ReportWire

Tag: early and often

  • Trump DOJ Misses Epstein Files Deadline, GOP Shrugs

    [ad_1]

    House Oversight and Government Reform Committee member Lauren Boebert.
    Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    Just two months ago, there was a “revolt” in Congress over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury the Epstein files. Once it became clear that a few House Republicans would support a discharge petition requiring the files’ release, Donald Trump himself flipped on the issue and ordered GOP lawmakers to do the same. Nearly all congressional Republicans voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which gave the Department of Justice 30 days to release all of the materials (with redactions of materials that might harm Epstein’s victims). Some observers thought it might be the beginning of the end of Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party or even over his own MAGA movement, where the Epstein files have long been the object of powerful conspiracy theories.

    That 30-day deadline has now come and gone, and only a small fraction of the Epstein files have seen the light of day. Indeed, as the Guardian reports, the slow-walking from Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice seems downright defiant:

    Justice department attorneys said in a 5 January Manhattan court filing that they had posted approximately 12,285 to DoJ’s website, equating to some 125,575 pages, under this legislation’s requirements. They said in this same letter that justice department staff had identified “more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review”.

    That these DoJ’s disclosures apparently comprise a drop in the bucket – and have done little to shed light on how Epstein operated with apparent impunity for years – has roiled survivors’ advocates and lawmakers. 

    The original House co-sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Democrat Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie, are so furious about the administration’s noncompliance that they have petitioned federal district court judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York to intervene and force an independent audit of the files and their release, arguing that the “DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act.”

    Meanwhile, most of Massie’s congressional Republican colleagues seem to be moving along to other matters having made their one gesture the passage of the law Team Trump is now refusing to implement. As Politico reports, the widespread indifference is typified by Colorado representative Lauren Boebert, one of the handful of House Republicans who joined Khanna and Massie and forced the issue to the House floor via a rare discharge petition:

    “I don’t give a rip about Epstein,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said last week when she was asked to take stock of the month since the Dec. 19 deadline.

    “Like, there’s so many other things we need to be working on,” she added. “I’ve done what I had to do for Epstein. Talk to somebody else about that. It’s no longer in my hands.”

    Even those Republicans who do “give a rip” about the Epstein files seem more interested in selectively than completely releasing them:

    Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who has worked with Democrats on a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigation into the Epstein case, said in a recent interview she’s now more more focused on holding Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for not honoring the panel’s subpoena to testify about Epstein.

    Many of the photos released by the DOJ so far feature the former president consorting with Epstein, and the administration has sought to portray Bill Clinton as the real pariah, not Trump.

    This is entirely contrary to the law that Representative Anna Paulina Luna and 215 other House Republicans voted to impose on the DOJ in an atmosphere of great self-righteousness. Luna told Politico the original deadline for release of the files wasn’t “realistic,” which does make you wonder why she voted for it just two months ago. Once viewed as a demonstration of the legislative branch’s last-ditch willingness to show just a little bit of independence from Team Trump, the Epstein files saga is now showing that only the judicial branch and perhaps midterm voters can exercise effective oversight of this lawless administration.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Trump Leaks World Leaders’ Private Texts in Greenland Bullying Fit

    [ad_1]

    Photo: Michael Kappeler/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

    While it’s cliché to call Donald Trump’s behavior childish, there’s really no other way to characterize his demand to take Greenland. Polls show that Greenlanders don’t want to be part of the U.S., and Americans’ support for forcibly taking the Arctic island is in the single digits. While Greenland is important for strategic and defense reasons, experts say Trump could get pretty much everything he wants there if he just asks nicely. But Trump keeps insisting he has to have Greenland, and he has to have it now.

    Now the president is using increasingly immature tactics in his quest to obtain the Arctic island, pouting about how he was robbed of a Nobel Peace Prize and publicly sharing world leaders’ private text messages about Greenland on Truth Social.

    Trump kicked off the long MLK Day weekend by inviting countries to join a new “Board of Peace,” which he will chair. It appears he’s envisioning an American-dominated alternative United Nations with a $1 billion admission fee. Then, in a lengthy Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump announced he will impose tariffs on several nations if they don’t let the U.S. purchase Greenland:

    Starting on February 1st, 2026, all of the above mentioned Countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland), will be charged a 10% Tariff on any and all goods sent to the United States of America. On June 1st, 2026, the Tariff will be increased to 25%. This Tariff will be due and payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.

    A day later, Trump’s text-based behind-the-scenes tantrum-ing spilled into public. In a Sunday message to Jonas Gahr Støre, the prime minister of Norway, Trump said he’s demanding Greenland because he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize.

    “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump wrote. He went on to question Denmark’s claim to Greenland.

    Støre said in a statement that he has repeatedly explained to Trump that — as everyone else is well aware — Norway has nothing to do with who gets the Nobel as “it is an independent Nobel Committee, and not the Norwegian government, that awards the prize.”

    Nevertheless, it seems Team Trump thought this error-ridden text was smart messaging. The Atlantic noted, “The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared.”

