Flush the Incumbents in November.
By Scott Ortkiese | June 9, 2026 | so@throughlinesynthesis.com
TO THE REPUBLICANS:
I am writing to you not as an enemy, but as a fellow American who used to believe some of what you believed. I believed in balanced budgets. I believed in a foreign policy that did not squander American lives in the sands of other people’s countries. I believed the Party of Lincoln stood for something more than blind fealty to one man. I have watched you, over the last decade, hand every one of those principles over to a twice-impeached, 34-count-convicted felon, a jury-adjudicated sexual abuser, a judicially-adjudicated fraudster, a man who wrote a bawdy 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein inside a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman with his signature curling down where the pubic hair should be. And I have watched you convince yourselves that this is somehow the second coming of Ronald Reagan.
I am here to tell you plainly: the American people are done pretending. Your party is walking, eyes open, mouths shut, into the worst midterm massacre since Watergate. You are being led there by a man who cannot remember whether the country he is bombing is called Iran or Japan. The only question that remains is whether you are going to have the courage to save yourselves by breaking with him, or whether you are going to be buried with him in November and again in 2028.
This is that letter. It is not going to be kind. It is not going to be short. But every single fact in it is on the public record, and every single one of them is going to cost you votes in the midterms.
PART I. THE MAN YOU HAVE HANDED THE NUCLEAR CODES TO
Let us begin with what happened this week, because it is the perfect summary of everything that is wrong with the man you have elevated to the American presidency for a second time.
On Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at a NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, the President of the United States, the sole human being on planet Earth who can launch a nuclear weapon on his own authority, delivered a press conference that will be studied for decades as a case study in cognitive collapse and diplomatic disaster. In the space of a single hour, Donald Trump did the following.
One. He called the government of a country of ninety million people “scum,” “sick,” “evil,” “vicious,” and “violent.”
Two. He announced that he had been attacked by “the Islamic Republic of Japan.” Japan. A treaty ally of the United States since 1951. He said this on live television.
Three. He turned to Volodymyr Zelensky and asked him what “President Putin” wanted to ask. He confused the Ukrainian president he was standing next to with the Russian president he claims to be negotiating with.
Four. He called the JCPOA, the deal he has railed against for a decade, “the JCPO.” Then he called it “the Obama nuclear waste deal.”
Five. He called the late Ayatollah Khamenei “Khomeini,” a man who died in 1989.
Six. When asked point-blank whether he was taking the United States into a full-scale war with Iran, his first two words were: “I don’t know.” He then added: “But if we did go back, it would be easy. It would be blood.”
Seven. He openly threatened to seize the sovereign oil terminal of another nation: “We attacked Kharg Island last night. Maybe we’ll take over Kharg Island. There’s not a thing they can do about it.”
Republican senators, Republican House members, Republican pundits, Republican donors: read that list again. Now imagine, genuinely imagine, that Joe Biden had said all of that in a single press conference. You would have called for the 25th Amendment before lunch. You would have run television ads for the next twelve months about “the man who confused Japan with Iran while starting a war.” You know you would have. Because you did it for twelve months over Biden calling someone the wrong name at a fundraiser.
This is your standard. Not ours. Yours. And you are refusing to apply it to the man who is now, on live television, making Joe Biden look like Cicero.
PART II. “I DON’T KNOW.” THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF CONFESSES ON AIR FORCE ONE
Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a four-tour combat veteran and one of the most respected retired officers in the country, put it plainly on Glenn Diesen’s program this week: “The bottom line here is that President Trump has no idea what he’s doing and he doesn’t know. I’m not using that as a pejorative. I’m using his own words.” Davis added: “He’s trapped himself into a position he can’t get out of and doesn’t know how to get out of. All the levers he has previously used to bludgeon people, to coerce them, to threaten them, they have worked up until now. And he doesn’t know how to act when all of a sudden all these things that have historically worked are now fizzling out.”
That is a combat veteran telling the American people that the sitting Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces is in the middle of a live shooting war and does not know what to do.
Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky on Breaking Points, a program watched by more Americans than most of cable news combined, described the moment succinctly: “We are in a ceasefire where the fire has not ceased. We are in a memorandum of understanding where there is no understanding. We are in a peace process where there is no peace.”
And who signed the “peace” that is not peace? Donald Trump. Personally. In June 2026. Then he blew it up nineteen days later because he did not read paragraph 5.
PART III. THE MOU PARAGRAPH 5 DISASTER, IN PLAIN ENGLISH
Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute and Lt. Col. Davis both laid out the mechanics on air this week, and every American Republican who claims to care about “the deal” and “the art of it” should read this section three times.
The June 17 Memorandum of Understanding was, in Davis’s precise phrase, “not a deal. It was merely a signpost that started the negotiations to get to a deal that would have ended the war.” Trump kept calling it a deal because he thinks the word makes him look good. It made him look ignorant.
Paragraph 5, governing the Strait of Hormuz, was deliberately left ambiguous by both sides. That ambiguity was the only way to get a signature at all. The paragraph gave Iran 60 days to administer safe passage without charging fees; on day 61, Iran had explicitly and repeatedly said fees would resume. Everyone knew this. Trump signed it anyway.
