Rep. Adam Kinzinger

Hey everyone, on this Monday morning I am feeling awfully fired up. Why? Well, I look around at the media landscape and can’t believe what I see.

On one hand, you have conservative influencers like Benny Johnson who have been proven – by US investigators – to have "unknowingly" taken millions in Russian cash to spout their anti-democracy (and, in my First Amendment protected opinion, pro-Russia) views.

And then when I turn my head just slightly, I see corporate media bowing to the Trump Administration. The damage that Bari Weiss has done at CBS will take years to fix.

The situations may not be perfect mirrors of each other, but they sure do rhyme.

The simple truth is that it’s never been harder to know where to get your information. And I am so grateful that you have placed your faith and your time in me and my writing.

I want to be abundantly clear: Trump and MAGA have and continue to do their worst to me for telling the truth about what the GOP has become. But I’m still here telling you exactly what I think every day.

No Russian cash under the table. No corporate bosses telling me to take it easy on the White House.

But most importantly…no fear.

Because they already tried to take everything from me and only ended up setting me free.

And you are the reason I can do this work. Plain and simple. And today I am asking you, if you can, to become a paid subscriber to my Substack, where I do most of my work www.adamkinzinger.com

Paid Substack subscribers keep me fighting, no matter what they throw at me.

Paid Substack subscribers give me the freedom that so few journalists have right now.

Paid Substack subscribers allow me to take care of my family in what is, candidly, a dangerous environment.

The monthly cost is about what you’d spend at a single trip to a sandwich shop for lunch. And you also get access to exclusive content, access to me, and other benefits.

If you can’t swing it, I understand. Trump has done his best to make this the least affordable economy in a generation.

But if you can, I am grateful if you’d consider joining today. It’s the best way to tell the thugs trying to destroy this country that their intimidation tactics won’t work.

Again, thank you for being here.

Join now at www.adamkinzinger.com

- Adam

Hey everyone, for today's Good News Sunday, I want to talk about something almost every American believes is getting worse — but actually is getting dramatically better.

Violent crime in the United States is falling. Not a little. A lot. And not for one year, but for three years in a row. We are living through one of the steepest declines in violent crime this country has ever seen.

I know that doesn't square with what you've been hearing. I know how the script goes. Crime is up, the cities are burning, lock your doors. It moves voters, it moves ratings, and it has remarkably little to do with what the data actually shows.

So let's look at the data.

In 2023, murder fell nearly 12%. At the time, that was the largest one-year decline the FBI had ever recorded.

Then in 2024 it fell another 15%. The overall violent crime rate dropped to its lowest level since 1969. Robbery sat near a 20-year low. Every category, every region, big cities and small towns alike.

And the preliminary 2025 numbers released this spring? Murder down another 18%. Robbery down another 18.5%. The bureau itself called it the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937.

Now I'll be straight with you — there is a fight going on right now over who gets the credit, and I'll just point out that this turnaround began in 2022 and has continued since then. This isn't a White House story. It's an America story.

The ER doctors and trauma nurses who save a kid's life at 3 a.m. and then put a counselor in front of him before he leaves the hospital — a handoff that, done right, dramatically lowers the odds he's ever back in that trauma bay again.

The men and women who stand in the gap — many of them formerly incarcerated themselves — who walk into the toughest corners of the country and put themselves between two kids about to throw their lives away.

The mentors. The pastors. The mothers walking their blocks at night because they're tired of burying their neighbors' children.
The cops who stayed on the job through the hardest years for American policing in a generation. A lot of their friends quit. A lot of departments were short-staffed. They showed up anyway and they deserve our thanks.

This story isn't really about crime. It's about what we still believe is possible.

Belief is not a small thing. If you believe nothing works, you stop trying. If you believe your neighbors are your enemies, you stop helping them. If you believe the country is past saving, you start acting like it.

But things are heading in the right direction. Not perfectly. Not everywhere. But measurably, and for long enough now that it isn't a fluke. Murder at a 60-year low. Violent crime at a 60-year low.

The steepest drop in nearly a century. And we as Americans should act like we are a nation capable of not just incremental improvement, but of great things and big changes. Because we are.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam

So it looks like we’re having a “Marshall plan” for Iran, in the amount of 300 billion to pay for the damage we did.

Winning?

I look around at the corruption, the bluster, the nonsense and I can't help but feel that we are living in the movie "Idiocracy." And the credits are rolling.

