Not a single ballot will be cast for Donald Trump in the 2026 election, but the president is top of mind for Republican candidates facing electoral tests in November. Day one of the 2026 Republican convention — the first ever held during a midterm election year — kicked off in Dallas on Wednesday. The event ostensibly serves to give Republicans the first word in the final sprint towards Election Day, where polls predict that despite coordinated attempts at gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and intimidation, the party is expected to take on heavy losses as voters revolt against the last two years of Trump’s chaotic governance.
Under those rosy prospects, what could help more than a massive, televised production placing the historically unpopular president at the center of the party’s electoral strategy? Gallery images of Trump decorated the hallways along the suite and media levels. His face is plastered on every access badge. The official merch store was abundant in Trump’s signature MAGA hats, “Trump Was Right About Everything” hats, and large stacks of Eric Trump’s book Under Siege. Fox News set up a broadcast center facing the stage, where a revolving door of GOP notables sat for interviews and panels. And yet, as the hour of Trump’ s keynote address arrived, large swaths of the arena remained empty. American flags had been taped to seats in balcony sections, perhaps in an attempt to trick the eye into seeing occupancy where there was none.
The floor was grouped by state delegation despite there being no candidate to nominate. Attendees sang along with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” as the president took the stage. Behind him, a large screen began to glitch out, ripping through hours of footage in milliseconds while chromatic neon blocks interpolated through the video. Someone eventually pulled the plug on the visual metaphor.
Those who attend a national party convention are usually devotees of their respective party. In this year 2026, devotees to the Republican Party tend also to be devotees to Trump. In the arena, no one gets louder cheers than the president, but even this cohort of attendees are nervous about the party’s prospects.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Ken Miller, an older gentleman in a MAGA hat, dress shirt, and vest who had accompanied his son to the conference, tells me as we chat in the main concourse. Miller had moved to Texas from Alaska just about a year ago, and was not exactly bursting with confidence over Attorney General Ken Paxton’s performance as the Republican Senate nominee. “Some people are better at messaging than others,” he explained, referencing Paxton’s Democratic opponent James Talarico, who has so far maintained a slight lead in the polls. “Some people are highly sophisticated in the new ways of messaging, and sometimes Republicans act a little bit like they’re behind.”
“I think he’s basically a good attorney general,” Miller adds of Paxton, “but he’s got baggage” and “needs to be” a little more inspiring if he’s going to go the distance.
Paxton may not be oozing charisma, but effective messaging is a tall task for any MAGA Republican, considering Trump’s tanking approval numbers. Candidates are well aware of the difficulty, so much so that plenty of embattled Republicans facing narrow races skipped the event, seemingly fearful that too close of an association with the ever-unpolular president would become an anvil to their own prospects. Maine Senator Susan Collins, Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan, and Michigan Rep. Tom Barrett are just some of the notable names ditching Dallas.
Trump claimed earlier on Wednesday that the only reason Republicans in competitive races skipped the event was because there was “no room” for them. It was more likely related to the fact that his polling is hovering in the mid to low 30s, around “Nixon is about to resign” levels. Nevertheless, he thinks he’s the key to midterm success. “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot,” Trump implored attendees and viewers alike. He spoke for over 90 minutes. (The original schedule circulated by organizers estimated his remarks would only take 45.)The prospect of a midterm underperformance was very clearly on his mind.
“For some reason, when a president wins — even if he’s really a good president or a great president, there aren’t too many of them — they don’t win the midterms, and nobody quite knows why,” he mused. “A president, Democrat or Republican, almost never wins the midterms. We’ve got to change that because we have something going that’s so good we can’t let that string be broken.”
In an attempt to stave off what feels like an almost inevitable electoral walloping, the president is re-upping his offer to pay Americans to keep him and his party in power. This time offering a $5,000 tariff “dividend” to every adult if Republicans manage to hold both the House and the Senate. He has previously offered payouts of $5,000 from the “savings” generated by DOGE (it cost more money than it saved), $2,000 tariff dividends (that never materialized), and other similar bonuses around the $1,000 mark.
It stinks of desperation, of a party that cannot agree on anything besides the need to appease a petulant president, even at the risk of their own electoral success. The midterm conference was not a carefully managed event curated to the tastes and concerns of the independents and moderates who have become skeptical of the party’s extremist policies, but a culture war bonanza intended to reignite the appetites of 2024’s electorate. The terrors of undocumented migrants, the threat of transgender ideology, the looming menace of sharia-law-Hasan-Piker-communism were the focus in Dallas, while the affordability crisis, which the president has deemed fake, was blamed on Biden or written off altogether.