The United States then unilaterally invented a “southern corridor” through Omani waters and told commercial ships to bypass Iranian coordination, something the MOU Trump signed gave America no authority to do. In Davis’s words: “The MOU President Trump signed did not give us any authorization to determine how anything happened in the strait, but we took it.”
Iran warned the ships. Warned them again. On the third day, during the funeral of the former Supreme Leader, which Iran read as a deliberate American provocation timed to a moment of national mourning, Iran fired warning shots at three vessels.
Trump’s response was a 20-to-1 barrage, his own boastful phrase, said on camera at the NATO press conference, that hit approximately 90 Iranian military targets in a single night, with the Pentagon and Central Command confirming strikes across more than 80 sites in the days that followed.
The United States then hit civilian rail infrastructure. That is the sort of horizontal-escalation target that historically triggers reciprocal civilian-infrastructure strikes.
Trump did not know what paragraph 5 said when he signed it. He did not know what “60 days” meant when he agreed to it. He did not know what happens when you unilaterally invent a shipping corridor in someone else’s territorial waters. And now, in his own words, he does not know whether he is taking the country to war.
This is the man you are still standing next to. This is “peace through strength.” This is “the art of the deal.” This is the man who was going to end the Ukraine war “in twenty-four hours” and is now, eighteen months in, deeper in it than Biden ever was.
PART IV. J.D. VANCE SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD
If any of you still cling to the idea that the Trump administration entered the MOU in good faith, let me hand you the words of your own Vice President. On camera. On the record. Played this week on The Young Turks by Ana Kasparian in her interview with Trita Parsi:
“So I think what the president has told us to do is use this MOU to sort of refill the world’s oil economy. To refill some stocks and then to see where the hand is.”
That is the Vice President of the United States admitting, in front of a camera, that the ceasefire your president signed was a stalling tactic: a fake peace deployed to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and reposition missile inventory for the next round of war. And this after the U.S. carried out surprise strikes on Iran twice, during active peace negotiations, in February and March of this year.
Republican members of Congress: your Vice President has just confessed, publicly, that the executive branch you are lockstep supporting negotiates in bad faith. What is left of your moral or political credibility when you defend that?
PART V. PETE HEGSETH, THE WEEKEND FOX HOST ANNOUNCING BLOCKADES ON LIVE TV
Standing next to Trump in Ankara, because in this administration the Defense Secretary now stands next to the president like a sidekick on a reality show, Pete Hegseth said this into a live microphone:
“Tonight, if we need to on your order, Mr. President, we will hit even more and even deeper because that’s the consequence. And we may put down the blockade. We may put it back, the blockade.”
Blockade. A word with an exact meaning in international law, one which for centuries has been considered a casus belli, a legitimate act of war. Hegseth said it into a hot mic and no one in the White House press office corrected him. Iran International reported back in May that Hegseth has been repeating the “blockade is still in place” line for two months. This is the same Pete Hegseth who boasted at a Pentagon podium a month ago: “We hit them hard yesterday and we’re gonna hit them again hard today,” hours after his own president had claimed to have called off strikes.
This man was hired off of Fox and Friends Weekend. He has never run a military organization larger than a small nonprofit veterans’ group he was forced out of after allegations of financial mismanagement and public drunkenness. He is announcing blockades and civilizational war crimes on television because he thinks it makes good TV. He has no clue that his own Navy, 20 warships in the region per Central Command’s own propaganda video, cannot enforce a blockade of the world’s most critical oil chokepoint against a determined Iran armed with swarming small craft, coastal missile batteries, and mining capability.
Republicans in the Senate confirmed this man 51 to 50, with a Vance tiebreaker, over the objections of every serious military voice in the country. You own him. Every gaffe, every boast, every checkbook-defying threat, every dead soldier who is going to come home in a flag if this escalates: you own all of it.
PART VI. THE STRATEGIC SUICIDE NO ONE WANTS TO ADMIT TO
Here is a fact that ought to be on the front page of every American newspaper and isn’t. The United States is running out of missile interceptors.
Ryan Grim on Breaking Points laid it out. During the initial 40-day Iran war earlier this year, Iran depleted key U.S. missile-defense stockpiles by 40 to 50 percent, in 37 days. If a China-Taiwan conflict erupts in the next 2 to 3 years, “our stockpile will go to zero in third.”
Emily Jashinsky, same program: “Ukraine has been consistently complaining that we’ve used multiple times as many ballistic missile interceptors for Israel and for American ships in Iran as have been used in the entire war between Russia and Ukraine, which is true.” In the most recent Russian ballistic-missile barrage on Kyiv, Ukraine intercepted zero ballistic missiles, because we have handed the inventory to Iron Dome batteries in Israel and Aegis destroyers in the Persian Gulf.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drained to its lowest level since 1983. As of the week ending July 3, 2026, the reserve held roughly 319 million barrels, a figure that has fallen by more than 100 million barrels since the pre-war peak of 415 million in early 2026, with a 9.1-million-barrel single-week emergency release in late May.