In 2006, Mike Judge released Idiocracy, a satirical comedy so niche that Fox buried it with almost no marketing or wide release. The studio apparently didn't know what to do with it, but we became it

The premise is deceptively simple: Joe Bauers, the most average man in America, gets frozen in a military experiment and wakes up 500 years in the future. Humanity, having out-bred intelligence for generations, has devolved into a civilization of breathtaking stupidity. Crops are dying because agribusiness replaced irrigation water with a sports drink called Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator — because “it’s got electrolytes.” No one can explain what electrolytes are, only that Brawndo has them, and Brawndo is good, so shut up.

The President of the United States is Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho — a former pro wrestler and p**n star turned head of state, who opens his State of the Union address by firing a machine gun into the air from a stage surrounded by pyrotechnics, monster trucks, and screaming fans. He communicates in slogans. He doesn’t know how to fix anything. But he’s entertaining, and in the world of Idiocracy, that’s the whole job.

Joe, now the smartest man alive by default, is appointed Secretary of the Interior and given one week to fix the economy, the dust bowls, and the dying crops — or be thrown into a demolition derby death match called “Monday Night Rehabilitation.”

It’s a comedy. Mostly.

Enter: The Real-Life Camacho

When Idiocracy was released, it felt like a warning. By 2016, it felt like a prophecy. By now, it feels like a documentary with a ten-year delay.

Consider the parallels. President Camacho is a pro wrestler turned entertainer turned head of state. Donald Trump is a pro wrestler — legitimately, having appeared in WWE events and been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame — turned reality TV star turned President of the United States. Both men built their brands on spectacle, dominance, and the performance of strength to adoring crowds. Neither was elected because of policy expertise. Both were elected because they were watchable.

The differences are largely cosmetic. Camacho is fictional.

The Parade, the Finger, and “Quiet, Piggy”

In Idiocracy, President Camacho rides through the streets of Washington on a motorcycle, flanked by adoring masses, and flips the crowd the bird — a gesture that is received not with horror, but with thunderous applause. To his people, it reads as authentic. He’s one of them. He doesn’t play by the rules. He’s real.

You don’t have to squint hard to see the echo. In November 2025, aboard Air Force One, Donald Trump turned to a female reporter who had asked him a question he didn’t want to answer and told her: “Quiet, quiet, piggy.” The remark — casual, contemptuous, aimed at a woman doing her job — was received by his base not as a disqualifying moment but as another proof of authenticity. He says what he thinks. He doesn’t pretend.

The gesture and the epithet are different in form, identical in function: dominance performance for a crowd that has been trained to read cruelty as strength.

The White House Gets a Makeover

The future Washington D.C. in Idiocracy looks like the Vegas Strip was dropped inside a demolition yard — garish, gold-trimmed, maximalist, empire-coded.

The real White House, under its current occupant, is trending in a strikingly similar direction. Trump’s ongoing renovation project calls for a $1 Billion State Ballroom to replace the East Wing, featuring gilded Corinthian columns, coffered ceilings with gold inlays, crystal chandeliers, gold floor lamps, and checkered marble floors. The Oval Office has already been bedecked in gilded frames and golden details. The architect of record, McCrery Architects, specializes in classical design — which in this context means less Lincoln Memorial and more Roman imperial court.

The people’s house, retrofitted to look like a monument to one man. Camacho would recognize it immediately. And of course, the UFC fight.

The 250th Birthday Party Nobody Wants to Play

The single most Idiocracy moment of this particular season may be the slow-motion unraveling of the Great American State Fair — the White House-backed extravaganza planned for the National Mall from June 25 to July 10 to commemorate America’s 250th birthday.

The event, organized under the White House initiative “Freedom 250,” was initially billed to artists as a nonpartisan celebration of the nation. Then the lineup was announced. Then artists started reading the press coverage. Then the exodus began.

Morris Day and The Time pulled out. Young MC pulled out, saying he was “never told about any political involvement.” Rapper-turned-country-artist Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli backed out. Country star Martina McBride posted on X that she had believed the event was nonpartisan and dropped out the moment she learned otherwise. The Commodores withdrew. Bret Michaels, frontman of Poison, dropped out.

Who stayed? Vanilla Ice, who is contractually obligated to perform on June 26 and, per his management, will honor that contract.

