because I do not want to black-pill people six weeks before a critical election. But there is still time to do something about it, and pretending the problem does not exist will not make it go away.

If the environment is this bad in Iowa — where Donald Trump has been the most popular political figure of the last decade — I shudder to think what it looks like elsewhere.

Iran has become a massive political albatross on par with the COVID lockdowns of 2020.

Whatever you want to call it — war, not-quite-war, prolonged military operation, strategic pressure campaign — voters are experiencing the consequences as another expensive Middle East entanglement with no clearly defined victory. Fuel prices are hurting. The public is frustrated bordering on furious. Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from the policy.

We are risking what remains of the Trump presidency on this.

If Democrats take control of Congress in January, much of the domestic agenda voters elected Trump to pursue will stop cold. Some of it will be reversed. Some of it will be tied up in investigations and appropriations fights. Add what the courts are already doing, and the remaining two years could become an exercise in siege warfare.

The damage would not stop in D.C.

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PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images

States like Iowa have spent the last 20 years moving dramatically to the right, with Trump accelerating that transformation. A national collapse would spill down the ballot and put those gains at risk.

That is why this half-war, quasi-war, whatever-we-are-calling-it has become such a catastrophic misuse of political capital.

Many of us never thought it was worth the cost. Increasingly, the voters seem to agree.

We need to save our own country before we save anybody else.

If a plane is in trouble, you put on your own oxygen mask first. Not because everybody else is unimportant, but because you are useless to them if you pass out.

America first cannot become America eventually.

I desperately want this presidency to succeed. I want it to fulfill the promise voters saw in 2024. But whatever this is right now, it isn’t working. And Republicans do not have to sit here and take the loss.

There is still time. There is still plenty of ammunition. Democrats have given Republicans more than enough material to run against. But the president needs to get on the stump now.

The messaging needs to get much sharper and much more aggressive.

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Stop wasting money on stupid ads about how often some Democrat missed a committee vote. Tell voters what Democrats are actually voting for. Put the cultural, economic, and constitutional stakes in plain English.

And most important, explain the mission in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. What does victory look like? What ends the operation? What are Americans being asked to pay, and for how long?

Because from the cheap seats, this increasingly looks like another Middle East quagmire in which ordinary Americans pay twice — once at the pump and again through their taxes.

If there is a compelling answer to that, the administration needs to give it. Soon.

Republicans are not out of ammunition. They are almost out of time.

And while we are at it, somebody please make sure Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are getting the finest health care in America.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally on X.

Trump’s Iran Question: When Do I Blow the Entire Nation Up? | 9/21/26
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Trump’s Iran Question: When Do I Blow the Entire Nation Up? | 9/21/26

The Loss Of Charlie Kirk Is Still Rippling Through MAGA Movement A Year After Assassination

His death left a kind of diplomatic vacuum and some nasty politicos — neocons and other grifters — stepped in to fill the breach.

The Stay-At-Home Parent Debate Is GDP First Vs. America First​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Conservatives have to make the American dream possible again, and letting moms and dads raise their own kids is a good place to start.

John Doyle and Alex Jones clash over the right’s biggest psyops in fiery MAGA debate



Before the 2024 election, conservative America was united under President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” banner. But that unity didn’t last.

Less than two years later, the base is deeply divided over many issues, especially Israel/Iran, the Epstein files, and whether MAGA still means the promises supporters voted for — or just blind loyalty to Trump.

“How did a once unified coalition with a stated goal of making America great again come to a place where some of the most powerful voices in the movement are now leaving? Who has caused the MAGA divide?”

Those are the questions debate host Brandon Straka asked eight of the right’s most provocative voices to go head to head over on last night’s #WalkAway MAGA vs. America First debate.

BlazeTV’s John Doyle was one of those voices. With him on the MAGA team was conservative debate host Andrew Wilson, MAGA attorney and commentator Will Chamberlain, and CEO of “Louder with Crowder” Gerald Morgan Jr.

