John Fund

Earlier this month, I wrote a cover story for The Spectator warning that Donald Trump’s increasingly brazen flouting of ethical standards portended a political disaster for Republicans in the midterms. Since then, the corruption news has only gotten worse.   Just this week, the financial disclosure form Trump quietly filed for the first quarter of 2026 revealed his personal account had made an eye popping 3,600 stock trades valued at between $220 million and $750 million (his corporate holdings aren’t subject to disclosure).

There’s been a change of mood across the country – and not one that is favorable to the GOP. Last November, the prediction markets gave Republicans a 70 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Now their odds have deteriorated. It looks likely that the Democrats will win both the chambers – so what’s happened? The latest polls all tell the same story. The economy is no longer Trump’s superpower. Of those polled by Fox News, three- quarters rate the economy negatively, with 70 percent feeling it’s getting worse. Voters now trust Democrats on the economy more than Republicans for the first time since May 2010. Trump’s weakness on the economy brings with it another growing danger for him.

The landslide defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán carries lessons across the ocean for Donald Trump and both MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans. Trump pulled out all the stops for his ally, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to Hungary for a three-day endorsement tour and promising the day before the vote to “use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy” if Orbán won. Well, he didn’t, and the Democrats are in full gloat mode after Orbán’s Fidesz party fell from 135 seats in parliament down to just 55. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer quickly made a comparison to the US, writing on X: “Pay attention, Donald Trump. Wannabe dictators wear out their welcome. November 2026 can’t come soon enough.

Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze in place and was unable to answer questions for an agonizing period. The incident raised concerns about both his age (eighty-one) and health. But it should spark a larger debate about the gerontocracy that sits atop America's government. In January, the Pew Research Center reported that the Senate's median age is now 65.3 years old. That's up from 62.4 years old as recently as 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency. More senators have been eligible for Social Security than not for years. Just this Monday, an Associated Press poll found 77 percent of Americans think eighty-year-old President Biden is too old to effectively govern in a second term. That included 69 percent of all Democrats.

Both legal lions and laymen can be excused for having doubts about the first indictment of a former president, as we toggle back and forth between the historical significance and the lurid facts involved. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis put it: “Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.”   Charges that Donald Trump falsified internal business records in covering up $130,000 in payments to “actress” Stormy Daniels aren’t what people will focus on. This case is headed for the cable TV shows long before it sees the inside of a courtroom. The Trump indictment certainly adds an extra coating of sleaze to The Donald’s image.

I first met Ken Starr in 1989. I was a Wall Street Journal editorial writer who was invited to speak at a conference held by the Federalist Society’s chapter at Cornell University. I met two very impressive people that day. One was Leonard Leo, the head of the Cornell Federalist Society. Only twenty-four, it was clear he had a natural genius for organizing, planning and networking. As the later head of the Federalist Society, he turned it into the premier farm team for conservative lawyers who wanted to become judges. In 2020, then-CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told a group of lawyers that Leo had played a major role in the selection of a majority of the Supreme Court.

Of all the improbable outcomes in this week's elections, a couple struck me as worthy of a Hollywood movie script. Ed Durr, the truck driver who toppled the New Jersey State Senate president after spending just $153 was one. But an even more inspirational, and almost as implausible, script could be fashioned from the story of Winsome Earle Sears, a 57-year-old Virginia mother of three, who by being elected Virginia’s lieutenant governor became the first female minority and naturalized citizen ever elected statewide. CNN and MSNBC ignored her memorable Election Night victory statement, but Fox didn't: https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1455761251737509898 Her "Winsome vs Goliath" story will no doubt now make her a fixture on the lecture circuit.

In August, polls showed that Gavin Newsom’s chances of surviving a recall were slipping away. Many Democrats were so apathetic and Republicans so fired up that in a low-turnout election, the nation’s largest Blue State might indeed oust its liberal governor. Democrats went to work. Leading Democrats from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris to Sen. Bernie Sanders all painted the recall as a 'life or death’ battle to preserve liberal values and fight 'Trumpism’ and extremism. Larry Elder, the leading Republican in the simultaneous election to pick a successor to Newsom should the recall succeed, was turned into a boogeyman with a Los Angeles Times columnist actually calling him 'the black face of white supremacy’. The strategy worked.

The latest French export to the United States is a requirement that people show proof of vaccination to visit indoor bars, concert venues, restaurants and gyms. But will it work? On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York City will be the first American metropolis to import the French health pass. Marketed like an upscale perk, the 'Key to NYC Pass' program will begin on 16 August and become mandatory on 13 September. De Blasio is doing his best to sell the pass as a carrot, rather than the stick it really is. But his rhetoric is still ominous. He said: 'It is so important to make clear that if you are vaccinated, you get to benefit in all sorts of ways. You get to live a better life. Besides your health in general, you get to participate in many, many things.

For decades, the American Idol and Eurovision TV talent shows have calculated millions of votes during commercial breaks with barely a hitch. But it only took a few hours this week for New York City, the largest city in the US, to demonstrate just how incompetent local election bureaucrats can be. New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor was thrown into utter chaos on Tuesday after election officials withdrew their initial tabulation of the contest’s ranked-choice voting results, just hours after releasing a tally showing the clear frontrunner ex-cop Eric Adams was in a dramatically tighter race against Kathryn Garcia, the candidate endorsed by the New York Times. Ranked-choice voting allows voters to list up to five candidates on their ballot in order of preference.

There is a reason Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called her 791-page bill, stuffed as it is with her favorite election-related changes, House of Representatives Bill Number 1 or HR 1. It’s that important to her. She has convinced or pressured every single House Democrat to co-sponsor it as it comes up for a vote this week. That means it will likely pass narrowly given that Democrats have a 219 to 211 majority. It faces more debate and a tougher road in the Senate, which is split 50 to 50 between the parties with Vice President Kamala Harris as tiebreaker. It can be stopped. It must be stopped. It is the worst piece of legislation I have even seen in my 40 years reporting from Washington.

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.

The left is demanding 'defund the police' in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. President Trump’s allies are hunkering down with calls for 'law and order.' Both miss the plot. When pressed, the left really wants a new Great Society. Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told NBC's Meet the Press that 'defunding police' is really about 'increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveiled.' But the Great Society didn’t work, and a new one would also be ill-fated. For its part, the right fails to acknowledge real problems with our criminal justice system. President Trump addressed some of them in a much-praised federal sentencing reform bill last year.