In many years of observing politics, I’ve seen a lot of nasty, negative ads between primary opponents who belong to the same party. But for sheer volume of vitriol, the latest John Cornyn ad against Ken Paxton, his opponent in the Texas GOP Senate primary, is hard to top:
As Inside Elections reporter Jacob Rubashkin points out, this wildly negative ad is co-sponsored by the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, whose fundamental purpose is to maintain GOP control of the upper chamber. Cornyn’s seat is one that could very well become the key to a Democratic takeover of the Senate, which was thought to be highly improbable just months ago. So the very people running this ad calling Paxton a despicable family-wrecking, corrupt, and LGBTQ-loving piece of garbage may soon be backing his general-election candidacy to the absolute hilt. Paxton is the favorite in a toxic contest that will almost certainly go to a May runoff, in which his brand of fierce MAGA conservatives are likely to dominate turnout.
Democrats have their own issues in this race: U.S. representative Jasmine Crockett and state legislator James Talarico are locked in a close and increasingly fractious primary of their own. But at least Democrats are very likely to know the identity of their Senate nominee six days from now (barring a virtual tie that allows a minor candidate’s vote to deny either major candidate a majority). They will have many months to heal their divisions as Cornyn and Paxton drag each other to the bottom of the sea like sharks taking down their prey.
It’s unclear how effective the savage (and lavishly funded) attacks by Cornyn and his D.C. friends will be in eroding or eliminating Paxton’s long-standing lead in this race. The intensely combative attorney general’s many ethics issues involving both his personal life and his finances are very well known. Republican voters may have already discounted them, much like Donald Trump’s many vices, as acceptable considering his longtime service to right-wing causes like stamping out abortion and blowing up public education in favor of private (and often religious) schools.
The Texas GOP is in the midst of an ideological revolution against a “Republican Establishment” typified by Cornyn. In 2024 Paxton, along with Texas governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, led a high-profile primary purge of Republican legislators who resisted a school-voucher push and voted to impeach Paxton on corruption grounds (he was acquitted by the Texas Senate). To put it simply, the Texas party is racing to the right at an amazing pace, and the four-term incumbent simply hasn’t been able to keep up. Worse yet, Cornyn looks and sounds like a stereotypical senator, making him a “swamp” creature in the eyes of Washington-hating Texas Republicans (his self-depiction in his latest ad as a cowboy-hat-wearing “Texas Workhouse” probably inspires as much derision as admiration).
Team Cornyn had hoped his bacon might be saved by a Trump endorsement, but the president chose to endorse all three major candidates in the race (Cornyn, Paxton, and U.S. representative Wesley Hunt), a familiar tactic that operates as a permission slip for MAGA diehards in Texas to follow their own preferences. Any way the wind blows, the GOP is going to have a major restoration project come May to bring supporters of either the empty-suit RINO Cornyn or the adulterous “Crooked Ken” back into the party corral during what could be a very difficult midterm election for the party.
When we heard that Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union Address would break his own record for the longest-ever presidential speech to Congress, a lot of us figured he’d combine improvised attacks on his enemies with his assigned mission of convincing people he had a plan to deal with pervasive economic discontent. In fact, he mostly appeared to stick to his script. On many topics, he was succinct rather than expansive or weave-y. The speech was very long primarily because of its extraordinary number of gimmicks, theatrics, and props, with multiple medals being awarded right there in the gallery, and the speechifying being regularly interrupted with extra-long standing ovations from the Republicans in the room. For a while, you felt that the veteran TV star at the podium was channeling Oprah, showering awards on the worthiest people in his studio audience.
The address did not, however, break any significant new ground. He had one surprise, an endorsement of a ban on insider trading by members of Congress, and one relatively novel (already leaked) proposal: a deal with tech companies to absorb utility costs created by their AI data centers. But that was about it.
The first half-hour of the speech was the familiar “American carnage” litany of bile hurled at Joe Biden’s administration, with the usual lies and exaggerations designed to make Trump’s record look better by making his predecessor’s record look dark and even sinister. Then he moved into his own economic agenda, and visibly lost momentum. There was a tiny flutter of emotion in his voice when he deplored the Supreme Court’s decision blowing up his tariff regime, which he rather childishly dismissed as irrelevant because he had come up with an alternative scheme. But he quickly moved on.
For a good while, we wondered if we were witnessing the first truly boring Trump speech on record. It was only when he moved on to what might be described as the “culture war” section of the address that he got some of his old verve back. Murderous immigrants, gruesome murders, monstrous transgender surgeries, stuffed ballot boxes, criminals being turned out of jail to do crimes again — it was the 2024 election message all over again. He did not say a single word to address the widespread dismay, extending even to Republicans, about the murderous tactics deployed by ICE and the Border Patrol as part of his mass deportation initiative.
When he finally transitioned to the obligatory section on world events, Trump lost his mojo again. While many expected a bombshell announcement about an impending military attack on Iran, he mumbled his way through what he’s said a hundred times before about denying that country nuclear weapons. He said almost nothing about the Russia-Ukraine war, and literally did not mention China — allegedly the greatest global challenger to our country — even once.
Most of all, this was almost certainly the most partisan speech any president has ever delivered to Congress, exceeding even his belligerent message a year ago. Over and over again, he accused Democrats — not just their supposed “radical left” element, but all of them — of conscious, deliberate betrayal of the country, by opening the borders, the prisons, the very gates of hell. He called them “crazy,” too. Knowing that many Democrats had resolved to show “silent defiance” during the address, he pulled off one neat trick: presenting a phony antithesis between the interests of U.S. citizens and “illegal aliens” and demanding they stand up for the country! He expertly prolonged the moment as Republicans hooted and cheered while Democrats sat sullenly. But the fact remains that in a narrowly divided Congress, Trump will need Democrats to get anything done the rest of the year. He detonated that slim possibility instead.
This probably didn’t win over many swing voters unhappy with the economy, but it surely, like the entire speech, thrilled his base. And since he gave very much the speech scripted for him, we have to conclude that its object was to shore up that base rather than to expand it. Perhaps he and his advisors truly believe the economy is going to go gangbusters later this year, or that Trump’s party will be awarded with continued control of Congress without much of an effort to change anyone’s mind.
If you tuned into the SOTU address expecting policy innovations or a different Trump tone, you had to be disappointed. It appears he will go into difficult midterm elections standing pat on his record, his message, and his unshakable belief in his own greatness.
When TheWall Street Journal asked White what connects MAGA and the UFC, he gave a one-word answer: “Testosterone.”
Okay, sure. Also, Trump and White have been friends for years, and their business and political interests are deeply intertwined.
In the early aughts, mixed martial arts was banned in most states and the UFC was struggling to book big venues. (A few years earlier, Senator John McCain had famously denounced the sport as “human cockfighting.”) But Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City agreed to host UFC events and celebrity businessman attended them, giving the organization exposure and legitimacy.
“Nobody took us seriously,” White has said repeatedly. “Except Donald Trump.”
As the UFC’s popularity skyrocketed and Trump entered politics, the two men occasionally supported each other’s ventures (for example, one of the UFC’s biggest stars appeared on TheCelebrity Apprentice, and White spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention). But Trump made White and the UFC central to his 2024 bid in an attempt to attract young male voters. White connected Trump with “manosphere” podcasters and influencers, and the CEO played a visible role in the campaign, speaking at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and his 2024 victory party.
White isn’t wrong about “testosterone” — or, rather, hypermasculinity — being a big part of all this. As Karim Zidan explained in The Guardian, UFC White House is the “natural climax of a partnership in which the UFC has become the stage for Maga mythology”:
Fascist Italy used rallies, parades and sports events to project strength and unity. Sports, especially combat sports, were used as tools to cultivate Mussolini’s ideal masculinity and portray Italy as a strong and powerful nation. Similarly, Trump has relied on the UFC to project his tough-guy image, and to celebrate his brand of nationalistic masculinity. From name-dropping champions who endorse him to suggesting a tournament that would pit UFC fighters against illegal immigrants, Trump has repeatedly found ways to make UFC-style machismo a part of his political brand.
It’s Alito who could make some additional political news later this year. To understand why, you must step back to 2018, when Trump faced his first midterm election as president and the dynamics looked grim. He had lost the popular vote in 2016. His job-approval ratings had been underwater from the second week of his term in office. One of his two big first-term initiatives, legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, had ended in dismal failure. And unsurprisingly, his party wound up losing 40 net U.S. House seats and control of that chamber.