The optics are almost too perfect. A celebration of America that most of America’s entertainers — the very people who were supposed to make it feel festive — want no part of. What was sold as a national birthday party has been understood, correctly, as a campaign rally with better fireworks.

In Idiocracy, the president throws a party and everyone shows up because they have no choice and no context. In America 2026, the entertainers have a choice, and they’re using it.

A Star Burns Bright Before It Implodes
There’s a phenomenon in astrophysics that most people know intuitively even if they’ve never studied it: a dying star doesn’t go quietly. In its final phase, it expands — burning hotter, brighter, and more dramatically than at any point in its life. It becomes a red giant, luminous beyond reason, consuming everything within reach. And then, with a violence proportional to its brilliance, it collapses.

MAGA, at this moment, is burning very bright.

The big beautiful ballroom. The gilded columns. The 250th birthday spectacular on the National Mall. The motorcades. The slogans. The performance of power, non-stop, unyielding. It looks, from a certain angle, like an empire at its peak.

But the numbers tell a different story. As of May 2026, 31 percent of Americans approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job. Sixty-four percent disapprove. His net approval rating — positive minus negative — sits at -34, compared to -6 just fourteen months ago. Just 29 percent approve of his handling of the economy. These are not the numbers of a movement at high tide. These are the numbers of a star in its final expansion.

And in November 2026, Americans go back to the polls. Democrats need to flip three seats to reclaim the House. Generic congressional ballot polling shows Democratic leads ranging from 4 to 13 points. The historical pattern — the president’s party almost always loses ground in midterms — has not been suspended.

The sequels to Idiocracy were never made, perhaps because the movie ends on a cautiously hopeful note: Joe becomes president, introduces water to the crops, and slowly, painfully, things begin to get better. Intelligence, it turns out, is not entirely extinct. It just had to wait for the right moment.

That moment may be coming.

The star burns bright and big — spectacular, impossible to ignore — right before it implodes. What comes after a supernova is not darkness. It’s a new beginning. The fuel is running out, the approval ratings are cratering, the entertainers are walking away, and November is on the calendar.

Idiocracy was a warning. The warning was ignored. But the ending — the part where someone finally waters the crops — that part is still being written.

- Adam

Another super blinkey afternoon for gramps.

Poor guy is just operating on fumes

Donald Trump promised his followers he would be their "retribution." Most people heard a campaign slogan. They should have taken it more literally. Because retribution is incompatible with leadership.

There is a moment that comes to most leaders eventually. The moment when they have the power to punish someone who wronged them, and they have to decide what to do with it. It is a clarifying moment, because what a leader does with that power tells you almost everything about what kind of leader they actually are.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a South African prison. He emerged in 1990 to lead a country that had imprisoned, tortured, and humiliated him — a country in which the people who had built and enforced apartheid still held positions of power, still owned most of the land, still controlled most of the institutions. The temptation to exact revenge was not abstract. It was concrete, immediate, and politically available. The moral majority of his movement would have cheered it. And he declined. Not out of weakness, and not because he had forgiven what had been done to him or to his people, but because he understood something fundamental about power: that leaders who spend their authority on retribution are not making lives better for the people following them. They are indulging themselves. And self-indulgence, at the scale of the presidency, is a form of theft from the people you were chosen to serve.

Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, with the Civil War nearly over and four years of catastrophic loss behind him. The men who had taken up arms against the United States were still alive. The politicians who had sanctioned secession still held influence in their states. Lincoln had every political and moral justification to govern the reconstruction of the South as a punishment.

He chose instead to offer “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” Historians still argue about whether that generosity was wise in every particular. What is not arguable is why he chose it: because he understood that a country reunited by fear is not actually reunited, and that the purpose of the presidency is to hold the country together, not to settle the president’s personal scores.

Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon — at enormous personal political cost, knowing it would likely end his presidency — because he concluded that the country’s recovery mattered more than Nixon’s prosecution. You can disagree with any of these specific decisions. But the thread running through all of them is the same: the recognition that the presidency is not personal property, that its powers are held in trust for the public, and that using those powers to gratify the president’s private grievances is a fundamental corruption of the office.

Donald Trump announced his candidacy for a second term at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022 with a phrase that was not a policy position or a governing vision. It was a personal declaration: “In 2024, I am your retribution.” He was not speaking to voters as a representative asking for their trust. He was speaking to followers as a leader promising to use public power for private payback. That promise has defined his second term as comprehensively as any policy he has enacted, and its costs are only beginning to be fully understood.