Their America First opponents were Infowars founder Alex Jones, former Trump counterterrorism official Joe Kent, pastor and Christian nationalist podcaster Joel Webbon, and College Republicans political director Kai Schwemmer.

Despite being on opposite sides of the debate, Doyle and Jones agree that hidden psychological operations are manipulating public opinion and distracting regular Americans from the truth — but their alignment ends when it comes to identifying the biggest threat.

Doyle sees the psyop issue primarily through the lens of Israel's influence and the risk of young Americans being dragged into foreign wars.

“Israel is losing the PR war, which Trump himself acknowledges,” he argued.

“There has been an effort in the last three or four years with people like Andrew Tate, his brother, Sneako, to make the online right wing, which informs, frankly, the actions of the federal government, something that is at least not hostile to Islam, maybe even sympathetic,” he explained.

“We've seen this with the Muslim-Christian alliance; we've seen this with them giving us permission to laugh at Hitler jokes again. Focusing too much on mass deportations is some kind of psyop to distract you from being drafted to go die in the sand for Israel,” Doyle continued. “This is what young people are tuning into when they are on Instagram and Facebook.”

While Jones agreed that major political events are controlled by secret, billionaire-funded operations rather than organic movements, he argued that focusing solely on Israel is a narrow trap that leads people to miss larger threats — like the multi-million dollar tech-funded campaigns working behind the scenes to crush anti-establishment candidates.

“Bill Gates spent over $200 million through a couple different dark money groups ... just to try to block [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s] nomination — and it wasn't to Congress,” Jones countered. “It was stories of fake doctors, and they had these online petitions that they themselves were using bots to put fake names on to then deliver to Congress.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from John Doyle?

To enjoy more of the truth about America and join the fight to restore a country that has been betrayed by its own leaders, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

‘Lake America’ is all swagger, no leverage



As an AP U.S. History student nearly 40 years ago, one of the more vexatious essay questions my classmates and I had to tackle was whether the War of 1812 was a matter of “national honor” or “national interest.”

As I recall, we went round and round for days before settling on national honor.

National honor can serve the national interest. National vanity does not.

Honor is often a dumb reason to go to war.

Often — but not always! In reality, the war was fought for honor and interest. The British were impressing American sailors, interfering with American commerce, and treating the sovereignty of the young republic as something they could disregard when convenient.

National honor and national interest were entangled.

Donald Trump is very big on national honor. He wants America respected. He hates the idea that foreign governments might laugh at us, exploit us, rip us off, or conclude that the United States is too weak or timid to defend its interests.

There is much to be said for that instinct.

The problem is that Trump sometimes confuses national honor with national interest. And sometimes he confuses both with national vanity.

Which brings me to Lake America.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The order gives the United States no additional territory or water rights. It opens no market, lowers no tariff, strengthens no alliance, and makes no American safer.

It does, however, annoy Canada.

This is where the War of 1812 becomes more than an old high school essay question.

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One assumption behind the American invasion of Canada was that it would be easy. Thomas Jefferson famously predicted that acquiring Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.” Not quite.

We surrendered Detroit, lost at Queenston Heights, and repeatedly failed to conquer Canada. Oh, and of course, there was the not insignificant matter of the Brits burning down Washington, D.C., in 1814 as retaliation for our burning and looting of York (modern-day Toronto) the year prior.

Americans had looked at the disparity in power and concluded that the disparity settled the question.

There is an echo of that mistake today.

My friend Kurt Schlichter captured the attitude neatly last week in a Townhall column headlined “It’s Always Cute When Canada Thinks It Matters.”

Schlichter is right about the imbalance of power. Canada is vastly weaker than the United States. It neglected its military while sheltering beneath the American security umbrella, and its economy depends much more on our market than ours depends on Canada.

But “Canada is weaker than we are” and “Canada doesn’t matter” are very different propositions.

My old teacher Angelo Codevilla had a useful maxim: “What is nearest is dearest.”

