Goldstone’s most recent book is "On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights.
In the classic film “Citizen Kane,” there is a scene in which Charles Foster Kane refuses to abandon his run for governor after learning that details of his extramarital affair will be made public. Kane growls that no one was going to “rob him of the love of the people of this state.” His antagonist, political boss Jim Gettys, who had exposed the affair, is stunned since the scandal means certain defeat for Kane. (This was 1941 after all.) Gettys says to Kane, “With anyone else, I’d say it would be a lesson to you. But you’re gonna need more than one lesson ... and you’re gonna get more than one lesson.”
That brings to mind today’s Republican Party. Getting devastated in the midterms should have been a lesson, but whether the GOP will need more than one is open to question. Indications are they will. Already, the Freedom Caucus, named for its desire to deny freedom to anyone but themselves, is putting pressure on presumptive House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to engage in precisely the same behavior that cost the party a majority in the Senate, a commanding majority in House, and a stunning number of state and local offices across the nation. McCarthy, who wanted to be speaker badly enough to get the lead in Faust, will almost certainly give in.
Then there is Donald Trump. In his new run for the presidency, in which he, like Kane, assumes the love of the people, Trump seems motivated more by his desperation to avoid jail time than to again shoulder the responsibility of running the country. (Of course, for him that was only a part-time job the first time.) One thing certain is that he will use his candidacy to settle scores, both real and imagined. Princess Diana may have had her “revenge dress,” but Trump will do her one better with the revenge campaign.
It is not as if most Republican leaders and many party operatives not on the extreme right don’t know better — Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence and a host of others were willing to state publicly they were none too pleased that Trump has refused to move offstage even though the play has ended. Even Rupert Murdoch, the ultimate opportunist, seems to have instructed his minions at Fox News and the New York Post to cut Trump loose.
But that does not mean they are embracing what tens of millions of voters showed that they wanted — a functioning democracy in which the government is used to solve problems rather than rule by personal ambition or pandering to the extremes. The most surprising thing about Democrats’ avoiding the midterm graveyard is that they did so in the face of what seemed to be the extreme unpopularity of President Biden and the belief by almost three-quarters of Americans that the economy was in bad shape. What Biden and the Democrats did have in their favor was that they seemed to be making an effort to actually govern instead of wallowing in transparently false conspiracy theories or insisting that obvious lies were true. Democrats pounded on the message that democracy itself was on the ballot and voters believed them.
And so, Speaker McCarthy has entered “be careful what you wish for” territory. His choice seems to be whether to kowtow to the Freedom Caucus — and risk further alienating mainstream voters — or to try to persuade House Republicans to pretend they are an actual political party, with policies and ideas that will make people’s lives better.
The latter will be no easy task. As minority leader, he could hide behind an inability to control the House’s agenda and try to gain voters’ loyalty merely by opposing Democrats’ “radical socialist agenda.” But that will no longer be sufficient. Republicans in the House will now be setting the agenda and if they confine themselves to investigating the arch-criminal Hunter Biden or trying to impeach his father for the high crime of ... they’ll think of something ... McCarthy risks having a rather abbreviated term as speaker.
But McCarthy and his fellow Republicans have a policy problem as well. Beyond banning abortion and protecting military-style weapon ownership, they don’t seem to have any. This is a party that has spent so long merely attacking their opponents that, now that they are in power, they seem devoid of the means to remain there.
Then, of course, the question circles back to Trump. Since he initially announced for president in 2015, Republicans have been fractured. At first, it seemed of little consequence that many rural conservatives and others that Hillary Clinton termed “a basket of deplorables” flocked to Trump’s candidacy, because he seemed certain to be brushed away like a fly. But in an upset that astounded even Trump himself, he won the election. (A friend sent me a photo taken in the employees’ lounge at Fox News on election night 2016, wherein the faces of the staff appeared as stunned and horrified as if aliens had landed.)
For the ensuing six years, the party tried desperately to hold together an increasingly fragile coalition. But while at first it seemed that the party could not win without Trump and his loyalists, it now seems equally apparent that they cannot win with them.
The only solution is for McCarthy to defy the fringes of his party and adopt a reasonable conservative agenda. There are certainly issues on which he can do so, including government spending, excessive regulation and a bloated bureaucracy. The reason he likely will not is that he will view it as a risk to his speakership, the loss of which he dreads.
And so, McCarthy and his fellow Republican House members are likely to continue to press forward with an agenda that three elections have told them is fatally flawed. A liberal pundit said recently that Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to the Democratic Party since FDR. Kevin McCarthy, another man who needs more than one lesson, will soon be standing at his side.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.