    So it does not seem that Trump’s next unhinged move was an act of retaliation for his message being shared publicly. While traveling to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum early on Tuesday morning, Trump posted what France later confirmed was a private text from French president Emmanuel Macron:

    A day earlier, Trump had publicly threatened France with a 200 percent tariff on wines and Champagnes following reports that Macron would refuse to join the Board of Peace. It seems Macron was attempting to smooth things over by reminding his “friend” Trump of their agreement on other foreign-policy issues and offering to set up a Thursday G7 meeting in Paris, along with a private dinner, to hash out the Greenland issue.

    Attempting to humiliate foes by sharing their private messages is a common Trump tactic (it was actually the premise for one of his coffee-table books). But this is the first time he has posted private messages from a foreign leader, aside from a fawning text NATO chief Mark Rutte sent him last summer.

    Trump continued his Truth Social taunting by posting altered images that showed him taking over Greenland (along with Venezuela and Canada):

    Next, Trump lashed out at the U.K. for giving away the island of Diego Garcia, arguing that it’s yet another reason why the U.S. must take Greenland:

    Then Trump shared a private message in which Rutte praised him and promised to hype his foreign-policy achievements in Davos:

    Trump told the New York Post that he shared the messages because they show European leaders are behaving differently toward him behind the scenes as they publicly issue warnings about Greenland.

    “It just made my point. They’re saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s have dinner, let’s do this, let’s do that.’ It just made my point,” he said.

    Both Macron and the White House confirmed on Tuesday that the proposed G7 meeting in Paris isn’t happening, as AFP reports:

    ‘No meeting is scheduled. The French presidency is willing to hold one,’ Macron told AFP in brief remarks after he delivered a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    … A White House official told AFP that Trump has ‘no plans to travel to Paris at this time’. The US president is set to arrive in Davos on Wednesday and leave on Thursday.

    So what’s next for Greenland? For now, it seems we’re all being held hostage, at the whim of a leader who’d rather bully allies via threats and nasty online posts than sit down to find a reasonable way to get what he wants.

    This post was updated to include Trump’s remarks to the Post.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Margaret Hartmann

    Source link

  • MLK’s Legacy of Nonviolent Protest Is More Urgent Than Ever

    [ad_1]

    Armed agents of “law and order” in Mississippi confront MLK in 1966.
    Photo: AP Photo

    During the 30 years since the United States began observing the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, the commemoration of the life and work of this remarkable man has mostly seemed like a backward look at a struggle that largely succeeded. Yes, there have been regular reminders of the unfinished business of the civil-rights movement and the dangers of backsliding on the country’s commitment to equality and justice. But the sense that we urgently needed to relearn the lessons King once taught us was often lacking — until now.

    In 2026, the country is governed by a regime as aggressive in its reactionary demands to obstruct and reverse social change as the southern local and state governments that fought and jailed MLK were. White-supremacist sentiment is being proclaimed again after decades of being too disreputable to say out loud. Perversion of the Christian Gospel to justify hatred and violence is as widespread as it was when white churches defended racial segregation as holy. And now, as then, advocates for “law and order” regard protest as insurrection and protesters as terrorists (or as George Wallace used to call them, anarchists).

    Millions of Americans seeking a way to cope with the Donald Trump administration and its excesses need to rediscover the legacy of nonviolent protest MLK embodied. Like his role model Mahatma Gandhi, King taught that firm but civil disobedience in the face of injustice is both powerful and difficult to defeat, in part because it denies oppressors the excuse of personal or institutional self-defense and exposes the brutality of those who seek to provoke violence. Although MLK was not present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, many of his disciples were, and televised images of their being clubbed to the pavement and attacked by police dogs that day probably did more to advance the cause of civil-rights legislation than anything that happened during the many decades of Jim Crow. Today’s protesters need not be willing to make such sacrifices to learn that exchanges of blows with law enforcement mostly benefit those who equate dissent with civil war, rather than civil rights.

    Aside from the strategy and tactics King adopted to move a long-complacent nation toward at least a semblance of racial equality (and had he not been murdered, perhaps economic equality), he also stood tall for universal values against the moral relativism of nationalists and nativists, who — then as now — show no respect for people outside their cult of blood and soil. In this he followed the teachings of Jesus Christ, who commanded love for the stranger, the prisoner, the despised outcast, even one’s enemies. King also understood that both the professed religious beliefs of most Americans and the civic creed of Americanism rely on a commitment to equality and a healthy disrespect for the idols of wealth and power. Most of all, MLK was firm in his conviction that true patriotism is aspirational, rather than a celebration of current or past “greatness.” He deeply believed in his country as a dream, rather than as a perfected society where criticism is treason.

    Perhaps the future of this country isn’t as dark and forbidding as it can seem at the beginning of 2026. It’s possible the drift into police-state authoritarianism can be reversed. Maybe the wars and rumors of war breaking out almost daily won’t burst into an orgy of killing or plans for a new American empire. But for the time being, King’s example of courage and conviction remains very useful, particularly for those whose peaceful protests are met with armed repression.