Writing about Mexico in 2009, Codevilla argued that geography had joined our countries together “whether anybody likes it or not.” Events close to home bear more directly on American peace and prosperity than events halfway around the world. “Canada’s position is analogous,” he added.

Canada matters not because we owe Canadians special deference. It matters because geography says it does.

We share more than 5,000 miles of border, the Great Lakes, continental defense, energy systems, supply chains, waterways, pipelines, railroads, and deeply integrated economies.

An America First foreign policy should understand this instinctively.

That does not require being nice to Canada. If Ottawa is free-riding on defense, demand more. If Canadian protectionism hurts American farmers or manufacturers, fight it. If pressure produces better terms for Americans, squeeze away.

The question is what American interest the pressure serves.

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Trump has spent much of his second term calling Canada “the 51st state,” referring to ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau,” dismissing the border as artificial, and threatening or imposing economic pressure on our northern neighbor. Canada’s navy is barely a coast guard!

Canada did not respond by becoming more accommodating. It became more Canadian.

At the beginning of 2025, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives appeared headed for a crushing victory. Trudeau was finished, and the Liberals were exhausted and deeply unpopular.

Then Trump changed the question.

Instead of asking whether they had finally had enough of the Liberals, Canadian voters increasingly asked who was best equipped to deal with Donald Trump.

That was a much better question for Mark Carney.

Trump did not single-handedly cost Poilievre the prime ministership. Carney was a strong candidate in his own right, and Poilievre had weaknesses of his own.

But the reversal was extraordinary. The Liberals came back to win bigly. Poilievre lost his own seat even as Conservatives won a record 8.1 million votes.

Trump helped turn a Liberal Party on its heels into a government with a political incentive to resist the United States.

That should interest an America First president, shouldn’t it?

I do not especially care whether Canadians believe their national honor has been wounded. I care whether wounding it makes them more or less likely to do what is advantageous to us.

Foreign policy is not therapy. We do not need to validate Canadian feelings or pretend Canada and the United States are equals in power.

But statesmanship requires understanding how other people are likely to behave.

Tell 40 million Canadians often enough that their country is a joke, their sovereignty is optional, and their border is imaginary, and some sizable fraction will become willing to pay a price to tell you no.

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Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

That may be foolish of them. It’s also predictable.

The United States can hurt Canada much more than Canada can hurt us. Of course we can.

But the measure of foreign policy is not whether you can hurt the other fellow. It is whether hurting him gets you something you want.

Tariffs might. Pressure on Canadian defense spending might. Hard bargaining over trade, energy, manufacturing, critical minerals, or Arctic security might.

What does Lake America get us? No land. No water. No money. No security. No concessions. Just the satisfaction of reminding Canada that we are bigger than Canada. Big whoop.

Nearly 40 years ago, my classmates and I decided the War of 1812 was chiefly about national honor.

I’m less interested today in settling that old argument than in remembering the question.

National honor can serve the national interest. National vanity does not.

Want to squeeze Iran? Trump has one clear move



Iran has been reported to be using negotiations with the United States to buy time, strengthen its position around the Strait of Hormuz, and rebuild military capacity for a wider conflict. The Trump administration needs a new Red Sea strategy. It should begin with Somaliland.

The Houthis recently fired on a ship in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and Iran has reportedly told the group to be prepared to close the waterway if the United States strikes Iran’s power grid. The Bab el-Mandeb is a global shipping artery and a pressure point on energy markets.

The crises in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are warnings. Iran and the Houthis are trying to turn geography into coercion. The United States should turn geography back into deterrence.

The warning is clear. The United States cannot rely indefinitely on distant strikes and vulnerable Gulf bases to protect shipping through the region’s choke points. Washington’s bombing campaign failed to neutralize the Houthi threat, leaving the group able to threaten commercial shipping, Gulf partners, and Israel.

The moment calls for more than another round of airstrikes. The United States should recognize Somaliland.

