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by Rod D. Martin and Ryan Helfenbein
September 2, 2026
In this Sunday interview on Real America’s Voice, Ryan Helfenbein and I discuss:
Why the Senate map still favors Republicans
Why the House is nowhere near a Democrat wave
How Trump wins either way
How Lincoln’s blockade of the Confederacy became Trump’s Iran strategy
Why Hormuz is open while Tehran starves
It’s 10 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!
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Our Full Discussion:
Ryan Helfenbein: Joining us now is Rod Martin. Rod is the founder and CEO of Martin Capital and The Rod Martin Report. He is an investor, tech entrepreneur, and futurist. You can find his daily analysis on geopolitics, economics, and advanced technology, all from a Christian worldview, at rodmartin.org.
Rod, thank you for joining Sunday: The Road Forward. It is great to see you.
Rod D. Martin: It’s great to be here.
Ryan Helfenbein: Well, I want to talk about this, because all eyes are on these midterms. I wouldn’t say “kind of,” but we’re about 80 days out. Many conservatives are wondering, and they’re quaking in their boots, Rod.
They’re looking at Texas and Talarico. They’re looking up at Michigan and wondering, are we going to have another Muslim senator, or rather, the first Muslim senator? They’re looking all around the country, and there’s a lot of doom and gloom.
And yet, there’s an instinct out there among the most stalwart conservatives, and you’re one of them: Don’t trust the polling. So tell us about this.
Rod D. Martin: Well, don’t trust the polling you’re hearing on MS NOW or CNN. But there is polling that’s actually quite encouraging. So let’s take this one piece at a time.
On the Senate side, I don’t know about you, but I think Susan Collins pulls it out. I think Mike Rogers has a great chance against Abdul El-Sayed, especially after he went off on a tear with Jesse Watters about how circumcising a child is equivalent to castration, and parents and doctors ought to be able to castrate their very young children.
I don’t think that sells to a lot of people in upstate Michigan, and I think Mike Rogers has a real shot there.
Whether we have a shot at Ossoff in Georgia, who knows? Michael Whatley’s running a terrible race in North Carolina, but if he can get his act together, he can win that. But if not, if we pick up Michigan, it balances out.
Likewise, no one is paying that much attention to New Hampshire, but I think Sununu wins that. His family name is strong there, his positions are far better suited to the state, and that would be another pickup for Republicans.
And as to Talarico, he’s as crazy as El-Sayed and frankly more offensive. So I really can’t see Ken Paxton losing that race. Everybody wants to dump on Ken Paxton. But I remember just months ago how he was supposedly going to get annihilated by John Cornyn, and oops, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.
So I don’t think we’re in any trouble in the Senate. We might lose a seat or two on net. We might pick up a seat or two on net, depending on how a couple of things shake out, primarily the Whatley race. I think we’re good there.
Okay, so the House. Look at Charlie Cook’s latest numbers. Don’t trust the polling you’re seeing on TV, but if you’ve got the stuff that a lot of us have access to that normies don’t ever look at, Charlie Cook’s numbers are pretty clear.
The Democrats would have to win two-thirds of the seriously competitive races to be able to eke out a 218-seat majority. That’s a one-seat majority after winning two-thirds of the races. So, okay, maybe they can do that. But it doesn’t really feel like a wave year to me. I’m not saying they couldn’t win more seats than 218: I’m just saying that the math on the ground is worse for the Democrats than everyone’s claiming.
But I think redistricting went heavily in our favor. I think you end up cutting their maximum upside from about 236 House seats to about 223 or 224. And so, even if they win the majority, they really can’t do business in any meaningful way, and the Senate’s going to block them. And Trump still has his veto.
So the people who are counting on Trump to lose the midterms, first of all, they’re likely to be wrong. I’m not predicting with certainty that they’re wrong. I’m just making the case. I actually think we’ve got a really good shot. If we really get to work we can win, which would be an historic upset for the President’s party in the midterms.
But beyond that, Mark Carney, Doug Ford, the Ayatollah (if he’s alive), all these guys are counting on Trump losing the midterms as if America had a parliamentary system and somehow that would change what Donald Trump can do. Sorry, guys, that ain’t happening.
Trump will double down. And he has plenty of executive power with which to do that, not least because the Supreme Court has restored Article II, Section 1 for the first time since the 1930s. He’s actually able to function as the chief executive and the commander-in-chief, and that’s just a watershed.