    It’s not a coincidence that one of MLK’s most important essays was titled “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” From behind bars, he argued that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” upbraided Christian ministers for their hypocritical demands for unjust peace, and expressed faith in his ultimate vindication. It’s a good time to reread his words and emulate his example. Keep in mind that the people now running the country have officially turned the civil-rights movement on its head by pretending the only victims of injustice worth defending are white men and the only refugees worth rescuing are white South Africans. Like Sisyphus in the Greek myths, Americans have watched the rock roll back down the hill during the long struggle for equality. MLK’s legacy inspires us to reject despair and keep up the fight.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Democrats Should Run a Governor for President in 2028

    [ad_1]

    The very electable Andy Beshear.
    Photo: Jon Cherry/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    In a long profile of potential presidential candidate Andy Beshear at Politico, Jonathan Martin elicited one absolutely firm comment from the Kentucky governor about 2028: “The Democratic Party needs to nominate a Democratic governor.” He wasn’t just talking about himself, though he’s nearing the end of two terms as chief executive of a very red state. California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker are likely 2028 candidates perceived as very different in temperament and even ideology from the model moderate Beshear. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro is perceived as being in the same “lane” as the Kentuckian, but doesn’t have the same laid-back personality. Maryland’s Wes Moore is an up-and-comer who hasn’t chosen sides in national party factional battles. Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer’s star has faded a bit, but she’s still a major party figure who could take the presidential plunge.

    Putting aside all these individuals and their specific strengths and weaknesses, is Beshear right about governors being not just a better bet for Democrats right now but essential for victory?

    Traditionally, big-state governorships were thought of as the best platform for a presidential candidacy. Though only 17 of the 47 presidents were governors, only four men (James Garfield, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama) have gone directly from Congress to the White House. Among Democrats, however, the last sitting or former governor to win a presidential nomination was Bill Clinton. Indeed, the last governor to run a viable Democratic nomination contest was Howard Dean in 2004, and his signature issue was foreign policy (his opposition to the Iraq War). In the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential field, four governors or former governors ran, but three dropped out before Iowa and the other (Deval Patrick) had zero impact on the race. So the prospective bumper crop of Democratic governors in 2028 is rather remarkable.

    What governors have that senators simply don’t is a record of executive accomplishment and practical management experience. Only the top tier of members of Congress get anything like the media coverage virtually every governor commands. As state civic leaders, governors are presumed to represent people of both parties even if they are the bitterest of partisans. And in this era of chronic anti-Washington sentiment, governors can treat the federal government with the disdain most voters feel.

    A governor might also provide a positive contrast to the very likely GOP presidential nominee in 2028, J.D. Vance, who has never run much of anything other than his mouth. When he heads out on the 2028 campaign trail right after the midterms, Vance will have had two years experience as Donald Trump’s very subordinate attack dog, and two years as an obscure Senate backbencher who barely got his seat warm. And most of all, Vance will be the candidate of the incumbent presidential party in 2028, with any “outsider” claims looking ludicrous.

    Looking at Trump-era Democratic politics more generally, senators make noise while governors at least have a chance to make laws, build things, and do things. This is one reason members of Congress posture so much about “fighting” Trump. Words are all they have. And in 2028, as Beshear makes clear to Martin, Democrats will likely be in a mood to stop fighting and start winning. All other things being equal, governors have an advantage in electability, if only because their identities transcend party and many of them have a record of winning Republican votes. If Democrats enter the 2028 election cycle feeling very confident of victory, maybe an AOC, who has never run a campaign outside New York City, or a Pete Buttigieg, whose top elected post was in a small Indiana city, will suffice. But if, as is more likely, prospects for victory look iffy, Democrats are very likely to look for a champion who’s not mostly known for long speeches in Congress (sorry, Cory Booker!)

    Among the governors who may run in 2028, of course, Beshear is distinctive for his enormous political success in a state where Republicans have super-majorities in both legislative chambers and hold seven of eight spots in the congressional delegation. He would enter the nomination contest as presumptively electable. If he can just figure out how to excite people who have been “fighting Trump” so long that they sometimes mistake words for action and moral victories for actual victories, Beshear could go all the way to the White House.

    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Trump Gets Nobel Peace Prize in Saddest Way Possible

    [ad_1]

    When Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, she immediately dedicated the award to Donald Trump. The U.S. president can’t stop talking about how he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, and White House sources even claimed that Trump didn’t make Machado president after ousting Nicolás Maduro because she committed the “ultimate sin” of accepting recognition from the Nobel Committee (though there are other, less absurd reasons that might have been a factor).

    In a Fox News interview this week, Sean Hannity seemed to nudge Machado into physically giving her award to Trump. In a separate interview days later, Trump told Hannity he’d accept, saying, “That would be a great honor.” So it seemed the Fox host/friend of Don had set the stage for Machado to dramatically present her award to Trump when she visited the White House on Thursday.

    But that isn’t quite what happened.

    Machado did meet with Trump on Thursday afternoon. But the press was never called into the Oval Office to watch Machado heap praise on Trump, then hand over her medal. In fact, the Washington Post reported that the meeting took place entirely off-camera:

    Machado entered the West Wing around noon and left after 2½ hours to go to meetings with Congress. Her meeting with Trump took place without cameras — something of a rarity for the president, who typically enjoys broadcasting his encounters with foreign leaders to the world.