What Retribution Actually Costs

The case against political revenge is not primarily a moral one, though the moral case is straightforward enough. The deeper case is institutional and strategic: a government organized around the personal grievances of its leader cannot simultaneously be organized around the public interest. Every dollar of political capital spent on punishment is a dollar not spent on governance. Every hour the Justice Department spends pursuing James Comey over a beach photograph is an hour not spent on violent crime, financial fraud, or the thousand other things the department exists to address. Every Republican senator who moderates a public position out of fear is a senator who is no longer representing constituents.

The costs compound in ways that are not always visible from the outside. When Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over four-term Texas Senator John Cornyn — a reliable ally who had supported the president’s agenda in nearly every vote, the immediate effect was Cornyn’s defeat in a Republican primary. The deeper effect was the message it sent to every other Republican officeholder: loyalty is not measured by votes. It is measured by submission. The distinction matters enormously, because it means the threshold for safety keeps moving. There is no position moderate enough, no record supportive enough, no silence sufficiently complete to guarantee protection. You are safe only until you are not.

That dynamic, applied consistently across the Republican caucus, produces a legislature that is less deliberative and more performative. Members optimize for visible loyalty rather than sound policy because visible loyalty is what the primary electorate rewards. The bills that get written, the hearings that get held, the investigations that get launched — all of these are shaped by the question of how the president will react, rather than what the country needs. This is not a new phenomenon in American politics, but it has never operated at this scale or with this degree of explicit presidential direction. Trump is not merely influencing the Republican Party. He is reorganizing it around his personal emotional requirements.

The Machinery of Retribution

What makes the current situation different from ordinary political hardball is the institutional apparatus being deployed in its service. Previous presidents had grievances. Some acted on them in ways that were petty or inappropriate. But the systematic redirection of federal law enforcement toward the punishment of political opponents represents something that sits in a different category — not just a norm violation but a structural corruption of the institutions themselves.

The Justice Department exists to enforce federal law impartially. Its credibility — and therefore its effectiveness — depends on the public’s belief that prosecutorial decisions are made on the basis of evidence and law, not on the basis of the president’s personal feelings about the defendant.

When that belief erodes, the consequences are not merely reputational. Grand juries become skeptical. Witnesses become reluctant. Judges become more scrutinizing. Defense attorneys become more aggressive. The department’s ability to prosecute actual crimes — crimes that have nothing to do with the president’s enemies list — is diminished because the institution’s credibility has been spent on cases that look, and in some instances demonstrably are, politically motivated.

The second Comey indictment is the clearest example. The federal government charged a former FBI director with threatening the president on the basis of a photograph of seashells arranged on a beach. The case was investigated for eleven months by career agents and prosecutors. It was then brought by political appointees who had every reason to understand that it would be perceived as, and argued to be, an abuse of prosecutorial power.

The indictment forced Comey to defend himself, to incur legal costs, and to endure the reputational damage that comes with any federal criminal charge, regardless of outcome. That was the point. The indictment was not a good-faith effort to prosecute a crime. It was punishment administered through the machinery of justice. The difference between those two things is the difference between a republic and something else.

The same logic extends to the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, which uses the settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against his own government to create a compensation pool for January 6 defendants. It extends to the acting Attorney General’s declaration that Trump, his family, and his businesses are permanently exempt from government investigation, including tax audits. It extends to the FBI’s seizure of a Washington Post reporter’s devices without a subpoena, the FCC’s threatened review of ABC’s broadcast licenses after a late-night host declined to apologize for a joke, and the effort to use the pardon power to benefit donors who had given millions to Trump-aligned PACs in the weeks before their clemency was granted.

Taken individually, each of these can be rationalized or explained away. Taken together, they describe a government that has been substantially reorganized around the personal interests and personal grievances of one man. That is not what the framers designed. It is precisely what they feared.

The Larger Cost

There is a version of this essay that ends with a list of the specific things Trump has done and a conclusion that he is a bad person. That essay is easy to write and not particularly useful because it has been written – a thousand times. The more important argument is structural, because bad people have held power before and the republic has survived. What the republic has not been asked to survive, at least not in the modern era, is the systematic normalization of retribution as a governing philosophy.

