"When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead."

The Republican Party was founded in 1856 in Ripon, Wisconsin. And in the 170 years of its existence, 19 Republicans have become President of the United States, among them some of the highest-character individuals ever to hold that office.

Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt. Dwight Eisenhower. Ronald Reagan.

They were not perfect men; none of us are. And each made choices that, from my perspective, were wrong and harmful to our country—as all presidents do.

But whatever you might think of the policies of those presidents, you cannot deny that each strove to uphold the great and enduring example of Washington in the office, and put the interests of the nation, as they saw them, above their own personal interests.

They understood the job to be a sacred trust bestowed on them temporarily by the people of the United States—not a personal office to be used to enrich themselves, or to exercise power for purely selfish reasons, or to glorify themselves above their fellow citizens.

Again—these men made many mistakes and possessed their fair share of familiar human faults. But they were true patriots, in that they put the country first.

That fateful choice by Republicans—made first by a few of them, then many, then nearly all—has changed our country and the world.

America is different because of the moment of choice that each Republican man and woman faced and made—from high officials, elder statesmen, and intellectual leaders of the party to fresh faces, new candidates and tens of millions of ordinary voters.

They did this. Trumpism—for better and worse—belongs to each one of them.

Most of us think our favorite news sources are just “the news,” and everyone else’s has “an agenda”. Right?

But that can be a trap. As we all know, social media algorithms will feed your news back to you until you can’t see much else.

So I use Ground News to try to break out of my own bubble. It’s a website that analyzes news coverage every day and helps surface stories that you might miss in your own personal echo chambers.

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Ground News is a supporter of independent journalism, including Real Patriotism. I encourage you to check it out. You might be surprised by the stories you’re missing. I know I have been—and it’s helped me get a better grasp of the national conversations.

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The task of repair and of building anew after Trump will require all of us to work together with charity and forgiveness across the great partisan divide, for the good of our beloved country. It won’t be easy.

But that work, it feels to me, is already beginning.

Part of it is the calendar. Midterm elections in the second terms of presidents always herald the end of an era and spark a competition to define the next.

The tang of presidential ambition is as sharp in the October air as woodsmoke and pumpkin spice. Would-be contenders for the White House in the next election are fanned out across the country to boost local House and Senate candidates—but they are also auditioning for donors, party leaders, and consultants as they weigh their own bids for the presidency.

Then there is time. It marches on.

Donald Trump is old. He looks old. He is clearly in decline. And he is unwell. He is desperate to deny these facts and cover them up, but all the makeup in the world cannot hide what is happening.

And so, the inevitable conversations about Trump’s successor in the Republican Party have begun.

This is what I want to focus on today.

At least 17 Republican candidates for House and Senate have publicly called for an end to the Iran War. A year ago, that kind of open dissent from Trump would have been unthinkable. It would have been a kind of political suicide. Look at what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and other Republicans who dared to break from the lockstep Republican ranks.

But that was then. More and more candidates are downplaying Trump in their campaigns. Look at how Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds revamped his website last week:

Incumbent GOP Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas and incumbent GOP Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida have both publicly criticized ICE immigration tactics in their states. Again—impossible to imagine a few months ago.

All our choices have consequences. They ensnare us. It’s not just that Donald Trump is historically unpopular, or even that his low character is costing the country dearly, and voters are angry. It’s more than that.

They knew.

I’m not talking about the true believers, the MAGA zealots. I’m talking about those who hung back, who understood the corruption and danger Trump represented, privately recoiled from it, but went along anyway. They went along because they wanted judges, tax cuts, deregulation, re-election, owning the libs, or simply survival in a Republican primary.

They imagined they could take the benefits of Trumpism without the consequences.

“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences,” the old saying goes.

For those Republicans who want to run for president in 2028—this will be a key issue. Voters will want to know: What have you done? What did you do to protect us from the malignity, corruption and disastrous policies of Donald Trump?

For many would-be presidents—those are going to be very hard questions to answer.

Our poem this week comes from a different period of our history, a different reckoning.

It’s called “Ichabod,” it’s by John Greenleaf Whittier, and it is a sorrowful attack on one of the greatest political leaders in American history, Daniel Webster.

Whittier was a fierce abolitionist, and he was horrified by the Compromise of 1850, with its stringent new Fugitive Slave Law and its recognition of the rights of slaveowners in new territories. Daniel Webster defended the Compromise.

In this poem, Whittier spoke for a generation in his takedown of Webster, who had once been seen as a man who recognized the moral evil of slavery—but was seen as its defender in the debate over the Compromise.

The name Ichabod is biblical—1 Samuel 3:13: “His sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.”

—Terry

by John Greenleaf Whittier

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone

Forevermore!

Revile him not, the Tempter hath

A snare for all;

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,

Befit his fall!

Oh, dumb be passion’s stormy rage,

When he who might

Have lighted up and led his age,

Falls back in night.

Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark

A bright soul driven,

Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,

From hope and heaven!

Let not the land once proud of him

Insult him now,

Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,

Dishonored brow.

But let its humbled sons, instead,

From sea to lake,

A long lament, as for the dead,

In sadness make.

Of all we loved and honored, naught

Save power remains;

A fallen angel’s pride of thought,

Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes

The soul has fled:

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!