    We only learned that Machado “presented” Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize when she broke the news to a gaggle of reporters after leaving the White House:

    On Thursday evening, Trump confirmed on Truth Social that “María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done”:

    The White House posted a photo of Trump accepting the medal, which Machado has already placed in a gold frame so it fits with the rest of the Oval Office decor:

    It’s unclear what, if anything, Machado hopes to achieve with this gesture. On Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s assessment that Machado doesn’t have the support to lead Venezuela hasn’t changed. She told Fox & Friends that she handed over her award to Trump “Because he deserves it”:

    As for Trump and his desperate quest for a Nobel, this is the saddest way he could have obtained a Peace Prize. The president’s general willingness to accept an award he didn’t actually win was always quite pathetic. (The Norwegian Nobel Institute reiterated on X yesterday that physical possession is meaningless when it comes to the awards, as “a medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”) And presumably the staging, or lack thereof, was the White House’s decision. The Post suggested that “the low-profile visit may have been a sign of [Trump’s] effort to bolster ties to the existing Venezuelan government rather than to give Machado a boost.”

    But this can’t be the way Trump hoped things would go. He missed out on basking in Machado’s face-to-face praise before the press and the dramatic, made-for-TV moment in which he was handed the award. Machado didn’t even let him break the news himself.

    This is very odd behavior for the president. As one observer put it, Trump “doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there existing?”

    Okay, that was actually something Warren Beatty said about Madonna in the documentary Truth or Dare. But it’s true of Trump too!

    This post has been updated.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Margaret Hartmann

    Source link

  • Trump Repackages Random Ideas Into ‘Great Healthcare Plan’

    [ad_1]

    Out of the blue.
    Photo: X/@WhiteHouse

    For many years, dating all the way back to 2015, Donald Trump has promised he’d someday offer a health-care plan to replace Obamacare. For months Republicans have fretted over allegations that they are clueless or heartless about rising health-care costs, exacerbated by their refusal to extend expiring Obamacare-premium subsidies received by around 22 million Americans. They’ve tossed out a bunch of random conservative health-care panaceas, as has Trump, mostly revolving around health savings accounts and other individualistic measures for undermining Obamacare-style regulated insurance markets.

    Today, without any warning, Trump released a video claiming a bunch of these well-worn ideas represent the “Great Healthcare Plan” he’s been talking about for so long.

    It’s significantly less vague than most of his past maunderings on health care but hardly anything you could call a blueprint, as the New York Times observed:

    The plan was short on specific details and left much of the direction for how to finalize it up to Congress. It amounted to a few paragraphs on a webpage, released with a video of Mr. Trump promoting what he called “the great health care plan.”

    Trump’s video unveiling this “proposal” was an odd pastiche of boasts about what he’s already done in the health-care arena (particularly his jawboning of pharmaceutical companies to lower prices for some drugs), denunciations of the “Unaffordable Care Act” (a term he clearly considers a bon mot), and wild claims about how incredibly good and cheap health care will soon become. He talked of lowering prices by far more than 100 percent, which is a mathematical impossibility. He failed even to mention the biggest problem Obamacare was created to address: the refusal of insurers to provide coverage for people with preexisting conditions or inherently expensive treatments. And once again, Trump’s impulses led him in contradictory directions; despite his denunciations of Obamacare, one of his big ideas is to build on an Obamacare discount feature called “cost-sharing reductions.”

    It’s unclear what Congress is expected to do with this plate of spaghetti thrown against the wall. Not a single Democrat will support this “plan,” which whatever it is, clearly aims to blow up Obamacare, just as Trump and the GOP unsuccessfully tried to do in 2017. That means the only path forward is via the party-line budget-reconciliation procedure, like the one that produced last year’s One Bill Beautiful Bill Act. Going in that direction in an election year with a topic as complex and controversial as health care may please conservative hard-liners who have been longing to destroy Obamacare for many years. But it hardly seems doable in a Congress where Republicans have such tiny margins of control.

    More likely than not, the president is just engaging in some high-visibility pre-midterm “messaging” to show concern over a set of problems that have stumped him and his party for eons. Maybe it will eventually turn into a proposal that more or less hangs together, even if its enactment by Congress is the longest stretch imaginable. Unfortunately, Trump’s claim that he has a “plan” will almost certainly kill off the already languishing efforts to come up with a bipartisan fix for the Obamacare-premium spike that is just now beginning to be felt in pocketbooks everywhere. He should have kept his rambling thoughts to himself.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • States Are Jostling for 2028 Presidential-Primary Spots

    [ad_1]

    Bernie Sanders supporters hold up their presidential-preference cards during the Iowa caucuses on February 3, 2020.
    Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    The first 2028 presidential primaries are just two years away. And for the first time since 2016, both parties are expected to have serious competition for their nominations. While Vice-President J.D. Vance is likely to enter the cycle as a formidable front-runner for the GOP nod, recent history suggests there will be lots of other candidates. After all, Donald Trump drew 12 challengers in 2024. On the Democratic side, there is no one like Vance (or Hillary Clinton going into 2016 or Joe Biden going into 2020 who is likely to become the solid front-runner from the get-go, though Californians Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris lead all of the way too early polls.

    But 2028 horse-race speculation really starts with the track itself, as the calendar for state contests still isn’t set. What some observers call the presidential-nominating “system” isn’t something the national parties control. In the case of primaries utilizing state-financed election machinery, state laws govern the timing and procedures. Caucuses (still abundant on the Republican side and rarer among Democrats) are usually run by state parties. National parties can vitally influence the calendar via carrots (bonus delegates at the national convention) or sticks (loss of delegates) and try to create “windows” for different kinds of states to hold their nominating contests to space things out and make the initial contests competitive and representative. But it’s sometimes hit or miss.

