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A prominent anti-Trump conservative admitted to still being surprised at the Republican Party, saying in a recent podcast that the recent midterm convention showed a shocking willingness to "degrade and debase and humiliate themselves" for the president.

The GOP this past week held an unprecedented party convention for the upcoming midterm elections, which are widely predicted to see it take bruising losses from Democrats. As the two-night event played out, the worst predictions from many critics appeared to come true, as the proceedings devolved into an unabashed celebration of President Donald Trump, even as it becomes clear that voters are steaming mad at him and ready to vent their frustrations at the ballot box.

One particularly galling portion of Trump's speech as he closed out the event, in which he asked attendees to raise their hands and repeat a pledge for the midterms.

"I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do," Trump asked them to repeat, further attacking Democrats and alleging without evidence that "there has never been bigger cheaters."

Charlie Sykes is a long-tenured conservative political commentator and former editor-in-chief for The Bulwark, known in recent years as an outspoken critic of Trump, his MAGA agenda and the changes he has wrought on the Republican Party. In the latest episode of his podcast, To the Contrary, Sykes told his guest, author and former John Fetterman chief of staff Adam Jentleson, that the depths to which the GOP continues to sink for Trump have exceeded his own expectations, specifically responding to the pledge he made attendees recite.

"The self-humiliation, just as a slight footnote, this has really been kind of a marker of the Trump age, the willingness of people to humiliate themselves," Sykes said. "This is something I hadn't calculated on. I had assumed — I think like the Founding Fathers [also assumed] — that people in power would not want to degrade and debase and humiliate themselves on a regular basis."

He continued: "But one of the things that Donald Trump has tapped into is, apparently, there is a vast reservoir of the desire to, like Lindsey Graham, you know, may he rest in peace, to humiliate themselves and you saw that again [this week]."

"It's dark, you know," Jentleson responded. "I mean, it's it's it's surfaced a very dark element of the American public and how they're willing to go along with sort of the strongman-type leader that we really thought was a feature of other countries but not ours, and and it's pretty chilling."

The U.S. is staring down a looming disaster that could explode into a "national security threat," one conservative writer warned for The Hill, but one that is also entirely "preventable."

John Mac Ghlionn is a conservative writer and researcher described as focusing on "culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life." On Saturday, he published an op-ed for The Hill about the growing doctor shortage in the U.S., and blasted what he called "the standard, lazy policy fix" for the issue.

"The U.S. is barreling toward a deficit of roughly 187,000 physicians over the next decade," Ghlionn explained. "Nearly half of that gaping hole exists in primary care, the basic, front-line medicine that keeps people out of emergency rooms. A country that leads the world in medical innovation is facing a future where seeing a doctor for a routine checkup could feel like winning the lottery."

He added: "The standard, lazy policy fix for this crisis involves raiding other nations for their medical talent. For decades, American health systems have treated foreign medical schools as an offshore supply chain, pulling doctors out of developing countries to cover the gaps in rural Kansas and inner-city clinics. This is not a wise policy, and it’s certainly not sustainable."

Ghlionn further chastised the practice of "treating the global South as a farm system for American hospitals" as "ethically bankrupt and strategically brain-dead," arguing that the standards at foreign medical schools might not align with those in the U.S. Medical training in the U.S., meanwhile, remains "the absolute global gold standard," and, he argued, must be pushed further.

Ghlionn accused the U.S. of "refusing to build enough seats for [its] own citizens" when it comes to medical training, and highlighted a particular law causing the issue.

"The bottleneck is concerning. It is also entirely artificial, engineered by a 1997 federal policy decision that froze Medicare funding for graduate medical education," he wrote. "The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped the number of residency slots the federal government would subsidize, locking the pipeline in place while the American population grew and aged. Thousands of brilliant, highly qualified American college graduates apply to medical school every single year, only to be turned away. They possess the test scores. They have the drive and the ambition, yet they hit a brick wall created by quarter-century-old federal accounting tricks. The U.S. created a system where it rejects its own talent, then acts shocked when it runs out of personnel."

He concluded later: "Elected leaders need to treat the production of American-educated doctors with the exact same urgency historical planners reserved for the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program. Those massive mid-century mobilizations succeeded because policymakers recognized that survival depended on training domestic talent and building national capacity."

NBC News reports that Republican gubernatorial nominees in key battleground states are suddenly eager to duck the topic of Trump’s 2020 election lies as November looms. As the days tick down to the midterm election, some are now acknowledging what they refused to admit before: Joe Biden won.

“Joe Biden won. Wisconsin voters have also spoken clearly on election integrity, banning Zuckerbucks and supporting voter ID,” said Rep. Tom Tiffany in a statement to NBC News, referring to two election-related ballot measures voters have passed in recent years. “In 2028, I’ll certify whoever wins the most votes in Wisconsin.”

