Alan Zendell, November 2, 2026
This year’s midterm elections forced me to make a decision I normally would scrupulously avoid. I’m not a single-party voter. I always try to vote for the individual rather their party affiliation. But not this year.
This year, with all the difficult issues we’re facing, I have only one priority: limit Donald Trump’s ability to do more harm to our country, the world order, and the rule of law. In 2017, six months into Trump’s first term, I published The Fable of Mika and the Pig, in which I used George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and specifically, Napoleon the Pig, as a metaphor for the Trump presidency. It was apt then, and it’s a hundred times more applicable today.
Trump is not only narcissistic, venal, completely lacking in both moral character and empathy for Americans who don’t have the means to enrich him, he has demonstrated a frightening level of incompetence in matters that threaten our future. We saw it first in his misguided obsession with tariffs. He barely made it through the Wharton School of Business, and likely wouldn’t have without his father’s money and influence, yet he thinks he knows more than ninety percent of the world’s most highly regarded economists.
Tariffs are weapons, not tools for creating prosperity and global harmony. Those two things, which previous administrations including Ronald Reagan’s consistently promoted, are anathema to Trump’s personal goals and ambitions. He has demonstrated that his only focus in office is to increase his own wealth and power and satisfy his enormous ego. His pet Supreme Court justices gave him immunity from any criminal act he commits while in office, and his power to pardon extends that immunity from prosecution to everyone who does his bidding.
In recent months, he has eased financial pressure on both Russia and China while exacerbating his economic war with Canada and western Europe. He has destroyed our trade alliances and alienated the international partnerships that have maintained economic stability in the world for eighty years in favor of imperial dreams of hegemony in which he, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping divide the world into three fiefdoms that they control dictatorially.
All of the above are repairable if the Trump sycophants in Congress are replaced with people who revere the Constitution and care about the the American Dream we grew up with. But not everything has a clear remedy, and Trump’s lack of judgment and total incompetence with regard to his war with Iran top that list. The alleged intent of the war, which he was drawn into by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon.
A noble goal and one that may be critical to averting World War III. But something that important requires a president who knows what he’s doing and a Secretary of Defense who is focused on optimizing the performance of our military. Instead, we have Pete Hegseth, who with Trump’s full approval and support, spends his time getting rid of generals who don’t fit his White Male image of a fighting force, and transforming a defense-oriented military into an offensive war machine. Moreover it requires close coordination between competent military and intelligence professionals. Trump and Hegseth’s prosecution of the Iran war has demonstrated neither.
Instead of a quick six-week victory, we have an eight-month stalemate which spread to a regional conflict that threatens Saudi Arabia and our Gulf State allies, and has already drawn Pakistan and Egypt into the growing conflict with the Houthis in Yemen. It has totally disrupted the world’s energy resources and markets and caused inflation to rise steadily as there is no end in sight. Hegseth irresponsibly allowed our arsenal of strategic weapons to be depleted, a situation which has spilled over into Russia’s aggression against Ukraine that is causing the deaths of thousands of civilians.
Most telling is that we have no reliable information about the original intent of the war. Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities set back their attempts to develop a nuclear weapon, but by how much and how long it will take Iran to recover are basically unknown. Meanwhile, our incompetent leaders handed Iran a weapon it never used before the war: the ability to hold the world’s energy supply hostage with impunity.
The only way this can come to a conclusion that is not disastrous for the United States and its former partners is for Americans to make a clear statement with their votes. They must repudiate the Trump administration’s disregard for what most Americans believe in and its attempt to destroy the rule of law. American voters must make it clear to our former allies that we can be trusted again, and that promises made by one administration cannot be easily undone every four years.
I find the rise of a socialist movement in America distasteful and dangerous, and I’m concerned about the anti-Semitism and discord cause by candidates like Abdul al-Sayed, I also believe there is room under our Constitution for those voices to be heard. But their importance pales in comparison to the need to reign in Trump’s power.
Do I have confidence that Democrats can unite and lead us back to sanity? No, I don’t, but I’m willing to bet our future on people who are united in opposition to Trump. Nothing is more important to both America and the world.