    Until quite recently, the two parties tended to move in sync on such calendar and map decisions. But Democrats have exhibited a lot more interest in ensuring that the “early states” — the ones that kick off the nominating process and often determine the outcome — are representative of the party and the country as a whole and give candidates something like a level playing field. Prior to 2008, both parties agreed to do away with the traditional duopoly, in which the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came first, by allowing early contests representing other regions (Nevada and South Carolina). And both parties tolerated the consolidation of other states seeking influence into a somewhat later “Super Tuesday” cluster of contests. But in 2024 Democrats tossed Iowa out of the early-state window altogether and placed South Carolina first (widely interpreted as Joe Biden’s thank-you to the Palmetto State for its crucial role in saving his campaign in 2020 after poor performances in other early states), with Nevada and New Hampshire voting the same day soon thereafter. Republicans stuck with the same old calendar with Trump more or less nailing down the nomination after Iowa and New Hampshire.

    For 2028, Republicans will likely stand pat while Democrats reshuffle the deck (the 2024 calendar was explicitly a one-time-only proposition). The Democratic National Committee has set a January 16 deadline for states to apply for early-state status. And as the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher explains, there is uncertainty about the identity of the early states and particularly their order:

    The debate has only just begun. But early whisper campaigns about the weaknesses of the various options already offer a revealing window into some of the party’s racial, regional and rural-urban divides, according to interviews with more than a dozen state party chairs, D.N.C. members and others involved in the selection process.

    Nevada is too far to travel. New Hampshire is too entitled and too white. South Carolina is too Republican. Iowa is also too white — and its time has passed.

    Why not a top battleground? Michigan entered the early window in 2024, but critics see it as too likely to bring attention to the party’s fractures over Israel. North Carolina or Georgia would need Republicans to change their election laws.

    Nevada and New Hampshire have been most aggressive about demanding a spot at the beginning of the calendar, and both will likely remain in the early-state window, representing their regions. The DNC could push South Carolina aside in favor of regional rivals Georgia or North Carolina. Michigan is close to a lock for an early midwestern primary, but its size, cost, and sizable Muslim population (which will press candidates on their Gaza War stance) would probably make it a dubious choice to go first. And recently excluded Iowa (already suspect because it’s very white and trending Republican, then bounced decisively after its caucus reporting system melted down in 2020) could stage a “beauty contest” that will attract candidates and media even if it doesn’t award delegates.

    Even as the early-state drama unwinds, the rest of the Democratic nomination calendar is morphing as well. As many as 14 states are currently scheduled to hold contests on Super Tuesday, March 7. And a 15th state, New York, may soon join the parade. Before it’s all nailed down (likely just after the 2026 midterms), decisions on the calendar will begin to influence candidate strategies and vice versa. Some western candidates (e.g., Gavin Newsom or Ruben Gallego) could be heavily invested in Nevada, while Black proto-candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Wes Moore might pursue a southern primary. Progressive favorites like AOC or Ro Khanna may have their own favorite launching pads, while self-identified centrists like Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg might have others. Having a home state in the early going is at best a mixed blessing: Losing your home-state primary is a candidate-killer, and winning it doesn’t prove a lot. And it’s also worth remembering that self-financed candidates like J.B. Pritzker may need less of a runway to stage a nationally viable campaign.

    So sketching out the tracks for all those 2028 horses, particularly among Democrats, is a bit of a game of three-dimensional chess. We won’t know how well they’ll run here or there until it’s all over.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Democrats Want to Run on Affordability. Trump Has Other Plans.

    [ad_1]

    Congressional Democrats have their issue for 2026.
    Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    One of the big political stories of 2025 was the Democrats’ search for a message that could bring their party back from its calamitous 2024 losses. They began with a lot of confusion and divisions. Some progressives wanted, as they have for many years, a “populist” economic message that bashed “oligarchs,” heartless corporations, and global elites. Some centrists wanted to begin the comeback by jettisoning “woke” cultural stances and paying much more attention to moderate-minded median voters. Everyone acknowledged that Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris had failed to fully comprehend the damage that persistent inflation was doing to voter perceptions of their competence and compassion. And there was a potential common ground between centrist advocates of an “abundance” agenda that would help Democrats get big things done that benefited regular folks in tangible ways, and progressive billionaire-bashers who also focused on helping people make ends meet, albeit through different measures.

    It’s hard to identify the precise moment when these varying strands came together into a message and agenda on “affordability.” But a big breakthrough occurred on November 5, 2025, when centrist gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia and one notable progressive mayoral candidate in New York all won smashing victories by focusing on the rising living costs that belied Trump’s 2024 promises that he would bring back pre-pandemic prices on virtually everything. It wasn’t working just in blue states and cities, either. In Georgia on that same day Democrats beat two incumbent Republican state public-service commissioners by holding them accountable for rising power bills. And the next month a lefty Democratic candidate in a special congressional election in deep-red Tennessee over-performed expectations with an “affordability” message, despite all kinds of problems with her record and issue positions.

