Never put off until tomorrow what can be done the day after tomorrow.
Dallas
Joined July 2012
- Tweets3.7K
- Following2.5K
- Followers1.9K
- Likes40.7K
I can remember asking Ted at the Dallas Petroleum Club how he would balance the budget about 15 years ago. He said he'd repeal Obamacare. I noted that Obamacare was a forward looking liability (nothing had actually happened at that point) so it didn't touch our debt problem. He responded by saying he'd eliminate the Department of Education. Peanuts compared to Medicare, Social Security or Defense -- no one is serious and conservatives got what we deserved.
History was made last night.
For months, we were saying that 2026 was the most consequential midterm election of our lifetimes.
Unfortunately, we were right. Sometimes history is to be celebrated; other times, it is to be mourned. Always, it must be reckoned with.
2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation. What happened, and why? What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here?
When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead. We’ve lost the House. We’ve lost the Senate. When all is said and done, we will have lost eight to 10 Senate seats.
We lost in historically red states, like South Carolina and North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa. We lost in purple states, like Michigan, and New Hampshire, and Georgia. And we just barely won by just a single point in bright red states like Florida and Louisiana, and then there’s Texas.
Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas. In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election. For weeks, I had been publicly warning on this podcast that we were in very real danger of losing everything in Texas. Far too few believed that was possible. I am very, very sorry that it came to pass. Texas has not had a Democrat governor since 1994. We haven’t had a Democrat senator since 1993. Now we’ll have both.
Why were the results so overwhelming? Pundits and analysts will break down the results for weeks or months or even years to come, but several things are already evident today.
Years ago, the very best political advice I ever got was from Heidi. She said, “It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about their kids, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their futures.” Too many politicians forget that.
Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas.
Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
The Canada trade war, 7.6%.
The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%.
Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%.
Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.
The top issue, cost of living, is very real. Too many in politics dismissed it. They didn’t understand. They pointed to the macro numbers showing the stock markets soaring, median income at record highs, and poverty at record lows. Those data are true, but they don’t tell all of the story.
Here are some stats that are a lot more real and personal. Spam, Hormel’s processed meat substitute, broke record sales, selling 113 million cans last year. That is nearly as much spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II. 29 percent of Americans have used buy now, pay later for groceries this year. That’s double the share just two years ago.
In August, banks repossessed 42% more homes than they did last year. In 2024, car repossessions topped 2.3 million, above the 2009 peak in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. In 2025, 6% of 401k holders took hardship withdrawals, paying penalties. That is a record, and triple the norm.
And here’s one that’s really stunning. Americans made more than 75 million paid plasma donations in 2026. That’s another record. That means 200,000 Americans every single day, with a needle in their arm, just to pay for groceries.
That is very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care. Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high.
Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars.
There’s a very real economic disconnect. Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide. Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families. Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.
Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain.
So, what do we do now? We need to listen and respond. We need to champion economic policies that make a real difference in working people’s lives, and we need to deal with the consequences.
Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.
We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.
And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed.
Sadly, that means many Americans will be hurt. Texans will be hurt. Their assault on business will make Texas a much less attractive place to start or grow a small business. Texas will become more like California if they succeed in halting all new investment into AI.
The economic results will be dramatic. Over $700 billion in new projects are scheduled to start in the next year. If the Democrats shut them all down, our country will very likely go into a recession. That will suit the Democrats just fine. They’ll just blame it all on Donald Trump.
In the next two years, we need to do two things.
One, fight the madness. I will work with Democrats when they’re willing to be reasonable. Last night, I called James Talarico. I congratulated him on his very impressive victory. It was a pleasant conversation, and I told him that I looked forward to working with him to try to benefit Texas.
So, if there are things like flood relief for the Hill Country, or trying to get the space academy to Texas, he and I will work together. But if the newly elected radicals push policies that hurt Texas, raising taxes, destroying jobs, opening the border, releasing violent criminals, threatening our children, undermining our constitutional rights, I will fight with all of my strength to defend Texas and to defend the Constitution.
And number two, we need to rebuild, getting behind policies that directly benefit the constituents we lost.
There’s a complicated story, no doubt, of what happened on Election Day, but as I see it, the key constituencies we lost were blue-collar voters, what had rightly become the core base of our party, Evangelical Christians, who didn’t show up with the same numbers and fervor as prior elections, farmers and ranchers. Tragically, we alienated rural America. Young people, who excitedly had voted Republican in 2024, and who shifted hard blue this cycle. And of course, Hispanics.
For Hispanics, there’s a strong overlap with young people and blue-collar workers. In 2024, just two years ago, I was proud to carry Hispanics statewide in Texas by six points, and we swung the Rio Grande Valley red for the first time in a century. It can be done, but in this election, those Hispanic voters overwhelmingly went back Democrat. We have got to turn that around.
