If you want a good idea of the Republican Party’s closing pitch to voters heading toward a 2026 election that doesn’t look good for them, Donald Trump’s two speeches to the GOP Midterm Convention in Dallas weren’t all that illuminating. At inordinate length on Wednesday night, and in a brief reprise Thursday night, the president suggested Americans are living in a virtual paradise of booming prosperity and swaggering global power that the evil “Dumocrats” want to take away in order to plunge the country back into the nightmare of Sleepy Joe Biden’s four years in office. The only news he made was a jaw-dropping trillion-dollar offer to give every American citizen $5,000 as a “dividend” if the electorate is wise enough (or greedy and needy enough, I suppose) to keep Congress in his party’s hands.

As Republicans everywhere rolled their eyes at this unserious and morally dubious gambit, Vice-President J.D. Vance spoke before Trump in the convention’s closing hours and laid down the actual message we are likely to hear from the GOP in the home stretch of the midterm campaign. He didn’t so much as mention the five-G bribe (though he had dutifully endorsed it in a TV interview). And he didn’t devote that much time to boasts about the administration’s record, other than repeating some of his boss’s howlers about a booming crime-free nation from the night before. No, the burden of Vance’s remarks to a MAGA crowd ready to believe absolutely anything about the opposition party is that Democrats are America-hating “crazies,” if not monsters. To the extent it was possible to discern any evidence for this proposition, Vance alluded to a handful of old social-media posts from one House candidate in Michigan and another in New York, along with an old provocation or two from progressive influencer Hasan Piker, who isn’t running for anything. It’s clear that Republicans have decided to seize on a handful of candidates (several in noncompetitive congressional races) associated (more........

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