"It'll guarantee the midterms," he told Republicans gathered in the ballroom of his golf course just outside Miami on Monday. "If you don't get it, big trouble." Trump insisted that building on strict national voter identification laws, banning mail ballots, and restricting transgender rights would secure Republican electoral success.
The Department of Homeland Security's Facebook account recently posted a recruiting notice for ICE under the banner "WE'LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN"-the title of a white-nationalist anthem by the Pine Tree Riots ("By blood or sweat, we'll get there yet"). The Department of Labor recently posted a video montage referencing American battle scenes under the tagline "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American"-a slogan close to the Nazi-era Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.
Indeed, regional "divisions" - others might say "alarm" or "outrage" - had intensified during the fall of 2025 following the US's massive military build-up in the Caribbean, its air strikes against alleged drug boats - resulting in scores of extrajudicial killings - and the threats of a US attack on Venezuela.
Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego's eastern outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and joining the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official in the region's local government. "I've been a Republican for 50 years," he said, in the statement explaining his action. "I just can't stand what the Republican Party has become. I'm formally renouncing the Republican Party."
The US's clear military and economic dominance of the postwar world gave it an obvious claim to seniority; however, there was also a strong strain within English conservatism at the time that saw itself as Greeks in this American empire, in the words of former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan. In other words, even if the Americans were to be the new Romans, extending their dominion over every corner of the globe, without the intellectual, cultural and political guidance of their wise old mother country they would quickly fall into ruin.
"It is not the critic who counts," President Theodore Roosevelt once said. "The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena." The Heritage Foundation has been in the arena for many years, fighting many battles, so it's no surprise that it has attracted many critics as well. And while Heritage cannot claim perfection, this much is certain: We have stayed true to our mission despite the critics;