Give me the choice to relive any day of my life, and I’ll have a full queue of picks. My 8th birthday party. The moment I had my first legal drink. The day Moonlight didn’t win, and then won, Best Picture at the Oscars. Far, far down the list, however—so far down that it plunges into the depths of the underworld—is November 5, 2024.
Alas, you can only imagine what it was like to hear Trump’s remarks on Wednesday night at the Republican National Committee’s first-of-its-kind, off-cycle convention, during which he urged voters to “pretend that I’m on the ballot” this year. (Again, because who doesn’t want to relive November 5, 2024???) “If we don’t have the majorities, so much can be lost,” he warned in his hour-and-44-minute long speech.
Wednesday was the first part of a two-day convention in Dallas, Texas, and was scheduled by the RNC as a way of mobilizing the GOP, hyping elections, and begging voters not to deliver Republicans a Big Blue rout. (Sure! That’ll work!) Lowlighting the six-hour event were all the usual gulp-inducing B.S. we’ve seen cover the last 21 months. (Less prevalent on-stage, however, was abortion, which we’ll get to in a moment.)
During the cringefest, dubbed by Salon as Trump’s “emotional support convention,” the president promised he’d dole out $5,000 dividend checks to Americans if the GOP maintains control of Congress; Sen. John Fetterman (D??-Penn.) made a surprise appearance as a “commonsense Democrat”; and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—who monitors porn intake with his son—bragged how “every seat all the way to the rafters is full,” in a news cable that showed immediately afterwards that not every seat, indeed, was full. Before the event, a copycat website pretending to be the official RNC conference page redirected to the Epstein Files Library. Dallas estimated $1.8 mil. in security costs. A lobbyist told Politico the “vibes” were “very bad.”
The best hope the GOP has for the RNC midterm convention is people simply don’t watch it
— Ben McAdams (The Resurrection Arc) (@purrtah.bsky.social) September 9, 2026 at 5:49 PM
And throughout the six-hour event, reproductive rights were barely mentioned—if anything, only referenced in a three-minute prayer by a pastor who said the party should “defend and protect life from the womb to the tomb.” Despite the fact that multiple states have abortion on their ballots this year, the administration is desperate to tamp down its anti-abortion agenda—because, as we know, abortion access remains popular among Americans.
Alas, all this is just a manifestation of what the party’s spent the last months quaking in their Florsheims about: That their razor-thin majorities in the Senate (53-45) and House (218-214) could soon come to an end, the trifecta could be toppled, and Trump—in his own words—could be impeached if/when the party loses the midterms. Well. Don’t threaten me with a good time.
