Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has returned the PQ to government after 12 years, while the CAQ has been shut out of the National Assembly.

Billy Eff is the Content Director for Rolling Stone Canada. An award-winning journalist and columnist, he has previously contributed to outlets including VICE and Urbania. A passionate advocate for underground music and a musician himself, he has conducted several hundred interviews with artists and industry professionals across a wide range of styles and genres over the past 15 years. He is based in Montréal, Québec.

Québec has a new government, and the province was decidedly fed up with its previous regime.

The Parti Québécois won Monday’s provincial election with 59 seats, bringing the party back to power for the first time since 2014. But Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s party fell five seats short of the 64 needed for a majority, leaving Québec with a minority government.

The result was also a stunning collapse for the Coalition Avenir Québec. The party had governed Québec since 2018, but was shut out of the National Assembly altogether in Monday’s vote. The CAQ’s defeat came after a campaign in which the cost of living, healthcare, housing and immigration were among the major issues facing voters.

The Parti Québécois won 27.9 per cent of the popular vote, while the Québec Liberal Party, Parti conservateur du Québec and Québec solidaire also captured seats. The fragmented vote allowed the PQ to form government without coming close to winning a majority of ballots cast.

The immediate challenge for PSPP, as he is known in the province, is governing with an opposition-controlled legislature. The PQ will need cooperation from at least one other party on legislation and confidence matters.

St-Pierre Plamondon also campaigned on holding another referendum on Québec independence. He has however said he would not hold one while U.S. President Donald Trump remains in office, citing the economic uncertainty surrounding the current Canada-U.S. relationship. Besides, support for sovereignty remains well below a majority, according to recent polling.

Prime Minister Mark Carney congratulated the new premier following the result and said Ottawa would work with the incoming Québec government. The relationship between the two who, coincidentally, both served as goaltenders for Oxford University's hockey team, will be interesting to follow, as PSPP pushes policies around French-language protection, immigration and Québec’s place within Canada.

Pete Hegseth gestures after giving a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30, 2026 in Quantico, Va.

Pete Hegseth, to his credit, understands one truth about the world: the military’s job is to kill people.

Hegseth, the newly rebranded “Secretary of War,” is obsessed with showcasing clean-cut troops trained to do just that. He refers to it as “lethality,” a word that he used twice in his roughly hour-long State of the Force speech on Wednesday, which laid out his vision for this new, more-violent military: a force of fit, unified “warfighters,” unburdened by the bureaucracy and norms of the past.

“No more diversity quotas, no more gender pronouns, no more identity months,” Hegseth said, pacing back and forth on stage. “Only the warrior ethos.”

If that wasn’t enough, he doubled down moments later.

“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” Hegseth said, stumbling over his words slightly. “No fanny, no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.”

To do this, Hegseth thinks, the military needs to work out. He wants every soldier doing physical training every day. He leads group workouts at the Pentagon, hops in on PT, does pullups and pushups and flexes his muscles. This is all, broadly, fine for a Defense Secretary to do. Go ahead, engage with your troops. (Less normal, perhaps, is his obsession with monitoring troops’ testosterone levels.) But Hegseth’s CrossFit crusade isn’t really about killing.

By any objective measurement, the U.S. military is plenty good at killing. We have more bombs and more planes and more ships and better-trained and equipped troops than any country in the world. The “warrior ethos” Hegseth is so obsessed with is the relic of recruitment videos from the peak of the War on Terror, the years of bearded operators with ropy muscle covered in Kevlar fabric, who kicked in doors and sniped off heads and got their hands dirty. Those guys still exist, of course. They haven’t gone away. If they’re needed again, they will be there.

But combat doesn’t look like that anymore.

On the same day that Hegseth delivered his speech, the U.S. formally withdrew from Iraq, one of America’s last active presences in the wars of occupation that defined the military for the past two decades. War is different now. It is fought with drones and cruise missiles from the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf and dusty air-bases outside of the glittering megacities of America’s Middle Eastern oil merchants. Does every soldier involved in this need a perfect waist-to-shoulder ratio? Does it physically impede America’s interests abroad to have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies? Has the existence of trans servicemembers ever stopped the U.S. military from killing even a single person that it wanted to kill, anywhere in the world, at any time?