Iran’s parliament now has a bill on the floor to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and change Iranian nuclear doctrine. Davis, citing technical people he has consulted, warns that if Iran makes the political decision, “they could literally have a bomb within a month,” because the “Midnight Hammer” strike destroyed one facility, not the many others.
This is your peace-through-strength presidency. In eighteen months, Trump has turned the world’s most powerful defense industrial base into a hollow shell that cannot simultaneously supply Ukraine, Israel, itself, and Taiwan. He has done it while his own parliament-facing counterpart in Tehran openly weighs going nuclear.
PART VII. THE ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE REPUBLICANS OWN FROM PRECINCT TO PRECINCT
Republicans, this is the part you need to memorize before you go home to your districts this August, because I promise you every one of your Democratic opponents already has.
Gas at the pump today, July 9, 2026: national average approximately $3.84 a gallon, with California at $5.38 and the entire West Coast in the $5 range. Diesel is around $4.80. Even the cheapest gas in Texas is $3.41, a full dollar higher than pre-war.
Household cost of the Iran war: the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculates the average additional cost to an American family, as of July 9, 2026, at $446.53, projected to reach $553.37 by end of summer.
Inflation: the IMF has just downgraded global inflation to 4.7 percent in 2026, from 4.1 percent, and slashed global growth to 3 percent from 3.5 percent. PCE inflation in the United States sits at 4.5 percent and consumer confidence is at 57. Real wages are negative for most working Americans.
Family formation: 68 percent of Americans say they cannot afford to have children; 61 percent say they are delaying or reconsidering the decision to have kids, primarily because of cost of living. That is the actual measurable end of the American family, and it is happening on your watch.
Presidential approval: Trump is at 34 to 37 percent in most major trackers. His net approval, per The Hill’s tracker, has crashed to negative 25 points, the lowest of any president in the modern tracker. His economic approval is 30 percent. His inflation approval is 22 percent. His gas-price approval is 19 percent.
Republican voters themselves: in the Reuters/Ipsos survey, 41 percent of Republicans disapprove of Trump’s economic management. That is not the Democrats. That is your own base.
Generic congressional ballot: Democrats plus 7 points, 48.1 percent to 41.1 percent, the widest Democratic lead since August 2018. In August 2018, that spread produced a 41-seat Democratic gain in the House.
Independents: in the Center Square poll of June 2026, self-identified independents preferred a Democratic congressional candidate 39 percent to 19 percent over a Republican. Among “True Independents,” those who refuse to lean either way, Democrats lead 20 percent to 10 percent, with 49 percent undecided. Those 49 percent are the ballgame, and Trump is losing them by the day.
Young voters, 18 to 29: Democrats 55 percent, Republicans 33 percent in the same survey. That is a 22-point generational gap. You are not just losing the midterms. You are losing an entire generation of American voters, permanently.
Trump promised in 2024 that he would bring gas down to $1.87 a gallon on “day one.” He has doubled it. He promised he would “end inflation immediately.” Under him, PCE inflation has risen from 2.6 percent at inauguration to 4.5 percent today. He promised no new wars. He is fighting two. He promised American families would be richer. Sixty-eight percent of them say they can no longer afford children.
“$5 Rogers” is coming to every Republican Senate candidate this fall. Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed already coined the phrase for Mike Rogers, and every Democratic strategist in the country is copying the playbook. Every one of you who has cheerleaded this Iran war is going to spend the fall of 2026 defending $5-a-gallon gas, $553 in extra household costs, and a comatose Senate leader you cannot prove is alive. Every one.
PART VIII. MITCH McCONNELL, SCOTT JENNINGS, AND THE WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S COVER-UP
Mitch McConnell, 84, has not been seen in public for approximately four weeks. On June 14, 2026, he was found unconscious at his Washington home, reportedly following a suspected cardiac event. He was hospitalized. He has not spoken publicly since. His wife Elaine Chao, the former Trump Cabinet secretary who now sits on Chinese-affiliated boards, is in China. She left his bedside two days after he was hospitalized, and her statement justifying the departure has never confirmed she has since seen him in person.
Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, a man who would appoint McConnell’s replacement in the event of a vacancy, has publicly and entirely reasonably demanded that the senator “be transparent” and provide a health update.
Trump, asked on camera whether he has spoken to McConnell, answered: “No. How’s he doing? I have no idea.”
And yet on Tuesday, July 7, McConnell’s staff suddenly announced that the senator had held three separate, coincidentally-20-minute phone calls with, respectively, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso, and the pigeon in the cover-up, CNN’s Scott Jennings. Same day. Same duration. Nearly identical topic list.
Jennings tweeted that they spoke for “just shy of 20 minutes” about Iran, Ukraine, the Graham Platner controversy in Maine, Jennings’s visit to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, and “a little bit of Senate history.” Then, on CNN’s The Arena that evening, anchor Kasie Hunt did what every American journalist in the country should have been doing for four weeks: she asked Jennings to call McConnell live on the air.
