Greetings, and welcome to Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. "Remember, remember the fifth of November," as the old British rhyme goes. Two days after the election, a lot of folks in Washington would like us to forget a few things. We won't.
My calendar says it's Men Make Dinner Day, Doughnut Day, and Bank Transfer Day. Fellas, tonight the kitchen is yours. Start with a doughnut for breakfast to work up your courage. And if your bank keeps nickel-and-diming you with fees, today's the day to move your money somewhere that appreciates it.
Today in History:
1605: Guy Fawkes is arrested in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, foiling the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and King James I.
1872: Susan B. Anthony casts a ballot in Rochester, N.Y., in defiance of the law. She's arrested two weeks later.
1895: George Selden receives the first U.S. patent for a gasoline-powered automobile.
1911: Aviator Calbraith Perry Rodgers lands in Pasadena, Calif., completing the first transcontinental flight. It took him 49 days, with dozens of stops and crashes along the way.
1912: Woodrow Wilson wins the presidency in a three-way race with William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.
1935: Parker Brothers releases the board game Monopoly.
1940: President Franklin Roosevelt wins an unprecedented third term, defeating Wendell Willkie.
1968: Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey to win the presidency.
1994: Former President Ronald Reagan reveals in a handwritten letter to the nation that he has Alzheimer's disease.
1994: At 45, George Foreman knocks out Michael Moorer to become the oldest heavyweight champion in history.
2007: Google unveils Android, its mobile operating system.
2009: Army Maj. Nidal Hasan opens fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people in what officials later classified as a terrorist attack.
Birthdays Today include: Roy Rogers, the "King of the Cowboys" (born five days after his partner, Dale Evans); Vivien Leigh, actress from Gone With the Wind; Art Garfunkel, singer from Simon & Garfunkel; Peter Noone, singer from Herman's Hermits ("Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter"); Sam Shepard, playwright and actor from The Right Stuff; Bryan Adams, rocker from "Summer of '69"; Tatum O'Neal, the youngest Oscar winner in a competitive category, for Paper Moon; Tilda Swinton, actress from Michael Clayton; and Sam Rockwell, actor from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here.
* * *
I wanted to like JD Vance. I really did. But now I'm not going to pull any punches.
From Just The News:
"The reason we lost is the war," [Vance] posted on X. "The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest," Vance went on. "But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there."
He also said the main problem was not voter turnout, it was that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is.
Vance then referenced polling data he had seen showing voters wanted an end to the Iran war, a focus on cost of living issues, for the administration to put "America first," and to reassess the U.S. relationship with Israel.
So were we to allow Iran to complete its nukes and start clamping down on Israel? Why? To make the Islamist horde like us?
Look, Vance is correct that the war was in fact a major voting issue. But let’s also acknowledge most of that is being driven by the Left still scrambling to tack anything they can onto President Trump. However, protection of the country, and frankly the whole of the West, transcends politics. Someone wanting to sit behind the Resolute Desk should understand that as a matter of instinct. Vance's comments are a clear indication that he doesn't and that his priorities are backward.
That understanding is the part the Vice President seems to have misplaced somewhere between the exit polls and his 2028 spreadsheet.
Nobody disputes the damage. Anyone who filled a tank this year felt it. Fuel prices took off after the shooting started in late February, and the president told The Wall Street Journal that "Iran was a piece of it" and that high fuel costs did more harm than anything else. Fine. Stipulated. The war cost us at the ballot box.
The question Vance wants to skip is whether that's the right yardstick to be judging these matters. My own answer is that it decidedly is not. You don't judge a war to keep a nuclear weapon out of the hands of men who chant "Death to America" by how it moved one midterm. You judge it by what happens if you lose it, or if you never fight it.
Vance dared someone to argue the war was worth the cost. Challenge accepted, and his boss beat me to it. Asked whether he'd do it again, Trump didn't flinch: "Because long term, it's the only answer. You can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon."
That's the whole case in two sentences. Iran is choking shipping through the Strait of Hormuz right now without a bomb. Imagine the mullahs doing it with one, knowing nobody dares push back. Today's gas prices would look like the bargain of the century. A nuclear Iran doesn't just threaten Tel Aviv. It threatens every tanker, every Gulf ally, every European capital within missile range, and eventually, us. It also hands a nuclear umbrella to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and whatever terror franchise Tehran opens next.