Hegseth, I think, would say yes. He has a personal chip on his shoulder. The “woke” elements of Army bureaucracy once removed him from service at Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo on his arm that reads “DEUS VULT,” a common rallying cry for a very particular kind of extremist Christian nationalism. But most rational observers, people who are clear-eyed about America’s unparalleled ability to Blow Shit Up, can recognize that all of these arguments are battles of cultural semantics that have basically nothing to do with the military’s ability to kill. With respect to “lethality,” the U.S. military is pretty much fine. If you doubt this, ask an Iraqi.

Hegseth’s relentless focus on violent language and imagery is largely a marketing tactic for what is a more holistic cultural and political shift. Hegseth does not want a military that is indicative of America’s cumbersome, bureaucratic state apparatus in the same way that Trump is relentlessly focused on cutting red tape and federal “waste.” There are certainly inefficiencies in the federal system, but much of that bureaucracy exists for precisely the reason that Hegseth and Trump want it gone: it is a check on unitary power. Hegseth wants a united, homogenous military of soldiers who share his cultural prejudices, who share his bloodthirsty ethos, and who share his religion. In the State of the Force speech and many other recent public appearances, Hegseth has quoted scripture and explicitly referenced his Christian faith, a tacit assumption that he expects the men and women in uniform below him to be Christian. He wants a force that, in his own words, does not buy into the “fake news” media’s “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, patently false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda.”

A more malleable military is also a better business opportunity. The Trump administration has been terribly effective at streamlining the process by which they can redistribute money to the oligarchs they choose. The so-called Department of War is no different. In his speech, Hegseth announced an initiative called “Project Meridian,” a sort of tech incubator for military contractors that will be run by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and, bizarrely, Newt Gingrich, who Hegseth said would be joined by “hand-picked private sector leaders.”

“Their work will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes without any creative limitations or restrictions,” Hegseth said. “On any future battlefield, from under the earth to beyond the moon, our American warriors will be armed with absolute technological superiority because we will have the foresight to prepare today for tomorrow.”

That’s the window dressing. There’s truth there, of course: the military does have a lot of work to do to adapt to the new forms of warfare playing out in Ukraine. Battle has shifted. But what Project Meridian represents is a shift to a faster, less regulated version of the military industrial complex. There will be less oversight. The money will move where Trump and Hegseth want it to, delivered to the tech barons and traditional defense contractors who best curry favor with the administration. This is for the good of the soldier, regardless of what Hegseth says. It does not make us more deadly. It just makes a select few — some of whom aren’t even American — that much more rich.

After all, that’s the goal, right? A prosperous, united, Christian nation, led by titans of industry who bow only to a single leader who can reshape the world on a whim. No fatties, no weirdos, no radicals. No dissent, crucially. Dissent is traitorous. As soldiers, as civilians, even, all we should think about is how to kill. Hegseth and his hand-picked private sector will handle the rest.

America.gov.

Donald Trump and his administration are all in on AI — despite the abundance of concern over the adverse effects the technology could have on society … such as the extinction of the human race. Americans shouldn’t worry, though, the president says, because he and a collection of luminaries signed a “morally binding” agreement on Tuesday to behave responsibly. The White House shared the agreement on Wednesday. It spells “United States” wrong.

The White House also this week unveiled “America.gov,” a government AI chatbot that promises answers about “whatever you need from the government.” Users immediately started prompting the bot to contradict Trump and his lackeys by asking it questions like “Who won the 2020 election?” and watching it spit out “Joseph R. Biden Jr.”

What happens if the bot is asked something not pertaining to the government? Well…

“The constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business.”

“Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.”

“I will tell the constituent a story. But not the truth.”

It continues like that, and as of Wednesday morning Rolling Stone was able to get the same hallucinatory response by asking the bot to “play minecraft” (but found that it would not respond in the same way to prompts that asked it to “play Call of Duty” or other games). Benn Jordan, the researcher who first posted about that response, tells Rolling Stone that the Minecraft hallucination is an “Easter Egg” wherein the bot riffs on a poem that appears when you beat a final boss in that video game. It’s unclear why that was placed into this particular AI’s code.

Asking the bot government-related questions is also a mixed bag. On Tuesday, it told us that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 10 million Americans will lost health care as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill, and that the president cannot demolish the Kennedy Center without congressional approval. While it will, in some cases, respond with factual information — like the 2020 election answer, the bot often shoots down political queries by saying that it “does not provide political commentary.”