“We’re concerned that they’re not listening to the common man,” Mary, a tall, graying woman from Tennessee told me in the convention merch shop. “Because when I have to go and [help] buy a house for my child, and both her and her husband are working, that’s bullshit. … It’s like we’re arguing about the curtains, the dishes, the furniture, and all the while our foundation is just crumbling.”
NYPD officers detain Susan Sarandon and pro-Palestinian demonstrators near the United Nations, ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address, on Sept. 24, 2026.CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images
Vladimir Putin addressing the audience during the Valdai Discussion Club meeting on Oct. 1
As Trump Dithers, Ukraine War Is Approaching a ‘Fatal Point of No Return’
The war in Ukraine is becoming increasingly dangerous, with the risk of escalation spilling further into Europe. As Russia and European governments trade explicit warnings that the conflict is spreading, the United States is pursuing diplomacy aimed less at stopping the carnage than restoring ties with Moscow.
With the Russian military making little progress on the ground in eastern Ukraine despite nearly five years of war and more than a million casualties, the Kremlin is intensifying aerial attacks. Ukraine, which has been the target of Russian missiles and drones since the war began in February 2022, is now experiencing a sharp uptick in attacks on infrastructure and populated areas that threaten to plunge parts of the country into cold and darkness over the winter.
The aerial blitzkrieg is intended to destroy Ukraine’s morale, infrastructure, and economy, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently told the Financial Times, citing intelligence intercepted by his country’s security services.
Zelenskyy told the paper that Russian President Vladimir Putin, in discussions with top Kremlin officials, had removed constraints on the bombardment campaign: “He said there are no rules now.”
U.S. disengagement from the conflict during Trump’s second term, coupled with the American president’s animosity toward Zelenskyy and Ukraine more generally, has only emboldened Putin. After promising he would stop the war “within 24 hours” after reelection, Trump’s tepid support for Ukraine and its European allies has increasingly convinced the Kremlin it has a chance to permanently rupture the NATO alliance.
At the Valdai Discussion Club on Thursday — an annual high-profile international summit in St. Petersburg — Putin said that continued European support for Ukraine was pushing the conflict toward a “fatal point of no return.”
The Kremlin has long described the war as an extension of a confrontation with the collective West. With more than 1.5 million active service members in the Russian military, about 44 percent of Moscow’s budget for 2027 is dedicated to defense and security spending. Around 700,000 Russian soldiers are serving on the front lines in Ukraine, where casualties remain staggeringly high.
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Meanwhile, Moscow is conducting a campaign of so-called “hybrid warfare” — with officials in multiple countries alleging that a series of drone attacks, arsons, and sabotage originated with Russian intelligence services. The Kremlin also continues to carry out targeted killings on European soil — and has even attempted to assassinate political dissidents in the United States, according to the FBI.
Russia’s belligerent activity has set alarm bells ringing across Europe.
Speaking at a NATO event on Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the continent must brace for “severe hybrid attacks,” as Russia targets production facilities and logistics hubs by which Ukraine’s allies supply the beleaguered country with arms. Europe must be prepared to “respond quickly and very clearly” to Russian provocations, Merz said.
For its part, Moscow asserts that NATO is provoking conflict, citing recent unannounced military exercises near Kaliningrad — a Russian exclave on the Baltic coast. In a communiqué to NATO this week, Russian officials warned that action against Kaliningrad would initiate a serious response, “including nuclear weapons” in order to defend its territory, and “Russian strikes against decision-making centers in the alliance’s member states.”
“This is a war that Europe is waging against us,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters at the Valdai forum. When asked about hybrid attacks outside Ukraine that European leaders have attributed to Russia, he said his country was only targeting support for what it dubs the “Nazi regime” in Kyiv.
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As the sabers rattle louder, American engagement with Moscow and Kyiv comes in fits and starts, with no apparent overarching strategy.
Critics of the White House’s approach point to a recent trip by Trump’s friend and special envoy to the Middle East, real estate attorney Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to Moscow and Kyiv. Their tour yielded headlines, but little progress toward negotiations between the warring parties — let alone toward ending the conflict.
“I hope they had a great discussion about opening a hotel or something,” one European official told Rolling Stone. “Because it was useless otherwise.”
Diplomacy via haphazard tête-à-têtes with the president’s personal envoys is almost certainly viewed as a sign of weakness by Putin, who is well aware that Trump hopes to claim normalized ties between the United States and Russia as a crowning foreign policy achievement.
