I've been trying to get ahold of you regarding our car's warranty. Oops. Sorry, wrong script.
Welcome to Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. Midweek, six days from the election, and the coffee’s already working overtime. (Make mine crunchy, if you please). Leaves have turned around here in Western New York. It's a very pretty sight. The leaf peeper traffic around the Florack Word Ranch has quadrupled in the last few days, making even a quick run to the store ummm… interesting.
My calendar says it’s Chocolate Day, First Responders Day, and Internal Medicine Day. So buy a box of chocolates for the firehouse down the road, and explain to your internist later why you ate the rest yourself.
Today in History:
1492: Christopher Columbus lands on Cuba, convinced he’s reached Asia.
1636: The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s legislature votes to found the college later named Harvard.
1868: Thomas Edison files for his first patent, an electric vote recorder that legislators promptly refuse to buy. Mostly because it worked too well. It was fast and conclusive, and at the time and since, slow vote counts were a feature, not a bug.
1886: President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
1919: Congress overrides President Woodrow Wilson’s veto and passes the Volstead Act, enforcing Prohibition.
1922: Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts march on Rome, and within days, the king hands him the government.
1929: Investors panic on “Black Monday,” and the Dow drops nearly 13% in a single day.
1940: Italy invades Greece, and the Greeks answer with a flat Oxi (No).
1958: Cardinals elect Angelo Roncalli pope, and he takes the name John XXIII.
1962: Nikita Khrushchev agrees to pull Soviet missiles out of Cuba, ending the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1965: Workers top out the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
1965: Pope Paul VI promulgates Nostra Aetate, rejecting the charge that the Jewish people are collectively guilty of Christ’s death.
2018: Brazilian voters elect Jair Bolsonaro president.
Birthdays Today include: Evelyn Waugh, novelist (Brideshead Revisited, Scoop); Francis Bacon, painter (Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion); Jonas Salk, virologist (polio vaccine); Charlie Daniels, singer and fiddler (“The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “Long Haired Country Boy”); Jane Alexander, actress (All the President’s Men, Kramer vs. Kramer); Dennis Franz, actor (NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues); Annie Potts, actress (Ghostbusters, Designing Women); Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder; Julia Roberts, actress (Pretty Woman, Erin Brockovich); Brad Paisley, country singer (“Mud on the Tires,” “Whiskey Lullaby”); Joaquin Phoenix, actor (Gladiator, Walk the Line, Joker); Frank Ocean, singer (Channel Orange, Blonde).
If today’s your birthday, too, Charlie Daniels says you can fiddle your way out of anything. Copies of the devil's concert schedule are available in the lobby. Happy Birthday.
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I've already listed in past columns a number of accomplishments by President Donald Trump. Both he and the Democrats want to make this election about him.
Democrats, particularly, are desperately wanting this election to be about Donald Trump. Every ad, every cable segment, every fundraising email says the same thing: Trump, Trump, Trump. Hate, Hate, Hate.
Fine. Let’s take them up on their invitation, but with one crucial, tactical twist: Instead of allowing this election to become yet another referendum on Donald Trump, let’s make it a trial of how the Democrat establishment reacted to him.
When you step back and view the political landscape of the last decade objectively, a striking pattern emerges. What the Democrat Party and its institutional allies have framed as a selfless defense of constitutional norms looks, upon closer examination, far more like a systematic overreach of power. If you lay out the record end to end — from the weaponization of government agencies and unprecedented legal maneuvers to the collusion with tech platforms to suppress dissenting speech and the shifting of long-held democratic procedures whenever they proved politically inconvenient — it reads less like a high-minded defense of republican values and more like an institutional rap sheet.
It is time to hold that record up to the light, so grab ahold of something. I'm adding headings for each section because each of these points is worth separate discussion.
They spied on his campaign.
Start in 2016. The FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane and wiretapped Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The Justice Department’s own inspector general later found 17 significant errors and omissions in the surveillance applications. After the fact, the secret FISA court itself concluded that two of those applications were not valid. An FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to doctoring an email to keep the surveillance going.