Jennings refused. He backpedaled. The 20 minutes suddenly became “about 17 minutes.” He was “not qualified to discuss any medical issues” and did not “know what McConnell was dealing with.” His story degraded in real time; his details started sounding rehearsed; his voice tightened. Then he pivoted to attacking the credibility of anyone speculating about McConnell’s condition.
Let us be precise about what this pattern shows. Three GOP loyalists produced simultaneous, coincidentally-identical “20-minute phone calls” with an 84-year-old man who just had a cardiac event, on the same day, covering the same range of topics. Only one of them, Jennings, was foolish enough to boast about it on television, where he was immediately caught refusing to redial.
Scott Jennings appears to have fabricated a phone call with a hospitalized senator to run political cover for the Republican Senate leadership on a Kentucky seat you are afraid to lose in a Beshear-appointed special election. He should be fired by CNN immediately. Kasie Hunt should be commended for being the only person on cable news with the guts to hand him a phone.
But the real scandal is what Republican leadership is doing behind the scenes. As Chris Norlund summarized this week on his own show: “The Republicans are worried if there’s a special election, they might lose, and someone else that they don’t want will get in. That’s basically what it boils down to.” So rather than tell the American people the truth about the health of an 84-year-old United States senator, Republican Senate leadership is coordinating with a paid television surrogate to stage-manage phone calls that at least one of them appears to have invented.
This is Weekend at Bernie’s with a Senate seat. It is a moral disgrace. And it is being run by the same party that spent five years demanding cognitive tests for Joe Biden.
PART IX. THE EPSTEIN FILES, THE THING TRUMP CANNOT MAKE GO AWAY
Republicans, we now need to have the conversation you have refused to have with yourselves.
For nine years, your movement told America that Donald J. Trump was going to “drain the swamp” and expose the “pedophile elite” who ran Washington. You built entire media empires, from Q-Anon in the basement to Charlie Kirk on the mainstage, on the promise that the Epstein files were going to be released, the client list published, the powerful named and jailed.
Then Donald Trump won. And suddenly the files could not be released. His Attorney General, Pam Bondi, initially made a great show of “Phase 1,” a photo-op binder handed to right-wing influencers on the White House lawn that contained essentially nothing new. The DOJ and FBI then released a joint memo stating that “a client list does not exist,” that Epstein “committed suicide,” a conclusion Trump himself has publicly questioned for years, and that there is no evidence Epstein blackmailed prominent people.
Your own base rebelled. Laura Loomer publicly demanded a special counsel. Charlie Kirk raged. Alex Jones melted down. And Trump’s response? He went on Truth Social and called his own supporters, the MAGA activists who had spent nine years demanding these files, “weaklings.” He told them the Epstein story was a “Democrat hoax” and a “bullshit” distraction. He told his “so-called friends” to “stop wasting time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” and instructed everyone to “let Pam Bondi do her job.”
Then, on July 17, 2025, The Wall Street Journal published a story that changed everything. The paper obtained, through documents held by the Epstein estate and later provided to the House Oversight Committee, a 50th birthday album compiled for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 by Ghislaine Maxwell, the same Ghislaine Maxwell now serving 20 years in federal prison for child sex trafficking. In that album was a letter bearing Donald Trump’s signature. According to the Journal, and now confirmed via subsequent House Oversight release, the letter is drawn inside the outline of a naked woman. In the Journal’s own words:
“Two small arcs represent the woman’s breasts, with the future president’s signature appearing in a squiggly form as ‘Donald’ positioned below her waist, resembling pubic hair.”
The letter closes with the line: “Happy Birthday, may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump’s response was immediate and multi-pronged. First, he denied ever writing it: “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women. It’s not my language.” Second, he sued Rupert Murdoch, Dow Jones, and the two reporters personally, in the Southern District of Florida. Third, as if this were a game, he ordered Bondi to “produce all Grand Jury materials, subject to Court approval” in a Truth Social post that same evening, as if grand-jury releases could be ordered by tweet.
House Oversight later confirmed the birthday book exists and contains Trump’s signed letter, along with letters from Alan Dershowitz, Les Wexner, and others. The book has been in DOJ possession for years.
Republicans, look at this timeline, on Trump’s own record and in his own words.
October 28, 2002. New York Magazine, four years before the FBI investigation began, six years before Epstein’s plea deal, seventeen years before his federal trafficking arrest: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
“Younger side,” as we now know from FBI charging documents and victim testimony, meant girls as young as fourteen.
Flight logs, publicly released by the Epstein estate, confirm Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet, the Lolita Express, multiple times in the early 1990s.
2003: the birthday letter above.
2019, after Epstein’s arrest: “I barely knew him. I wasn’t a fan.”
One of those two statements is a lie. Both cannot be true. In 2002, Trump said he had known Epstein for fifteen years, meaning since 1987, and called him a “terrific guy” whose taste for young women he shared and admired. In 2019, he claimed he “barely” knew him. One of these statements is perjury under oath if it is ever repeated in a deposition, and the other is a public admission of intimate friendship with a serial pedophile.
