FORUM and the Spoils of Victory

As the 2026 Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention was set to get underway in Dallas on Wednesday, a group of misfits, miscreants, and mavericks—this writer included—congregated at a bar a few miles up the road at FORUM.

The Dallas gathering was the first of many FORUM events organizer Matthew Peterson plans on hosting as life after Trump weighs heavily on the American right.

“FORUM is where the right debates the future,” Peterson told attendees in his opening remarks. The day’s programming centered on the future for the touchstones of the Trump 2024 coalition, with panels and debates on immigration, MAHA, technology, and affordability.

Some in the press covered FORUM as if it was counterprogramming to the RNC. I think it’s more fitting, however, to consider Wednesday’s event as additional course material. FORUM’s participants—Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown, Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling, and The Blaze’s John Doyle and Steve Deace, to name a few—were not charting out a path contrary to the movement Trump and his allies built in 2024. They are scouts, not defectors, ranging ahead of the movement and surveying the terrain beyond the camp’s perimeter.

Among the scouting party and in the camp, there was real energy.

The midterm convention, which the corporate media said would be a gigantic flop, overflowed from the arena. President Donald Trump was all too eager to capitalize on the mismatch between expectations and reality. The master of the weave took a marathon-length victory lap, providing the faithful with a two-hour play-by-play of the last 20 months, broken up by fits of applause and chants of “USA” that could make a choreographed State of the Union jealous. The enthusiasm emanating from the convention was the simple joy of being on the winning team. In politics, few things matter more.

But the energy at FORUM was different.

The attendees, around 500 according to event organizers, unsurprisingly skewed young and male. The median age of a FORUM attendee was probably 25 years younger than the RNC attendees camped out at the American Airlines Center. Most likely gained political consciousness in the era of Trump, and the thought of what comes after is what keeps them up at night.

The consensus on the stage and at the bar is, although there will be a time after Trump, the notion of a post-Trump Republican Party does not exist. Whatever comes next will have the indelible mark of Trump’s decade-plus of domination. The challenge for this generation of right-wingers will be knowing when to conform to that vision and when to transcend it.

“We live in a world on the right that is post 2024,” Peterson told the crowd. “What happened in 2024 was a massive generational win. So you actually live and breathe right now in a majority coalition.”

“How many people on the right are acting like that right now?” Peterson asked the crowd. The consensus in the room was not very many. 

From Peterson’s perspective, some of that is natural: “As soon as you put together a big coalition and win, everyone fights. They start fighting with each other about the spoils of war.”

Part, however, is manufactured, mainly in two different ways.

The first is perhaps best represented by the “influencers … flinging garbage at each other on a daily basis.” The Balkanization of Podcastistan is a fast track to prominence—even though you’ll have dominion over something much less impressive.

The second is the way of the beautiful loser. They talk like winners but act like losers—that is, they fail to do anything with their victory. Chalk it up to a lack of creativity or pure laziness, but their many meetings and conferences are redolent of The Synod on Synodality.

“I’m tired of conversations at events that don’t matter,” Peterson told the crowd. “I’m tired of conferences that suck. I’m tired of older institutions that don’t get it and are years behind the base and where the action is.”

There was plenty of action, especially in the debate on AI that pitted Joe Allen, formerly of Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” against Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

“People like me are subject to the decisions made by billionaires, and we were not consulted, and to the extent that we have revolted, we’ve been told we’re a lot of reactionary rubes,” Allen told the crowd.

“We see the kids being deranged by these technologies,” Allen, often labeled an anti-AI activist, claimed. “We see education slipping away and falling into the hands of the tech companies … We see people’s relationships become more and more disconnected, more and more synthetic. And so we don’t buy the sales pitch anymore.”

“I think there are actually things that already are working, and I’m curious if you’d like to turn everything off,” Lonsdale asked Allen during the debate. “Let’s give one example. We’re invested in a bunch of healthcare companies… When someone looks at a cancer slide right now, thanks to AI, they make about 0.4% mistakes. Previously, they made 8 to 12% mistakes. So it’s already, when you measure, it’s already saved hundreds of lives. And this is the case in tons of these areas.”

Cui bono? That was the question animating the AI debate and many of the other conversations at FORUM on Wednesday. 

Ryan Williams, talking on a panel focused on affordability and the common good, said, “if you remove a large portion of the foreign-born population, lower end wages will rise. This has been shown time and time again. The price of housing will drop, and you’ll have more of a recalibration away from a finance-heavy, financialized-heavy economy back toward more of a working-class and middle-class-friendly economy.”

Who benefits? How do they benefit? These are simple and direct questions, much better than rambling inquiries into the limiting principles of a hypothetical balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, and far better suited to serve the movement FORUM hopes to advance.

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