Then special counsel John Durham reported that the FBI launched the whole thing on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence. That’s the investigation that hung over Trump’s entire first term. Two years of “collusion” headlines, and Robert Mueller never charged a single American with conspiring with Russia. That’s what sabotage looks like when it wears a badge. And guess what? Now we see James Comey being dragged into court just yesterday over it.
They silenced him.
Two days after Jan. 6, Twitter permanently suspended the sitting president of the United States. Facebook followed. And later, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to Congress that the Biden administration pressured Meta to censor content and said he regretted going along with it. The only thing that saved the outfit called Twitter at the time was the ownership change.
When Trump went on trial in Manhattan, Judge Juan Merchan slapped him with a gag order, then held him in contempt and threatened him with jail for talking about witnesses who were trashing him on national television. The leading candidate for president, gagged mid-campaign. Nothing to see here, citizens. Go about your lives.
They raided his home.
On Aug. 8, 2022, FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago, the private residence of a former president, over a records dispute that previous administrations had handled with letters and negotiations. Two years later, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the resulting case after ruling that Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. Smith now faces a criminal referral on the matter.
They arrested him. Four times.
In 2023, prosecutors in New York, Florida, Washington, and Georgia brought four separate indictments totaling 91 felony counts. Trump surrendered and was booked four times, capped by a mug shot at the Fulton County jail that his campaign promptly turned into a T-shirt. Ninety-one counts, all landing right in the middle of a presidential campaign. Pure coincidence, surely.
They tried to take him off the ballot.
When the courts weren’t moving fast enough, Democrats tried to stop voters from choosing Trump at all. Colorado’s Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state tried to kick him off their ballots under the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed them unanimously, 9-0. Nine to nothing. Even the court’s liberals couldn’t stomach it.
They prosecuted his supporters.
The Justice Department charged roughly 1,500 people in connection with Jan. 6. Some assaulted police and earned their sentences. But hundreds more were nonviolent trespassers who got hunted down for years, held for years in pretrial detention, and paraded as “insurrectionists,” while the 2020 rioters who burned cities didn't face a fraction of that scrutiny. Trump pardoned them on his first day back in office.
And the rhetoric had consequences.
For over a decade, Democrat leaders called Trump a fascist, a Hitler, and an existential threat to democracy itself. Then people started trying to kill him.
On July 13, 2024, a gunman in Butler put a bullet through Trump’s ear and killed firefighter Corey Comperatore. Two months later, Ryan Routh lay in wait at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach with a rifle; a jury convicted him of attempted assassination. In April, prosecutors say Cole Allen charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and shot a Secret Service officer. And in August, police arrested an armed man near Trump’s golf club in California, allegedly scouting his security.
No one can draw a straight line from a cable-news panel to a trigger finger. But tell enough people, often enough, that a man is the next Hitler, and don’t act surprised when someone decides to play Valkyrie.
“Saving Democracy”
Now read the list again: spying on his campaign, silencing him online, gagging him in court, raiding his home, charging him 91 times, trying to strike him from the ballot, prosecuting his supporters, and painting a target on his back. And we’re supposed to accept that these people are the ones “saving democracy.”
I've already pointed out the Democrats are champing at the bit to get Trump with Congressional power, once again overriding the will of the people. And after all that, they want us to trust them?
Recommended: Dear Leftists: Shut the Hell Up About Trump 'Profiting' From Politics
Folks, Democracy is voters choosing. Every item on that list was an attempt to keep voters from choosing, or to punish them for the choice they made.
So yes, let’s make this election about Trump. Specifically, about what his opponents were willing to do to stop him. Then ask yourself what they’ll do with the House and Senate back in their hands.
Thought for the Day: A party that calls every lawful election a crisis has already decided what it will do if it loses.
VIP members: It's time. Your voice matters. Dive into the comment section.
Take care today, folks. I'll see you here tomorrow, I hope.