    With polls showing Trump’s job-approval numbers on handling inflation and managing the economy diving and his tariff initiatives getting much of the blame, it looked like Democrats had found their lightning in a bottle in a way that unified the party’s factions and also showed they had learned from the Biden-Harris-Walz debacle. Perhaps the best indication they were on to something special was the urgent concerns Republicans were starting to express about persistently high living costs. Even Trump seemed to be trying to get with the program, though he kept stepping on his own message by complaining that the economy was doing great, that restive voters were offensively ungrateful, and that the entire affordability issue was a “hoax.” It was beginning to look like Democrats were getting their mojo back, particularly after they triggered a government shutdown that proved they were willing to “fight Trump” on favorable ground (in this case, the “affordability” problem with health-care costs generally and Obamacare premium subsidies expiring in particular).

    While Trump was experiencing the downside of being the party in power in a period when voters were unhappy with government’s performance, he also retained the ability to control public discourse by audacious actions that surprised the opposition and literally changed the subject of partisan debate. In fact, he’s done that twice in the past week, first with his military strike on Venezuela and then with his robust defense of an ICE agent who killed an unarmed civilian in Minneapolis, apparently for no good reason.

    Neither development came out of nowhere, of course. The Venezuela action followed a long buildup of military forces in the waters near that country along with lethal attacks on alleged “drug boats” and wild threats against Nicolás Maduro for supposed “narco-terrorism.” And it also reflected a new national-defense strategy involving near-imperial U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. The killing in Minnesota was the inevitable product of Trump’s mass-deportation initiative with its reliance on terrorizing immigrant communities into “self-deportation” with thuggish tactics from armed and masked federal agents. It also stemmed from Trump’s decision to target Minnesota immigrants to exploit a child-care scandal linked to Somalis that happened on the watch of Democratic state and local officials.

    But predictable as they might have been, both incidents unsettled Democratic hopes of spending 2026 talking about “affordability,” and spurred fears that Trump would drag them “off-message” onto potentially treacherous and even divisive ground. As Politico reported, some Democrats sought to quickly “pivot” from criticism of Trump’s adventure to their now-favorite preoccupation:

    Across the country, candidates and lawmakers are slamming Trump’s decision to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and are using the moment to hammer their domestic affordability message.

    “Ohioans are facing higher costs across the board and are desperate for leadership that will help deliver relief,” former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is running to reclaim his seat, said on X. “We should be more focused on improving the lives of Ohioans – not Caracas.”

    The frame from Democrats shows how potent the party views affordability as an issue in the midterms, one that Trump and his team have grown increasingly preoccupied by after across-the-board losses in 2025.

    Trump’s seizure of multiple news cycles to lord it over the hemisphere and endorse lethal law-enforcement policies also made it hard for Democrats to follow consultants’ advice to ignore his provocations as much as possible, noted The Hill:

    Political strategists say Democrats running in competitive races in this year’s midterm elections for the House and Senate should steer clear of making President Trump the centerpiece of their campaigns.

    While Trump’s approval ratings are low and Americans have been frustrated by his job performance in the first year of his second term, the strategists say the key to winning is to home in on economic issues — particularly affordability. …

    It’s not as though Trump won’t be mentioned, people familiar with the strategy of the House Democrats’ campaign arm say. It’s that the president will be secondary to the primary focus of how Democrats can make the economy better. 

    Many rank-and-file Democrats reject this Trump-o-phobic approach. Some think Venezuela and ICE are big issues that must be confronted even if they’re “off-message” or believe Trump’s larger threat to democracy and traditional American values goes deeper than the wallet, and would exist even if life was “affordable” for most Americans. It’s a tension between cold calculations and red-hot emotional reactions to this president’s regular outrages that will likely continue in the opposition party so long as he is in office.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Trump’s Latest Outrages Could Ramp Up Pressure for Another Government Shutdown

    [ad_1]

    The lights could yet go off on January 30.
    Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    There’s a lot of conflict in Congress to begin 2026, but the odds of another government shutdown — which could happen when stopgap spending authority runs out on January 30 — have been dropping. The trigger point for the long shutdown that began in October, the deadline for extending Obamacare premium subsidies, has come and gone, and while all Democrats and some Republicans still want to resurrect them, the issue isn’t time sensitive in quite the way it was. Plus, Congress is actually making progress on regular spending bills covering agencies till the end of the year, which could make the scope of government operations vulnerable to a shutdown significantly smaller. Beyond that, midterm elections are now less than a year away, and they will provide Democrats with the most important opportunity to check Donald Trump without interrupting vital government services.

    And so, as NOTUS reports, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been putting out the word that January 30 will pass without too much drama:

    Days into the new year, congressional Democrats are livid over a litany of issues, including President Donald Trump’s unilateral invasion of Venezuela, stalled action on health care and, most recently, an immigration agent fatally shooting a woman in Minneapolis. But they are split on how to fight back.

    With another critical government funding deadline on Jan. 30, Democratic leaders don’t appear willing to leverage their votes for spending bills in exchange for action. In fact, they appear to be openly forecasting there won’t be a shutdown at all.