But at the same time, Republicans actually posted a net gain of two U.S. Senate seats and increased their majority from a fragile 51-to-49 margin to a more robust 53 to 47. Why? Well, according to many GOP spin-meisters, it was to a significant degree owing to “Kavanaugh’s revenge,” as CNBC reported at the time:
Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both credited the so-called Kavanaugh effect for Republican victories in key Senate races against red-state Democrats.
Graham, in a thread of tweets Wednesday morning, said that the constituents of those Democratic incumbents who voted against Kavanaugh “held them responsible for being part of a despicable smear campaign orchestrated by the left.”
The ”#KavanaughEffect,” Graham said, should be renamed ”#KavanaughsRevenge” …
Republicans in critical states for the party were “highly offended” by the Democrats’ conduct during the confirmation proceedings, McConnell said, and the fallout from the process acted “like an adrenaline shot” for GOP turnout.
Graham, as you may recall from his feral attacks on Senate Democrats during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, chaired the Judiciary Committee during that confirmation fight and contended that accusations of sexual assault against the soon-to-be Justice were blatantly unfair — nay, villainous. So it was natural for him to claim the hearings enraged both Republicans and swing voters and saved the Senate (an interpretation that also inflated his own importance, as it happens).
It was a dubious interpretation of the midterms at the time, but the important thing is that many Republicans believed it. And that could feed a parallel development going into the 2026 midterms: a possible retirement by Kavanaugh’s senior and very right-wing colleague Samuel Alito.
Alito has been on retirement watch for a while now. He’s 75 years old (and will turn 76 on April 1) and recently celebrated 20 years on the Supreme Court. And as the intrepid Court watcher Joan Biskupic noted in 2024 after he twice lost an initial majority on a case, Alito’s influence within the Court has been slipping, leaving him visibly frustrated:
Alito has long given off an air of vexation, even as he is regularly in the majority with his conservative ideology. But the frustration of the 74-year-old justice has grown increasingly palpable in the courtroom. He has seldom faced this level of internal opposition.
Overall, Alito wrote the fewest leading opinions for the court this term, only four, while other justices close to his 18-year seniority had been assigned (and kept majorities for) seven opinions each.
His unique year in chambers was matched by the extraordinary public scrutiny for his off-bench activities, including lingering ethics controversies and a newly reported episode regarding an upside-down flag that had flown at this home in January 2021, after the pro–Donald Trump attack on the US Capitol.
There is also evidence that Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, would like him to step down from the bench so that both of them can openly express their political opinions.
Thus, there’s been speculation, mostly from the political left, that an Alito retirement could happen before or immediately after the current Supreme Court term. The Nation’s legal expert Elie Mystal, then Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Joseph Stern, drew attention to the odd timing of a new Alito book. Here’s the clue on which Mystal focused:
[T]he book is scheduled to be released October 6, 2026. That’s a curious date. The Supreme Court starts its 2026–27 term on October 5, the first Monday of October. Alito’s book is set to drop the next day.
It sure feels like Alito doesn’t plan on having a real job the Tuesday his book launches and instead thinks he’ll be free to run around the country promoting it.
There’s also a political reason Alito might want to step down at this particular moment. He clearly cares about his legacy on the Court and wants to solidify the conservative majority for which he and Justice Clarence Thomas have served as the point of an ideological spear. Trump is leaving office in 2029, and it’s possible Republicans will lose their Senate majority in November. Confirmation of anyone remotely like Alito would be impossible with a Democratic Senate and difficult with a smaller majority than Republicans currently enjoy.
Add in the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” theory of 2018, and you can see why Republicans might really want to press for an Alito retirement and then a good, savage Senate confirmation fight over a controversial nominee to succeed him, possibly 40-somethings like Andrew Oldham or Emil Bove, both Trump-nominated Circuit Court judges. If Alito was to retire at the end of the current term (perhaps announcing the retirement earlier), then the shape of the future Supreme Court could become a base-mobilizing issue for the GOP, all right — but potentially also one for Democrats.
That leads us back to the idea that poor Kavanaugh’s persecution by Democrats “saved the Senate” in 2018. The alternative explanation is that Republicans had an insanely favorable Senate landscape that year in which three Democrats who lost (Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri) were doomed from the get-go by the rapidly rightward trends of their states, and a fourth, Florida’s Bill Nelson, lost by an eyelash in another red-trending state after being massively outspent by then-Governor Rick Scott.
Even if you believe the Kavanaugh fight provided Republicans with a net benefit in 2018, there’s no reason to assume the same thing will happen in 2026, a year in which the Senate landscape is far less favorable to the GOP than it was in 2018 (according to the Cook Political Report, four of the seven competitive Senate races this year are on GOP turf). We also don’t know how the confirmation hearings for an Alito successor will turn out.
But between Alito’s motives for retiring, the GOP’s fear that it could lose control of the confirmation process, and the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” mythology about 2018, don’t be surprised if there’s a Supreme Court fight this summer or fall. Democrats would be happy to bid farewell to the author of the infamous decision reversing Roe v. Wade. Even if it hurts rather than helps their midterm prospects, Alito’s right-wing fans will be happy to welcome a younger version of the cranky conservative onto a life-time seat on the Court.
Does Heaven exist? And if so, is Donald Trump going to get in?
In the last year, President Trump has been publicly musing about the afterlife and his place in it with increasing regularity. No one really knows why we’re suddenly seeing this metaphysical side of Trump — is it age, health issues, surviving assassination attempts, glimmers of deeply suppressed guilt for his many sins? Whatever the reason, Trump keeps giving updates on his current odds of getting into Heaven, which seem to fluctuate a lot.
Honestly, all of these questions are beyond Intelligencer’s purview. The only solid information we can share is what Trump himself has said about the ultimate fate of his soul. Below, we will provide ongoing coverage of this important developing news story, which you can share with your pastor, rabbi, theology professor, Reiki healer, or extremely religious aunt for further discussion.
At 42, Trump’s concept of the afterlife was pretty hazy, and he didn’t seem all that concerned about where he’s headed. Here’s what he told Glenn Plaskin when he asked him if he was worried about his own mortality in a 1989 profile for the Chicago Tribune:
Seven years ago, Donald Trump remembers, he gazed at his $200 million Trump Tower and thought to himself: “I’ll be 36 next year and I’ll have done everything I can do… . Sometimes, I think it was a mistake to have raced through it all so fast… .”
Was it?
“I don’t know,” he answers thoughtfully, near the end of a long day.
“What’s the next level up? The grass isn’t always greener… . I might try a different step. Right now, I’m genuinely enjoying myself. I work and I don’t worry.”
Not even about death. “No. I’m fatalistic and I protect myself as well as anybody can. I prepare for things. But ultimately we all end up going.”
Heading upstairs for dinner with his children, Donald Trump looks back, hesitating, wanting to finish: “No. I don’t believe in reincarnation, Heaven or hell — but we go someplace.”
“Do you know,” he says, “I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where.”
A year later in a Playboy interview, Trump said that “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. You know, it is all a rather sad situation.”
Asked if he meant life or death, Trump continued:
Both. We’re here and we live our sixty, seventy or eighty years and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. But it is something to do — to keep you interested.
Nine years later, Trump told Diane Sawyer that he hoped Heaven was real so there could be some purpose for living:
I believe in God. I’m religious. I’m religious in my thought. And I just hope, in fact, that we’re all right in believing that there is a heaven, and perhaps in believing that there is a hell. I mean, we have to be here for something. We have to be doing this for some reason. There has to be a reason. And I believe that there is in fact a reason, and I believe heaven could be that reason.
I look at life and, sadly, life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. From the time you’re born, you’re here for an instant. When you look at — They found Neanderthal man two billion years ago. When you think of time, we’re here for a speck. If you live to be 100 years old, it’s just a millisecond in the overall scope of things. You realize that. You realize that nothing is really so earth-shattering, nothing is really so important. You realize that you live a life, you live a good life, enjoy it, have a lot of fun — which I do — and you’re only going to be here for a short time. On God …
I believe in God. I think that there’s got to be something, because I can’t believe we’re doing this all for no reason.
