President Donald Trump’s long-awaited 2026 October Surprises began erupting across our news screens in this past week. They sparked two very different types of outrage.

Trump’s War-and-Peace Outrage Surprises: In a bizarre and seemingly prohibited deal, Trump flip-flopped and agreed the U.S. would buy Russian diesel fuel – gifting Vladimir Putin with diesel dollars that can help fund Russia’s invasion and slaughter of neighboring Ukraine. Why? Trump’s polls are at his all-time lows, fuel prices are soaring, Trump’s MAGA voter base feels betrayed. Trump also is giving Putin another gift – by reportedly delaying shipments of Patriot interceptors that could be protecting helpless Ukraine families from Putin’s hundreds of incoming missiles and drones.

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump told reporters Monday. Just hours earlier, Inna Mariukhna was taking her 1-year-old daughter for a walk through Nova Vodolaha’s bucolic Central Park when one of Putin’s Shahad drones scored a direct hit. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s posted photo of 1-year-old Anhelina, dead in her stroller, just wallpapered the world.

Trump’s Moral Outrage Surprises: Trump also vastly increased his daily launching of venomous personal attacks and sandbox bully name-calling at his real and perceived enemies. It also triggered expressions of moral outrage. But frankly, it wasn’t all that surprising. It was, after all, just another blast of Trump’s same-old politics of hate that has become his national and global trademark.

And we’ll get to it. After we explain why we all need to care. Trump’s hate-based politics has shaken even those who voted for him three times. And it threatens to shatter the notion that America will ever again be looked up to as the world’s greatest democracy. Indeed, Trump has trashed the notion that Republicans can ever again be called the Grand Old Party. (“G.O.P. was a short-hand headline writers loved – many don’t even know what it means today.) After all, America has gotten used to seeing the dysfunction that occurs when Congress ends up led by the silence of the sheep.

And this past week, we just got a reminder of the sort of leadership we must reject, once and for all. At a CNN town hall in Fort Worth, there was James Talarico, a boyish looking, yet surprisingly successful Texas Democratic Senate candidate. Polls show Talarico about even with the multi-scandal-plagued Republican Ken Paxton.

“This is LBJ’s Senate seat I’m running for,” Talarico said, with his straight-talk, eye-to-eye, LBJ-sort of way. Talarico is 37 – which makes him about a decade older than I was when I first found myself with LBJ, in his Oval Office, covering him as Newsday newspaper’s new correspondent.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, America’s 36th president, knew all about the sort of hateful political scumbaggery Talarico had just weathered. Here’s a totally made-up joke that LBJ loved to tell. It seems an old Texas congressman, who usually was unopposed, finally had an opponent. So he hired a retired newspaper reporter as his press secretary — and told him to plant a story in the local newspaper saying this opponent had sexual intercourse with a barnyard animal. (LBJ told it a lot more colorfully.) Being an old reporter, the press secretary asked his boss what proof they had. “Proof? Hell!” roared the old congressman. “Just get him to deny it!”

This past week, Talarico found himself being targeted by a too-real version of LBJ’s favorite just-get-him-to-deny-it punchline. It was no laughing matter, because the attacker was Vice President JD Vance. And he was just following the lead of his boss, who, being that sandbox bully we knew in grade school, thinks it’s a hoot to keep calling the Texas’ Democrat “TalaFreako!”

Just the other day, America’s veep stood beside his official Air Force Two jetliner at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington and, as TV cameras rolled, he chose to publicly hint about proofless personal gossip suggestions about Talarico’s personal and sexual life that had been pushed all over the internet by right-wing conspiracy zealots. Talarico finally thought he’d ended all that by giving reporters the name of his longtime girlfriend. But that didn’t stop Team Trump.

Vance, a proud Yale Law School graduate, chose to attack-by-inuendo, standing by his famous plane and babbling insinuations that stopped just short of actionable accusations.

Listen for yourself: “Well, he’s just a guy who shows a weird focus… And I think typically people who say stuff like that tend to have pretty unusual searching histories. Maybe he doesn’t. Just guessing.”

As we watched Trump’s veep insinuating all that stuff, MS NOW put this chyron across the screen below him: “VP Vance implies TX Senate nominee James Talarico is gay.” My media colleagues ended up end-playing themselves.

Talarico had also just endured some non-sexual smears: When Talarico recently didn’t campaign for 10 days, right-wing conspirators claimed he had checked into an Ohio mental health center. No, his campaign explained, he had the flu; and for persons such as Talarico, who openly cope with type 1 diabetes, the flu can become serious. Talarico said he recovered at home and was never in Ohio. The Ohio mental health center said he was never a patient. Finally, aides showed reporters time-coded videos of Talarico in Texas on those days.

You may be wondering why Vance chose to diminish himself by becoming a human gutter ball. Then again, you may recall he took a similar tack during the 2024 campaign. In his attention-getting Haitian Elegy episode, as Ohio’s senator running for vice president, Vance claimed Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and pets – without citing a shred of verified proof. The immigrants were officially welcomed to legally work in Springfield factories and other sites that were closing because of worker shortages. Trump recycled his veep’s claim in his presidential debate. But the charges were refuted as baseless by Springfield’s mayor and police chief – and by Ohio’s conservative, highly principled Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.

Springfield’s Haitian workers, families and even school children ended up terrified, targeted by threats including bomb threats. This past week Trump aired it all again at a rally in Youngstown. He even added: “I was right.” Shameful.

Epilogue: DeWine did not attend Trump’s Youngstown rally. But in case the president missed talking with him, or the former senator from Ohio just didn’t realize, we can helpfully share a few comments DeWine made in 2024, on ABC’s This Week:

“This is a piece of garbage that was simply not true. There’s no evidence of this at all.… So when you look at all of these … people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community... And any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.”

Republicans ought to reread those 2024 words. Because the Mike DeWines that remain in their midst as potential leaders are their best hope that their Old Party may someday deserve, yet again, to be reunited with its first word: Grand.

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