And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record.
Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.
People voted as they did because they were angry. Ironically, the Democrats that they elected are going to advance policies that will make affordability worse. The Democrats want gas prices higher. They want to ban gasoline engines altogether. Their extreme environmental mandates will drive up food prices and the prices of everything else.
But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. I am filled with hope and optimism. Texas will be red again. We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas.
We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives. The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well.
When the zealots overreach, and they will, we will stand ready to lead in the direction of freedom, of prosperity, of safety, and security, and common sense. We will return to a new dawn of freedom in America.
It is dark right now, but it is always darkest before the dawn, and morning is coming. That is my fervent prayer, and that is my commitment to you.
Matt Miller retweeted
Bad policy, bad character make bad politics: erratic tariffs, impulsive Iran war, blanket pardons, apparent corruption, weaponized justice, ICE brutality, mountainous deficits, hiding Epstein, abandoning allies and coddling enemies. Hoping for a course correction, for the country and for my party.
Hey @nikitabier why doesn't X create a "verified human" option? Use face ID to verify you're human before posting and allow users to turn off posts by anyone who doesn't verify. Folks can still be anon but verified human.
Matt Miller retweeted
This should outrage every American. This is the president of the United States telling Iran to bomb American cities. I live in Los Angeles, but that’s beside the point. Tommorow it could be your city.
My fellow Americans, this is not normal. This is not funny. This behavior should ring alarm bells for us all!
If @SouthwestAir got a first class cabin, I would never fly American again.
The K-shaped economy has a seat map.
United's first 787-9 had 48 business-class seats and no premium-economy cabin.
Its newest has 99 seats across those two cabins.
More than double the premium seats. On the same plane.
And 30 fewer seats overall.
ALT Headline: Same 787. Twice the premium seats. United's official current and Elevated 787-9 seat maps are stacked for comparison, with Polaris outlined in bright pink and Premium Plus outlined in orange. The current aircraft has 69 premium seats, 27% of its total. The Elevated aircraft has 99 premium seats, 45% of its total. United's first 787-9 had 48 business-class seats and no dedicated premium-economy cabin.
Matt Miller retweeted
Real estate magnate Donald Trump calls into UPN 9 News in New York City.
When they ask if his tower on 40 Wall Street has been damaged by the attacks, he brags that it used to be the second tallest skyscraper in downtown Manhattan before the collapse of the World Trade Center, and now it’s the tallest building again.
"There's a real federal statute for this: 18 U.S.C. 597, expenditures to influence voting, a fine or up to 2 years if it's willful."
I am the payments logistics officer at the United States Treasury Department who has personally touched every version of the free money this country has been promised since 2020, and I am the only person left in this building who remembers how the first one actually went, because the first one is the only one that was ever real.
Spring 2020. Economic Impact Payments, $1,200 a person, funded, appropriated, moving. Then Mnuchin's office ordered the president's name onto the memo line. Not a rubber stamp. A printed signature, the first time a president's name had ever gone on an IRS payment. Commissioner Rettig wasn't told until the request was already in motion. Our engineers had to reprogram the check-printing software and run it through testing before a single check could clear, because the system had never been built to hold a name that wasn't the Treasurer's. 70 million people waited an extra few days for their own emergency relief, during a pandemic, so a signature could finish QA. I sat in the room where someone asked if we could just skip the testing and was told no, we are not shipping the president's name with a rendering bug in it. The actual money moved slower so the branding could move faster. Every version since has been the branding moving faster and the money not moving at all.
Version one was the DOGE Dividend. It didn't come from this building. It came from a 30-year-old hedge fund manager named James Fishback, CEO of a firm called Azoria, who has said publicly that the number arrived to him in a dream. He posted it to Musk in February of 2025: take 20% of whatever DOGE saves and cut it into checks, math it out to roughly $5,000 a household if the savings hit $2 trillion. Musk replied that he'd check with the president. The president checked. Within days it was a line in a press briefing, no legislation, no appropriation, just a number that had been asleep in one man's head 12 hours earlier now sitting on the Resolute desk. By May, DOGE's own public savings tracker read $175 billion, not $2 trillion, which works out to $1,086.96 per taxpayer, not $5,000. Nobody issued a correction. The number just stopped being said out loud. And when Fishback later described himself as having advised DOGE, a former senior DOGE adviser went on the record to say, quote, you didn't advise DOGE. So the origin story of the $5,000 figure still being used today, 18 months and 2 rebrands later, is a dream, a tweet, and a denial. I have that DOGE savings tracker bookmarked. I check it the way other people check their portfolio.