You cannot square this circle by shouting “Democrat hoax.” The record is Trump’s own words. The birthday letter is Trump’s own signature. And your president is now in federal court trying to sue Rupert Murdoch, the co-founder of the modern conservative media empire, for reporting what the Wall Street Journal editors verified through the Epstein estate.
Let us call this what it is. Donald Trump, the sitting President of the United States, was, on his own recorded admission, a 15-year close personal friend of the most notorious child sex trafficker in modern American history. He knew of, and casually commented on, that trafficker’s preference for underage girls. He is now personally suing the newspaper that revealed his sexually explicit birthday letter to that trafficker. That is not a “witch hunt.” That is a public record.
PART X. THE RAP SHEET REPUBLICANS REFUSE TO READ ALOUD
Republicans, before we go any further, look at the record of the man you have made the nominal head of your party. It is a record I ask you to imagine, once again, applying to any Democrat.
34 felony convictions. In May 2024, a Manhattan jury of twelve Americans found Donald J. Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to adult-film performer Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign, a scheme to defraud American voters. He was the first former or sitting U.S. president in history to be convicted of a felony. Judge Juan Merchan sentenced him to an unconditional discharge only because he was about to re-take office. The conviction stands on his record.
Jury-adjudicated sexual abuse. In May 2023, a federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department-store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her. In January 2024, a second federal jury awarded Carroll an additional $83.3 million in damages for further defamation. Trump’s appeals have been rejected, most recently at the Second Circuit in April 2026 and by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2026. Under Judge Lewis Kaplan’s post-trial ruling, the word “rape,” as ordinary Americans understand it, describes what the jury found Trump did.
In sworn deposition in the Carroll case, Trump was asked whether stars can “grab” women. His answer, verbatim: “Well, that’s what, if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”
The Access Hollywood tape, 2005, verified in every particular by his own co-host Billy Bush, in his own voice: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” At least 26 women have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct ranging from unwanted kissing and groping to rape.
The New York fraud judgment. In February 2024, New York Judge Arthur Engoron found Trump, his adult sons, and his business liable for a decade of financial fraud, inflating asset values by between $812 million and $2.2 billion to defraud lenders and insurers. The judgment: $464 million. In August 2025, a New York appellate court reduced the monetary penalty on procedural grounds but upheld the core finding that Trump committed fraud. Trump remains barred from serving as an officer of a New York corporation.
The classified documents case. Trump was charged under the Espionage Act with 40 counts of willfully retaining national defense information and conspiracy to obstruct justice for hoarding boxes of classified material at Mar-a-Lago, in bathrooms, and in ballrooms. The case was dismissed in November 2024 on procedural grounds after his re-election.
The January 6 federal case. Trump was charged by Special Counsel Jack Smith with four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding, for his role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The case was dropped in November 2024 solely because DOJ policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president. The evidence in the indictment remains, uncontested, in the public record.
Pardons of the coup plotters. In November 2025, Trump pardoned Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and other co-conspirators from the 2020 election-overturn effort. He also pardoned or commuted the sentences of hundreds of January 6 rioters, including those convicted of assaulting police officers.
Republicans, ask yourselves plainly: is this the moral leader of the Party of Lincoln? Is this the man for whom you have jettisoned every doctrine of family, faith, law, and country your party once claimed to stand for?
You have made your peace with a 34-count convicted felon, a jury-adjudicated sexual abuser, a judicially-adjudicated fraudster, a man who wrote lewd birthday letters inside outlines of naked women to a serial child trafficker, a man who calls his own supporters “weaklings” when they ask him to release the files he promised, a man who cannot in a single press conference tell Iran from Japan or Zelensky from Putin, a man who tells the country he doesn’t know whether he’s starting a war, a man who is presiding over $5 gas, a $464 million fraud judgment, and a strategic petroleum reserve at 1983 levels.
If your grandfathers could see what you have done to their party, they would weep.
PART XI. THE UNIPARTY AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE YOU HAVE BOTH BETRAYED
But this letter would not be honest if it stopped at the Republicans, because the American people are not fools, and they know the Democrats have been every inch as complicit in the wars that are draining this country dry.
The Biden administration ran a proxy war in Ukraine that consumed $175 billion in American treasure and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, with no coherent plan for victory and every incentive to prolong the killing.
Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats voted lockstep for every emergency Israel aid package that helped depopulate Gaza and vaporize the international laws of war.
Kamala Harris ran a presidential campaign in 2024 whose singular foreign-policy message was: more of the same. She lost, and she deserved to lose.
Democratic leadership in 2026 has been essentially invisible in opposing the Iran war. Only four Republican House members and a handful of Senate Democrats even bothered to vote for the War Powers Resolution that would have limited Trump’s Iran authorities.
On the Epstein files, Senate Democrats have talked a big game and delivered nothing. Pam Bondi walked out of a House Oversight interview last month having answered essentially no questions of substance, and the Democratic response was a strongly worded press release.
This is the Uniparty: a donor class, a defense contractor class, an intelligence-community class, and an AIPAC-blessed foreign policy class that stretches across both wings of the Washington establishment and speaks with a single voice on the only issues that actually matter. Endless war. Endless money-printing for the arms industry. Endless subordination of American strategic interests to the geopolitical adventures of small countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Endless indifference to American workers, American families, and American democracy.
