Big Decision on Iran Coming. Much to Dem Chagrin, Hasan Piker Loves to Talk. Byron York on Good Economic News (that You Might Not Have Heard about). Cleta Mitchel: Mother of SAVE. Amusing C of E Incident. More

Busy foreign affairs schedule next week for President Trump. There is a meeting with China’s President Xi, who will be given a state dinner. The president says he is also facing a “big decision” regarding Iran:

“Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not?” he told Axios. “It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me.”

What will happen? “It’s within [Trump’s] power to take the fight to the Iranian regime,” Matthew Continetti writes at Free Expression (“How Trump Can Solve His Yemen Problem“):

It’s impossible to sustain support for a war when the public believes that its government isn’t dictating events but responding to them. …

By taking the offensive, President Trump can shift the focus of attention from America’s perceived vulnerabilities to Iran’s actual deterioration. The first step is to bring the Saudis, Israelis and Emiratis together to prevent the Houthis from consolidating their position. Then, lend rhetorical and material support to Iranians willing to fight their government. Send the Iranian leadership back to the bunkers by taking out communications networks, transportation hubs, state institutions and symbols of the regime. Direct military and intelligence officials to form a plan for Iran’s next popular uprising.

Hoo boy. Streamer and sometime surrogate for Michigan Senate hopeful, Abdul El-Sayed Hasan, Piker apparently has no plans to hide his light under a bushel until November 3. This is making Democrats nervous. New York Post columnist Isaac Schorr explains why:

With a little under seven weeks to go until the midterms, Democratic campaign surrogate and professional meathead Hasan Piker just committed a costly “Kinsley gaffe.”

That is, he told the truth about what he and the ascendant wing of his party believe.

During a disastrous sit-down with Axios’ Alex Thompson, the journalist reminded the meticulously manicured Twitch streamer that he had once deemed the United States “the top dog in terrorism” before asking: “Do you think America, then, is worse than al Qaeda?”

“Pound-for-pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes. We have caused tremendous terror all around the world,” replied Piker.

Piker’s “pound-for-pound” remark made the cover of the New York Post. “With Friends Like These” is the headline, presenting pals Piker and Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed as the friends. Here is the original Axios interview, and here is a follow-up Axios story that has Piker hoping to campaign for AOC in 2028 and Dems running for cover. It should be mentioned that Piker also said that the Middle East would be “more stable” if Iran had nuclear weapons.   

All eyes, meanwhile, are on the midterms. Democrats are wildly optimistic, but Hugh Hewitt suggests that they might come to regret several primary choices, including Abdul El-Sayed (who nevertheless wowed elected Democrats in Capitol Hill meetings this week) in Michigan, and James Talarico in Texas. Veteran political reporter Michael Barone writes that it looks as if both parties are trying to lose:

If Republicans’ weakness is the self-indulgence of a second-term president, Democrats’ weakness is their propensity to embrace the wildest and least popular impulses of their political left.

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel writes that the GOP is missing an opportunity: they should take greater pains to declare Democrats “the shutdown party.” Byron York writes about Trump, good economic news, and the midterm election:

Did you know that just-released Census Bureau statistics show the poverty rate in the United States fell to a record low in 2025? That’s an extraordinary development, but it has so far not attracted a lot of media coverage or discussion.

What about a big White House event featuring President Donald Trump touting a welcome decline in poverty and an increase in income? There hasn’t been one. “I dunno, but if I were president and the poverty rate dropped to the LOWEST RATE ON RECORD, I might make a big deal out of it — a lot bigger deal than the Trump White House is making,” commentator Mickey Kaus, who has been covering poverty and social policy for decades, remarked on Wednesday.

One more note — the Census Bureau also announced that real median household income in 2025 was $87,460, an increase of $2,250 from the year before and “the highest on record dating back to 1967.” So Trump could brag about the highest income and the lowest poverty on record. …

Vice President JD Vance almost got there in a podcast interview this week in which he pointed out the administration’s accomplishments, argued that electing Democrats to control Congress would undo that progress, and asked voters for more time to work on the things that are not going well.

“We’ve had an amazing success with the border, with immigration,” Vance said on the All In podcast. “We’ve pursued H-1B reform that prioritizes American workers over foreign nationals. There’s a lot of good that’s been done, but there’s a lot of work left to do. Don’t give power to the people who caused the problems that we’re fixing. Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.”

It’s never a great idea for a second-term administration, even with the unusual circumstances of the Trump second term, to ask for “another chance” at election time. … There is still a high probability that voters won’t buy that one, either — a number of key indicators look terrible for Republicans — but it’s the best the Trump administration can do. And the new poverty and household income statistics help them make the case.

Because we can’t face the magnitude of the debt crisis, calls to address the coming Social Security shortfall are generally unheeded. But the Dems stole a march, and the Republicans preemptively surrender on Social Security reform, according to Joseph Sternberg in the Wall Street Journal.

Well, that’s a very good way of putting it. “The lobby at war with learning: teachers unions serve no one but themselves” is the argument in a nutshell for Joel Kotkin’s Unherd story on education unions:

A recent federal survey suggests the share of Americans at the lowest levels of literacy has now reached 28%, up from 19% a decade ago. With the support of the unions, many schools have abandoned phonics and tried-and-tested approaches for teaching literacy in favor of “whole -language” and other trendy theories; 60% of American fourth-graders are poor readers. As the usually true-blue Atlantic put it, “declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.”

The biggest losers here tend to be minorities. Recent California testing results show that only a third of Latino students meet or exceed English-language standards, and fewer than one in four exceeds the standards for math. Nearly 70% of black students failed to meet state standards for English Language Arts in the 2021-2022 school year, while about 84% didn’t meet math standards. It can’t be the press of too many students that’s causing this decline; California is expected to lose 1 million more students in the next five years.

Don’t Miss. Cleta Mitchell is profiled at RCP as the “Mother of the SAVE” Act. You probably know Ms. Mitchell as a prominent conservative election law and campaign finance lawyer. Well-deserved praise.

“Why is the Church of England fawning over a hardline Muslim?” asks Brendan O’Neill on Spiked Online. The award, supposedly to commemorate religious reconciliation and 9/11, is named for Hubert Walter, a former holder of Mullaly’s job. Walter’s form of reconciliation, it might be observed, was to go on the Third Crusade with his pal, Richard the Lionheart.

PS. The award was withdrawn after the recipient’s praise of Osama Bin Laden came to light. Big oopsie.