In the first three months of the Trump administration, Americans were stunned by President Trump’s breakneck pace: executive orders overturning onerous Biden-era regulations, massive reductions in force, and rescissions eliminating billions in waste. Republicans notched some of their highest approval ratings in months. Democrats looked rudderless.
For the first time in years, it felt like Republicans were taking the country back — unapologetically.
The task remains what it was 365 days ago: Save the country, secure future elections, and restore the American dream.
Fast-forward a year, and the public mood has turned bleak. A recent Fox News poll found that 52% of voters would support the Democrat candidates in their House districts this November — reportedly the highest level of support for either party since 2017. More jarring: Voters favor Democrats by 14 points on affordability and helping the middle class and by 21 points on health care.
President Trump’s worries about the midterms, typical swings aside, look justified.
But plenty of time remains, enough to change the trajectory — if Republicans are willing to spend time and effort instead of conserving both.
The problem sits in the mirror. Despite ample runway to tee up major legislation through a second round of reconciliation — the tool Republicans can use to deliver big wins without a single Democratic vote in the Senate — too many lawmakers have acted as if the moment already passed.
The Republican Study Committee produced a blueprint aimed at making the American dream affordable again by tackling the same pressures families feel every day: rising costs, rising premiums, and a fading path to home ownership for younger Americans.
Yet too many Republicans have decided to run on last year’s accomplishments in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, hoping “tax cuts” can substitute for finishing the America First agenda.
Voters aren’t buying it — and they have reasons.
Just days ago, 76 House Republicans joined Democrats to pass a consolidated appropriations package that included millions in earmarks for clinics providing "gender-affirming care" and $5 billion for refugee resettlement — while declining chances to strip the bill of the pork Republicans claim to oppose.
Days before that, 46 Republicans voted against an amendment to defund rogue activist judge James Boasberg’s office. Eighty-one Republicans voted against an amendment to defund the National Endowment for Democracy — which, contrary to its name, functions as a rogue CIA cutout that fuels global censorship and domestic propaganda.
While basic conservative principles get betrayed in plain sight, Senate Republicans too often hide the ball, using procedure as an excuse for inaction.
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Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act and the new SAVE America Act have passed the House a combined three times. Lawmakers and pundits insist it’s a nonstarter in the Senate. Passing it, they say, would require “nuking the filibuster” — a risky move when 51 votes for major conservative policy cannot be taken for granted.
But to voters, it looks like business as usual: elected officials trying to save their seats rather than save their country.
And voters are right.
Contrary to the lazy narrative, enforcing a talking filibuster does not eliminate the filibuster.
The talking filibuster has been permitted under Senate rules since 1806 and served for more than a century as the primary way to delay or block a vote. Cloture came later. Today, the minority can simply signal its intent to filibuster, triggering a 60-vote threshold to invoke cloture, end debate, and move to final passage by simple majority.
Enforcing a talking filibuster on the SAVE America Act would not change Senate rules or eliminate the minority’s right to filibuster. It would require the majority leader to keep the bill on the floor — and force the minority to sustain a real filibuster as long as the majority maintains a quorum.
Time and effort stand between us and an immensely popular voter ID law.
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Out-of-control spending keeps burying families in debt and shrinking what their dollars buy. Between backroom deals and broad inaction, politicians seem to be counting the days until a Democrat House returns with subpoenas and impeachment resolutions. The status quo won’t cut it.
The task remains what it was 365 days ago: Save the country, secure future elections, and restore the American dream.
No one believes the job is finished, so stop pretending it is. With months left before November, members of Congress need to prove why voters should keep them in office. Only a dogged push to finish the America First agenda will do.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) recently sent me a seven-page memo outlining the House Freedom Caucus’ priorities for 2026. It is outstanding.
Nothing in it calls for knock-down, drag-out ideological fights. These are 60%-70% issues with the American public, not just conservatives: secure the border, secure elections, expand health care freedom, cut government waste, and eliminate fraudulent programs.
We still have agency as free Americans — if we choose to exercise it in service of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Hope is an action word. But so is fear.
Depending on what happens with the economy over the next six or seven months, this agenda may represent the GOP’s last realistic chance to hold the House and avoid what betting markets currently put at a 53% likelihood: President Trump facing yet another impeachment next year.