But ABC News points out that Tiffany, who is now running for governor in Wisconsin, voted against certifying the 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania that proclaimed Biden the winner, as did Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) who is now running for governor. Biggs and Tiffany both also signed on to a Texas lawsuit in December 2020 that outright sought to invalidate Biden’s victory.

Additionally, ABC reports Tiffany also supported an FBI investigation of the 2020 election in Wisconsin and has said that he would have voted to overturn his state’s election results if a vote had been held.

It was only after his general election against Democrat David Crowley was well underway — and Trump’s distinct drop in popularity in Wisconsin — that Tiffany acknowledged Biden won the election.

“While questioning or outright denying the outcome of the 2020 election helped these Republicans curry favor with President Donald Trump and his supporters on their way to securing their nominations, the political calculus has changed as they set their sights on swaying independent voters in swing states amid a challenging environment for the party,” reports ABC.

Unlike Tiffany, Biggs still refuses to admit Trump lost the election or lied about his bogus victory. But ABC reports the Arizona Republican is running hard from engaging the topic as he prepares to face Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in November. When asked “three times by USA Today in July” who won the 2020 election, Biggs refused to answer, reports ABC.

“I’m not going to be critical against Republicans, and we have a lot of people with a lot of diverse viewpoints,” Biggs told USA Today. “The reality is we’re going to win this state by looking forward and having a vision for the state.”

Later, when pressed by The Salt Lake Tribune on whether Biden won, Biggs demanded why the reporter was asking about old news from “six years ago” in the first place.

“Seriously, why are you? I’m going to tell you most Arizonans are like I am. We’re going forward,” said Biggs, still refusing to answer for his support of Trump’s proven lie. Plus, Biggs’ spokesperson did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.

And down in Georgia, Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson is similarly coming to terms with a change of mind since his release of a February ad calling Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger a “Judas” for rejecting Trump’s demands to “find” votes after the 2020 election. Four months later he told NBC News that Biden’s victory in 2020 “was a travesty.”

But now, as the president’s polls across the nation and in Georgia take a nosedive, Jackson is laboring to straddle the fence between admitting the obvious while also not angering Trump or his MAGA supporters.

“Rick acknowledges both Biden’s win and that there were issues in the 2020 election that needed to be resolved in order to ensure Georgians have faith in our electoral system,” said Jackson campaign spokesperson Garrison Douglas.

President Donald Trump has once again stumbled "with stamping feet" into statements that hit a raw nerve internationally, but according to a new breakdown from The i Paper, he might avoid causing an incident this time around, largely because no one cares what he has to say anymore.

Trump has been visiting Ireland this weekend to attend a golf tournament and briefly meet with the country's leader, Taoiseach Micheál Martin. While the visit has seemingly been crafted to avoid diplomatic headaches, the president nonetheless managed to play with fire when he made comments expressing support for the unification of Ireland with Northern Ireland, the region on the same island controlled by the United Kingdom.

"I’d love to see it unified,” Trump said. “I think it would be a great feather in everybody’s cap if that happened. It’s going to happen eventually... yeah, I think it would be a fantastic thing. Now the UK will have something to say about it, obviously. But I think it would be a great thing. I mean, how can it be bad?"

Writing for The i Paper on Saturday, reporter and columnist James Ball said that "To call the issue a sensitive one is a dramatic understatement."

"People have fought and died for both sides of this cause for more than a century," Ball explained. "The current relatively peaceful status quo was achieved through the Northern Irish peace process, which involved painstaking, grinding diplomacy over a period of years – with significant US involvement."

Ball further argued that Trump's comments "in normal circumstances, dramatically upend the status quo." He also noted that the supporters of the current status quo have "spoken most favorably of Trump," believing him more likely than former President Joe Biden to support their cause.

Typically, such statements from a U.S. president would not be made "without significant diplomatic work alongside it," but that, Ball added, is yet another norm Trump has shattered in his second term.

"At this stage, everyone knows that isn’t how Donald Trump’s administration operates in its second term," Ball wrote. "Instead, the 80-year-old President just tends to say whatever pops into his head at any given moment, and whatever seems like a good idea at the time. If someone puts it to him in different terms later, he might say something else entirely."

Despite the potential concerns, however, Ball argued that Trump's Ireland comments are unlikely to kick up an international incident in the same way that his Greenland remarks did, as his conduct in office has severely degraded the import of his words and the weight of his office.

"Trump is so volatile that his words no longer carry the weight that they once did, and certainly not the weight that his office implies," Ball argued. "Even a few short years ago, everything he said was international news, because it could be assumed that everything he said mattered. Now, we almost always have to wait a few days to see whether Trump really means it or not."