Somaliland has governed itself for decades, has shown interest in deeper ties with the United States and its allies, and sits beside one of the world’s most important maritime corridors. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has argued that recognition would advance U.S. interests in the Horn of Africa through counterterrorism, anti-piracy operations, and cooperation with partners such as Taiwan and Israel. He is right.

Recognition should be followed by a formal security relationship allowing regular intelligence cooperation, military access, and a forward operating presence along the Gulf of Aden.

Geography is Somaliland’s strongest argument. It sits across from Yemen near the approaches to the Red Sea and the same waters the Houthis have threatened to close.

Others have noticed. Reports indicate that Israel has explored a strategic presence in Somaliland as part of its response to the Houthi threat. The United States has no comparable formal footprint. Access there could support counter-Houthi operations, intelligence collection across the Gulf of Aden, and the fight against Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Israel understands the value of the location. Washington should too.

The United States also needs to reduce its dependence on bases within easy striking distance of Iran. On a recent webinar, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former head of U.S. Central Command, described the problem bluntly: “No one in their right mind would ever put the CENTCOM forward headquarters, you know, 100 miles away from Iran, yet that’s where it is.”

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He elaborated: “It’s good to be close to your potential enemy because it’s a short commute to the fight. It’s bad to be close to your potential enemy, because he has the ability to strike you very quickly.”

I have previously argued that Washington should distribute regional assets across secure, aligned territories rather than concentrate them where host governments can restrict access, basing, or overflight. Somaliland would not replace Al Udeid or every existing Gulf facility. It would give the United States another option when allies limit operations or adversaries threaten choke points.

A U.S. presence in Somaliland would also signal that Washington is willing to reward capable partners instead of remaining trapped by diplomatic habits that no longer serve American security. Recognition would carry costs, including friction with Somalia and other governments committed to Somalia’s territorial integrity. Those costs should be weighed against the strategic value of a reliable partner at the mouth of the Red Sea.

The crises in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are warnings. Iran and the Houthis are trying to turn geography into coercion. The United States should turn geography back into deterrence.

Recognizing Somaliland would give the United States a stronger hand in the Red Sea, a better position against terrorist threats, and greater freedom to operate when existing partners hesitate. A proactive strategy begins by securing options before the next crisis closes them off. The time to act is now.

The senator Trump mocked became his best diplomat



“A diplomat who says ‘yes’ means ‘maybe,’” the great French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand is supposed to have said. “A diplomat who says ‘maybe’ means ‘no,’ and a diplomat who says ‘no’ is no diplomat.” Whether Talleyrand actually said it hardly matters. The spirit is right: Diplomacy, like politics, is the art of the possible.

Put another way, diplomacy is the art of getting what you want without needlessly making it impossible for the other side to give it to you.

For the first time in decades, an American secretary of state has a plausible path to the pantheon.

By that standard, the United States has produced few truly great diplomatic tenures in the past half-century. There have been capable secretaries of state and important agreements, but remarkably few achievements with the durability of the great settlements of earlier eras.

Madeleine Albright's tenure remains inseparable from NATO expansion and the deterioration of relations with post-Soviet Russia. Colin Powell's is shadowed by his 2003 presentation at the United Nations and the Iraq War. Condoleezza Rice brought competence, but no settlement that transformed America's strategic position.

Hillary Clinton's much-advertised “reset” with Russia aged badly. John Kerry helped produce the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal, both of which were abandoned by the first Trump administration. Rex Tillerson never found his footing. Mike Pompeo was more effective, but his major diplomatic projects did not fundamentally reorder America's position abroad.

Antony Blinken helped oversee AUKUS with Britain and Australia, an important strategic arrangement, though more an extension and deepening of existing alignments than a new diplomatic architecture.

America's earlier history offers a much higher bar. Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Seward, Hamilton Fish, John Hay, George Marshall, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger helped shape American diplomacy in ways that outlasted the administrations they served.

Their work changed not merely the headlines of the day but America's long-term position in the world.

A few years ago, almost no one would have guessed that Marco Rubio might be the next American diplomat with a plausible claim to join that company.