When retribution becomes normalized — when senators expect to be primaried for procedural independence, when journalists expect their devices to be seized, when entertainers understand that their networks will be threatened if they tell the wrong jokes, when prosecutors understand that the measure of their success is whether they prosecuted the president’s enemies — the behavior of every actor in the system changes. People self-censor. Institutions become cautious. The range of permissible dissent narrows, not through explicit prohibition but through the rational calculation of consequences. This is how democracies hollow out long before they formally end. Not with a coup but with accommodation, gradually and then all at once.

Mandela understood something important about this. His decision to pursue reconciliation rather than retribution in South Africa was not primarily an act of personal generosity. It was a strategic judgment about what a functioning democratic society requires. A society organized around grievance cannot simultaneously be organized around shared citizenship.

The two are in fundamental tension. You can build a coalition on resentment — Trump proved that — but you cannot govern a country with it, because governing requires persuasion, compromise, and the recognition that the people who disagree with you are still, in some meaningful sense, yours to serve.

Lincoln knew this. Washington knew it. Ford knew it at the cost of his presidency. The leaders who chose restraint at moments when they had both the power and arguably the justification to exact revenge did so not out of weakness or naivety, but out of a clear-eyed understanding of what their office was for and what it was not for.

The presidency of the United States is not a vehicle for personal satisfaction. It is not a mechanism for settling scores or rewarding loyalty or punishing insufficiently complete submission. It is, at its best, the highest expression of the idea that a free people can govern themselves — that they can choose a leader, trust that leader with enormous power, and have reasonable confidence that the power will be used in their interest rather than the leader’s.

That idea is not dead. But it is under more pressure than it has been in a very long time. The people who understand why it matters have an obligation to say so, clearly and consistently, for as long as it takes.

I spent years as a Republican in Congress watching what this president does to people who disagree with him. I know what it costs to say this out loud. I also know what it costs not to. The second cost is higher.

It always is.

- Adam

Poor guy, he’s so exhausted

Last night, Republican Senator John Cornyn and Representative Chip Roy lost their primaries in Texas, despite being staunch supporters of President Donald Trump. But their loyalty still wasn't enough because they dared show glimmers of independent thought and were punished by the base for it.

In the summer of 1787, the men gathered in Philadelphia to write America’s Constitution operated from a particular theory of human nature — one that was unsentimental and clear-eyed. They did not assume that future officeholders would be virtuous. They assumed the opposite. They designed a system around the expectation that senators would jealously guard the Senate’s power, that representatives would fight for the House’s prerogatives, that the branches would be in constant tension with the executive — not out of nobility, but out of self-interest. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51. The structure of government itself would keep any single man from becoming too powerful.

The founders never imagined a Tuesday like the one Texas just had.

On May 26 and 27, 2026, the Republican Party in Texas held runoff elections that sent an unmistakable message to every sitting Republican officeholder in America: you will bend the knee fully, without reservation or asterisk, or you will be destroyed. Not nudged out. Not narrowly beaten. Destroyed.

Senator John Cornyn — a 24-year Senate veteran, the former Republican whip, a man who ran the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm with ruthless efficiency for years — lost to Ken Paxton by more than 20 points. Congressman Chip Roy, a multi-term conservative who authored the SAVE Act and was the preferred candidate of Washington Republicans, lost the attorney general runoff to a state senator named Mayes Middleton by double digits. And those results came one week after Thomas Massie of Kentucky — the most libertarian, ideologically consistent member of the House Republican caucus — was wiped out in his own primary by a Trump-backed former Navy SEAL named Ed Gallrein, in what became the most expensive House primary in American history.

Three down. The offense? In each case, a small but detectable pulse of independence.

Let’s be precise about what these men actually did — because the sins were not dramatic.

John Cornyn repeatedly voted for Ukraine aid packages when Trump opposed them. In 2023, he said bluntly that Trump would be “unelectable” and that Republicans needed “to come up with an alternative.” He ran for Senate Majority Leader. He was, in other words, a conventional Republican senator doing conventional Republican senator things — managing policy, expressing opinions, occasionally drifting from whatever the president wanted.

Chip Roy, for his part, was almost entirely a loyal conservative. He supported Trump’s agenda on immigration, spending fights, and most everything else. But he had a few marks against him. On January 6, 2021, he said Trump engaged in “clearly impeachable” conduct — then voted against impeachment anyway. He had backed Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. He called Ken Paxton’s lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election a “dangerous violation of federalism.” His opponent branded him a “backstabbing D.C. Congressman” who “betrayed MAGA.” Trump didn’t endorse in the attorney general race. He didn’t have to. The gravitational field did the work.

