“What I want you to do,” US president told a South Carolina rally audience in August, ” is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot” when it’s time to vote in the 2026 midterm election for US House and Senate seats. He repeated the request multiple times in various venues.

Republican candidates likely hope that voters weren’t listening. As of late September, Trump’s approval rating stood at 29 percent according to an American Research Group poll. Republican candidates are distancing themselves from him,  scrubbing references to his endorsements of them from their web sites, and in some cases performatively coming out against him on various issues.

All year we’ve heard predictions of a “blue wave” in the midterms, with Democrats taking majorities in both houses of Congress.

As of this writing, most forecasts I’ve consulted say that there’s a good chance of a Democratic House come January, but that the Republicans will likely hang on to the Senate.

My own forecast is “don’t get your hopes up for substantial change no matter how the midterms turn out.” That’s just not how American government works. Or at least that’s not how American government USUALLY works.

“Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising,” historian Shelby Foote noted in Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary The Civil War.  “Our true genius is for compromise. Our whole government’s founded on it. And, it failed,” leading to southern secession and four years of brutal war.

While the conventional wisdom holds that America is politically “polarized,” its two major political parties have converged over the last few decades.

They’ll quibble over the details, but they pride themselves on compromising where big issues are concerned. Their joint raison d’être is to keep the jalopy of government moving down the same road, in the same direction, no matter the cost.

Seldom a month goes by that we’re not told of negotiations on some “must-pass” bill, saved at the last minute when a handful of members from one party “cross the aisle” to put a little more gas in the jalopy’s tank or a plug in one of the jalopy’s flat tires.

In fact, it’s kind of silly to pretend that the two major parties are separate parties. Since the 1890s, when they seized control of elections with “ballot access” laws to exclude competitors, they’ve effectively become feuding factions of a single political party whose mutual hatred of each other is largely fueled by what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

And over the last 50 years or so, the party factions in Congress have painted themselves into the corner of servitude to an increasingly imperial and unbridled presidency. Trump may be the most predatory example, but he’s hardly sui generis. He’s just an extension of a long-term trend.

The Democrats aren’t going to secure veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress … and even if they did, it’s not obvious they’d make any foundational changes to how American government works.

They’d keep spending more and more money.

They’d keep borrowing more and more money to spend.

They’d keep sticking their noses into every corner of our personal lives and our businesses’ operations.

They’d keep kicking the Social Security can down the road toward insolvency.

Sure, they might impeach and remove a president, but the next president and the president after that would continue down the same road with, largely, complete congressional cooperation — and with a free hand to engage in foreign military adventures despite the Constitution’s assignment of war powers to Congress.

The problem isn’t which party controls the House, the Senate, or the White House, or appoints the most Supreme Court justices.

The problem is political government itself. The framers of the US Constitution hoped to bequeath us a system which wouldn’t devolve into tyranny, but that hope was obviously in vain. George III ruled his American colonies with a much lighter touch than we’ve enjoyed from the US government since the revolution.

For all his failings, Abraham Lincoln got it right when he pointed out that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

When we go back to the drawing board, as eventually we must, that should be written across the top as our starting point.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Yemen’s Houthis,” Euronews reports, “have assured Washington that they would not attack US vessels in the Red Sea, following reports that the US cancelled its planned strikes on the group at the last minute, a senior Houthi official said on Monday” (September 21).

For more than a decade, the US has periodically thrown in with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in its attempts to conquer Yemen and impose rule by “the internationally recognized government,” a Riyadh-based, Saudi-funded puppet regime, usually on the justification that the Houthis are an “Iran-backed” movement and government.

For more than a decade, the Houthis —  formally known as Ansar Allah — have ruled a smaller amount of territory, but a far larger percentage of the country’s population, than that “internationally recognized government,” and recently launched a successful offensive to seize more, and more strategically important, territory. That new territory comprises key points on the coast of, and islands in, the Red Sea around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

If Iran’s near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a knife to international oil shipping’s throat, Houthi control of the Bab el-Mandeb is a firm grip on international oil shipping’s testicles.