Version two was the Tariff Dividend, announced that November. $2,000 a person this time, lower number, new funding source: tariff revenue instead of imaginary government savings. This one at least had a real number behind it: $195 billion collected in tariffs for the fiscal year. Economists ran the arithmetic before we did. Cato called it fiscal fantasy in print. A deputy chief economist at Oxford Economics warned that stacking a stimulus check on top of the existing tax cuts could overheat the economy. The math didn't work even before the legal problem showed up, and then the legal problem showed up: the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, the ones the dividend was supposed to be funded from, and by May we were issuing refunds to importers faster than customs was collecting anything. I watched the ledger cross from positive to negative in the same spreadsheet tab we'd built to track the dividend. We didn't rename the tab. We just stopped opening it.
Version three is the Trump Dividend, the one I'm actually being asked to price this week. Same number as version one, $5,000, announced Tuesday night from the stage of the midterm convention. Quote: if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our tremendous economic success, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States for $5,000. One condition attached, and it isn't a funding mechanism, it's a spending restriction: the money has to stay in the country, no Canada, no China, no Germany, his words. So the government has now, for the first time in three attempts, specified where the imaginary money is allowed to be imaginarily spent. Commentators started using the word bribe before the applause even finished. There's a real federal statute for this: 18 U.S.C. 597, expenditures to influence voting, a fine or up to 2 years if it's willful. Nobody in this building has said the statute's number out loud in a meeting, and I've listened for it, because there's a comfortable legal argument sitting right there in plain sight: you cannot criminally buy a vote with money that was never appropriated, never budgeted, and has no line item anywhere in the federal government. It isn't a bribe. A bribe requires a bribe.
I priced it anyway, because pricing a number has never once required the number to exist. 270 million adults, $5,000 each, $1.35 trillion, against a national debt that closed this week at $40.1 trillion. It costs 7 times what version two's tariffs brought in at their peak. I put the number in the deck. I did not put in a funding source, because there's a blank cell where that used to go, and I've started to think of that blank cell as the actual through-line of my career here.
Four checks. One real. One dreamed by a guy who isn't even employed by the government he says he advised. One that went negative by court order. One that costs a Senate seat instead of a tax dollar. And I'm still on the invite list for the pricing meeting, because I'm the only one left who was in the room in 2020 when we tested a signature before we tested the money.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This post is satire. Peter Girnus's X profile is self-desribed as a "cyber populist" and "hacker/writer." He has no know affiliation to federal work or involvement with stimulus-type checks for Americans. Further, his work history shows only non-federal cybersecurity work.
linkedin.com/in/peter-girnu…
Hey @grok can you paste the verbatim text of 18 USC 597 - even though this guy is a comedian, I’m trying to confirm if what was said is unlawful.
Matt Miller retweeted
What we're watching here is a kind of humiliation ritual that makes him feel in control. He knows he's lying and we know he's lying but he also knows that he's wearing us down with the avalanche of his lies. And of course we hate ourselves for our fatigue and increasing apathy, and because we know that for the next two years there's nothing we are going to do to stop his pathological lying. He has the world's biggest podium and he's trashing it, while all we can do is watch the sickening display. He's tossed the country into a post-truth pit of fakeness out of sheer boredom and narcissism. He's having the time of his life.
Matt Miller retweeted
Ghalibaf to Bessent, for people who don’t speak Bloomberg:
OQX26 = Oman crude, November 2026.
USGG10YR = the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield.
DOESSPR = America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The one stored in salt caverns.
Translation:
Keep shorting, champ. Or drain the reserve past the danger line and watch Bryan Mound collapse. Either way, that’s your résumé. The world already bought popcorn.
Bessent promised an economic D-Day.
Ghalibaf sent him Wile E. Coyote with his own face glued on and wrote: You are here, cutie.
Matt Miller retweeted
I asked Claude to rank the presidents in these tiers according to the scholarly consensus. Then I asked ChatGPT to make the image.
I did not move anyone according to my own personal preference.
They say DC is Hollywood for ugly people.
“Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, himself in a regular suit and tie, approached a group of racecar drivers hanging out by the paddock. ….
“‘Good luck today,’ Mr. Lutnick told them. ‘Enjoy it. This is all of Washington, just for you.’
“He walked away. One of the drivers turned and shrugged.
“‘I honestly have no idea who that was,’ he said.”
nytimes.com/2026/08/23/us/po…
So I'm going to assume that if he tries this, y'all are going to be ok with the whole 2nd amendment thing still, right? Like, what other circumstance would you envision as straight up tyrannical?
No. You're still playing man to man. It's just that one receiver is wide fckn open downfield.
When you have your third kid people joke about “going from man-to-man defense to zone.”
It’s a funny line, but it undersells the challenge.
The real issue is combinatorial growth:
You go from one sibling relationship (AB) to three (AB, AC, and BC) .
Which means that whereas once the causal arrow of sibling antagonism could point in either of two directions (AB or BA), it can suddenly point in any of six (AB, BA, AC, CA, BC, or CB).