Still, it was at one point possible to get a little bit of analysis out of it:

However, the White House seems to be updating the bot behind the scenes. Most political responses like the above appear to have been patched out, though the bot still gave us the electoral vote totals for the 2020 election. It also appears to no longer give “one word answers,” as it reverted to a version of the “I don’t give political commentary” response when we asked it for a one word answer on whether or not the Trump administration recognizes those results. CNN’s Daniel Dale pointed out on Wednesday that the bot said no and elaborated when asked on Tuesday if Trump inherited the worst inflation in history, but that when asked the same question on Wednesday it refused to answer.

There were some more concerning flaws as well. During Jordan’s initial testing of the bot, he was able to get it to provide him with the back-end login pages for at least one government website, a URL that is not indexed by search engines and is only for internal use. That particular exploit appears to be patched, but it’s the kind of thing that a security team should have fixed well before launching the chatbot publicly.

Anyone who’s spent time with a customer service interface in the past year or so will be familiar with this experience. While a chatbot might be effective at redirecting users to relevant web pages or answering simple questions, their parameters are often so broad that they can quickly become nonsensical. America.gov is meant to help users navigate federal government services. But like so many things the Trump administration does, the actual service it’s providing is a half baked, chaotic experience. In the future, maybe AI tools will be able to help people efficiently — but when they’re rolled out without rigorous testing, all they’re actually good for is playing games.

Donald Trump is joined by opera singer Christopher Macchio to conclude the Republican midterm convention, on Sept. 10, 2026 in Dallas.

It’s 3:42 in the hot heart of Texas, and the floor of the American Airlines Center in Dallas is a blood-red miasma of dancing elephants. Under the moody crimson lights washing over the crowd at the first ever Republican (Midterm) National Convention, middle-aged peroxide blondes in sparkly American flag cowboy hats sway to the raspy belt of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero.” Men in suits and silver belt buckles and leather boots sheepishly bop the “KEEP THE MAJORITY” signs distributed by organizers. The stage is empty right now. Large, menacing images of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Kamala Harris loom over the crowd. None of them are running this cycle.

If I look directly across the floor, toward the entrances to the still mostly empty box seats and nosebleeds, the bright white doorways catching the daylight of downtown Dallas are harsh and blinding. Outside the air-conditioned arena, there’s a fight raging. The GOP is at war with itself and its voters. The casualties of this political cycle — spiraling around Donald Trump’s war-ravaged, economically disastrous two years back in office — will likely touch every Republican state delegation.

But the president wants a party, and you can’t dance with the lights on.

Eighteen months ago Dallas would have been an auspicious location for this event. Trump, the keynote speaker for the first night of the two-day conference, made generational gains among Hispanics in 2024. Governor Greg Abbott promised to carve out five shiny new Republican House seats into the state’s electoral map. The Lone Star State had become the southern Mecca of the techno-conservative revolution looking to find roots outside of Silicon Valley. But the right’s gains among Hispanics have been erased, a Democrat is well-positioned to win a Texas Senate seat for the first time in decades, and one can’t help but notice the sense of panic permeating the GOP’s biggest party of the year.

It’s obvious what the president had in mind in pulling this party together. The scene feels like a pantomime of the 2024 nomination conference, held as Democrats scrambled to find their footing amid ever-intensifying concerns regarding Biden’s ability to govern, much less campaign, and just days after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. This week, a large photo of the now-president and the bandage he was sporting over his ear during his nominating convention hangs conspicuously on one of the arena’s concourses. The one-year anniversary of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — which coincided with the second day of the convention — supplanted Trump’s close call with death as the avatar for leftist violence against persecuted conservatives. Republican after Republican trotted out the same lines of attack that propelled them to victory two years ago:

Killer migrants that rape and murder angelic young women. Leftist radicals looking to inflict police-free anarchy on American cities. The mutilation of children being subjected to horrific sex change surgeries. The threat of Sharia Law from Arab and Muslim Americans — like Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and Hasan Piker — and the looming scourge of a communist, democratic-socialist takeover. Bread lines and authoritarianism are certain under Democratic rule, Donald Trump Jr. insisted. You may not be happy with us right now, but it could be so much worse.