If Trump did any additional deep thinking about Heaven and hell over the next dozen years, he apparently did not share those thoughts publicly. The next time the topic came up was in August 2016, when Trump was begging Evangelical leaders at a “Pastors in the Pews” event to help him get elected.
“Once I get in, I will do my thing that I do very well,” Trump said. “And I figure it is probably, maybe the only way I’m going to get to Heaven. So I better do a good job.”
It’s pretty clear that at this point, Trump was just telling a joke tailored to pastors, not actually asking for help getting past the pearly gates.
Three weeks after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump sat down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. He argued that the country needs religion because it gives people “hope.” (This came up as Trump was accusing Democrats of being “fascists” who were “violent and ruthless to religion during COVID,” but the widely circulated Fox clip omitted the nasty lead in.) Ingraham asked Trump if he believes in Heaven.
“I do!” Trump said. “If I’m good, I’m going to Heaven. If I’m bad, I’m going to someplace else, like over there, right?”
A month later, Trump reiterated his basic understanding of the afterlife as good = Heaven, bad = hell while talking with podcaster Lex Fridman.
“You know, you’re supposed to go to Heaven, ideally not hell, but you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good,” he said.
Just as Trump dodged the original question (“How often do you think about your death?”) he didn’t say where he thinks he falls on this spectrum.
A year later, Trump had returned to office and his afterlife prognosis had taken a turn for the worse. During a call to Fox & Friends, he said he wanted to broker an end to the war in Ukraine because his chances at getting into Heaven weren’t looking so hot.
“I want to try and get to Heaven, if possible,” he said. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
Days later, Trump took his new concerns about the great beyond directly to his donors. As Mediaite reported, his Never Surrender PAC sent an email with the subject line “I want to try and get to Heaven”:
Then he asserted that we need religion because the fear of burning in hell for all eternity is the only thing that motivates us to make moral decisions, and getting into Heaven is really “important” to him.
“I felt for a long time that if a country doesn’t have religion, doesn’t have faith, doesn’t have God, it’s gonna be very hard to be a good country,” he said. “You know, there’s no reason to be good. I wanna be good because you wanna prove to God you’re good so you go to that next step, right? So, that’s very important to me. I think it’s really, very important.”
While talking with reporters on Air Force One, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked the president if he was still looking to improve his shot at getting past St. Peter.
Trump shrugged off his recent on-air existential musings, saying, “I’m being a little cute.” Then he suggested he’d resigned himself to eternal damnation.
“I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into Heaven. I think I’m not maybe Heaven-bound,” Trump said. “I may be in Heaven right now as we fly on Air Force One. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make Heaven, but I’ve made life a lot better for a lot of people.”
Laura Ingraham informed Trump that all of his public ruminating about possibly winding up in the bad place wasn’t sitting well with the MAGA faithful.
“A lot of Christians were sort of sad to hear that because Christ came to forgive our sins, if you believe that as Christians, and they opened Heaven to all of us,” she said. “So don’t you believe that?”
Trump said he was just joking when he talked about going to hell, and attacked the New York Times for failing to understand sarcasm. But he didn’t actually say he’s confident he’ll go to Heaven.
“I was kidding, I was having fun. I don’t know if I will or not, I don’t know,” Trump said. “I was having fun, and they made it, like, serious.”
During a Weave at the National Prayer Breakfast (in which he asserted “religion is back now, hotter than ever before”), Trump reiterated that he was just joking about hell, not questioning the meaning of his life.
“I really think I probably should make it,” he said. “I mean, I’m not a perfect candidate, but I did a hell of a lot of good for perfect people.”
So Trump’s Heaven outlook has been upgraded to probably getting in, if only because you don’t actually have to be that good.
During yet another weave, this time in a speech at a steel processing plant in Rome, Georgia, Trump recounted and exaggerated his previous remarks about his prospects for heaven, and again criticized those who take what he says on the subject seriously.
I said, “I don’t think I’m gonna make it to Heaven!” in front of this massive group of people, 56,000 people. And they all said “Woah, what does he mean?”
He then continued playing himself in his own story:
“I don’t think I’m gonna make it to Heaven! I do a great job for a lot of people, but I don’t think so. I’m just not worthy of Heaven. I’m not gonna make it.”
And I was having a good time going. You know I was having fun.
I hope to make it, but I doubt I will, to be honest. A lot of you will. I’m not so sure…
But I was having fun. The New York Times says in a front page story: “Donald Trump is now questioning his mortality.” They made it like I was totally… So you can’t joke, it doesn’t work.
So Trump is once again betting against getting to go to Heaven, even though he’d clearly like to go. He also appears to believe that many Georgia steel workers have much better odds than him.
Meta’s hard and early pivot into artificial intelligence hasn’t exactly gone as planned, with tens of billions of investment dollars sunk into middling models, departmental restructurings, and clashing visions. In technical terms, the company remains an AI also-ran. In another way, though, it’s emerging as an industry leader: It’s spending a ton of money on politics.
Regarding regulation and national law, firms like Meta are, for now, in reasonably good shape. They have an administration that’s broadly deregulatory and specifically pro–AI industry and has mostly limited its threats of intervention to complaints about “wokeness” — a problem for a company like Anthropic, perhaps, but maybe less so for ones like Meta that preemptively ponied up and fell in line. Plenty of money will be spent by the AI industry on national politics, of course (OpenAI president Greg Brockman recently became a Trump PAC megadonor), but for now, AI firms are pushing further into state and local politics and Meta is spending a lot. According to the New York Times:
Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives … Political operatives tied to A.I. interests have focused this election cycle on state capitols out of concern that states were developing a patchwork of laws that would stifle A.I. development.
This, says the Times, is “the biggest election investment by Meta” so far and is focused, to start, on supporting AI-friendly Republicans in Texas and Democrats in Illinois. Meta isn’t alone here: A fleet of new PACs backed by other AI firms is funneling money into local and state elections across the country.
What are these companies lobbying for, exactly? Their needs fit imperfectly into two categories. First, they want to fend off direct regulation of how AI products are built, used, and deployed. That includes avoiding “transparency” laws that often include risk audits, whistleblower protections, and frameworks for ensuring AI “safety,” in both the catastrophic and child-safety senses of the word. In this fight, AI firms have a useful ally in the federal government, which has been actively pressuring state lawmakers to drop the issue, most recently in Utah.
Closer to the ground and a bit further from the national political discourse, for now, is the matter of data centers. Much of the money AI companies spend on AI — raised from investors, their own balance sheets, and, more recently, bond sales — goes into buying GPUs and leasing or building structures in which to put them. These structures then need huge amounts of power coming from either the grid or newly constructed generators of one type or another (if you’re xAI, this means standing up gas turbines without permits; if you’re Meta, this may look like partnering directly with a nuclear power plant). In addition to the staggering power needs, data centers use a lot of water. And despite their eye-popping costs to build and run, they barely create any jobs. For the sorts of communities being approached with these projects — places that may be persuaded to accept the mixed prospect of hosting an Amazon warehouse or, say, a massive new ICE detention center — AI data centers are uniquely unappealing. As a result, they encounter local resistance from across the political spectrum. According to the Financial Times:
Over the past year, the White House has courted tech billionaires and gone out of its way to protect the AI industry’s agenda, fast-tracking permits for data centre construction and approving the sales of advanced chips to China while cracking down on states’ attempts to regulate chatbots … But across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grassroots rebellion against the rapid rollout of the technology.
Data centers offer an almost perfectly sympathetic NIMBY cause. They’re a drain on local resources, straining infrastructure and driving up utility prices. They exist to support a technology about which people are fairly pessimistic across the political spectrum. They’re pitched as investments in an exciting future, but that future will unfold elsewhere while your town, now designated as an infrastructural non-place, is just stuck with a big jobless box that uses more power and water than everyone else combined.
The surge in local lobbying isn’t about winning this argument — good luck with that! — so much as it’s about getting as much done as possible while the companies still can, buying support at the state level and breaking ground in as many municipalities as possible before data-center backlash becomes a universal condition of local politics in America. AI firms always talk about how they’re in a technological race with one another or against China in which every day counts. But they’re also in a race to take advantage of a brief domestic political moment during which they’re relatively unencumbered and haven’t yet been metabolized into American politics. At the national, state, and local levels, this may be as good as the AI industry will ever have it. And ahead of the midterms — not to mention the prospect of 2028 — it’s lobbying like it’s running out of time.
Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon with his Christian nationalist mentor Doug Wilson. Photo: @PeteHegseth/X
At the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on February 5, President Donald Trump indulged himself in a 75-minute rambling tirade devoted to glorifying himself, attacking his enemies, claiming a Republican monopoly on faith, and pledging to “viciously and violently” defend his kind of Christians. But his wasn’t the most alarming speech at the event. That distinction belonged to Trump’s secretary of Defense, as Baptist minister Brian Kaylor observed:
Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “Secretary of War,” spoke after Trump to baptize the U.S. and especially its military. He did so by highlighting the worship services he’s been leading at the Pentagon. And he even suggested that soldiers can gain salvation by fighting for the United States.
“America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it. And as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him,” Hegseth said as he pointed upward. “That’s precisely why we instituted a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon, an act of what we see it as, spiritual readiness.”
This was just an appetizer. As Kaylor notes in a separate dispatch, Hegseth has used his government-sanctioned Pentagon worship services to promote the rawest kind of Christian nationalism, most recently treating military leaders to the spiritual stylings of Doug Wilson:
The Idaho pastor and self-described “paleo-Confederate” preached about the importance of trusting God for protection in battle and praised the monthly worship services as perhaps a sign of a new revival like the Great Awakening or the biblical Day of Pentecost….
Wilson, an outspoken proponent of Christian Nationalism, has sparked numerous controversies over the years for what he preaches and teaches. He has downplayed the horrors of slavery and defended enslavers. He also pushes a hardline version of patriarchy, not just insisting only men can serve as pastors or in other church leadership roles but also that they should rule in families.
Hegseth doesn’t just promote Wilson’s views at the Pentagon; he is a member of a congregation affiliated with the denomination Wilson founded and seemed thrilled to be able to welcome this prophet of patriarchy to bless America’s war fighters: “Thank you for your leadership, for your mentorship, for the things you’ve started, the truth you’ve told, your willingness to be bold.”
Irreligious folk accustomed to hearing this sort of divinization of cultural conservatism proclaimed as “Christianity” should be aware that this isn’t what all Christians believe. Indeed, when it comes to the fraught subject of church-state separation, Christian nationalists stand at one extreme on a spectrum that includes many millions of believers who staunchly defend rigorous church-state separation on religious grounds. The same day that Hegseth and Wilson were whooping it up for a militarized American Jesus, Texas legislator and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico gained a viral YouTube audience for an interview with Stephen Colbert in which he pronounced Christian nationalism as, well, basically unclean:
We are called to love all our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors. And forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment.
My granddad [a Baptist minister] raised me to believe that boundary between church and state doesn’t just benefit the state or our democracy, although it certainly does, but it also benefits the church.
Because when the church gets too cozy with political power, it loses its prophetic voice, its ability to speak truth to power, its ability to imagine a completely different world. And this separation between church and state is something we have to safeguard. It’s something we have to fight for.
And I think we need someone in the U.S. Senate who is going to confront Christian nationalism and tell the truth which is that there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power in the name of Christ. And it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.
Talarico, as it happens, is a Presbyterian seminarian. Mainline Protestant horror at the Prince of Peace being turned into a Man of War is not unusual, although until now it has gotten little attention. Alongside the faith-based backlash to Trump’s mass-deportation effort, which is especially strong among Catholics, we are beginning to receive regular reminders that alongside partisan and ideological polarization is a quiet battle among religious believers spurred by the particularly aggressive version of Christian nationalism espoused by Trump allies. It may be an accident that Talarico’s interview went viral after CBS clumsily discouraged its airing at the behest of Trump’s thuggish FCC chairman Brendan Carr. But the MAGA conquest of American Christianity will not be uncontested.
Hard-core conservative Republicans have been agitating lately for a follow-up to last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A second budget-reconciliation measure would let them do various things that Democrats would normally be able to block in the Senate, if not in the House. Some want a Second Big Beautiful Bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, such as Trump and Republicans unsuccessfully tried to pass in 2017. Others may want to implement some of Trump’s recent proposals to put thousands of dollars into the pockets of taxpayers right before they vote in the 2026 midterms, deficits be damned.
But whatever fantasies Republicans were harboring seem to have come to an abrupt end. Last week, the president said one Big Beautiful Bill was enough, per Politico:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday ruled out pushing another one-party reconciliation package through Capitol Hill.
“In theory we’ve gotten everything passed that we need,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow. “Now we just need to manage it. But we’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years.”
… The president didn’t rule out any legislation in the remainder of his term, but indicated he’s focusing on smaller-scale bills.
“Do we have other things in mind? Yeah. We do — we have things in mind,” Trump said. “And we have, perfecting a little bit about what we did.”
This means Trump is standing pat for the midterms, at least legislatively. Sure, he and his congressional allies will pursue “messaging bills” like the SAVE Act, which they are currently ventilating about at great length. But they know that such bills won’t survive a Senate filibuster. And it’s abundantly clear by now that Senate Republicans won’t kill the filibuster, either; this is the one thing — perhaps the only thing — they won’t give Trump in a million years, since they need to preserve the filibuster for a future Democratic presidency. So what Trump is admitting is that it’s time to buckle down for the midterms and forget about addressing troublesome issues like health-care costs or ICE outrages that would require a degree of genuine bipartisanship that has largely gone out the window since the president’s second inauguration.
Obviously enough, the president will continue his efforts to expand his own powers to the maximum, making legislation — and Congress itself — largely unnecessary. But if you look closely at what he told Kudlow, he wasn’t just talking about 2026; he said, “We’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years” [emphasis added]. Now, in part he may be thinking of the current brouhaha over ICE; the super-funding of immigration enforcement in the OBBBA means his masked thugs don’t need further money from Congress until every single immigrant has been deported. But more generally, he may feel inclined to stop relying on Congress for much of anything until he leaves the White House in 2029.
The truth is, of course, that he may not be able to rely on Congress for much of anything in the last two years of his presidency. The odds are very high that Republicans will lose control of the House in November. History says so; conditions in the country are nothing like those in the two midterms since FDR when the president’s party didn’t lose House seats. And the handicappers agree: The Kalshi prediction market currently projects a Democratic majority of at least ten seats. Republicans are favored to hold on to the Senate, but a Democratic-wave election could still flip the chamber. Even if Republicans lose only the House, you can forget about any budget-reconciliation bills like the OBBBA. And thanks to the torching of bipartisanship by the 47th president and his congressional allies, compounded by Trump’s lame-duck status, there’s precious little Congress will be able to do on a simple majority-vote basis.
Yes, in the waning days of a Trump administration there will still be occasional crises over must-pass legislation involving appropriations and debt limits. (It’s now estimated that the federal debt limit will again be breached by the spring or summer of 2027.) There may be partial or full government shutdowns now and then, which could lead to bipartisan negotiations on spending or even unrelated matters. And a lot of the overall atmospherics in Washington will depend on whether there is a Republican Senate to approve Trump’s judicial and executive-branch appointments (if not, you could see a vast number of judicial openings along with temporary appointments to key federal offices). But any way you slice it, the legislative phase of Trump 2.0 may be coming to an end. And the president himself seems fine with that. Believe it or not, he may become even more aggressive in asserting that he can do whatever he wants without congressional authorization.
Sometimes the forces that lead to major social and political change take years to mature before they become public policy. The environmental movement, for example, began well before the first Earth Day in 1970; after decades of advocacy and resistance, the U.S. government finally passed laws regulating the practices and substances poisoning the planet.
Now all that progress has been reversed at the hands of the Trump administration. The New York Timesreported:
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.
The so-called endangerment finding, first promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, represented the culmination of scientific and regulatory initiatives dating back to the Nixon presidency. Until Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, climate-change “denialism” was a fringe movement. While many Republicans questioned the pace and scope of climate-change regulation, they didn’t oppose it entirely. But now climate-change denialism is official U.S. policy, making this country a global pariah. We’re now the only country that has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Agreement — in which most of the world agreed to greenhouse-gas-emission reductions — joining Iran, Libya, and Yemen as climate-change scofflaws.
While Trump has long been a climate-change denier, he really amped up his opposition to environmental protection in 2024 as part of a devil’s bargain with the fossil-fuel industry, as the Brennan Center explained:
Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won.