More to the point, he’s not stupid. He knows how hard it is for the President’s party to win the midterms historically — it almost never happens — and he’s been planning for that from the beginning. Anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t serious.
So I think we win. I think we’ve got a really good shot of winning in both houses. And I think Donald Trump is unstoppable either way.
Iran’s 47-Year Forever War
Ryan Helfenbein: Rod, there’s a lot of tepid conservatives out there, some probably not actually conservative. But they’re looking at Iran, and they’re thinking, “Gosh, I just wish that we didn’t have this war going on right now, because, my goodness, it looks like we’re going to lose that. And we’re going to lose public opinion, we’re going to lose affordability, and we’re going to lose these midterms.”
What’s really happening in Iran? What’s the strategy going on there? Break it down simply for us, because I think there’s just a lot of miscommunication, especially when you have the two halves of the conservative side, the older generation and the younger generation. The younger generation wants to have nothing to do with Iran. What are your thoughts?
Rod D. Martin: Well, they’re just mistaken. They haven’t lived with this as long as some of us have.
I was 10 years old when the Iranians stormed our embassy in Tehran and took all of its staff hostage for 444 days. I have been here for Iran’s forever war on the United States: 47 years of low-level warfare that has been unrelenting and has had absolutely no ceasefires.
Forty-seven years. Donald Trump is not starting a forever war. Donald Trump is ending one.
And all of the people who claim, “Oh, he promised no wars.” Did you just sleep through the last decade? That’s not what he said. He said we’re not going to be stupid and invade countries and have troops there for 20 years anymore like Bush and Obama. We’re not doing that anymore.
But look at his first term. Everybody forgets, and I’ll just pick one example because I know you want to get to the blockade. Does anybody remember that in his first term, Donald Trump spent seven months destroying ISIS? Seven months!
Don’t tell me he’s unwilling to use force when it serves American interests. He’s just not willing to use force when it doesn’t, unlike his predecessors. That’s the difference.
These are people who were building 20,000 ballistic missiles. These are people who were building nuclear weapons. These are people who would terrorize the world if they could. And they have, for half a century. And Donald Trump is ending it.
A Blockade Straight Out of Abraham Lincoln
Rod D. Martin: So the strategy, actually, right this minute, is brilliant. And it’s a page straight out of Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln and General Winfield Scott devised the strategy at the outset of the Civil War. Lincoln announced it within weeks of taking office. So this is long before Grant and Sherman were anybody.
Lincoln announced a blockade of the South, and the South just laughed because, “Oh, that’ll never work. The Union Navy isn’t big. They can’t do that. And Europe will come to our defense because they need our cotton.”
Literally, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, England was buying five-sixths of its cotton from the South. They were utterly dependent on the South. And the South was just certain that they would come into the war to help them out, or at least would use the world’s foremost navy to make the North’s blockade irrelevant.
Well, guess what? They were wrong.
Britain just diversified production to Egypt and India. And that production never came back to the South, which is one of the reasons the South stayed poor for decades after the war.
But for Iran, this gets a thousand times worse. Lincoln didn’t have GPS. Lincoln didn’t have satellite reconnaissance. Lincoln didn’t have carrier strike groups. Lincoln didn’t have B-2 bombers that can fly a 14,000-mile mission. And Trump does.
The blockade of the South, with 19th-century technology, reduced Southern cotton exports to just 5 percent of the prewar total.
In Iran, we’ve completely shut down their ports. They’re getting nothing in and nothing out. And in the meantime, we’re actually moving a dramatically increased number of ships through the Strait of Hormuz. It’s up 400 percent just in the last 14 days.
So we’re keeping oil prices stabilized. The whole world is functioning. We were told it would be $250-a-barrel oil. It’s actually $83, which isn’t much more than it was before the war. And the war is still going on.
What does the blockade do? It’s starving them to death. Don’t ask me. Ask the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who went on TV two days ago and said, “We’re starving to death. We can’t sustain this.”
And this is ultimately the strategy. If they can’t pay their troops, eventually their troops either melt away or turn on them. And that’s where you get the revolution that Trump is really angling for. He’s not going to say that, but I promise you that’s the endgame.
Ryan Helfenbein: Well said. Folks, listen, that was brilliant. And if you want to hear more analysis like that, you need to go to rodmartin.org.
Rod, thank you always for your insight, your wisdom into all of this. And I think a lot of us are feeling a little bit more encouraged on this Sunday morning.
Rod D. Martin: I appreciate your comments. Thank you.