He concluded: "Whatever Trump’s intent, any hopes for a relatively quiet weekend are surely over. Trump has made headline news on an issue that is life and death, especially for the people living in Northern Ireland. The mess he left behind will be for others to clean up, though. Trump himself has golf to watch, after all."

Republicans continue to stare down a midterm implosion in one of the most reliable stronghold states, with one veteran reporter and expert explaining to The Bulwark what is driving this trend.

On Saturday, Christopher Hooks, a reporter for Texas Monthly, appeared as a guest on the latest episode of The Bulwark's Focus Group podcast, with host and preeminent pollster Sarah Longwell. Among other topics, the two discussed one of the midterm races setting off the most alarms for Republicans: the Texas Senate race, where Trump-backed candidate Ken Paxton continues to trail his Democratic opponent in what has long been one of the party's most reliable states, setting up the prospect of a particularly embarrassing flip in November.

As Labor Day recedes into the rearview, money has begun flowing into the Paxton campaign to help stop the bleeding. However, according to Hooks, "misgivings" still abound among Republicans, who take issue with his character and with the notion of wasting money on his race when there are other races across the country that could use the help. Paxton has also reportedly been sounding the alarm to Republicans that a Democratic win in Texas this year could break the dam and make the state bluer for years to come.

"I talked to Texas Republicans, they have a number of different attitudes about it," Hooks said. "I think what Ken Paxton is telling conservative voters right now is that, if the Democrats get in this election, the Democrats are going to win forever here and it's going to be a blue state, and there's no coming back. But I think a lot of Republicans have the sense that if Ken Paxton loses this, it's because Ken Paxton sucks, pardon my language, and it's not necessarily something that's going to permanently derail the Republican coalition here. In private, Texas Republicans have always had a lot of misgivings about this character, and there's a lot of misgivings nationally, as you know, about how the primary ended.”

Longwell then shared some comments from Texas voters that she received from a recent focus group, outlining the disdain for Paxton that is driving his race towards the Democrats.

“I don't like the guy," one respondent said. "I mean, he's been indicted for securities fraud. He's also been linked to investments in companies. He's awarded contracts to, I believe... a camera company that installed cameras, I think, all over the state. I don't think his credibility is there to be a senator. I mean, I would definitely not vote for him.”

"I don't recall exactly what one of the issues was about," another voter said. "Something about house renovation, potentially, with him and his wife getting a vendor. I don't know, somebody that was his friend, and they said he used some campaign money for that, to me. I mean, I'm not saying this is okay, but politicians are very dirty, corrupt, and look at government right now.”

"I think he's a full-blown crook who's right in line with Trump as far as not being able to tell the truth," a third respondent said. "So this particular time, I won't be re-electing him anymore because it's to the point we are so conditioned when a person lies, we're just going to let it go.”

Hooks further explained that Paxton is the sort of politician common amongst Texas state Republicans, who has gotten to an advanced position in government without having to improve their skills as a candidate. This deficiency is now coming back to hurt him, as he is forced to actually try in the race against Democratic candidate James Talarico.

“In all of that time, he never had reason to become good at campaigning or to try to contest a general election," Hook said. "He just never had to do that. So over the years, I've seen him give a few stump speeches and appear at a few rallies, and he wasn't very good, and he didn't have any reason to get better because the only thing that he needed to advance in his position was things that were happening behind the scenes. So he ran for Senate because he hates John Cornyn, and he holds a grudge. He holds grudges for a long time, and he succeeded in taking out John Cornyn. It almost seems like having taken out John Cornyn, he's accomplished the thing that he really wants to do, and it doesn't seem like he really wants to be a Senator.”

Democrats are not yet in control of the House, but they’re already past the point of measuring the drapes — they’re pulling information and hunting corruption.

“Favored to regain the majority in November’s midterm elections — and with little official business to consider in the handful of days left in this session — Democrats’ attention has turned to mapping out an accountability agenda that would pull President Donald Trump, his administration and his family into a harsh spotlight next year,” reports the Washington Post.

A dozen Democratic members and staffers poised to run committees are already telling the Post that they’ve got their eyes on targets and nuggets of research likely to serve up trouble for Trump and his family. And they are preparing “sweeping investigations of Trump’s growing wealth in office, his remaking of the federal government and his pursuit of his political enemies.”

In recent weeks, staffers have already connected with outside groups for guidance on how to conduct effective investigations.

“There’s so much corruption and grift that it’s going to take the entire House on the Democratic side to do investigations appropriately,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who would likely lead investigations as chair the Oversight Committee in a Democratic-held House. “We are all talking.”

Democrats are already “laying the groundwork” for investigations of how Trump and his family are getting richer while he is in office. Garcia’s committee has launched a running tracker of the Trump family’s profits from cryptocurrency and foreign deals, estimated that Trump has pocketed $2.25 billion from foreign payments in the first year of his second term.