This is one deal on which he has abundantly delivered:
His signature legislative package [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act]— which one executive deemed “positive for us across all of our top priorities” — gives oil and gas firms $18 billion in tax incentives while rolling back incentives for clean energy alternatives. He’s placed fossil fuelallies in charge of the agencies that oversee the industry and fast-tracked drilling projects on public lands. In just his first 100 days back in office, Trump took at least 145 actions to undo environmental rules — more than he reversed during his entire first term as president.
Yes, scientists and nature lovers generally have been stunned by the aggressively reactionary efforts of the 47th president to roll back the fundamental achievements of environmental policy for the past half-century. But you don’t need to be a professor or a tree hugger to comprehend that something dangerous is happening thanks to the toxins our industries and our cars are belching into the atmosphere. The recent explosion of extreme weather from coast to coast, and the steady diminution of the glories of the temperate seasons of spring and autumn, are evident to Americans over the age of 30. And Americans under the age of 30 need no convincing that climate change is a huge and very real challenge, as a 2024 Sacred Heart University survey shows:
Nearly 2 in 3 (63%) youth report experiencing “eco-anxiety”—a level of psychological distress about climate change that impacts their daily lives—up from 55% in the 2024 ISSJ Sacred Heart University poll.
Seven in 10 (70%) also report being worried about climate change.
This concern transcends demographics: more than 60% of Black, Hispanic and white youth report eco-anxiety, and among Republicans and conservatives, over 60% say they also experience “eco-anxiety.”
Partisan polarization means that differences of opinion on climate change can be countered or obliterated by tribal allegiances on other issues. But it’s important to understand that this particular policy priority of the Trump administration is really bad, rivaling mass deportation, the inversion of civil-rights laws, the ongoing destruction of NATO, the subversion of reproductive rights, and the use of government as an instrument of vengeance as precedent-breaking developments. We will live and breathe Trump’s repudiation of climate-change initiatives for a long time.
There’s not much question that the brutal immigration-enforcement tactics on display in Minneapolis and elsewhere have roiled U.S. politics. The resulting furor produced a partial government shutdown, and Trump himself seems wrong-footed by the world-wide backlash to scenes of masked thugs attacking immigrants, protesters, and bystanders alike.
But it’s a little more difficult to measure how much this has affected Donald Trump’s own public standing. Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent on January 7. Alex Pretti was killed by Border Control agents on January 24. Using the polling averages at Silver Bulletin, we see that Trump’s overall net job-approval rating stood at minus-12.2 percent on January 6 and dropped to minus-14.6 percent by the end of the month (it’s at minus-14.4 percent on February 11). The percentage of Americans strongly disapproving of Trump’s job performance has increased to a second-term high of 46.2 percent (24.1 percent strongly approve, which is near the second-term low of 23.8 percent). As usual, the mix of pollsters releasing data in this period puts various thumbs on scales. Readings on Trump’s net job-approval range from Insider Advantage, whose February 1 survey pegged it at 1 percent, to Pew Research, which placed it at minus-24 percent as of January 26.
Looking at post-shootings job-approval trends for specific pollsters is tough, since few have released multiple surveys in January or February. Morning Consult’s tracking poll shows little change. Nor did Economist/YouGov, which pegged Trump’s net job approval at minus-16 percent on January 26 and minus-17 percent on February 9. Interestingly, one of Trump’s favorite polling outlets, Rasmussen Reports, showed his net approval dropping to a second-term low of minus-16 percent on February 5, before rebounding somewhat to minus-9 percent as of February 11.
Silver Bulletin maintains separate averages for polling on Trump’s job approval with respect to particular issues. The immigration trend has been downward (if unevenly so) since June. Net job approval on immigration was at minus-3.8 percent as recently as December 10. It fell all the way to minus-12.4 percent on January 26 and is now at minus-11.1 percent. It’s been clear for quite some time that what was once Trump’s strongest issue area is now another problem for him, albeit not as severe as perceptions he is mishandling the economy. His net job approval on the economy is minus-16.7 percent, and on handling inflation is minus-25.2 percent, though both numbers were worse at the end of 2025.
A few recent polls that conduct deeper dives on immigration policy tell us much more about the impact of immigration-enforcement atrocities. The Economist/YouGov survey from February 2 is particularly nuanced. Fifty percent of Americans say Trump’s approach to immigration policy is “too harsh,” 8 percent say it’s “too soft,” and 36 percent say it’s “about right.” Democrats and Republicans are sharply polarized on the question, as usual, and 54 percent of independents say Trump’s approach is “too harsh.” The “too harsh” percentage rises to 58 percent among Hispanics. Sixty-three percent of Americans, and even 35 percent of Republicans, oppose deportation of illegal immigrants “who have lived in the U.S. for many years without committing any crimes.” Sizable majorities favor a raft of restrictions on ICE agents. Perhaps most tellingly, 53 percent of Americans agree, and only 24 percent disagree, with the statement that “Alex Pretti was wrongfully executed by immigration agents.”
A February 2 Quinnipiac poll shows 62 percent of registered voters think the shooting of Alex Pretti was unjustified, while only 22 percent call it justified. More generally, 63 percent of registered voters disapprove of “the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws,” while 34 percent approve.
Most recently, a February 6 NBC News Decision Desk survey of registered voters showed “49% of adults strongly disapprove of how Trump has handled border security and immigration, up from 38% strong disapproval last summer and 34% in April.” And a February 9 GBAO poll, also of registered voters, focused on perceptions of Democratic demands for ICE reforms. By a margin of 52 percent to 36 percent, respondents favored withholding DHS funding until ICE is reformed. And support for the individual demands Democrats have made with respect to ICE ranges from a low of 63 percent (allowing private lawsuits against ICE agents) to a high of 75 percent (requiring ICE participation in state and local investigations into potential violations of rights).
How the administration handles immigration enforcement going forward will determine how much residual damage the events in Minneapolis have damaged public support for ICE, mass deportation, and Trump himself. But Americans are definitely paying attention now.
Who needs a right-wing minor-party demagogue like Nigel Farage when you have Donald Trump? Photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images
If you aren’t too distracted by the unprecedented events in America’s political system recently, you might have noticed that even more shocking developments have overtaken established and once-indomitable political institutions in Europe. These include the stunning, real-time apparent collapse of the two major parties in Great Britain.
They seem like punch-drunk prizefightersstruggling to catch their breath as they slog it out. Is the party over for Britain’s storied heritage parties?
Neither the Conservatives nor their traditional Labour rival have proven strikingly fit for purpose for some time. Their combined share of the vote in recent elections has been falling and the tribal loyalties they could always rely on in the past are eroding. Increasingly the public impression is that neither has the ability to tackle the country’s huge post-Brexit problems.
The Conservatives (a.k.a. Tories), a center-right party from the 19th century that gave the U.K. Disraeli, Churchill, and Thatcher, suffered the worst electoral fiasco in British history in 2024:
They lost almost 70 percent of the 362 seats won just five years earlier. And equally alarming for party bosses, they attracted their lowest share of the vote ever in their modern history — a remarkable humbling for a party often cited as the most successful in the democratic world.
Meanwhile, the left-leaning Labour Party has rapidly lost popularity since its massive electoral win in 2024.
With the two major parties in freefall, the ascendant entity is U.K. Reform, formerly the Brexit Party. Until very recently, Reform was a pariah party widely considered to be a xenophobic gang of demagogues. But it has not only won over the Tory rank and file, it has also attracted a growing number of high-level Conservative converts — former Tory members of Parliament and government officials who have switched their affiliation to Reform. This upstart, right-populist party generally comes out on top in U.K. polling these days.
In general, the two-party system in Britain as we’ve known it seems to be in danger of collapsing, Dettmer suggests:
Scottish and Welsh nationalists have chewed away at the mainstream parties. So, too, have the revived Liberal Democrats — had they attracted two or three percent more of the overall vote 16 months ago, they might have won more seats than the Tories, becoming the main official opposition party. And now the Tories have a genuine competitor on the right.
For many years, Britain’s first-past-the-post election system (like ours) was considered an unassailable barrier to minor parties, but it doesn’t appear that way right now.