Ryan Grim called it the “Democratic industrial complex.” He is right, but only half right. There is a Republican industrial complex that is exactly its mirror image, and the two of them are the same machine wearing two different jerseys.
The American people know this. They have known it for a decade. And now they are going to do something about it.
PART XII. 58 PERCENT OF AMERICA WANTS OUT. IT IS TIME TO GIVE THEM A CHOICE.
Every year for the past twelve consecutive years, Gallup has asked Americans a simple question: Do we need a third major political party in this country? And every year for the last twelve years, through Obama, through Trump 1.0, through Biden, through Trump 2.0, a majority of Americans have said yes.
The current numbers are staggering.
58 percent of all U.S. adults say a third major party is needed.
69 percent of independents, the largest and fastest-growing bloc of American voters, want a third party.
83 percent of Americans who do not view either party favorably want a third party.
Even 43 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats, the two most partisan cohorts in the country, say a third party is needed. In 2022, that number for Democrats hit 74 percent.
This is not a fringe view. This is not a Twitter obsession. This is the overwhelming, sustained, multi-decade will of the American people. And every year the response of the political class is to laugh in their faces, gerrymander harder, raise the ballot-access thresholds, sue third-party candidates off the ballot, and continue running the same two-team scam that put us $37 trillion in debt, fought and lost four wars, and now has the sitting president unable to distinguish Iran from Japan.
The time has come to give Americans the option they have been demanding for a generation.
The infrastructure now exists, barely, imperfectly, but it exists. And more importantly, the political oxygen exists. When the incumbent president is at negative 25 net approval; when his handling of inflation polls at 22 percent approval; when 68 percent of Americans cannot afford to have kids; when the Uniparty has just lit a match to the strategic petroleum reserve on behalf of a country most Americans could not find on a map; this is the moment when a third-party movement becomes possible.
Consider what already exists to build on.
The Forward Party, founded by Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, is now running candidates in over a dozen states and has secured ballot access in a growing number of jurisdictions. Its platform, ranked-choice voting, open primaries, term limits, anti-corruption reform, is the exact set of structural reforms the Uniparty will never enact on its own.
No Labels, whatever one thinks of its 2024 stumbles, spent years securing ballot access in over half the states. That machinery does not evaporate; it can be reactivated for 2026 down-ticket races and for a serious 2028 presidential run.
The Movement for a People’s Party and various left-populist formations have been organizing since 2020 around exactly the anti-war, anti-corporate, pro-worker platform that a Bernie-Sanders-style candidate, someone like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan on the left, or a serious populist conservative on the right, could carry into a general election.
Independent Senate races in Maine (Graham Platner and his successor), Vermont, West Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska show that when voters are given a genuine anti-establishment choice not shackled to either party’s donor list, they take it.
The obstacles are real. Fifty state ballot-access regimes, most of them designed by the two parties specifically to strangle third-party competition in the crib. Debate commissions rigged to exclude anyone not blessed by the Uniparty. A campaign finance system that rewards incumbents by orders of magnitude. A media ecosystem that treats any candidate outside the duopoly as either a spoiler or a joke.
But 58 percent of Americans are still asking for it. And every one of those obstacles is a policy choice, a policy choice made by the two parties who have the most to lose from being challenged. Every one of them can be dismantled with sufficient political pressure.
Here is the call to arms.
If you are an American of any political stripe who has looked at the last eighteen months and said, “This cannot be the choice: a 34-count-convicted felon on one side and a Democratic Party that voted lockstep for every war he now wants to escalate on the other,” then organize. Locally. Now. Not for 2028. For the 2026 midterms.
One. Register independent if you have not already. In every state with meaningful ballot access, an independent registration is worth more than a partisan one.
Two. Recruit candidates for city council, state house, county sheriff, and the school board. Recruit them to run for the Forward Party, for the Libertarian Party, for the Green Party, or as unaffiliated independents. Have them run specifically on ending the Iran war, ending the Ukraine war, releasing the full Epstein files, restoring the 1973 War Powers Act, and passing ranked-choice voting in your state.
Three. Pass ranked-choice voting or open primaries in your state through ballot initiatives. Maine and Alaska have already done it. Colorado nearly did. Every additional state that adopts RCV is a state where a third-party candidate is no longer a “spoiler” but a genuine alternative.
Four. Support Senate candidates who will vote for the War Powers Resolution. Not just endorse it. Vote for it. When four House Republicans broke ranks last month to support limiting Trump’s Iran authorities, that was a signal that even inside the GOP the war coalition is cracking. Reward it.
Five. Withhold your vote from any Republican or Democrat who cannot publicly commit, on the record, to (a) an end to the Iran war within 60 days, (b) an end to U.S. offensive support for the Ukraine war, (c) the full, unredacted release of the Epstein files including grand-jury materials, and (d) support for a bipartisan commission on Trump’s cognitive fitness to hold the nuclear codes.