    But this mind-set was developed before Trump decapitated the Venezuelan government and asserted “control” over that country while repeating threats to attack Mexico and Colombia and acquire Greenland. And it’s also before an ICE agent shot and killed a motorist in Minneapolis and the entire Trump administration doubled down on aggressive law-enforcement deployments and treated protesters as “domestic terrorists.” Now the rage of Democratic activists at Trump is bubbling up from its steady boiling state into geysers of fury, and the last thing Democrats in Congress want is to again let them down and provoke their wrath. And a few leading Democrats are wondering if an end-of-January interruption of funding might be in order after all, suggests NOTUS:

    “We’re about to have the DHS budget before Congress,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Senate Appropriations Committee member, said Wednesday. “And it’s clearer than ever that Democrats can’t support this budget if there aren’t constraints on the growing illegality of DHS, and it appears the lethal illegality of DHS.”

    Sen. Chris Van Hollen, another Appropriations Committee member, said that “nobody wants the government shut down,” but “it’s going to be important that Trump and his administration work on a bipartisan basis to address a lot of the issues.” He also cited the DHS budget as a point of concern.

    It’s worth remembering that funding for DHS, which supervises ICE, and for the Department of Defense (or as Trump and Pete Hegseth call it, “War”), which executes Trump’s bellicose global designs, will almost surely be included in the next stopgap spending bill that has to be passed by January 30 to keep the government humming. So it could very well be the target on multiple grounds for Democratic protests and demands both within and beyond Congress.

    As that potential choke point approaches, the mood among congressional Democrats may become a lot darker, particularly if the most recent administration outrages at home and abroad are just the beginning of many reminders that the 47th president is a dangerous would-be tyrant. Will they and “the base” remain patiently focused on the midterms? Or will Democrats feel the need to put sand in the gears of the machinery of government in the confident expectation that the party controlling Washington will get the blame for the ensuring disruptions of programs and services?

    Right now, you’d have to bet both parties will find a way to avoid another shutdown even as they gird their loins for a vicious and competitive midterm election. But if Trump continues to run wild, and his allies in Congress continue to enable him, all bets could be off until the government is refunded for the rest of the year and the campaign trail takes over.

    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Susie Wiles’s Big Slip Is a Test of Her Power

    [ad_1]

    Susie Wiles and the Boss.
    Photo: Eric Lee/The Washington Post/Getty Images

    For all the chaos the second Trump administration has generated, it appears to be remarkably calm at its center, thanks largely to Susie Wiles. The current White House chief of staff differs dramatically from her four first-term predecessors precisely because of the lack of drama surrounding her. There have been relatively few leaks, high-level resignations, or credible reports of internal turmoil in the second Trump White House despite Donald Trump’s impulsiveness and the menagerie of outlandish characters in his orbit.

    Considering her powerful role in the administration, it’s remarkable how much Wiles has kept herself out of the spotlight. Axios’s description of her at the beginning of Trump 2.0 has rung true:

    Incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles tells Axios in an interview that she aims for the West Wing to be a no-drama zone for staff. If that works, it won’t be the chaotic den of self-sabotaging that stymied the early days of President-elect Trump’s first term.

    “I don’t welcome people who want to work solo or be a star,” Wiles, whose boss calls her the Ice Maiden, said by email. “My team and I will not tolerate backbiting, second-guessing inappropriately, or drama. These are counterproductive to the mission.”

    It’s intensely ironic, then, that Wiles is the source for the first explosive media exposé of the internal dynamics of this White House. On Monday, Vanity Fair published an article by Chris Whipple, the author of a book on White House chiefs of staff, who interviewed Wiles 11 times in the past year. While much of the material presents Wiles as a defender of the president’s motives, agenda, operating style, and historical significance, this paragraph has put her in a world of potential trouble:

    One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)

    There are other problematic excerpts disclosing Wiles’s low opinion of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files; her indulgent attitude toward her “junkyard dog” deputies, Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, and James Blair; and her efforts to convince Trump himself to put a rein on his pursuit of personal vendettas.

    Tellingly, in her initial public comment on the Whipple article, Wiles did not contradict any of the specifics but simply denounced it as a “hit piece” in which “significant context was disregarded” and lots of positive stuff she said about the president and his team was “left out of the story.” It’s a classic non-denial denial.

    It’s unclear at this early juncture whether Wiles is in any trouble with Trump. But his initial reaction was to defend her “alcoholic’s personality” remark.

    “No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump told the New York Post.

    The explosiveness of Wiles’s comments immediately reminded veteran political observers of a parallel moment early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, as the New York Times notes:

    The off-script comments felt reminiscent of a similar episode in President Ronald Reagan’s first term when his budget director, David A. Stockman, likewise gave a series of interviews to what was then called The Atlantic Monthly with candid observations that caused a huge stir.

    Stockman was famously “taken to the woodshed” by White House chief of staff James Baker for revealing to the world the backstory of the struggle within and beyond the White House over Reagan’s highly controversial initial budget and tax proposals, which among other things depicted the well-meaning 40th president as being manipulated by his underlings. But the incident really wasn’t much like the one we are witnessing now. In his interviews, Stockman was mostly talking about intense policy disagreements within the administration and the Republican Party. Wiles doesn’t much engage with policy arguments; her interviews make it clear she shares some of Trump’s most controversial policy initiatives (particularly the assault on the deep state) while leaning over backward to rationalize his current warmongering toward Venezuela. And for all her casual slurs about Team Trump, she refers, incredibly, to his inner circle as “a world-class Cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of.”