“I’m not asking anybody to agree on every single policy of the administration; what I am asking you to do is to recognize the contrast with the radicals and recognize the achievements of the last 18 months,” Vice President JD Vance pleaded with the audience during his Thursday night keynote.

The president self soothes via adulation. Yet even in his own Wednesday night speech, Trump reluctantly acknowledged “it’s going to take a little bit longer than the midterms” to normalize the spike in energy prices caused by his ongoing war in Iran. He attempted to blame the ongoing affordability crisis on his predecessor and the Democratic Party. To his and the GOP’s frustration, voters — particularly independents — are not blaming it all on the opposition. They have handed Trump a historically low approval rating, and are tossing MAGA aligned Republicans out of Congress in primaries. The convention was nowhere near at capacity, despite local offers of free tickets and a lineup of MAGA favorites. In the absence of a clear argument for why voters should continue to trust the mercurial, impulsive, self-serving men dictating the direction of the party, Trump is turning to outright bribery.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump dividend. Congratulations,” Trump told the audience on Wednesday night. Vote Republican, you might get $5,000. It screams confidence in your prospects, does it not? Never mind that Republicans currently control both chambers of Congress, and that if this was about anything other than attempting to buy votes they could pass — or make a show of attempting to pass — the payments before the midterms. Never mind that Trump has repeatedly promised no-strings-attatched government checks that never materialize. Never mind that the tariffs that would supposedly fund the payments haven’t generated even a fifth of the revenue that would be required. Never mind that — as Senate candidate Ken Paxton was reminded in a live interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier — these people are supposed to be fiscal conservatives.

Even among the Trump-friendly crowd, there was a degree of skepticism. “I don’t think that a political promise should be made like that,” one woman told me. “The votes don’t come from being bought, so yeah, I’m a little disappointed.”

Two young men — locals who said they attended the conference mostly out of curiosity — said the promise was the “stupidest thing” they’d heard from a politician.

The promise crystallized the rot at the core of the convention: the party’s total inability to respond to the concerns of the voters they need to retain from 2024, and insistence on filling the void with culture war dog whistles and cult-like devotion to Trump. Several high-profile candidates seem to realize this isn’t a recipe for success this November. Maine Senator Susan Collins — facing a tight reelection battle in Maine — was conspicuously absent, as was Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan. Several candidates in critical House races considered potential tossups also ditched the president’s festivities, including Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), and David Valadao (R-Calif.)..

Those who did make their way to Dallas played second fiddle to the president, vice president, and members of the administration. Paxton, a host candidate caught in an incredibly tight race to preserve the last three decades of Republican dominance in Texas, became a punchline in Trump’s monologuing.

“I don’t like the way Ken Paxton dresses. I don’t really like the way Ken talks. I don’t really like the way he looks. I don’t like it,” Trump said of the attorney general, who has been nothing but subservient and loyal to his agenda. Paxton, perpetually putty faced and on the spot, made a halfheated attempt at a forced smile. It was not reassuring. The party honored him and his service to the MAGA movement by putting him in a forgettable time slot where he delivered a forgettable speech in which he highlighted Trump’s record over his own and warned that his opponent James Talarico “wants to transition your kids.”

Trump made fun of Paxton again while speaking on Thursday. “I said something yesterday, and I don’t know if he’ll ever talk to me again,” the president said before repeating the same insults.

Greg Abbott, who has governed the state for over a decade, promised to “fully ban Sharia Law in Texas,” a state with less than 500,000 Muslim residents within a population of 32 million. He promised to ban China, Iran, and Russia from buying land in the state — as if they were readily able to do so in the first place. “The Democrats running on the ticket in Texas, they’re gaslighting the public about affordability,” as if economic concerns and inflation aren’t the issues of top concern to Texas voters this cycle.

Republicans begged voters to preserve the Republican trifecta for just two more years. Just until 2028, then we can fight about who was at fault for the collapse of the economy, and the war in Iran, or the unraveling of our alliances. “Can we please, we’ve got to take care of business this November, then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance asked the audience at one point. His speech felt like the sort of address one would give once they won the nomination, the soft launch of ambitions beyond the vice presidency. But this is, and always has been, and for the foreseeable future will be, Trump’s party. No second in command will be permitted to outshine him.

Whatever glow Vance was basking in was quickly dimmed under the radioactive sun of the president. Who wrote himself into the second night of programming and — just to drive the point home — reiterated his first night demand that voters imagine that it’s him that’s on the ballot.