If they will not commit, replace them. That is the entire ballgame. The two parties have owned Washington for a century and a half not because they are what Americans want, but because Americans keep giving them their votes anyway. Stop giving them your votes.
PART XIII. THE CASE FOR THE NOVEMBER WIPEOUT
Let me speak plainly to the Republican House and Senate incumbents who will read this and think, “But my seat is safe.”
No seat is safe when the top of the ticket is at negative 25 net approval. No seat is safe when the party’s own economic approval is at 30 percent, its inflation approval is at 22 percent, and its gas-price approval is at 19 percent. No seat is safe when the generic ballot has moved from Republicans plus 1 at inauguration to Democrats plus 7 in eighteen months, a 13-point net swing.
Historical analog: in August 2018, Democrats were at plus 7 on the generic ballot and won a 41-seat swing in the House. That was under Trump’s first term, in a much better economic climate, with far less foreign entanglement, and without the Epstein files scandal that is currently metastasizing across MAGA media.
Current conditions are worse for Republicans on every single metric. Trump’s net approval in August 2018 was negative 7; today it is negative 25, 18 points worse. Presidential approval was 42 percent; today it is 34 to 37 percent, roughly 7 points worse. Economic approval was 43 percent; today it is 30 percent, 13 points worse. Inflation approval was above 40 percent; today it is 22 percent, more than 18 points worse. Gas at the pump was $2.85; today it is $3.84 national average, roughly a dollar per gallon higher. Consumer confidence was 96; today it is 57, a massive deterioration. In August 2018 the United States was in zero active shooting wars; today it is in two, Iran and a deepening Ukraine, a catastrophic reversal. Republican own-base approval of Trump’s economic management was 74 percent in 2018; today it is 59 percent, with 41 percent of Republicans openly disapproving, 15 points worse.
Republicans in the House are staring at a 40-to-60-seat loss. In the Senate, they are staring at losses in Maine, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and possibly Iowa and Texas. Every Republican governor’s race in a competitive state is now a coin flip at best.
You will not “run against Democrats.” You will be running against $5 gas, an Epstein birthday letter drawn inside the outline of a naked woman, a Defense Secretary announcing acts of war on television, a Commander-in-Chief who cannot remember which country he is bombing, and a Senate leader whose office is faking his phone calls. That is your 2026 ticket. That is the record you will defend.
And in November, the American people are going to send you home.
PART XIV. WHAT EVERY AMERICAN CAN DO IN THE NEXT NINETY DAYS
If you have read this far, you are not a spectator anymore. You are part of what happens next. Here is your homework.
Call your Senator and your House member today. Demand a vote on the War Powers Resolution to limit Trump’s Iran authorities. Demand the full release of the Epstein files, including grand-jury materials. Demand a public update on Mitch McConnell’s condition. Demand a Congressional hearing on the depletion of the missile-interceptor stockpile.
Find and support a third-party or independent candidate in your local or state race for the 2026 cycle. Do not wait for 2028. Do not wait for “the perfect candidate.” A serious, credible independent challenger in every competitive district changes the incentive structure of both parties overnight.
Cancel your cable news subscription. Cancel your Twitter Blue. Cancel your Substack subscriptions to writers who have gone along with the war-hawk consensus. Redirect the money to independent, on-the-ground reporting, including outlets like Breaking Points, The Grayzone, Consortium News, The Duran, and any local reporter in your state actually covering city council and school board races.
Show up to town halls. Bring the questions. Record the answers. Post the videos.
Register non-partisan or independent, in every state where it matters.
Vote in your primary. Both party primaries are open to independents in more states than you think, and it is in the primaries that the Uniparty defends its incumbents. Deny them their nominations.
In November 2026, vote every incumbent out. Republican and Democrat. If they voted for the war, if they enabled the Epstein cover-up, if they supported the Ukraine escalation, if they defended the Iran strikes, if they refused to demand a health disclosure from Mitch McConnell, vote them out.
You are not “wasting your vote” by voting third-party or independent when the incumbents have wasted your vote for a generation. You are reclaiming your vote.
PART XV. THE CLOSING
Republicans, I return to you one last time.
You still have a choice. Not a great one. You have narrowed your options over ten years of accommodation with a man who has now proved, on live television, in front of the entire world, that he cannot reliably distinguish Iran from Japan, Zelensky from Putin, or “the JCPOA” from “the JCPO.” But you do still have a choice.
You can break with him. Publicly. Loudly. Now. You can vote for the War Powers Resolution. You can force the release of the Epstein files. You can demand a public health disclosure from Mitch McConnell. You can strip Pete Hegseth of the ability to announce blockades on television. You can begin the political and moral reconstruction of a party that was once, genuinely, and in some quarters admirably, the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan.
Or you can go down with him.
That is it. Those are your options. There is no third way in which you continue to fold your arms and pretend that “the base” is with him and everything is fine. Because the base is not with him. Forty-one percent of Republicans disapprove of his economic management right now, and Trump is on Truth Social calling them “weaklings” for asking about Epstein. Every additional week that passes, that number gets worse.
