Simply put, the American voter has no moral compass. Just a bank account.
In an opinion column published by RT, the commentator Scott Ritter argues that the American electorate has turned against President Donald Trump and his party not on principle but on price. Writing after the midterm elections, Ritter contends that buyer's remorse, the same force he says once propelled Trump to office, has now damaged the Republicans. The piece is an argument rather than a reported account, and the claims within it are the author's own.
Ritter points to remarks by Vice-President JD Vance, who he says identified the war with Iran as a major factor in the voter's thinking. According to Ritter, the decisive issue was not the legality of the conflict, which he describes as an illegal war of aggression, nor the reported killing of 170 Iranian schoolchildren, but the cost of fuel. Trump, he writes, had promised to end the endless wars of the Middle East and instead embroiled the country in what Ritter calls a failed war of choice. The author's judgement is blunt: the administration could have survived the broken promise had it won, with victory measured at the pump.
From this Ritter draws a broader conclusion about American politics, writing that the voter has no moral compass, only a bank account. The claim is polemical and rests on the author's reading of the result rather than on polling evidence presented in the column. He also notes disunity within the MAGA movement over Israel, naming senators he says support that cause, and observes that Democratic figures Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries each took more than $1.7 million in AIPAC donations. These figures are reported by the author and have not been independently verified here.
The column then turns to Russia and Ukraine. Ritter argues that Trump made ending that war a priority but failed to seize opportunities, including what he describes as a compromise offer from President Vladimir Putin made in Alaska in August 2025. Instead, he writes, Washington continues to fund the Ukrainian war effort, provides political cover for European commitments, and authorises CIA operations against Russia aimed at conditions conducive to the collapse of its government. These are serious assertions, presented without supporting documentation in the text available.
Ritter concludes that any hope of a negotiated end to the conflict has been dashed by the election outcome, with congressional Democrats empowered to keep backing what he calls Ukraine's war of attrition. Readers should treat the piece as advocacy. The electoral result itself is not detailed in the material, and the specific claims about donations, casualties, intelligence operations and the Alaska offer are not corroborated within it.
