Welcome, all, to Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026.
My calendar says today is World Suicide Prevention Day. If that's something touching your life or someone you love, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is there at any hour — day or night.
On the lighter side, my calendar also says it's TV Dinner Day, Swap Ideas Day, School Picture Day, and Gibraltar National Day. So pop a frozen dinner in the oven, swap an idea or two with someone outside your usual circle, and smile for the camera — Gibraltar's technically celebrating too, 99.6% of it, anyway.
Today in History:
1608: John Smith is elected council president of the Jamestown colony in Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America.
1813: Naval Capt. Oliver Hazard Perry leads a fleet to victory over a British squadron at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.
1846: Elias Howe receives a patent for his lockstitch sewing machine.
1919: New York City holds a parade welcoming home Gen. John J. Pershing and 25,000 soldiers of the First Division, nearly a year after the armistice ending World War I.
1920: F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes his first short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers.
1935: Sen. Huey Long, Louisiana's "Kingfish," dies in Baton Rouge two days after someone shot him.
1939: Canada declares war on Nazi Germany.
1945: Vidkun Quisling is sentenced to death in Norway for collaborating with the Nazis.
1955: The Western series Gunsmoke premieres on CBS, eventually running 635 episodes over 20 seasons.
1960: The Baghdad Conference concludes with the founding of OPEC.
1962: The Supreme Court rules that black student James Meredith has the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement.
1967: Gibraltar holds its first sovereignty referendum; 99.6 percent of voters choose to remain a British territory rather than revert to Spain.
1977: Hamida Djandoubi becomes the last person executed by guillotine in France.
Birthdays Today include: Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer (Chanel, Fendi); Mary Oliver, poet (American Primitive, New and Selected Poems); Misty Copeland, ballet dancer (American Ballet Theatre). If today's your birthday too, happy birthday from all of us here.
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Ever the consummate showman, President Trump invented the concept of the midterm convention, and he stepped right in to headline it. But there's a perfectly legitimate argument that Republicans should run on what they've actually accomplished rather than turning this election into another referendum on one man. I made exactly that argument myself, at column length, yesterday in the VIP article, “So, What Has Donald Trump Actually Accomplished?” (If you’re not a VIP member yet, why not?)
Elections ought to be about results, policy, and competing visions for the future — not another round of "Trump good" versus "Trump bad." That's the ideal.
Unfortunately, politics doesn't happen in the ideal. It happens in the real world, and every strategy has to survive contact with the reality surrounding it.
And here's the reality Republicans can't wish away: Democrats have already made Donald Trump the centerpiece. They've been doing it for over a decade. Since he first came down that escalator, Democrats and most of the institutional media have treated virtually everything in American life as somehow being about Donald Trump — his personality, his tweets, his speeches, his insults, his policies, his supporters, his opponents, his legal troubles, his victories, his defeats.
Did the cat hack up a hairball on your pillow while you were sleeping? Trump's fault. Car won't start? Trump's fault. Kid brought home a report card that reads like a cry for help? Also, somehow, Trump's fault. At this point, Democrats have done everything but formally rename the San Andreas Fault "Trump's Fault."
For years, Democrats told voters, loudly and on an endless loop, that the defining issue facing the country is Donald Trump. They made him the issue. They made him the villain. They made him the explanation for everything they didn't like. They made him the explanation for everything that happened after he left office. They made him the explanation for everything that's happened since he came back.
And now, having spent years insisting Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic, they apparently expect Republicans to politely agree that maybe we shouldn't bring him up too much this fall?
That's adorable.
Sorry. That's not how this works. Republicans can certainly choose to talk about something else — but that strategy has a fatal flaw: you don't get to unilaterally decide what the other side's campaign is about. If Democrats plan to spend the whole cycle talking about Trump (and obviously they do), pretending he isn't part of the election just hands them the subject uncontested. Not answering them isn't strategy. It's surrender with better lighting.
There's also a real difference between making Trump the centerpiece and simply recognizing that the opposition has already made him the centerpiece. Those aren't nearly the same move.
Republicans don't have to make every speech about Trump. They don't need his face on every mailer. They don't need every candidate sounding like they were personally deputized by Trump to defend Western civilization before breakfast. But they do need to recognize the political battlefield they're standing on.
The question isn't whether Republicans should crown Donald Trump the centerpiece of the midterms. It's whether they're willing to fight on the battlefield that already exists — which is exactly what I did in yesterday’s column, and from what I saw, what they did last night, in Texas. If Democrats are going to campaign on stopping Trump, Republicans have every right, and frankly an obligation, to ask voters a simple follow-up: "Stopping him from doing what, exactly?" That's the question Democrats don't want asked, because it's where their whole strategy comes apart.
It's one thing to tell voters that Donald Trump is an awful human being, a threat to democracy, a fascist, a dictator-in-waiting, or whatever label happens to be trending that week. And as they’ve demonstrated, you don’t even need to have any proof of any of it. Simple repetition does the work.
However, it's an entirely different thing to explain why the actual policies voters are living under should be thrown out. Democrats have clearly demonstrated that they can't do the second part. They've never had to — they've spent a decade coasting on the former.
So the Republican case shouldn't be — and isn't — "Vote Republican because Donald Trump says so." It should be: "Here's what we promised. Here's what we delivered. Here's what Democrats want to undo. And here's what happens if they get the chance to do that." That's exactly what I laid out yesterday, and what the GOP did last night in Dallas.
That's the God-given opening Republicans have in front of them. So sure — let Democrats talk about Trump all they want. Then ask voters whether they're better off under the policies Democrats want to bring back, or the ones Republicans actually put in place. That flips the entire question into an argument Democrats don't want to have. It forces them to defend something besides their hatred of one man. Absent an actual record to run on, Democrats will lean on nothing but anti-Trump chants, and you and I both know it.
Shift the argument, and it becomes: if Trump is supposedly the gravest threat the country's ever faced, what's the alternative? Higher taxes? More spending? More regulation? Wide-open immigration? More of the energy policy that keeps making American energy more expensive? More government dependency? More of the cultural chaos that's convinced so many ordinary Americans the Democrat Party no longer recognizes the country they actually live in?
Democrats keep chanting the same decade-old anti-Trump dirge because it's all they've got. And here's the sharper question underneath it: What exactly are Democrats offering the voter who still remembers what life looked like before their last promised "restoration"?
The actual point and the entire purpose of yesterday's column, and I think last night in Dallas, is this: Democrats have spent ten years telling you Trump is the problem. Here's what we've actually accomplished. Here's what they want to undo. Now you decide which direction the country goes.
That's a question Democrats desperately don't want to answer, because hatred of Trump isn't a policy. It isn't a governing philosophy. It isn't an economic program, an immigration policy, or a national-security strategy. It isn't an answer for inflation, a plan for restoring American energy production, or a strategy for dealing with China, Iran, Russia, or North Korea — threats that exist whether or not Donald Trump occupies the White House.
A record like the one I spent days compiling and went to press with yesterday is a lot harder to demonize than a personality — which is exactly where all the "Orange Man Bad" energy comes from in the first place. That reframes the entire midterm fight into one simple challenge: "Fine. We get it, you hate Donald Trump. Now tell us what you're actually going to do for the American people."
The silence will be remarkable.
Thought for the Day: In keeping with the day, perhaps the most important thing anyone will do today is to simply notice someone else and ask if they're okay.
VIP members: Did you watch the coverage last night? What were your thoughts? Your voice counts. Let's hear from you.
Take care today, gang. I'll look forward to you being here tomorrow. See you then.
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