When Trump nominated Rubio for secretary of state, commentators wondered whether he would moderate the president's more unpredictable foreign-policy instincts. Old Republican voices, sidelined after Trump's rise, and left-leaning academics alike expected friction between Trump and a man long identified with the GOP's interventionist wing.

That prediction has not held up.

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The senator Trump mocked became his best diplomat Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Getty Images

On his second day in office, Rubio told State Department personnel that their mission was to ensure American foreign policy remained centered on the national interest: whatever makes the country “stronger, safer, and more prosperous.”

He added that conflict would sometimes be unavoidable, but never at the expense of national security, the national interest, or America's core values.

The language signaled a break from the old habit of treating international approval as an end in itself.

That shift can be dismissed as political adaptation. It is also evidence that Rubio has absorbed something larger: The pre-Trump Republican foreign policy consensus is gone, and a new one is being built in its place.

At the Munich Security Conference this year, Rubio delivered a broadside against unfettered free trade, deindustrialization, mass migration, and an international order detached from the interests and identities of the nations expected to sustain it.

He also spoke explicitly about the shared language, religion, culture, and ancestry connecting Europe and America — language difficult to imagine from a secretary of state only a few years ago.

The record is becoming more substantial.

In 2025, Rubio played an important role as NATO members agreed to a new 5% defense spending commitment by 2035. He has kept open the possibility of negotiations with Iran, even amid anger from some Israelis over the administration's approach.

He has repeatedly pursued efforts to bring Ukraine and Russia toward negotiations after years in which diplomacy between the two sides largely stagnated.

And on Venezuela, Rubio has been credited as a central figure in the administration's campaign against Nicolás Maduro, a dramatic reversal in U.S.-Venezuela relations.

On Cuba, Rubio has paired pressure with calls for political change and dialogue, while also speaking directly to the Cuban people.

Rubio has therefore become something unusual: a secretary of state who is not merely influential inside the administration but increasingly visible to the public.

In 2026, he has at times seemed to eclipse nearly every other Cabinet official in political stature. His popularity among Republican voters is especially striking for a secretary of state, an office that usually produces prestige without a mass constituency.

Barely 18 months into his tenure, that does not yet make Rubio a great secretary of state. It does make the possibility serious.

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The unanswered questions are enormous: Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ukraine, North Korea, and the Ortega regime's recent actions in Nicaragua could all complicate or diminish his record.

Durability is the test. A diplomatic achievement that vanishes with the next administration is not much of an achievement at all.

But Rubio has already helped push NATO toward higher defense commitments, pursued talks over Ukraine, increased pressure on Cuba and Venezuela, and strengthened Washington's effort to counter Chinese influence around the Panama Canal.

If those gains endure — and if he can turn today's openings into settlements that survive Trump — Rubio's legacy will look very different from that of the secretaries of state who preceded him.

The pantheon is not his yet. But for the first time in decades, an American secretary of state has a plausible path to it.

And why stop there?

Federalist Contributor Michael Alfonso Wins Wisconsin Congressional Primary

Federalist Contributor Michael Alfonso won a decisive victory Tuesday night to be the GOP nominee for a Wisconsin-based U.S. House seat. If elected this fall, he would become the youngest member of Congress. Unfinalized results show that, with more than 95 percent of votes tabulated, Alfonso, 26, is projected to win the Republican primary for […]

Washington still has not learned the North Korea lesson



Jimmy Carter did more damage to American foreign policy in one weekend than most diplomats manage in a career.

In June 1994, President Bill Clinton sent Carter (no relation) to Pyongyang as a private citizen, with no authority to negotiate or speak for the U.S. government. Two days later, Carter cut a deal anyway. Then he called CNN before he called the White House. Clinton learned that his own North Korea policy had changed by watching television.

Fleitz has written the best kind of policy book: one grounded in the record, animated by firsthand knowledge, and confident enough to let readers reach the obvious conclusion.

