Patricia Lyle

I read JD Vance's post on this site yesterday and at first I was shocked. The Vice President all but admitted that his own administration made a mistake going to war with Iran. I can't think of a sitting VP breaking with his President this publicly in my lifetime. And at first glance his analysis seems spot on. His first prescription is to end the war. A war that he and the President, until this week, refused to even call a war. It's hard to disagree with him. But like everything MAGA, the thread of truth is there to hide the larger truth. And the larger truth is this. Tuesday was the greatest repudiation of a sitting President by voters in the history of this country. Not a repudiation of a policy. A repudiation of a man. The message was not only about Iran or Israel or slogans or even the price at the pump. The message was simple. WE ARE DONE WITH DONALD TRUMP. We are done with his lies. We are done with the corruption and the gaslighting. We are done with the insanity. We are done with the cruelty. The message from Mississippi to Iowa, from Kansas to Maine, from North Carolina to Texas, young and old, North and South, East and West, was the same. Fuck Donald Trump. This country desperately needs a healthy Republican Party. A party with room for Mitt Romney and Thomas Massie, for Chris Christie and (I can't believe I'm saying this) Marjorie Taylor Greene. A party that puts this constitutional republic above the interests of one man. A party that knows the difference between a Ken Paxton and a John Cornyn, between a Vivek Ramaswamy and a Mike DeWine. That is the message voters sent on Tuesday, with more ballots cast than in any midterm in American history. WE ARE DONE WITH DONALD TRUMP. The sooner the brave members of whatever remains of the Republican Party understand that, the sooner we can begin to heal. I hope Democrats in Congress heard it too. Voters sent the same message in 2020, and we failed to make it stick. I for one don't think this country can afford 26 more months of this madness before we do the one thing voters just demanded in historic numbers. Trump needs to leave, and he needs to leave now. All it would take this January is eleven Republican senators willing to acknowledge the existential threat this lawless President poses to the country and the world. Eleven brave Republicans need to stand up and end this madness. Save their party. Save the country. It's up to all of us to give them the courage to do what's right.

Last night Trump said he could have won Vietnam in a week. His plan was “going after Ho Chi Minh City.” Ho Chi Minh City was Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. Our ally. The enemy’s capital was Hanoi. We bombed it. He called the presidents who fought that war stupid, then explained how he’d have won it by attacking our own side. 58,220 Americans died in that war. Trump got five deferments. Now he’s telling the rest of us how easy it would have been. He’s had more than fifty years to learn which side we were on. He still hasn’t. That alone should disqualify him from sending anybody else’s kids to war. Instead, he’s weighing more strikes on Iran after Tuesday. His administration has reportedly considered using the “mother of all bombs,” the one he calls “like a tiny nuclear bomb.” The man who thinks we should have bombed our ally’s capital gets to choose the targets.