Meanwhile, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) the likely new head of the Judiciary Committee, is sniffing around investments by venture capital firms linked to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The Post reports Raskin’s investigation would probe companies that got government contracts or favorable policies from the administration. Among these targets are Trump’s settlement with the IRS shielding his family and businesses from future audits; his social media platform, Truth Social, selling access to his posts; and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s doings.

Dems will also be targeting Trump’s abuse of clemency power to pardon convicted fraudsters who donated to his campaigns or have ties to his political circle. Many of the pardoned criminals were also absolved of the requirement to pay restitution to their victims.

“One case they’ve flagged for review is that of nursing home executive Joseph Schwartz, who spent nearly $1 million lobbying last year for a pardon, which Trump granted seven months after Schwartz was sentenced for defrauding the government out of $38 million,” reports the Post.

Rep. Jared Huffman says he’s got his sights on “mining and energy deals that have benefited Trump’s supporters,” he told the Post, with Trump offering a $1.2 billion settlement to a German energy company to give up its offshore wind leases. That deal requires the firm to reinvest most of that money in a Louisiana liquefied natural gas project owned by a Trump donor.

“Trump is using the settlement fund as a slush fund,” said Huffman. “It’s a glaring example of just the abuse of trust and the total waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Among other targets, including immigration enforcement and Trump’s unprecedented reshape of the federal government, are Trump’s prosecutions of his political enemies, including former FBI director James B. Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and the lawmakers who released a video in November reminding military personnel they could refuse illegal orders.

And amid these potential targets and others will certainly be the Epstein files, which Trump reversed a campaign promise to hide the convicted sex offender’s crimes for unclear reasons.

The Washington Post reports U.S. states with some of the most competitive congressional races in the nation are now “caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney,” and the GOP senators are flummoxed.

While the average American may not feel the tariffs, key industries in places like Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania are likely to feel the added costs, said the Post, and this appears to be complicating Republicans running in competitive House and Senate races in those states, according to GOP analysts.

“Donald Trump was elected in part to bring down inflation and juice the economy,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant in Washington. “Anything that works opposite of those goals is not helpful for any Republican running this year.”

Brent Buchanan, founder of the Republican polling firm Cygnal, said Trump’s trade war is giving Republican candidates further reason to separate themselves from the president, whose approval ratings have dropped as gas prices have risen as a result of his war with Iran.

“With this being so salient to the states closer to the Canadian border, it’s a way for them to say, ‘I’m standing up for you — above the president, above Congress, above Canada, above anybody,’” said Buchanan.

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin) claims Canada has been “jamming our dairy industry for a long period of time,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is fighting hard to ward off a Democratic takeover of her seat in a state that is steadily getting more critical of Trump.

Collins has called Trump’s trade war with neighboring Canada a “mistake,”

Meanwhile several Michigan auto suppliers and Maine lumber companies have locations on both sides of the border, reports the Post. Iowa has close agricultural trade ties with Canada, including exports of farm machinery.

Trump amped up the trade war between the two ally nations in July, when he announced that he would impose 50 percent tariffs on some Canadian goods. The new 50 percent tariffs took effect late last month after negotiations between the two countries collapsed, with alcohol, dairy products and a list of other Canadian imports getting hit with new fees for U.S. consumers. Then Canada retaliated on Sept. 8 with new tariffs on U.S. goods, including aluminum, dairy, agricultural equipment, plastics, paper products and appliances.

Trump later announced new bans on the import of some Canadian alcohol, motorcycles, molasses and other products beginning Sept. 29.

But Michigan did more than $66 billion in trade with Canada last year, according to the Post, and it has a “closely intertwined manufacturing sector” that regularly exchanges products with neighboring Ontario. This means Canadian tariffs on American steel and aluminum, nuts and bolts, rods for steering wheels and other small parts will boost costs for manufacturers who are “already worn out after years of supply chain disruptions from the covid-19 pandemic and changing federal policy on electric vehicles.”

“I think we reached fatigue about a month ago,” said Glenn Stevens, executive director of MichAuto, an advocacy group for the state’s auto industry, speaking with the Post. “It’s a difficult business.”

This leaves Michigan Senate candidates like Mike Rogers — who is running for an open seat against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed — tottering on the edge of embracing Trump while criticizing him for his disapproving voters. In August, Rogers wrote in a post on X that Trump “is right to put America First” but that “trade isn’t one-size-fits-all.” And he pledged to work with Trump “to broker a fair deal with Canada” that supports Michigan farms, automakers and manufacturing.

For Republican candidates, the chaotic trade war “injects an issue they probably thought they never had to deal with,” said John Truscott, founder of Michigan PR firm Truscott Rossman and who once served as a spokesperson for Michigan Gov. John Engler. “As a candidate, when you want to be on offense on things, this adds a vulnerability.”