That episode, recounted on page 34 of Frederick H. Fleitz’s new book, "North Korea, Nuclear Brinkmanship, and the Oval Office," makes up the best two pages in the book. It also contains the clearest explanation of why the book deserves attention.

Fleitz spent more than two decades inside the machinery of American national security policy — at the CIA, State Department, House Intelligence Committee, and National Security Council. He was in the room, or close enough to it, for much of what he describes. This is not a book assembled from newspaper clippings. Fleitz names names, places officials on opposing sides of consequential fights, and lets the record judge them.

The Carter episode establishes the pattern Fleitz traces across three decades. North Korea manufactures a crisis. Washington sends someone to talk. Pyongyang extracts a concession. The concession is celebrated as a “breakthrough.” North Korea breaks the agreement once the cameras leave. Then the cycle begins again.

Why did it continue under presidents of both parties? Because it worked.

Fleitz does not spare the Clinton administration. He describes the 1994 Agreed Framework — the deal Carter set in motion — as a bad bargain from the start. The administration called it a “framework” rather than an “agreement,” he argues, to avoid the Senate ratification a treaty would have required. Pyongyang received two light-water reactors and years of fuel oil. Washington received a promise to surrender spent fuel rods that never arrived.

The Bush years receive the same treatment. Fleitz recounts envoy Chris Hill dismissing intelligence about North Korea’s secret uranium-enrichment program. Dick Cheney later told journalist James Rosen that Hill was “deceitful, perfectly prepared to lie to the president.” Hill’s reply — "I’m not Richard Nixon" — is the kind of detail that makes an insider’s account worth reading.

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Fleitz is writing about policy, but he understands that policy is made by people with ambitions, loyalties, grudges, and blind spots. His book is not a dry institutional history. It is a fight among real officials over real consequences.

The 2007 destruction of Syria’s North Korean-built reactor at al-Kibar receives similarly careful treatment. Fleitz reports that the Bush administration tried to keep Israel’s strike hidden from Congress — a detail that reveals as much about Washington’s instinct for secrecy as it does about North Korea’s proliferation network.

The Trump chapters give the book its greatest energy because Fleitz supports his case with numbers rather than adjectives. North Korea tested no missiles in 2018, only a handful of short-range missiles in 2019, and no intercontinental ballistic missiles until 2022. That year, under President Joe Biden, North Korea set a single-year record of roughly 165 missile launches.

Fleitz also details the February 2018 sanctions package, the toughest imposed on Pyongyang to that point, and Trump’s warning that "phase two" could become "very, very rough" if sanctions failed. Whatever one thinks of the rhetoric, it reads as the voice of a president wielding leverage rather than asking politely for cooperation.

Fleitz states his central conclusion plainly: North Korea respects strength and exploits weakness.

In his telling, every bad deal in the book was struck when an American president negotiated from a position of distraction, exhaustion, or political vulnerability: the 1994 Agreed Framework under Clinton, the near-deal at the end of George W. Bush’s second term, the Iran nuclear agreement under Barack Obama, and a reported secret arrangement with Iran under Biden.

The one moment Pyongyang backed off and came to the table, Fleitz argues, came in 2018, when the regime confronted a president threatening its destruction rather than pleading for another agreement.

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That thesis will invite argument, as it should. Trump did not eliminate North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, and the regime remains dangerous. But Fleitz makes a persuasive case that pressure created negotiating space while accommodation repeatedly rewarded bad behavior.

The lesson extends beyond North Korea. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are drawing closer. Washington still faces the temptation to mistake talks for progress, signatures for compliance, and diplomatic activity for strategic success.

For that reason, "North Korea, Nuclear Brinkmanship, and the Oval Office" is not merely a history of failed negotiations. It is a warning about a pattern that American policymakers keep repeating.

Fleitz has written the best kind of policy book: one grounded in the record, animated by firsthand knowledge, and confident enough to let readers examine the evidence and reach the obvious conclusion. Weakness does not moderate regimes such as North Korea. It teaches them what they can take next.