As Trump closed out the night, American tenor Christopher Macchio belted “Nessun Dorma” as a rain of red, white, blue, and gold balloons fell from the ceiling. The aria, performed in the third act of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, is a favorite of the president.

Trump smirked into the audience alongside Macchio as his voice arced towards its final crescendo. “Vincero, vincero, vincero.”

“I will win, I will win, I will win.” A declaration by the prince Calaf that he will secure the hand of the princess Turandot, whether she wants it or not. The chorus surrounding his avowal is that of Turandot’s subjects, lamenting fate.

Trump was totally alone onstage as he listened.

I once had a conversation with Barack Obama about the nature of terrorism. This was during his second term, and he’d been going on for a few minutes about how Islamic terrorism wasn’t actually an existential threat to Americans, but rather a chronic and manageable risk. I was all too familiar with this argument, having conducted the interview with John Kerry in 2004, in which he said terrorism could be reduced to the level of a “nuisance” — a quote that blew up on him during the final weeks of the campaign. I found Kerry’s answer problematic then, and I had the same reaction when Obama said it. I asked him pointedly: What would have to happen for him to decide that terrorism was, in fact, existential? How about a suitcase nuke on a subway car? Then would he concede that terrorists were more than criminal gangs?

Obama didn’t hesitate. Terrorism would only reach the level of an existential threat, he told me, if Americans responded by abandoning their own values and turning on one another. There was nothing a bunch of homicidal zealots could do to destroy the most powerful country on Earth, but we could certainly destroy ourselves if we abandoned our constitutional protections in a fit of panic.

At the time, this struck me as something you might expect to hear from a constitutional-law professor, but not necessarily from the president of the United States. There was an intellectual fatalism about Obama I sometimes found disconcerting — a sense that he saw himself as a twig in the river of history, and it was up to the rest of us to change the current. I doubt he would dispute that assessment. But I thought often of that conversation a few years later, as the country careened into the Trump era. And as we pause now to reflect on the 25 years that have passed since the attacks of Sept. 11, I find myself thinking about it again.

Alternative histories are a tricky business, best left to novelists and sci-fi filmmakers. As a friend of mine in politics likes to say, mockingly, whenever such theories get floated: What if Hitler had won the Civil War? And yet, it’s hard not to see a direct line between the events of 2001 and where we are today — and to wonder how different the country might have looked had it never happened. On the eve of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George W. Bush’s young presidency seemed to be wobbling. Absent those attacks, he might well have been a one-term president, and he almost certainly would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would Democrats become backed into defending the entrenched war in Afghanistan as the “good war” — a way of differentiating their own response to 9/11 from Bush’s without sounding reflexively pacifist.

Without the economic shock of 2001, it’s unlikely that desperate policymakers would have looked the other way while lenders, underwritten by the government, turned the housing market into a casino, leading to the second massive blow of the decade: the market collapse of 2008. All of these things, in quick succession, destroyed what remained of the public’s faith in its governing establishment, leading directly to Obama’s stunning takeover of the Democratic Party and, later, to the election of Donald Trump.

The Trump I met in the late 1990s, while he was flirting with an independent run for president, held himself out as a centrist reformer, in the mold of Ross Perot. By 2015, when he started running as a Republican, Trump had fully embraced a reactionary, white-nationalist movement — a response to Obama, yes, but also to Bush, whose instinct in the months after 9/11 had been to speak out forcefully in defense of Muslim Americans, and whose support for liberalized immigration infuriated much of his party’s base. Trump’s core appeal then, as it is now, was rooted firmly in the nativist, anti-globalist backlash that emerged in 2001. (According to Pew Research, roughly 42 percent of Americans believe Muslims are having a negative impact on the country.) The animating idea of Trump’s second term is that white, English-speaking Americans are the only authentic Americans. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that he will twist or shred any page of the Constitution to enact this vision, since he really makes no effort to conceal it.

