COUNTRY FIRST. PARTY SECOND. Your Party Can Recover From Defeat. Your Country May Not Recover From Your Loyalty.

This November, Republican leaders must face the consequences of their failures. A party that will not restrain its leaders must be restrained by voters. Americans must decide whether accountability still matters—even when enforcing it means voting against their own team.

By Bear Howard and Associates

Sedona, AZ — At some point, loyalty to a political party becomes disloyalty to the country it claims to serve. America has reached that point.

The November 3 election must deliver a clear verdict: the Republican Party’s accommodation of Donald Trump’s abuses of power, contempt for democratic accountability, and entanglement of public authority with private enrichment must carry an electoral price. Republicans need to lose enough power that ignoring these failures becomes politically impossible.

People entrusted with power answer for how they use it—and for what they allow others to do with it.

Whatever your political history, your vote belongs to you. You do not owe it to a party, a television personality, a president, or the person you were when you voted two years ago. You owe your country an honest judgment about what is happening now.

Perhaps you voted Republican because you wanted lower taxes, stronger borders, less bureaucracy, or a government more responsive to people who felt dismissed. Those preferences do not require you to excuse everything done in their name. No previous vote obligates you to keep defending a bargain after its terms have become unacceptable.

A citizen has the right—and sometimes the duty—to say: This has gone too far.

Start with the basic democratic obligation to accept an election defeat. After the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, 147 Republican members of Congress still voted to reject electoral votes from Arizona, Pennsylvania, or both. Their objections failed, but their willingness to discard certified results revealed how far much of the party would go to accommodate a president who refused to accept losing.^[1]

On January 20, 2025, Trump commuted the sentences of 14 named January 6 defendants, pardoned the other people convicted of offenses connected to the attack, and directed the Justice Department to seek dismissal of pending cases. That is the plain content of his proclamation.^[2] Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted during the attack, according to the Justice Department.^[3]

Such sweeping clemency tells future political loyalists that a powerful leader may ultimately forgive criminal conduct in support of that leader. No functioning republic should encourage that expectation.

Now consider the treatment of elected officials who challenged him.

In November 2025, six Democratic members of Congress, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, appeared in a video reminding military personnel that they must refuse illegal orders. Trump called them traitors and suggested their conduct could warrant execution; the White House subsequently said he did not want them executed. The FBI sought interviews with the lawmakers.^[4] In February 2026, a grand jury rejected prosecutors’ attempt to indict some of the lawmakers involved.^[5]

Federal prosecutors brought the machinery of criminal prosecution to bear against elected representatives over their message about unlawful orders. A failed indictment does not erase the intimidation. Investigations impose costs, threaten reputations, and warn others about the potential price of speaking out.

A president has no entitlement to a government that punishes his critics. Congress has an obligation to confront that conduct. Republican officials cannot claim to defend constitutional government while excusing its use against political opponents.

The financial entanglements demand equally serious scrutiny.

Reuters estimated in June 2026 that the Trump family had made at least $2.3 billion from cryptocurrency projects since his return to office.^[6] His administration’s banking regulator subsequently approved a charter for a World Liberty Financial affiliate. The regulator said career staff reviewed the application and officials complied with their ethical obligations. Even so, the underlying conflict remains: the president’s family has substantial financial interests in an industry whose treatment his administration helps determine.^[7]

The overlap extends to his inner circle. The Wall Street Journal reported that presidential envoy Steve Witkoff disclosed more than $100 million in 2025 income from the entity holding his stake in World Liberty Financial, which he co-founded with Trump and members of Trump’s family.^[8]

Those earnings do not, by themselves, establish bribery. They establish why independent scrutiny is indispensable. Americans should not have to wonder whether regulatory decisions, access, and diplomatic relationships serve the country or the financial interests of the people conducting its business. Public office must never become a business advantage reserved for a president’s family, wealthy friends, and favored investors.

Congress must apply that standard to itself. Reuters reported that a Common Cause study counted 13,324 trades totaling $635.6 million by members of both parties in 2025.^[9] The STOCK Act already prohibits using nonpublic information obtained through public duties for private profit.^[10] Profitable trades alone do not prove insider trading. But lawmakers who help shape decisions that move markets should not ask citizens to trust that their portfolios never influence their judgment.