The White House is considering a range of unprecedented diplomatic deals that would help keep Russia’s economy functioning while doing little to benefit Ukraine.
These proposals reportedly include an easing of economic sanctions if Putin agrees to release some political prisoners, and a potential multibillion-dollar oil deal ostensibly aimed at stabilizing energy markets and reducing gas prices.
With gas prices rising amid the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and midterm elections around the corner, Trump has made energy central to his Russia policy. Washington has called for an “energy ceasefire” — while Trump has blamed Kyiv for rising diesel prices in the United States.
While high oil prices are the result of a concatenation of crises, Ukraine has been targeting Russian oil refineries, producing fuel shortages and long queues for gasoline — in one of the world’s largest oil producers — over the summer.
Ukraine is also developing its own domestically produced tactical ballistic missiles. Ukrainian officials said Friday that one type of missile, the FP-7, had been successfully used in combat for the first time. But whether Kyiv can produce enough of them to create a meaningful deterrent is unclear.
As winter nears, the outlook for Ukraine is bleak. A recent attack on Kyiv consisted of nearly a dozen ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones in a single night. That many munitions slip through highlights the dire situation faced by Ukrainian defenders, who are running out of advanced missile interceptors. They also struggle to shoot down drones that are becoming increasingly numerous, sophisticated, and effective as the war drags on.
In recent months, Russia has adopted widespread use of an advanced drone, the Geran-5 — a jet-powered drone that bears an uncanny resemblance to the V-1 “buzz bombs” used by the Nazis to bombard London toward the end of World War II.
As with the German V-1 campaign against London 80 years ago, the targets are often indiscriminate. Even before the ramping-up of attacks this fall, 2026 was on track to be the deadliest year for Ukrainian civilians since the early months of the full-scale war in 2022.
The proliferation of Russian attack drones and ballistic missiles means that cities like Kyiv now spend much of each day under air alert. Even aside from the human toll and physical damage that the weapons inflict, officials estimate that the disruptions to daily life are costing the country as much as $45 million per hour in lost economic activity.
Since Friday, a series of drone attacks has targeted two of Kyiv’s major bridges spanning the Dnieper River. The damage has disrupted traffic between the capital’s “Right Bank” — with its historic core and city center — and its “Left Bank,” with its sprawling Soviet-era industrial and residential developments.
Ukraine is already experiencing a severe financial squeeze. Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi says the country is facing a $27 billion “funding gap” before the end of the year.
Ukrainian lawmakers warn the government could even run out of funds to pay soldiers. One serving member of the Ukrainian military, who spoke to Rolling Stone on background, said by the end of the summer, members of his unit had already begun experiencing “delays” in receiving their pay.
The Ministry of Defense disputes that soldier’s salaries could go unpaid, but acknowledges that “technical issues” had caused some delays.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy is under pressure from corruption scandals and resignations involving members of his inner circle. Polls show him potentially losing hypothetical match-ups against rivals, including former Ukrainian Armed Forces commander Valerii Zaluzhny. The country’s “long-admired cohesion” has begun to crack — an outcome that aligns with Russia’s strategic objectives.
But after nearly five years of war, both combatants are showing signs of political and economic strain.
Russia’s regular military conscription process — 120,000 new recruits are expected over the next three months — barely offsets the grievous casualties its military is experiencing at the Ukrainian front, with high estimates exceeding 1,000 casualties per day.
Some analysts believe the Kremlin is considering a massive mobilization in the wake of parliamentary elections. But Putin so far has merely called for an increase in the total number of active-duty military members by a little more than 15,000. Russia’s president remains wary of generating a meaningful anti-war movement inside Russia, while also facing pressure from hard-line nationalists expecting him to deliver victory.
Across Europe, governments are no longer treating a direct confrontation with Russia as a remote possibility. They are preparing for worst-case scenarios, particularly in the Baltic states and other countries that experienced Russian rule under the Soviets. Meanwhile, NATO insists that all members — including the United States — have an “ironclad commitment” to collective defense.
In 1914, at the outset of the First World War, few leaders understood how faulty strategic assumptions, entangling alliances, and lethal technologies were pushing the continent toward cataclysm.
But some did. On the eve of war, U.K. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously wrote that “The lamps are going out all over Europe.”
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Across Ukraine, darkness will again become a feature of daily wartime life amid rolling blackouts as a hard winter looms. And the shadows are lengthening, far beyond its borders.
But in America, the White House dithers as the president has his attention elsewhere. Perhaps Trump’s new ballroom, at least, should be well lit.