The Loan Is Called

An article by , November 2, 2026

Bold black, red, and blue poster illustration: a hand drops a ballot into a ballot box while a large blue wave crests behind it and a red field recedes.
Illustration by Eunice, in bold black, red, and blue.

This article, read aloud:

Share: X · Facebook · LinkedIn · Reddit · Bluesky · Threads · Email

Tomorrow is the midterm election, and I am probably going to vote a straight Democratic ticket. I say that as a man who voted for Donald Trump three times. File it however you want—as a conversion, a surrender, a man finally seeing the light. It was never love. It was a loan. The loan had terms, the terms were in writing twenty-one years before he defaulted on them, and a defaulted loan gets collected.

The invoice

I voted for the man three times. Every vote was a purchase with terms on it. The terms were written in February 2005, in the middle of the Iraq adventure, when I published America's Foreign Policy: In Search of Monsters to Destroy. The occasion was a Meet the Press debate: Natan Sharansky selling The Case for Democracy, the book George W. Bush adopted as his foreign-policy roadmap, against Pat Buchanan arguing the older American rule—John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821: America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all, and the champion and vindicator only of her own. I sided with Buchanan, in print, in 2005, and I have never unsided. No foreign wars of choice. No democracy delivered at gunpoint and invoiced as charity. No empire with a TED Talk.

What I wanted was a president of the nation-state of the United States of America. Borders enforced the way every country I ever lived in enforced theirs on me. Industry brought home behind tariffs instead of a one-way street where the whole world tariffed against our dumping and we tariffed against nothing, and called the resulting cheap-import economy prosperity while Americans got poorer underneath it. A government too busy at home to run a social revolution or a foreign one. I republished the essay in 2025 as America Still Hunts Monsters Abroad, and this past March I devoted a whole episode of this show to it—a 21-year warning about endless war.

Trump ran on exactly that invoice. No more endless wars. No more regime-change fantasies. He was not the system. The coalition that carried him—populists, a lot of us former liberals—lent him our weight for those promises and no others. The enemy of our enemy was our friend for precisely as long as he stayed the enemy of our enemy: the neolibs and the neocons, one party with two gift shops.

The default

In June 2025, the president I hired to keep America out of other people's wars dropped a payload on Iranian nuclear sites. We were not attacked. We were not invaded. We were not occupied. We struck because we could—I wrote the sentence then and it has not improved with age. The cudgel picked back up, the monsters hunted again, democracy's missionary streak back in the saddle wearing a red hat. The moment Donald Trump became a neocon, he betrayed me and every voter who lent him weight on the same terms. The terms were the relationship.

None of this is about Israel. I am a Zionist. I love Israel and support her without a single reservation, and her wars are her business. Ukraine's war is Ukraine's business. Iran's is Iran's. Their business is theirs and ours is ours, and a president of this nation-state does not get to spend American weight on other people's maps and call the spending strength.

Tomorrow

So tomorrow I hope the Republicans shit the bed. I hope the wave is blue and enormous and impossible to spin. And I hope the president reads it the way it is meant—as the invoice coming due—and repents, and sins no more. I mean it the way it was meant in John 8, spoken to the woman the crowd wanted stoned: neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more. I wrote a companion piece this morning, I Don't Hate Trump Enough, about refusing to throw rocks at the man, and I am not starting now. My sentence for him is the same one offered to her: come home, end the adventurism, be president of this country. He won't. Presidents don't repent, and this one has mistaken the coalition's borrowed weight for his own muscle. So the coalition that made his majority should unmake it, tomorrow, in the only language Washington reads—seats.

Not a conversion

Tomorrow's ballot will not bring me back into anybody's fold, whatever the fold tells itself on Tuesday night. I still fail the entrance exam. I still think Donald Trump is funny—professionally, undeniably funny. I still watch him push to the fence and heel the moment a judge rules, and I cannot locate the existential threat in a president who complies with court orders and has filled no graves, fed nobody to a chipper, built no ovens. The price of the fold was never a ballot. The price is the hatred, metered and performed on command, and I am not paying it tomorrow either. My Democratic vote is arithmetic. A loan defaulted gets collected, and the collector does not have to join the borrower's enemies to do his job. When the next candidate runs on the 2005 terms—no monsters abroad, industry home, president of this country only—I will read the invoice again, the same way I have read it for twenty-one years. The record shows one man who has not moved. It is the candidates who keep moving, and then act surprised at the address they find me at.

The guide

Disclosure: the Amazon links in this piece are Associates links (tag gerris-20). Buy through one and I earn a few cents, at no extra cost to you.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Share: X · Facebook · LinkedIn · Reddit · Bluesky · Threads · Email

More writing in the articles, and every episode of the show in the archives.