And it will not stop with him.
Democrats will come after War Secretary Pete Hegseth for killing “innocent” drug traffickers. They will target Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for disrupting the childhood vaccine schedule. They will pursue Secretary of State Marco Rubio for alleged “war crimes” in Venezuela.
They will do all of this for one reason: In the end, they are coming after you.
The House alone cannot stop that onslaught. As sensible and popular as the Freedom Caucus’ agenda is — and as eager as Trump would be to sign it — the Senate must also act. And I see no path to real victory unless the Republican Senate finds the clarity and courage to nuke the filibuster.
The alternative is grim. If Republicans refuse to act, Democrats will almost certainly scrap the filibuster themselves within a year to impose their agenda. If that happens, I am not sure the Republican Party — or the country — recovers.
Our side already suffers from a deep demoralization problem. What do you think happens to morale when voters watch their leaders voluntarily surrender leverage to the enemy during what increasingly resembles a cold civil war? The black pill will become a black hole of civic abandonment.
Or we could try something radical: empower a Republican Congress to deliver tangible results — $1.90 gas as we are currently enjoying, lower inflation, and health care costs driven back toward pre-COVID levels. Then watch as figures like Candace Owens and the Groyper gang lose their ability to manipulate a depressed and disoriented base with conspiratorial nonsense about the Jooooooooos.
Money in people’s pockets or more gaslighting?
That should be one of the easiest political choices the GOP has ever faced — especially in an environment where turnout collapses when Trump is not on the ballot. Republicans either go big by eliminating the filibuster, or they go home. And if they fail, some of us may end up facing prosecution while the likes of Tim Walz skate free.
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The year 2025 was about pushing back the darkness inflicted by the Biden administration. The year 2026 must be about what we unapologetically replace that worldview with. Standing in the way is the filibuster.
So what are we prepared to do?
No matter how dire things feel, I have seen proof that action still matters. Children’s Health Defense recently exposed a quiet attempt to shield pesticide companies from liability. Within days, that language was pulled from the bill in question.
I also watched Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) abruptly abandon his re-election bid after a single determined individual exposed the massive Somali fraud scandal bleeding taxpayers dry to benefit people who openly despise this country.
That tells me something important.
We still have agency as free Americans — if we choose to exercise it in service of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Hope is an action word.
But so is fear.
And 2026 will force us to choose between them.
When General George S. Patton served as military governor of postwar Bavaria, he startled the press by comparing Germans who voted for the Nazis to Americans who voted for Republicans or Democrats. Eighty years later, that comparison, once deemed outrageous, makes more sense than most care to admit.
Today’s Democratic Party has become a profoundly destructive force. Its leaders incite violence, wink at assassination attempts, and encourage riots to block the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants — including criminal offenders — the Biden White House imported as future Democratic voters.
As a European historian whose own family fled the Nazis, I recognize the pattern. The difference today is that Democrats enjoy advantages the German totalitarians never had.
In Virginia, Democrats just elected an inexperienced attorney general who once wished death upon a Republican leader and his children. Jay “Two Bullets” Jones, a man with no serious professional experience and a long public record of hate-filled rhetoric, is now the state’s top law enforcement officer. His victory didn’t trouble Virginia’s Democratic establishment. Democrats defended him, celebrated him, and made clear they see nothing disqualifying about open derangement when it serves the cause.
The point isn’t that the Democratic Party is identical to Hitler’s regime. It’s that its tactics — the deceit, manipulation, and contempt for constitutional limits — echo the methods the Nazis used to dismantle Weimar Germany from within.
As a European historian whose own family fled the Nazis, I recognize the pattern. The difference today is that Democrats enjoy advantages the German totalitarians never had. Even at the height of economic collapse, no more than one-third of German voters supported Hitler’s party. In America, at least half the electorate — and possibly more — backs a party that celebrates political violence, erases gender distinctions, tears down monuments, degrades men, and promotes the mutilation of confused children in the name of “affirmation.”
Many of the Democrats’ most reliable constituencies — college-educated women, black voters, and recent immigrants — embrace the movement’s nihilism without the desperation that once drove Germans to extremism. Their loyalty is ideological, not circumstantial, and that makes the threat more enduring.