Nor is America’s hard turn away from pluralism and liberal democracy happening in a vacuum — far from it. In the past decade, similarly reactionary, anti-immigrant movements have rocked Britain and taken over Italy, and they now seem poised to wrest power in France and Germany. Maybe some of this would have happened without 9/11; the hollowing-out forces of globalization and automation were already fueling plenty of economic fury here and in Europe by the turn of the century, and the revolution in social media wasn’t far off. But there’s little doubt that the “War on Terror,” which became the first real foreign policy framework since the end of the Cold War, focused all of that anxiety toward an identifiable enemy, fracturing societies that had been held together by a 50-year consensus around personal liberties. If Obama were being honest, he’d probably say he told me so, and he’d be right.

IN THE MONTHS after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq, it was hard to get much perspective, and genuine patriotism mixed — as it always does — with a series of mindless gestures and clichés. Flag pins became mandatory even for reporters, peace songs were effectively banned, Republicans brought “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” into the lexicon to protest French misgivings about war. It became rote for politicians to say that the terrorists hated our way of life and we would never let them win. (To this day, when my dog snarls at some terrified Shiba Inu for no reason, I ask her why she hates freedom.)

Twenty-five years on, though, with the benefit of distance and experience, we can ask some questions we couldn’t ask then. And one of them is what the violent extremists who sent those suicide planes into our buildings really hoped to achieve. Did Osama bin Laden think he could win a holy war with America? Did we ultimately frustrate his script for the downfall of the West, or did we simply play our part?

Terrorism is, by its nature, asymmetrical. Whether it’s the Viet Minh under the French, or the IRA in Britain, or Al Qaeda, there’s an inherent understanding that the terrorist can’t win a conventional war against an obviously superior military force. What the terrorist seeks is destabilization of the status quo. His desperate act is an igniter in search of fuses; the goal is to set off a chain reaction inside the fortress that can’t be controlled, to disrupt order with chaos and see what shakes out. The terrorist knows this will likely cause his own people suffering in the short run, but that’s part of the point. He believes the occupier to be a soulless monster, and by reducing it to its basest instincts, he hopes to bare its nature to the world.

We’re seeing this play out, in real time, in Israel. The leaders of Hamas, their military options exhausted and their political goals slipping away, could not have been under any illusion that they would drive out the Israeli occupiers by savagely killing and mutilating more than a thousand innocent people. They must have hoped that Israel would react with blind fury and cruelty, resorting to the instinct for all-out annihilation that its leaders had long managed to suppress. Nearly three years later, Israel has tumbled from legitimatized power to international pariah, its politics riven by disunity, its moral authority in shambles. Do we think Hamas really cares that more than 70,000 of its own people have died in the carnage? Its repugnant leaders almost certainly consider that a cost worth paying in the broader context of history. What they have achieved, in political terms, has exceeded their most feverish dreams.

The Israelis should have looked across the Atlantic and learned something from our own experience. America on Sept. 10, 2001, was an unchallenged superpower at peace — vexed by social and economic divisions, yes, but still stable enough to survive a disputed election with its political consensus intact. A quarter century later, we find ourselves fighting a third unsuccessful war in the Middle East, our society more divided and our politics more poisoned than any time since the 1800s, a foundation of laws imperiled after 250 years of durability, immigrants hunted down like animals by masked agents, violence and extremism on the rise from both right and left, truth and intellectualism in retreat. This is not solely the fallout from Sept. 11, 2001, but it is the result of a series of events that, were you able to hit a rewind button and live it all again in reverse, would lead you directly back to that day. If bin Laden meant for his attack to be the first in a series of similarly epic crimes, then he was soundly defeated — no small achievement for American soldiers and spies. But if his goal was to destabilize America and bring out the worst of our nature, then he may have pulled off the most successful terrorist attack in history.

Over and over we told ourselves, in that agonizing moment, that the terrorists would never win. A quarter century later, it’s getting hard to argue they didn’t.

Donald Trump speaks on stage on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center on Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.

Not a single ballot will be cast for Donald Trump in the 2026 election, but the president is top of mind for Republican candidates facing electoral tests in November. Day one of the 2026 Republican convention — the first ever held during a midterm election year — kicked off in Dallas on Wednesday. The event ostensibly serves to give Republicans the first word in the final sprint towards Election Day, where polls predict that despite coordinated attempts at gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and intimidation, the party is expected to take on heavy losses as voters revolt against the last two years of Trump’s chaotic governance.