The rest of us, the Americans who no longer believe in either of your parties, are going to move forward with or without you. We are going to organize. We are going to run independent candidates. We are going to pass ranked-choice voting in state after state. We are going to build the third party 58 percent of us have been demanding for a decade. And in November 2026, if you have not by then found the spine to break with the man in the White House, we are going to bury both your parties in a landslide the likes of which this country has not seen since 1932.
The world is watching. The Iranians are watching. The Russians are watching. The Chinese are watching. Every ally we have left is watching. And every one of them has now seen the President of the United States, on live television, unable to remember the name of the country he is bombing. Every one of them has now seen the Defense Secretary of the United States announce a blockade, a legal act of war, into a hot microphone. Every one of them has now seen the Vice President of the United States confess on camera that a peace deal was a stalling tactic.
They know what we know: that the American republic, in the summer of 2026, is being led by a lying, thieving, adjudicated fraudster and jury-established sexual abuser who wrote lewd birthday letters to a child sex trafficker and cannot remember, from one sentence to the next, which decade we are in.
Republicans, this is your moment. Choose.
And to every American reading this, Republican, Democrat, independent, disgusted, exhausted, unsure:
In November, vote them all out. Vote for the independent. Vote for the Forward candidate. Vote for the anti-war populist. Vote for the third-party longshot. Vote against the machine. Vote as if your children’s future depends on it.
Because it does.
Lt. Col. Daniel Davis put it this week better than any of us could: “If it was said that the world sleepwalked into World War I, we are now more like zombies heading into World War III, and somebody better damn wake up pretty quick from this malaise, or we’re all going to stumble right into it, and it won’t be anywhere near limited like it was in World War I. This could be catastrophic.”
Wake up, America. Wake up, Republicans. Wake up, Democrats.
November 3, 2026. That is the date circled on every ballot box in this country. That is the date the Uniparty ends, or it doesn’t. That is the date the American people take their government back, or they lose it forever.
Choose.
SOURCES
On the Ankara press conference and the Iran war, July 8 to 9, 2026:
The New Republic. Trump, 80, Confuses Iran for Japan, Zelenskiy for Putin.
Daily Mirror. Befuddled Trump says US fired missiles at the Islamic Republic of Japan.
Chosun Ilbo. Trump Mistakenly Calls Iran the Islamic Republic of Japan.
Kyunghyang Shinmun. String of Trump gaffes at NATO summit.
Al Jazeera. Trump says US may take over Kharg Island.
Reuters. Trump says he wants to take Iran’s Kharg Island oil hub.
CNN. US hits more than 80 Iran targets, reimposes oil sanctions.
U.S. Department of War. U.S. Plans Major Strikes on Iran, Hegseth Says.
Iran International. Hegseth says US blockade of Iran is still in place.
On Scott Jennings and the McConnell cover-up:
People. Former McConnell Aide Scott Jennings Challenged Live on Air.
NBC News. Gov. Beshear urges McConnell to be transparent.
The Daily Beast. Scott Jennings Drips Out More Claims About McConnell.
New York Times. Kentucky governor demands health update on McConnell.
CNN. Scott Jennings on his call today with Sen. Mitch McConnell.
On the Epstein files and the Trump-Epstein relationship:
Wall Street Journal and CNBC. Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein bawdy 50th birthday letter.
Wall Street Journal. Epstein Birthday Letter With Trump’s Signature Revealed.
Rolling Stone. What Trump Has Said About Jeffrey Epstein Over the Years.
Newsweek. Fact Check: Did Donald Trump Call Jeffrey Epstein a Terrific Guy.
Wikipedia. Relationship of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
ABC News. Trump’s comments on Epstein raise new questions.
CNN. Bondi defends DOJ’s handling of Epstein probe.
On Trump’s criminal and civil legal record:
NPR. Trump found guilty on 34 felony counts in hush money trial.
Wikipedia. E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump.
Wikipedia. Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations.
NBC News. New York appeals court on $500 million fraud judgment, August 2025.
Business Insider. Access Hollywood tape and Carroll deposition.
BBC. Billy Bush confirms Access Hollywood tape authenticity.
Associated Press. Status of legal cases against Trump.
CNBC. Trump pardons Rudy Giuliani and others.
On the economy, midterms, and third parties:
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Iran War Fuel Cost tracker, July 9, 2026.
Morningstar and OPIS. Strategic Petroleum Reserve emergency release.
Wikipedia. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, United States.
Gallup. Support for a Third Political Party in the U.S.
The Hill. Trump net approval tracker.
Forbes. Trump approval ratings on Iran and the economy.
US Polling Data. 2026 Generic Ballot, Democrats plus 7.
Center Square and Noble Predictive Insights. June 2026 generic ballot.
Reuters and Ipsos. Trump approval poll, April 28, 2026.
Alestiklal. Nuclear Fatwa Is Dead. What If Iran Withdraws from the NPT.
Forward Party. Run for Office.
Transcripts, aired July 9, 2026:
Breaking Points, with Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky.
Glenn Diesen, with Lt. Col. Daniel Davis.
The Young Turks, with Ana Kasparian and Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute.
Chris Norlund.
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