The totalitarian Democrats’ rise owes as much to their ruthlessness as to the right’s failure to resist it. For years, the so-called conservative establishment — especially the Murdoch media — has preached “common ground” and “dialogue.” Its members have treated the left as a legitimate partner even as it dismantled every shared institution. They’ve assured us, wrongly, that the Democratic Party was about to collapse. Their naïve optimism left Republicans unprepared for last week’s electoral debacle.
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A serious conservative movement would treat the Democrats not as rivals but as a subversive force bent on domination. They control the mainstream media, public education, entertainment, and the bureaucracy. The task is not to appease them but to weaken their grip. That means defunding their institutions, shrinking the administrative state, and cutting federal money to the states and cities run by radical leftists — Virginia, California, New Jersey, Minnesota among them. Washington should stop subsidizing those who despise the nation it governs.
The vapid notion that “we all want the same things for our children” only empowers those who plainly do not. They want to rule, not reconcile.
Conservatives must demand fair, transparent elections conducted in designated polling places on Election Day under bipartisan supervision. Voter identification should be federally required — a safeguard, not a surrender of state authority, which has long been diluted anyway.
And before Senate Democrats move to end the filibuster to cement their control, President Trump and his allies should act first. Forget “comity.” The GOP cannot afford another cycle of deference to rules their opponents ignore.
The moment demands moral clarity, not compromise. The Democratic Party is not merely misguided — it has become an organized threat to constitutional government and civil peace. Treating it as anything less will only hasten the day when America wakes to find itself a one-party state.
Over a month into the record-breaking shutdown, enough Senate Democrats finally caved to advance a key vote, sparking outrage within the party.
Eight Senate Democrats broke from their party late Sunday night to break the filibuster in a 60-40 vote, advancing key legislation and putting the government back on track to reopen after a record 41-day stalemate. The Senate is expected to formally pass the legislation Monday, when the continuing resolution will be punted back to the House.
'America deserves better.'
Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire joined Sens. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Angus King (I) of Maine, and Catherine Cortez Masto, who have consistently voted to reopen the government for the last six weeks. Notably, only Shaheen and Durbin are up for re-election in 2026, and both are retiring.
Although these other rogue Democrats are electorally safe for the next several years, many of their colleagues have ridiculed them for bucking the party and cutting a deal with Republicans.
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After 15 failed votes to reopen the government, Democrats folded and finally came to the negotiating table. Party negotiators walked away with a continuing resolution to fund the government through January 30 featuring a reversal on reduction-in-force notices issued after October 1 and also barring future RIFs from being issued through the duration of the CR.
While Republicans made concessions on RIFs, Democrats ultimately were unable to push through any meaningful policy goals and fell short on their call to extend Obamacare subsidies. In response, high-profile Democrats tore into their Senate colleagues for caving, calling it a "surrender."
"Pathetic," California Gov. Gavin Newsom's press office said in a post on X. "This isn’t a deal. It’s a surrender. Don’t bend the knee!"
"America deserves better," Newsom added in another post on X.
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It's not just rumored presidential hopefuls who took a stand against their Democrat Senate allies. Many of the eight defectors' colleagues came out against their vote, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
"There's no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight," Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in a post on X. "And my fear is that Trump gets stronger, not weaker, because of this acquiescence. I'm angry — like you. But I choose to keep fighting."
"To my mind, this was a very, very bad vote," independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said in a post on X.
"Just on Tuesday, we had an election, all over this country. And what the election showed is that the American people want us to stand up to Trumpism. ... That is what the American people wanted. But tonight, that is not what happened."
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Elon Musk has joined a chorus of conservatives pushing for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to force Democrats into a talking filibuster in order to pass the SAVE America Act, which requires proof of U.S. citizenship and photo ID to vote in federal elections. “The filibuster rule is meant to allow senators to present […]
The talking filibuster has been a tool in the Senate’s arsenal for 200 years. Returning to it could unlock the majesty of the institution.
Sources say some Senate Republicans don't want to see the popular election-integrity measure come up for a vote.
A voter ID filibuster would be a 24/7 GOP campaign ad.
The filibuster will end sooner or later, so conservatives should act now while they have power in the House, Senate, and White House.
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