This phenomenon is not limited to Britain — across Europe, many other center-left and center-right parties are seemingly being marginalized by new populist parties. In Germany, the far-right AfD party — endorsed by Elon Musk in late 2024 and defended by J.D. Vance in early 2025 — is threatening the power of the conventionally conservative Christian Democratic Union, the party of Angela Merkel and many other German leaders. At the same time, the center-left Social Democrats, an electoral powerhouse dating back to the late 19th century, is losing vote-share to the recently created left-populist BSW party. In France, fragmentation of past political allegiances has become the rule, along with predictable instability. But there, too, a far-right party (if an older, better-established one), Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, has become the largest political force in the country.
Of course, this isn’t limited to Europe — similar dynamics have roiled American politics. So it’s worth asking: Can the major-party meltdown spread to the United States?
Certainly there are pervasive signs of popular disgruntlement with both Republicans and Democrats. Gallup has been tracking self-identified party affiliation since 2001, when Americans were almost evenly divided into Democrats, Republicans, and independents. As of 2025, 45 percent self-identified as independents, an all-time high, while 27 percent identified with each of the major parties. But in contrast to Europe, none of this disaffection has fed the growth of minor parties. Indeed, in both 2020 and 2024, the major-party share of the presidential vote rose to 98.1 percent, as compared to 94.3 percent in 2016 (and as low as 81 percent in 1992). Nor have any of the periodic efforts to organize a new “centrist” third-party borne any fruit, despite constant complaints about partisan and ideological polarization. Yes, America’s own first-past-the-post system has made it hard to organize, fund, and gain ballot access for nonmajor parties. The major parties have fought like hell to maintain their duopoly.
But something else is clearly going on. And the most obvious thing when you compare the United States to Europe is that the “populist” movements that have upended the centrist parties across the pond have gravitated here toward one of the major parties, the GOP. Indeed, instead of undermining the two-party system, the enemies of globalization, refugee migration, and pandemic-driven anti-elitism have reinforced it as they took control of the Republican Party via the MAGA movement of Donald Trump.
There are, unsurprisingly, distinctly American mutations of right-wing populism in the MAGA takeover of the GOP. There’s the very un-European religiosity of both pre-Trump and post-Trump grassroots conservatives, compounded by an anti-government ethos that helped fuse the interests of populists and economic elites. Trump’s own cult of personality helped make the transition from the old to the new system relatively smooth not only in his party but among Democrats — where ideological differences were generally subsumed in a common response of horror at the changes in the GOP.
But overall what killed off much of the old pre-Trump Republican Party was the dynamic that accompanied its birth back in the 1850s: the rapid replacement of one of the two major parties by a new and different electoral coalition. America didn’t need a Reform U.K. or an AfD or a National Rally party to represent a radical new movement of cultural, economic, and social reaction. It had Trump’s GOP.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is eternally a MAGA target. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
We’re all used to negative campaign ads, but this inaugural offering from Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson is quite the doozy:
Yes, that’s right. The decidedly un-mom-like mom in this ad sneeringly tells her innocent-looking son that in order to lower expectations for his life, he was named “Brad” after Georgia secretary of State and Jackson gubernatorial-primary rival Brad Raffensperger, who “turned on his own kind” (Republicans? White people?) and consorted with the likes of Stacey Abrams. Mom’s backup name for him, she tells the traumatized child, was “Judas.” In case you missed the connection, the ad ends with the words “Brad ‘Judas’ Raffensperger” across the screen.
All Raffensperger did to earn this most hateful of epithets (in deeply Christian Georgia, anyway) was to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win in the state and refuse Donald Trump’s wildly corrupt and inappropriate demand that he “find” enough new votes to change the outcome. Trump tried to purge Raffensperger (along with his co-certifier of the Biden win, Governor Brian Kemp) in a 2022 primary but failed. Now Raffensperger is running for governor (Kemp is term-limited) precisely at the time Trump is reviving his conspiracy-theory-laden take on the 2020 election in Georgia. Just this week, FBI agents and Trump’s director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, were in Atlanta hauling off boxes of 2020 voter files. So Jackson’s toxic ad is designed to arouse fresh MAGA resentment of the public official who “turned on his own kind.”
Jackson isn’t just a random jerk. A former health-care executive, he’s pledged to spend up to $50 million of his own money in the 2026 race, where he is posing (as you might tell from his ad) as a defender of the president. Trouble is there is already a wacky rich MAGA dude in the race: state lieutenant governor Burt Jones, who was a fake Trump elector in 2020. Indeed, Jones has already been endorsed by the Boss. But Jackson made it clear right away he was as much of a target as “Judas” Raffensperger, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported:
Jackson, 71, wasted no time at his Wednesday rally at Jackson Healthcare’s opulent Alpharetta campus, calling Jones “a so-called front-runner who was weak as can be and as lazy as the day is long. He wants the title of governor, but not the job.”
If Jones were to win the nomination, he added to a crowd of hundreds of employees, “we would be risking losing his seat to a radical Democrat — or a Republican who acts like one. I wasn’t willing to sit and let that happen to our president or our great state.”
Jackson’s surprise entry into the race wasn’t the first unwelcome surprise for Burt Jones in recent months. During the Christmas holidays, TV viewers in Georgia were treated to a $5 million barrage of ads accusing the lieutenant governor of corruption. They were bought by a shadowy PAC, and all of Jones’s gubernatorial rivals denied having anything to do with it. Is it possible Rick Jackson was the mystery donor for these nasty-grams aimed at softening up Jones? Nobody knows, but the plot has thickened. And we do know Jackson doesn’t have a problem with running negative ads.
The irony is that Jackson may help Raffensperger win by splitting the MAGA vote and battling with Jones in a way that distracts attention from the secretary of State’s perfidious behavior in refusing to steal an election for Trump. There’s also a fourth major candidate, Attorney General Chris Carr, who agreed with Raffensperger and Kemp about the 2020 results but has gone out of his way to be lovey-dovey with the 45th and 47th president ever since he trounced his own Trump-endorsed primary opponent in 2022. There are all kinds of murder-suicide scenarios on the table for this fractious Republican field.
And victory-minded Republicans are aware this could be a good year for Democrats in Georgia as elsewhere. Yet another survivor of the Republican civil war Trump set off in Georgia in 2022, then–Republican lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, is now running for governor as a Democrat, though former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and former Labor commissioner Mike Thurmond lead him in the polls.
It could be a wild ride to November in the state Trump just can’t leave alone.
When asked why the NFL chose Bad Bunny at an October 22, 2025, press conference, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell answered, “He’s one of the leading and most popular entertainers in the world. That’s what we try to achieve. It’s an important stage for us. It’s an important element to the entertainment value. It’s carefully thought through.”
Goodell added that the NFL is not going to cancel Bad Bunny’s performance due to the backlash.
“I’m not sure we’ve ever selected an artist where we didn’t have some blowback or criticism,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to do when you have hundreds of millions of people that are watching. But we’re confident it’s going to be a great show.”
Clearly, the NFL didn’t hire Bad Bunny by accident, and executives knew there would be some right-wing backlash. As Wired’s Anna Lagos put it, this was “a calculated business move and a continuation of its strategy to rejuvenate and diversify its audience.” Lagos explained:
The league is aware that its traditional viewership base is aging. Attracting younger audiences and the growing Hispanic market is a business imperative. Bad Bunny, the most-listened-to artist on Spotify worldwide from 2020 to 2022, represents the key to accessing that global market.
The NFL’s partnership with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, launched in 2019, was designed to do just that: inject cultural relevance into the halftime show, an event that had become predictable and artistically safe. Kendrick Lamar’s acclaimed and politically charged performance in 2024, which used American symbolism to deliver a blunt critique of racism, demonstrated that the NFL is willing to take calculated risks if the result is cultural relevance and global conversation.
By choosing Bad Bunny, the NFL not only secures a global superstar, but also aligns itself with a narrative of inclusion and representation.
Jay-Z defended Bad Bunny to a TMZ photographer who asked on October 27, 2025, “Why are people hating on him?” Hov responded, “They love him. Don’t let them fool you.”
Here’s a brief overview of their friendship and falling-out, and how Trump’s political career intersected with Epstein’s prosecution.
1980s to Early 2000s: Trump & Epstein Are Friends. Trump parties with Epstein and flies on his private jet at least seven times. Trump appears in Epstein’s “little black book”, along with several of his family members (and many other famous and powerful figures).
2004: Trump-Epstein Friendship Ends. Trump and Epstein have a “falling-out,” as the president put it years later. The cause may have been a real-estate battle, but it’s not totally clear when or why they cut ties.
