Donald Trump is a friendly boss; he lets his top aides freelance. Two of those aides, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, are spending most of their time spearheading midterms spending for Trump’s PAC. But last week, they both managed to find time for a quick trip to the Balkans, where—the New York Times reports—they have each been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to consult on behalf of the pro-Russian sub-national government in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seems fine. Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post live today at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

The Blue Wave. The Rocky Shore.

by William Kristol

It could be the best of elections. So it makes sense to be hopeful. But it’s surely the worst of administrations. So it makes sense to be alarmed.

On the hopeful side: The blue wave shows no sign of abating. Democrats are doing a decent job of getting out of their own way. Meanwhile Donald Trump is traveling around the country and doing his best to make the election about himself.

Which is good.

According to the polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne, President Trump’s job disapproval stands at 61.9 percent, compared to 35 percent approval. The Democratic advantage on FiftyPlusOne’s average of the generic congressional polling is a still impressive but less overwhelming 51.1 percent to 43.4 percent.

There’s a simple lesson here: The more this election is about Trump, the better. The more the generic ballot numbers move towards the presidential approval numbers, the better. The more Trump visits competitive states for rallies that are all about himself, the better. The more ads we see that feature Trump, the better.

Yesterday morning, stung by media reports that his rallies aren’t what they once were, Trump posted:

My Rally crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable! Nobody has ever seen anything like it. We are flipping races all over the place. . . . It’s all happening! The Dumocrats [sic, needless to say] never counted on this. Watch for the “Midterm Surprise!”

About an hour and a half later, Trump had a further thought to share, this time in ALL CAPS:

MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!

Lots of Republicans would beg to differ with the leader of their party. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, apparently has decided not to join Trump’s rally tonight in San Antonio. After all, as Abbott explained, “Because of my schedule, where I go to multiple cities a day doing events like this, I already have events like this scheduled that day and will not be able to make it.”

It will be amusing to see what important event Abbott’s attending that couldn’t have been rescheduled to make room for the president. And it will be interesting to see if Trump takes offense at the slight. A little intra-Republican squabbling in these closing weeks couldn’t hurt Democrats’ chances, either.

So much for Trump and the GOP.

As for the Democrats, they’re doing a pretty good job of riding the wave of voter discontent. They’re keeping the focus on the Trump administration’s failures and corruption, and on the Republican Congress’s complicity in them. They don’t even seem to be over-thinking things and tying themselves in knots nearly as much as they normally do.

Their biggest problem may be that many of their big donors and key operatives don’t seem to realize what a historic moment this year could be. They’re being cautious when their party has a golden opportunity to win senate seats and governorships that have long appeared to be out of reach. Democrats have a chance to turn a shrinking map into an expanding one.

The implications of a Democratic senate majority of fifty-four seats would be very different from getting to fifty-one. And as for governorships, six of the ten most-populous states now have Democratic governors, and Democrats seem unlikely to lose any of them this November. But in the other four of the ten most-populous states—Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Georgia—the gubernatorial races are competitive. If Democrats win, say, two of the four, they’d govern eight of the ten largest states, and twelve of the largest fifteen. This would affect the character of our politics going into 2028 and beyond.

So there’s reason to be hopeful.

But there are reasons to remain alarmed.

The main reason is obvious: Trump and his loyalists will control the levers of executive power over the next two years. You’d have to be crazy not to be alarmed by what they can do during this time—to our nation’s well-being at home and to its standing abroad, to our civil liberties and civil service, to any remaining guardrails against corruption and lawlessness. So Donald Trump and JD Vance, Todd Blanche and Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought in positions of great power remain a clear and present danger to our constitutional republic.

As do their collaborators outside the government. The public has moved pretty decisively in the right direction over the past two years. Our elites have not. Some are eagerly taking advantage of the benefits of crony capitalism. Others, intimidated, are cowering or cutting deals. Few are standing up to autocracy.

And all of this is to say nothing of the threat to free and fair elections in 2028. Trump and his cabinet officials, and all the loyalists they’ve stuffed into government agencies, really do not want to lose power in 2028. They don’t want a new administration to come in and turn over the rocks to uncover their corruption and lawlessness. The threat of election interference in 2026 has been worrisome. But the threats in 2028 will be of a whole different order of magnitude. And the stronger the popular opposition to Trump and Trumpism becomes, the more determined Trump and his authoritarians will be to subvert the democratic process.

So be hopeful and a