Thomas Massie is the most interesting case. He was never a Trump ally in any meaningful sense — he was a Ron Paul libertarian who happened to wear a Republican jersey. He opposed the NDAA repeatedly, voted against military adventurism, and co-sponsored legislation that led to the release of the Epstein files. That last one, you might think, would please the MAGA base. It did not. What mattered was that Massie could not be counted on. He was a loose thread. So $32 million poured into a Kentucky House district to pull it out.

The pattern is not complicated. You do not have to have done much wrong. You just have to have done something wrong — expressed a doubt, cast a vote, given an interview, backed the wrong guy in a primary — and that something will be retrieved, amplified, and turned into your political obituary.

The entrance requirement for the Republican Party is no longer conservatism. It is not even populism or nationalism. It is personal submission to one man. The test is whether you will crawl on glass for Donald Trump, and crawl cheerfully, and never once glance up to check how your knees are doing.

There is a temptation to call this a purge. It is more like a compression.

Think of Trump’s hold on the Republican base the way you might think about squeezing a fist around a ball of Play-Doh. Inside the grip, the pressure is absolute. Nothing moves without permission. The shape is determined entirely by the force applied. But some of the material always finds the gaps — it oozes out between the fingers, slowly and inevitably, seeking space where the pressure isn’t.

Trump’s grip on Republican primary voters is real and it is ferocious. Tuesday proved that. A sitting United States senator, a senior figure in the Republican establishment for a quarter century, was dispatched without ceremony. A conservative congressman with a substantive legislative record was replaced by a man whose primary qualification was loyalty. The base responded.

But the base is also shrinking.

General election results tell a different story than primary results. The enthusiasm that carries a “MAGA Mayes” Middleton through a May runoff with 300,000 voters does not automatically scale to November with three million. Ken Paxton, the newly minted Republican Senate nominee, will now face Democrat James Talarico in a Texas general election — in a state that has been slowly, stubbornly trending Democratic for a decade. Ed Gallrein, who beat Massie, will run in a district that was safe with Massie holding it. Whether it stays safe with a candidate whose entire pitch was devotion to the president remains to be seen.

The Play-Doh in Trump’s grip is not infinite. Every squeeze that purifies the primary produces less material to work with in November. The base that turns out for a loyalty test in a runoff is not the coalition that wins a generation.

The founders built a system for exactly this moment — or rather, they built a system that was supposed to prevent this moment. The entire architecture of American government rests on the idea that people in power will fight to keep their power, and that this self-interest would be the mechanism of accountability. A senator was supposed to resist presidential overreach because senators, as a class, had institutional interests in doing so. A congressman was supposed to push back because the House had its own power to protect.

What the founders did not account for was a political party that would function as the enforcement mechanism for executive dominance — that primary voters would become the instrument by which an executive punishes resistant legislators. Madison’s ambition-counteracting-ambition only works if the ambitious have somewhere to run. If the party itself becomes the trap, if the primary is the punishment and the primary electorate is the enforcement arm, then the careful machinery of checks and balances seizes up.

That is where the Republican Party is today. The legislative branch, designed to be a co-equal check on executive power, has been largely converted into a ratification body. Dissenters are not debated. They are eliminated.

Tuesday was not an anomaly. It was a demonstration.

It was meant to be seen. It was meant to be absorbed by every Republican in the Senate and the House who has, at some point in the last five years, entertained the thought that their own judgment might occasionally matter. The message is simple: it doesn’t. Your judgment is irrelevant. Your record is irrelevant. Your years of service are irrelevant. What is relevant is whether you bent low enough, fast enough, completely enough.

And if you didn’t — if you said, even once, even when you thought no one was listening, that you had a concern, a reservation, a competing principle — then someone will find it. And they will beat you with it. And you will lose.

John Cornyn, who gave 24 years to the Republican Party and the state of Texas, found that out.

Chip Roy, who was by almost any measure a MAGA-aligned conservative, found that out.

Thomas Massie, who had the honor of being the only member of Congress to vote against the Patriot Act’s renewal multiple times, found that out.

The founders wanted ambition to counteract ambition. What they got, in the Republican Party of 2026, is ambition that has been trained to point in only one direction — down, and inward, and at itself.

The Play-Doh squeezes tighter. More of it escapes through the fingers with every election.

And the hand gets tired eventually.