2006: Epstein Indicted in Florida. After Florida police investigate multiple claims of Epstein sexually abusing underage girls, he is indicted on just one count of soliciting prostitution. Florida officials are accused of giving him special treatment, and the FBI launches its own investigation.
2008: Epstein Takes Plea Deal. Epstein pleads guilty to two state charges after striking a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, to avoid federal prosecution (Acosta later served as Trump’s Labor secretary). Epstein serves most of his 18-month sentence in a work-release program that lets him leave jail during the day.
July 6, 2019: Feds Arrest Epstein. Epstein is arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in New York. Acosta resigns from the Trump administration days later amid public outcry over his decision not to prosecute Epstein years earlier.
August 10, 2019: Epstein Dies. Epstein is found dead in his Manhattan jail cell. His death is ruled a suicide.
2024: Giuffre-Maxwell Documents Released. Files from a settled defamation suit Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre brought against his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell are released, fueling public interest in the case. On the campaign trail, Trump suggests he’ll declassify the federal government’s Epstein files if reelected.
February 2025: Bondi Says Epstein Files Are Coming. Attorney General Pam Bondi teases the release of more Epstein files, saying the “client list” is “sitting on my desk right now to review.” Days later, right-wing influencers are given binders of previously released Epstein materials.
July 7, 2025: FBI & DOJ Cancel Epstein Release. The FBI and DOJ release a memo saying that following an “exhaustive review,” they have determined that there is no “client list,” nothing in the Epstein files warrants further investigation, and there will be no further document releases.
December 2025: Congress Orders Epstein Files Release. The Epstein Files Transparency Act passes almost unanimously. (After unsuccessfully trying to stop the vote, Trump backs it at the last minute.) The DOJ posts the first batch of documents on December 19, but misses the deadline set by the law.
One of the most confusing federal-government shutdowns in living memory began at midnight on January 31 when the stopgap-spending authority that ended the last government shutdown in November ran out. The shutdown was triggered by Democratic fury (and Republican misgivings) over ICE and Border Patrol atrocities in Minneapolis. But Congress had to unravel and end the shutdown before it could begin serious negotiations on new guidelines for immigration enforcement.
The Departments of Defense, Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and State — along with the department that supervises immigration enforcement, Homeland Security — shut down on Friday night. Other agencies remained open because spending bills affecting them passed both houses of Congress before the Minneapolis crisis began.
But the partial shutdown will end later today after two close votes in the House approved a Senate bill to reopen all government departments other than DHS. That agency will receive stopgap spending authority until February 13 to allow for very difficult negotiations over immigration enforcement policies and tactics.
Here’s how we got here and what we know about what will happen next:
The current crisis began when the House combined six regular appropriations bills into one huge package after allowing a separate vote over DHS funding as protests against ICE were breaking out around the country (it passed narrowly with just seven Democratic votes). The House then adjourned, hoping to “jam” the Senate into approving the whole package and keeping the government fully open.
But after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, Senate Democrats withheld the votes needed to clear the spending package, demanding reforms in immigration enforcement. As the January 30 deadline approached, the White House became engaged in the dispute and cut a deal with Chuck Schumer to provide a separate two-week stopgap-spending bill for DHS to allow for further negotiations and pass the rest of the appropriations. This arrangement cleared the Senate late on January 30, with most Republicans and about half the Democrats going along. Because the earlier House package was changed by the Senate, the Trump-Schumer deal went back to the House for its approval. In the meantime, the affected federal departments had to shut down.
The House wasn’t privy to the Trump-Schumer deal, and there was grumbling over it in both party caucuses. House Democrats are sensitive to the explosion of grassroots anger at the Senate Democrats who failed to use their leverage to either force major ICE reforms in exchange for keeping the government open, or to defund ICE altogether. Hardcore conservative House Republicans are upset about a rumored White House “pivot” away from total support for aggressive ICE tactics. Some wanted to attach provocative anti-immigrant conditions to the Senate deal, like measures to defund “sanctuary cities” or a forced Senate vote on the SAVE Act, which would impose new citizenship-ID requirements for voting. Democrats made it clear such amendments would be unacceptable poison pills that would extend the shutdown indefinitely.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had hoped to get around these grumbling factions with a quick vote right after the House reconvened on Monday to approve the Senate deal under a suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds vote. But in recognition of the divisions in his own ranks, and likely annoyed that he was left out of the Trump-Schumer negotiations, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries informed Johnson that he couldn’t promise the requisite number of votes to make the suspension of the rules feasible.
So Johnson was forced to go through the laborious process of getting a vote set up via House passage of the “rule” for consideration of the Senate deal. By ancient tradition, the minority party won’t vote for the majority’s “rule,” so the Speaker was forced to obtain must virtually every Republican vote for it. By all accounts, Trump spent Monday twisting arms and quelling dissent. House Freedom Caucus types asked for and probably received assurances from Trump that he won’t back down too much on ICE or on mass deportation generally if and when negotiations on the DHS spending bill ever happen. The rule passed by one vote with just one Republican (Thomas Massie) dissenting.
Passage of the rule brought the Senate deal to the House floor, where it passed by a 217-214 vote, with 21 Democrats voting for it (mostly outspoken “moderates” and some very senior members in safe seats) and 21 Republicans voting against it (mostly House Freedom Caucus members). It looks like Johnson figured out how many Democrats he could get to vote for the bill and gave an identical number of Republicans a “free vote” to oppose it. The outcome showed that nobody really wantsed the partial shutdown to continue, but everyone is aware that once everything other than the DHS bill is resolved, Democratic leverage to secure restraints on immigration-enforcement agents will be reduced significantly. Trump will sign the bill momentarily and the shutdown will officially end.
Absolutely not. Negotiations haven’t begun, and there are signs of a deepening partisan rift on the subject. Senate Democrats announced a list of substantive demands prior to the Trump-Schumer procedural deal that included a requirement for judicial warrants before ICE–Border Patrol arrests; coordination with local law enforcement (and deference to their use-of-force rules); and an end to masking. Any or all of these demands could be deal-breakers with the White House, aside from whatever additional demands House Democrats insist upon.
We’ll know soon enough: The Senate-passed CR for DHS expires on February 13. If no substantive deal is struck that can get through both Houses and and also secure Trump’s signature, the options are either another CR to allow more time for negotiations or a new shutdown of DHS (which includes, in addition to immigration enforcement, agencies like FEMA and the Coast Guard). The only good thing about these scenarios is that at least it will be clear to everyone what the fight’s about.
It’s definitely possible to overreact to special-election results. These episodic contests, often far downballot, tend to attract low, sometimes skewed voter turnout. But the special elections held since Donald Trump’s 2024 victory add to the evidence that his party is headed for some real problems in November.
The latest Democratic win is quite the shocker: In a very large (larger than a U.S. House district) state-senate district deep in the heart of Texas that Trump won by 17 points, local union leader and Democrat Taylor Rehmet trounced veteran conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points (it was technically a runoff election for the two candidates who finished first and second in the first round in November). There’s nothing about this traditionally very conservative Fort Worth–area district that made it particularly susceptible to an upset of this depth, which contributes to the sense that it’s part of a national vibe shift, as this account of recent state legislative special-election trend lines indicates:
CNN number cruncher Harry Enten summed up the situation and what such trends have meant in the past:
A closer look at the Texas results, moreover, makes it difficult to attribute them just to a temporarily skewed pro-Democratic turnout pattern that won’t hold in November. Yes, turnout was very low, possibly because the election was, unusually, held on a Saturday. But not only Democrats turned out:
Wambsganns, incidentally, “vastly outspent Rehmet as Republicans including Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick mounted a furious funding push in a bid to tilt the election in their favor in the final days,” noted the Texas Tribune.
Another rationalization Republicans sometimes offer for special-election (or, for that matter, midterm) losses is that some Trump fans feel no particular need to vote if his name isn’t on the ballot. That, indeed, is why he has been much more engaged in preparations for the 2026 midterms than was the case in 2018, when Republicans lost pretty badly. But as Aaron Blake observed at CNN, Trump and his allies were very focused on this race:
The race was important enough to earn the involvement of the national committees, top statewide Republicans and even Trump.
Trump postedthreetimes about the race in recent days, in clear hopes of juicing Election Day turnout for Republicans.
