Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Home – Political News – FORUM and the Spoils of Victory

FORUM and the Spoils of Victory

As the 2026 Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention was set to get underway in Dallas on Wednesday, a group of misfits, miscreants, and mavericks—this writer included—congregated at a bar a few miles up the road at FORUM.

The Dallas gathering was the first of many FORUM events organizer Matthew Peterson plans on hosting as life after Trump weighs heavily on the American right.

“FORUM is where the right debates the future,” Peterson told attendees in his opening remarks. The day’s programming centered on the future for the touchstones of the Trump 2024 coalition, with panels and debates on immigration, MAHA, technology, and affordability.

Some in the press covered FORUM as if it was counterprogramming to the RNC. I think it’s more fitting, however, to consider Wednesday’s event as additional course material. FORUM’s participants—Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown, Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling, and The Blaze’s John Doyle and Steve Deace, to name a few—were not charting out a path contrary to the movement Trump and his allies built in 2024. They are scouts, not defectors, ranging ahead of the movement and surveying the terrain beyond the camp’s perimeter.

Among the scouting party and in the camp, there was real energy.

The midterm convention, which the corporate media said would be a gigantic flop, overflowed from the arena. President Donald Trump was all too eager to capitalize on the mismatch between expectations and reality. The master of the weave took a marathon-length victory lap, providing the faithful with a two-hour play-by-play of the last 20 months, broken up by fits of applause and chants of “USA” that could make a choreographed State of the........

© The Daily Signal