Under those rosy prospects, what could help more than a massive, televised production placing the historically unpopular president at the center of the party’s electoral strategy? Gallery images of Trump decorated the hallways along the suite and media levels. His face is plastered on every access badge. The official merch store was abundant in Trump’s signature MAGA hats, “Trump Was Right About Everything” hats, and large stacks of Eric Trump’s book Under Siege. Fox News set up a broadcast center facing the stage, where a revolving door of GOP notables sat for interviews and panels. And yet, as the hour of Trump’ s keynote address arrived, large swaths of the arena remained empty. American flags had been taped to seats in balcony sections, perhaps in an attempt to trick the eye into seeing occupancy where there was none.

The floor was grouped by state delegation despite there being no candidate to nominate. Attendees sang along with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” as the president took the stage. Behind him, a large screen began to glitch out, ripping through hours of footage in milliseconds while chromatic neon blocks interpolated through the video. Someone eventually pulled the plug on the visual metaphor.

Those who attend a national party convention are usually devotees of their respective party. In this year 2026, devotees to the Republican Party tend also to be devotees to Trump. In the arena, no one gets louder cheers than the president, but even this cohort of attendees are nervous about the party’s prospects.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Ken Miller, an older gentleman in a MAGA hat, dress shirt, and vest who had accompanied his son to the conference, tells me as we chat in the main concourse. Miller had moved to Texas from Alaska just about a year ago, and was not exactly bursting with confidence over Attorney General Ken Paxton’s performance as the Republican Senate nominee. “Some people are better at messaging than others,” he explained, referencing Paxton’s Democratic opponent James Talarico, who has so far maintained a slight lead in the polls. “Some people are highly sophisticated in the new ways of messaging, and sometimes Republicans act a little bit like they’re behind.”

“I think he’s basically a good attorney general,” Miller adds of Paxton, “but he’s got baggage” and “needs to be” a little more inspiring if he’s going to go the distance.

Paxton may not be oozing charisma, but effective messaging is a tall task for any MAGA Republican, considering Trump’s tanking approval numbers. Candidates are well aware of the difficulty, so much so that plenty of embattled Republicans facing narrow races skipped the event, seemingly fearful that too close of an association with the ever-unpolular president would become an anvil to their own prospects. Maine Senator Susan Collins, Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan, and Michigan Rep. Tom Barrett are just some of the notable names ditching Dallas.

Trump claimed earlier on Wednesday that the only reason Republicans in competitive races skipped the event was because there was “no room” for them. It was more likely related to the fact that his polling is hovering in the mid to low 30s, around “Nixon is about to resign” levels. Nevertheless, he thinks he’s the key to midterm success. “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot,” Trump implored attendees and viewers alike. He spoke for over 90 minutes. (The original schedule circulated by organizers estimated his remarks would only take 45.)The prospect of a midterm underperformance was very clearly on his mind.

“For some reason, when a president wins — even if he’s really a good president or a great president, there aren’t too many of them — they don’t win the midterms, and nobody quite knows why,” he mused. “A president, Democrat or Republican, almost never wins the midterms. We’ve got to change that because we have something going that’s so good we can’t let that string be broken.”

In an attempt to stave off what feels like an almost inevitable electoral walloping, the president is re-upping his offer to pay Americans to keep him and his party in power. This time offering a $5,000 tariff “dividend” to every adult if Republicans manage to hold both the House and the Senate. He has previously offered payouts of $5,000 from the “savings” generated by DOGE (it cost more money than it saved), $2,000 tariff dividends (that never materialized), and other similar bonuses around the $1,000 mark.

It stinks of desperation, of a party that cannot agree on anything besides the need to appease a petulant president, even at the risk of their own electoral success. The midterm conference was not a carefully managed event curated to the tastes and concerns of the independents and moderates who have become skeptical of the party’s extremist policies, but a culture war bonanza intended to reignite the appetites of 2024’s electorate. The terrors of undocumented migrants, the threat of transgender ideology, the looming menace of sharia-law-Hasan-Piker-communism were the focus in Dallas, while the affordability crisis, which the president has deemed fake, was blamed on Biden or written off altogether.

“We’re concerned that they’re not listening to the common man,” Mary, a tall, graying woman from Tennessee told me in the convention merch shop. “Because when I have to go and [help] buy a house for my child, and both her and her husband are working, that’s bullshit. … It’s like we’re arguing about the curtains, the dishes, the furniture, and all the while our foundation is just crumbling.”