But it didn’t work. In fact, in a pretty rare occurrence these days, Democrats actually did better on special Election Day than in early voting. While Rehmet won early voting 56-44, he won day-of voting 58-42, according to results from Tarrant County.
Trump’s call clearly wasn’t heeded.
The two candidates will compete for a full term in the Texas state senate in the March primaries and November general election. But the special election is setting off alarm bells among Texas Republicans, who face a potentially difficult U.S. Senate race (incumbent John Cornyn has two primary opponents, including MAGA favorite Ken Paxton) and are counting on major gains in U.S. House races in the state after the legislature conducted a mid-decade partisan gerrymander at Trump’s request. And if the GOP is in trouble in Texas, there could be trouble everywhere.
In 1935, Adolf Hitler commissioned director Leni Riefenstahl to make Triumph Of The Will, a highly nationalistic and likely heavily staged account of the Nazi Party’s 1934 Nuremberg rallies. It was a key moment in the history of propaganda films, a coldly fascistic conceptualisation of Germany as the Nazis hoped to recast it, produced with full participation and collaboration of an authoritarian regime. Melania, on the other hand — a new documentary about Melania Trump, wife of President Donald Trump — is more like Triumph of the Shill. It is political propaganda at its most transparent — cynical, pointless, and very, very boring.
He also notes the missed opportunity:
There is no drama to speak of, no tension, no narrative arc. Melania’s life story is undeniably fascinating: a former model and beauty queen, born in Soviet-era Yugoslavia, an immigrant who improbably clawed her way to the top, making the White House her home — twice. Within her life, you can surely find the story of America in microcosm: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to start a luxury jewellery line! As a public figure who rarely gives interviews, she is a mystery, a cipher hiding behind designer sunglasses, surely waiting for her story to be told.
But this film is uninterested in backstory, in delving even remotely under the surface.
The Amazon founder has been cozying up to Donald Trump for some time, from killing a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris to attending Trump’s indoor inauguration. In the same February 2025 WSJ piece, the paper revealed that Melania pitched the documentary to Bezos personally when he dined a Mar-a-Lago in December:
[Melania] was looking for a buyer for a documentary about her transition back to first lady. Her agent had pitched the film, which she would executive produce, to a number of studios, including the one owned by Amazon. As the meeting approached, Melania consulted with director Brett Ratner on how to sell her idea to the world’s third-richest man. Melania regaled Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, with the project’s details at dinner.
Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40 million to license the film — the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary and nearly three times the next-closest offer.
Netflix and Apple declined even to bid. Paramount made a lowball $4 million distribution-rights offer. Disney, the most interested studio besides Amazon, offered $14 million.
And in March 2025 a “person close to Bezos” told the Financial Times that the Melania documentary “is patently ridiculous, but is very pragmatic”. They added, “He is doing a deal, offering money to buy the Trump family’s affection and flattering the president. If you think about it in terms of costs versus benefit, it is pretty low. It’s a smart investment.”
An Amazon spokesman downplayed the suggestion that the deal was part of Bezos’s effort to kiss up to the new administration, telling the WSJ, “We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it.”
The documentary isn’t the only deal the Bezos-owned company has made with the Trumps recently. In March 2025, Amazon announced that Prime Video would begin streaming The Apprentice, the reality competition show in which Donald Trump played a successful businessman. The president promoted the show’s streaming debut with twoposts on Truth Social. It’s unclear how much he stands to make from the deal.
Days before its premiere, things are looking rough for the Melania Trump documentary. It sounds like the film is on track to flophard at the box office next weekend, despite Amazon’s efforts to bolster sales. And the White House is getting flak for going ahead with a glitzy private screening of the film on Saturday night as the nation was reeling from the fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis. But hey, at least they had a blast making it!
Well, not exactly. Rolling Stone has a new report on all the behind-the-scenes gossip that makes the whole process sound nightmarish.
While Trump ventures often do no attract the best of what the entertainment business has to offer, the cinematographers involved in the film had surprisingly impressive résumés, and none of the sources mentioned any drama among crew members. But Rolling Stone reported that the “frantic scramble” to gather footage of Melania in the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration presented huge logistical issues:
It was a chaotic process that involved hiring and coordinating three separate production crews working in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York City.
“People were worked really hard. Really long hours, highly disorganized, very chaotic,” one person who worked on the set said. “It wasn’t easy money,” another added. “It was very difficult because of the chaos that was around everything. … Usually [for a documentary] it’s like, ‘Oh, follow the subject.’ Well, it’s Melania Trump. With the first lady and Secret Service, you can’t just do things you usually do.”
A full-time travel coordinator was brought on to deal with logistics issues that would invariably arise when, for example, members of the crew would board the Trump Organization’s Boeing 757 to film the first lady on a flight en route to Mar-a-Lago and end up without a ride home.
Melania herself didn’t add to the problems; sources described her as friendly and engaged in the process. Brett Ratner, however, was another story. The director was “canceled” in Hollywood following sexual-harassment and misconduct allegations in 2017. While no one quoted in the Rolling Stone piece specifically raises those kinds of allegations, one person said they wouldn’t have signed on for the job if they knew he’d be involved. Another source said there was a lot of talk of “Brett being slimy” among the crew, but perhaps they meant that more literally:
Ratner left a trail of detritus — discarded orange peels, gum wrappers — wherever he went on set. “He did actually chew a piece of gum and throw it in a coffee cup on my cart,” one said, [but] “didn’t acknowledge my existence for even one nanosecond.”
Another recalled a long day during which the crew wasn’t allowed to break for meals, and no outside food was allowed to be brought into the space where filming was taking place. Everyone was starving. “Brett, unknowingly or maliciously, got his own food, went up there, was just eating it and just licking his fingers in grubbiest way possible, either being a dick or [having] no awareness whatsoever to the fact that everybody else is working and no one’s eating,” one person recalled.
“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one member of the production team said. “But Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.”
An estimated two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York asked to not be credited. Another told Rolling Stone that after experiencing Trump’s second term, they now wish they’d done the same. “I’m much more alarmed now than I was a year ago,” the person said.
Sure, you could argue that these crew members should have guessed where things were going in the weeks before Trump’s second inauguration. But it’s hard to find work in Hollywood these days. And few people would have guessed in late 2024 that the Melania documentary would also be an attempt to rehabilitate Bret Ratner because Donald Trump has a secret passion for the Rush Hour movies.
Naturally, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Representative Thomas Massie, and a handful of other congressional Republicans who regularly dare to defy Trump spoke out against the administration after Pretti was killed.
But now a growing number of Republicans are joining them in publicly pushing back against the tactics used by federal immigration agents, even if they still support the Trump administration’s broader mass-deportation goal.
On Sunday, Thom Tillis, North Carolina’s outgoing GOP senator, issued a statement calling for a “thorough and impartial investigation” of Pretti’s shooting.
“Any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump’s legacy,” he said.
His call for an investigation was echoed by Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, who is facing a Trump-backed primary challenger:
As well as two very conservative members of the House GOP, Dusty Johnson of South Dakota and Michael McCaul of Texas, both of whom demanded a “thorough investigation.”
Representative Andrew Garbarino of New York, who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, asked the leaders of ICE, U.S. Customs and Borders Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to testify before the committee. Though he did not explicitly criticize immigration agents or even mention Minneapolis, he noted in a statement that “Congress has an important responsibility to ensure the safety of law enforcement and the people they serve and protect.”
Other Republican elected officials are privately raising their concerns with the Trump administration, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, and an even larger number are hoping someone else will bring the immigration “vibe shift” to Trump’s attention so they won’t have to:
They plead with Trump and his advisers in private to calm tensions, as a handful did this weekend. However, most officials hope one of their colleagues can do that work so they don’t have to play the heavy. “You can talk to them” or “Can you talk to them?” are phrases I don’t need access to text chains to know are being relayed between top Republicans.
When lawmakers do reach Trump, the dialogue is similar to those private messages he posted last week from European leaders eager to get him off his Greenland fetish: Start with praise and flattery before moving to the heart of the matter.
And while hope may not be a strategy, as the saying goes, there’s a whole lot of hope among Republican officials — mostly that they don’t have to go public with their true feelings, because if they wait for a few days the president will consume so much media coverage he’ll recognize the depth of the crisis.