Here's the irony Vance walked right past. His own pollster's list includes "put America first." Keeping a nuke away from a regime that has spent 47 years calling us the Great Satan is about as America First as policy gets. You can't put America first while letting its sworn enemy build the bomb.
Leadership sometimes means taking a beating for doing the right thing. History has a long list of men who did, and they are among our most celebrated figures, though in their day, they took an electoral beating for their positions.
Lincoln's Republicans got hammered in the 1862 midterms. He didn't sue for peace with Richmond. Truman left office with approval numbers that would make a used car salesman wince, largely over Korea, and history judged him far more kindly than the voters of 1952 did. Reagan put Pershing missiles in Europe in 1983 while the nuclear-freeze crowd filled the streets, and that resolve helped bring the Soviet Union to the table. George W. Bush lost both chambers over Iraq in 2006, and his answer was the surge, not a retreat.
I've spoken often about Churchill, and he's on this list, too; he won the war and got tossed out of office in 1945 before the ink dried on the surrender. Nobody today argues he should have cut a deal with Hitler to save his majority.
Polls measure how people feel this week. Wars get decided over years. A party that sets national security by the latest crosstabs doesn't have a national security policy. It has a focus group.
Now look at what Vance actually did. Before the last races in Mississippi and Alaska were even called, the man everyone expects to run in 2028 posted a lengthy manifesto that reads less like a post-mortem and more like a stump speech. The polling behind it comes from someone he calls "one of the smartest people I know," a pollster he never names. Convenient. A source with no name can't be checked.
Then there's the timing. Vance was widely reported to have opposed the war before it launched on Feb. 28. In public, he backed it, and he served as a key negotiator with Tehran as the fighting dragged on. So which Vance do we believe — the one who sat at the table for eight months, or the one who found his voice the morning after the votes came in? If he believed the war would cost us Congress, the time to say so was when saying it might have changed something. Saying it now doesn't take courage. It's positioning.
Then comes the line that tells you where this is going. Vance wants to "change our relationship to Israel." Change it how? He doesn't say, and the vagueness is the point. It lets the corner of the right that has decided the Jewish state is the root of all evil hear exactly what it wants to hear. And that’s just the thing in practical terms, completely ignoring the moral terms. One of the things that has disturbed me about the Left’s Jew hatred is the immorality of it. Is it any less of a morality problem when uttered by an assumed Republican candidate?
Recommended: The Democratic 'Civil War' Is Over. The Crazies Won.
Never mind that Israel has largely sat out the strikes on Iran since April. Never mind that Israel stands as the West's forward operating base in a neighborhood full of people who want both of us dead. Abandoning your one reliable ally in the region to win back a few swing voters doesn't make the Islamists like us. It tells them we fold under pressure, and trust me on this: They'll remember it.
Then there's Vance's line about "losing the Senate for the next 6 years." The senators elected Tuesday serve six-year terms, sure, but the majority goes back on the ballot in 2028, the same year Vance hopes to head the ticket. Conceding the Senate through 2032 is a strange pitch from a man who wants to lead the party back. Unless the real pitch is "I told you so," and the target is the president.
Vance asked for an honest conversation. Here's mine.
The war hurt us at the polls. Pretending otherwise is foolish, and Republicans need a far better answer on gas prices and the cost of living than "small price to pay." But the fix is to win the war and deal with the pain at the pump, not to hand Tehran the finish line because the voters got cranky in November. That's why it transcends politics. And a man who wants to be commander in chief ought to know that before he hits "post."
Elections come every two years. A nuclear Iran would be with us forever. And really, that’s the message I think President Trump didn’t get across. You can argue about how he could have and should have done better with the messaging. But not getting the level of importance of throttling Iran’s radical nuclear ambitions across is the reason Tuesday was so painful. The war itself is not as painful as one nuke in the hands of the Iranian regime would be. It's not any less so when someone like Vance caves on Iran.
Thought for the day: Coddling a regime set on the destruction of America is not "America First" by any measure.
VIP members: Tell me your thoughts in the comments. Your voice matters.
Take care, gang. I'm glad you made it today. Join us again tomorrow, won't you?