US president Donald Trump, it seems, would rather the Houthis didn’t squeeze. Or maybe he’s just trying to conserve limited military resources for continued war with Iran.

Either way, when Saudi terror kingpin … er, Crown Prince … Mohammed bin Salman requested a new round of US airstrikes, the answer was “no, not this time.”

And either way, that’s the right answer.

The conflict in Yemen has never been any business of the US government’s, and continued US military support of the Saudi regime, going at least as far back as Desert Storm in 1991, has always been a disaster for America.

Among other blowback: In 2016, declassified information established that some of the attackers were materially supported by the Saudi royal family.

I’m not going to try to tell you that Ansar Allah make for “better” governors  of the Yemeni population than some Saudi quisling (I’m an anarchist — do the math). That’s a decision for the Yemeni population to make.

But if we’re going to put up with political government over here, Thomas Jefferson laid out the best foreign policy for that government to pursue: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Thanks to president Trump for veering toward that course, this time and on this issue. More, please.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Concerning AI,” US president Donald Trump  asked on Truth Social in mid-September, “when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

The answer, of course, is “never.”

When “industry leaders” start advocating for government regulation — or even, initially, for industry-internal “standards” bodies leading to such regulation — they’re not riding to the rescue of humankind, they’re looking out for their own bottom lines.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen rising public moral panic about the energy demands and environmental effects of AI data centers. While I can’t prove it, my perception is that the panic was algorithmically encouraged by, if not entirely created by, the same social media platforms that just happen to be operated by big players in AI.

Then, in mid-September, a sequence of events quickly unfolded that seemed pretty clearly artificial and contrived:

A researcher at Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, resigned, stating that the big players in AI are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Following Coxon’s resignation, Anthropic’s “Alignment Science Lead,” Evan Hubinger, commented that “[w]e really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

Within days — almost as if they’d just been waiting for a great news hook to roll their plans out for public consumption! — “industry leaders” moved from mildly asserting the desirability of an AI “standards” body (explicitly framed around a need for government to catch up with mandatory regulation) to openly coordinating with each other on forming such a body.

On September 18, four “paying subscribers” to AI services filed suit (seeking class action status) against Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google. The suit claims collusion between the firms, in violation of US antitrust laws, to establish “industry-wide coordination” that would “pace the frontier” of AI, slowing down its evolution (and thus depriving the public of whatever benefits that evolution might bring).

I’m not a big fan of antitrust law, but the case for collusion does look pretty strong, and that collusion really seems aimed at getting the US government to impose uniform and strict regulations on the development of artificial intelligence.

Why?

To keep new competitors — ambitious startups, smaller existing firms looking for new revenue centers, etc. — from entering the industry in the first place.

Those big industry players are already entrenched. They’ve established huge leads in building out AI infrastructure. They’ve already got the money and manpower in place to comply with such regulations.

Joe Blow, who just wrote some killer code at his desk, code to power a new kind of AI model running on a server in his garage, doesn’t have a data center to move his great idea onto.

He doesn’t have a major law firm on retainer to make sure his idea doesn’t violate any of the many government regulations that will inevitably evolve from the proposed “industry standards.”

And once those regulations are in place, he’ll have trouble raising enough investment capital to buy membership in a corporate club with a big “NO DOGS OR ENTREPRENEURS” sign on its door.

At best, Joe Blow might get one of those club members interested enough to hire him or buy his work product. More likely his big idea will just wither away and die.

That’s what the defendants in the lawsuit are really after: A shared monopoly.

Will AI kill all humans? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s either impossible or inevitable.

If it’s impossible, it’s nothing to worry about.

If it’s inevitable, all US government regulation — or “industry standards” — can accomplish is depriving Americans of the benefits of the most advanced AIs until the literal “killer app” emerges from Beijing or Bengaluru or Budapest.

Let’s not allow moral panic to deprive us of those benefits just so a few would-be monopolists can make bank.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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