In the year since Democrats lost the 2024 election, with Donald Trump beating then President Biden in all seven swing states, they’ve struggled to admit exactly what went wrong.
It wasn’t one thing. For starters, Biden got precipitously older in the last two years of his presidency, often leading to moments that seemed to concern voters more than it did those closest to Biden and Dems in leadership, who insisted he was in perfect health.
Then there were several problems of their own making. Biden’s decision to end Trump’s Remain-in-Mexico immigration policy opened our borders to millions of asylum-seekers without the resources to match, breeding resentment and fear in cities and towns across the country over the crush of a new population explosion.
Dems’ soft-on-crime policies in cities like San Francisco, Chicago and Portland — from ending cash bail to sentencing reform and defund the police rhetoric — inarguably made voters feel less safe, and resulted in the ouster of numerous Dem mayors and DAs for failing their cities.
Other problems were inherited or unexpected, like a post-COVID-19 economy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, respectively.
But the biggest problem was that Dems seemed totally out of touch with Americans’ problems. Though voters were telling them over and over again that they were worried about the economy, crime and immigration, Democrats looked them straight in the eye and said: the economy is strong as hell, crime is down, and immigration isn’t a crisis.
It was a recipe for disaster, and disaster is what they got. Republicans now control the courts, the House, the Senate, and the White House, and Trump got a second chance at wrecking our democracy.
Now, with a year before midterm elections that will tell Republicans and Trump in fairly definitive terms what voters think of them, the shoe appears to be on the other foot.
Trump’s obvious cognitive and physical decline — falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, rambling incoherently in press conferences, unexplained medical issues — should be worrisome to Republicans and those in Trump’s inner circle.
Then there are the problems of Republicans’ and Trump’s own making. His definitively dumb tariffs have made the cost of goods more expensive, the cost of operating business more expensive, and unemployment rise. Even as they try to walk tariffs back, the uncertainty he’s created has led to less foreign investment in the U.S., which trickles down to consumers.
Likewise, Trump’s failure to produce the Epstein files, as he promised, has divided MAGA influencers, and has frustrated his base; sloppy and ineffectual DOGE cuts felt unstrategic and pointless; the longest government shutdown in history felt unnecessarily punitive; and Trump’s foreign adventuring — threatening a war with Venezuela, striking Iran’s nukes, bailing out Argentina — felt like anything but America First.
But worst of all, Trump is making Biden’s fatal mistake. He’s telling voters they’re wrong about how they feel.
Polling shows Trump with an abysmal 36% approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, a new second-term low. And even more ominous, a CNN/SSRS poll last month found 61% of Americans believe Trump’s policies “have worsened economic conditions in this country.” Voters, including many of his own, are putting the blame squarely on him.
Trump’s befuddling and dangerous response has been to tell them affordability — the issue they care the most about — is a Democratic “hoax,” “scam,” and “con job.”
During last week’s Cabinet meeting, he sounded a lot like Biden when he insisted, “Our country is wealthy again and secure again.”
His surrogates are similarly brushing off voter concerns. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on one of the Sunday shows, “The economy has been better than we thought,” and “I think, next year, we’re going to move on to prosperity.”
Speaker Mike Johnson said everyone needs to “relax.”
“We are exactly on the trajectory of where we’ve always planned to be. Steady at the wheel, everybody, it’s going to be fine. Our best days are ahead of us. Americans are going to be feeling a lot better in the early part of next year.”
But the early part of next year is around the corner. And so are midterm elections. If Johnson’s not worried, his members certainly are. And they’re starting to talk openly about the party’s failure to sharpen its messaging.
“If we don’t do that, we would be morons, because the economy is very much on people’s minds,” said Rep. Tony Gonzales.
Other lawmakers worry it’s not just a messaging problem, but a policy problem, and they’re right to.
But Trump seems either oblivious to or unbothered by the pain. And he’s repeating all the mistakes Dems made in 2024. If Republicans don’t turn things around, and quick, they’ll surely suffer the same fate.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.