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There Is No Moral Margin for Error on Tuesday

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30.10.2026

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There Is No Moral Margin for Error on Tuesday

It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for voters to turn things around for American democracy.

A protester holds a sign in front of the City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, California, during the No Kings–Vote Early march on October 17, 2026.

With the mid-term elections just days away, Trump has been caroming around the country making increasingly frenzied, incoherent pleas for voters to support the GOP. When he’s not off on bizarre riffs about admiring the asses of sycophants and foul bromides about jihadists running for the Senate and immigrants burning down Paris, he continually tells his shrinking cohort of adoring fans, Pretend I’m on the ballot.

Trump’s—and the GOP’s—problem is that his narcissism, the classic blinkered narcissism of the authoritarian strongman, is standing in the way of their political radar. Encircled by his cultlike followers cheering his every inane, incoherent, antidemocratic sentence, Trump simply cannot fathom that the broader public is busily ditching him and scrubbing his sadistic, strongman spectacle, his gauche merch, and his potty mouth from the collective psyche. He cannot comprehend or internalize the dozens of polls that have shown that the public, by nearly two-to-one margins, rejects his persona and his cruel, destructive, political vision.

“Pretend I’m on the ballot” is as good an incentive as any attack ad that Democratic spin-doctors could have come up with for tens of millions of voters to head to the polls and cast votes up and down the ballot for Democrats. It makes Biden’s awkward embrace of the phrase “Bidenomics,” during a time of high inflation and economic angst, seem positively benign.

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Trump has spent the past two years on a wrecking-ball mission against the American government, the American people, and America’s international relationships, while being cheered on by the GOP-led Congress, aided and abetted by GOP governors and state legislators, and supported by America’s opportunistic new tech-overlords. If there is any karma in the universe, Tuesday will be the GOP and the oligarchy’s day of reckoning.

Increasingly fascist in its outlooks and its methods, this regime—for it is that far more than a regular administration—has systematically undermined the rule of law and attacked pretty much every part of the Constitution apart from the Second Amendment; and, it has done so not just with GOP congressional and state-level blind-eyes but with their active connivance.

Trump’s regime has repeatedly gone after the press, and attempted to ban critical outlets from covering the White House and the Pentagon, pressured television broadcasters to take liberal late night comedians off-air, encouraged oligarchs to buy up media outlets and remake them as pliant supporters of Trumpism, strong-armed universities to fire staff and expel students it dislikes and to end “diversity” hiring and admissions policies (a code word for firing or demoting the Black and brown people in academia and their departments), arrested and deported students simply for writing essays and articles about Israel-Palestine that stand contrary to administration policy, and bullied white-shoe law firms into committing to hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono services.

The Trump regime has destroyed USAID and, in the process, knowingly condemned untold millions of people around the world to disease and to death. It has yanked the welcome mat, that has been such a........

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