The remedy should be a meaningful prohibition on individual-stock trading by members of Congress and their immediate families, enforceable disclosure requirements, and independent investigation of suspected misconduct, regardless of party.

These failures are connected. When oversight weakens, retaliation becomes easier to attempt and financial conflicts become easier to tolerate. A government feared by its critics and financially valuable to its insiders has lost sight of whom it belongs to.

Meanwhile, the consequences of policy fall on ordinary households.

In its February 2026 outlook, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Medicaid changes in the 2025 reconciliation law would increase the number of people without health insurance by 7.5 million in 2034.^[11] That is a projection, not a count of people already uninsured. It is nevertheless a concrete measure of what the enacted policy is expected to do.

Behind that number are people who will still get sick, need prescriptions, have children, and face emergencies. Government priorities become real in those lives. Voters have every right to decide that the human cost is unacceptable.

America’s responsibilities extend beyond its borders, too.

After World War II, the United States helped build institutions and partnerships intended to prevent another catastrophe. The Marshall Plan supported European recovery. NATO established a collective defense alliance. These projects drew on bipartisan cooperation and an understanding that American security depended partly on the stability and confidence of other nations.^[12]

That history contains grave failures and contradictions. Yet its central achievement remains worth defending: a powerful America could help create conditions in which cooperation, democratic government, and shared security had a chance to endure.

Leadership of that kind requires credibility. Allies must be able to trust commitments. Other governments must believe American policy has some continuity beyond a president’s impulses. People struggling for democratic rights must be able to see something in our conduct worth defending.

The evidence of damaged confidence is substantial. In Pew Research Center’s 2026 survey of 36 countries, a median of just 23 percent of adults expressed confidence in Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs.^[13]

Foreign opinion does not determine American policy. But a country that depends on allies, trade, diplomacy, and international cooperation cannot casually dismiss the loss of trust. Distrust makes leadership harder, gives competitors opportunities, and weakens the value of our word.

The world is watching whether Americans recognize that cost—and retain the capacity to correct their course.

This election provides a practical means of doing so. Congressional oversight includes investigations, testimony, and demands for records.^[14] Changing who controls Congress can change whether those powers are used to examine an administration or shield it.

State elections matter for the same fundamental reason: public officials must understand that their authority is conditional. Governors and legislators who enable attacks on democratic accountability should face consequences at the ballot box.

A defeat must be large enough to teach the lesson that private misgivings and occasional expressions of concern cannot substitute for exercising responsibility.

Voting Democratic this November does not require signing a lifetime contract with the Democratic Party. It means choosing a way to take power away from leaders who have failed to exercise it responsibly. Then hold the people who replace them to the same standard—including the same restrictions on self-enrichment.

A party earns another opportunity by changing its conduct, improving its leadership, and persuading voters that it deserves their trust. Automatic loyalty removes the incentive to do any of those things.

Republicans can survive losing an election. They can rebuild, recruit better leaders, recover principles they have abandoned, and return to voters with a stronger case.

America cannot safely keep teaching its leaders that there is no abuse their supporters will refuse to excuse.

History will judge the officials who made these decisions. It will also judge the citizens who had an opportunity to impose consequences.

On November 3, use that opportunity. Vote to defeat Republican candidates who sustain this administration and its approach to power. Vote to restore meaningful oversight, democratic restraint, and the credibility America needs in the world.

Your party can compete again tomorrow. Today, make it answer for what it has done.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE AND SEND IT TO EVERYONE AND ANYONE YOU KNOW THAT NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND THE REAL ISSUES OF THE ELECTION OF NOVEMBER 2, 2026!.

These realities should motivate everyone to vote for the Democratic slate across the board, and understand this has nothing to do with whether you are a conservative or a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican.

It has everything to do with whether you are a TRUE American and an ENLIGHTENED human who knows that sometimes you have to make difficult decisions, even if it means abandoning your team, at least this time!