    Stockman, moreover, was a huge celebrity in the early days of the Reagan administration and a living symbol of his domestic agenda; Wiles was a noncelebrity until now and apparently had no idea her talks with Whipple would create a stir, notes the Times:

    While Mr. Stockman kept his interviews secret from the White House (and nearly got fired), the broader Trump team cooperated with Vanity Fair. Mr. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave interviews and along with top aides like Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt posed for glamour photographs by Christopher Anderson.

    So the question now is whether Susie Wiles can go back to being a noncelebrity and dismiss her indiscretions as the product of a quietly malicious writer trying to disrupt the calm at the center of the White House. If she does survive this furor without significant damage to her position, then we’ll know she is even more powerful than anyone realized.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Trump Is Angry at Americans for Not Appreciating His Greatness

    [ad_1]

    So sad!
    Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

    Anyone who has paid close attention to Donald Trump’s utterances over the years is acutely aware of his black-and-white perspective on America’s history and its current trajectory. It’s a tale of incredible heroism matched by incredible villainy with Trump representing the summit of national achievement and his opponents and detractors motivated strictly by malice, dishonesty, and even treason. There is no nuance in his publicly expressed worldview, no room for honest disagreement. And up until recently, there has been no doubt that the 47th president believes he is the true champion of the values and interests of the overwhelming majority of the American people, who have (in his estimation) lifted him to supreme power three times now by ever-increasing margins that reached epic, unprecedented levels in 2024.

    And that’s why it’s startling to see a new note of anger toward those same American people emanate from his soapbox at Truth Social:

    Assuming Trump believes half of what he says, this aggrieved astonishment makes some sense. Throughout the 2024 campaign, he regularly depicted the Biden administration as utterly depraved and consciously evil — a nation-destroying enterprise with not a bit of redeeming value, having wrecked the living paradise Trump was busily building during his first term. The 47th president fully resumed and even accelerated his American-greatness project in 2025 and is already so satisfied with his success that he is devoting a great deal of time to building monuments to himself and demanding global recognition of all he has done. Yet instead of being able to bask in his accomplishments and glory in his plans, he’s being told by the political experts in his orbit that the people aren’t happy. Indeed, even as he claims that in one year the country has gone from Weimar levels of hyperinflation to a dizzying climb in real wages and living standards, he’s being pushed out on the road to exhibit concerns about affordability, a term he has mocked and repeatedly called a hoax.

    It’s not just the White House political staff who are worried. Off-year elections are regularly showing troubling signs for Trump’s party. The lockstep machinery in Congress that gave the president his One Big Beautiful Act is showing some wear and tear. The U.S. Supreme Court majority he helped forge is reportedly poised to deny him the beloved tariff powers that stand at the very center of both his economic policies and his foreign-relations strategy. Worse yet, Trump seems to fear, the people themselves have turned on him. Don’t they get it? Don’t they “understand what is happening”?

    The president’s growing dismay over the ingratitude of the American people may help explain his determination to insulate his party from public opinion via an unprecedented wave of pre-midterm gerrymandering of congressional seats. If so, you can imagine the level of fury he must feel toward the Republican members of the Indiana state senate who just thwarted his demands for a new map giving Republicans a monopoly on representation in the U.S. House. He personally met with and spoke to many of these people. He sent J.D. Vance to lobby and threaten them some more. His allies in MAGA-land joined the Hoosier pressure campaign, some of them going over the brink into threats of violence and others treating the gerrymander as a necessary tribute to the late Charlie Kirk. Yet they defied the man who has already restored American greatness, distracting him from his divinely blessed work. How dare they!

    Your normal politician experiencing the sort of setbacks Trump has recently encountered would privately complain, maybe cry in a beer or two, and then buckle down to the work of restoring public trust and improving the poll numbers (which Trump regularly denounces as “fake” but seems to follow closely). It’s unclear if he has that in his makeup. A successful presidency is not an aspiration for him; it’s an accomplishment worth celebrating with some extra gilding of the White House and a few more international peace prizes. In reality, every second-term president loses some altitude as lame-duck status sinks in — the wise chief executives give their underlings some slack to distance themselves from the incumbent and prepare the way for a succession. But Trump isn’t just a president; he’s the leader of a movement that has remade American politics and saved a country headed straight to hell. So the MAGA prescription for the GOP in the remaining three years of the Trump presidency is to hew ever more closely to his wishes and stand proudly in his enormous shadow.

    If his current grumpiness about public opinion persists or even intensifies, Trump would not be the first leader to be undone by the sense that his country didn’t deserve him. It is, in fact, an occupational hazard for those who view themselves as world-historical figures instead of mere elected officials with limited horizons, operating within constitutional boundaries. Given his famous unmanageability, it may be vain for Trump’s advisers to urge him to admit some shortcomings in his policies and show some empathy for those who believe they are suffering in this greatest of all moments in U.S. history. It’s going to be a long three years if he simply cannot adjust to adverse public opinion and grows contemptuous of the people whose adulation he believes he has earned.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Indiana Republicans Defied Trump and Bomb Threats to Stop Pro-GOP Redistricting

    [ad_1]

    Photo: Kaiti Sullivan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    Indiana Republicans defied bomb threats, swatting incidents, and a pressure campaign led by President Donald Trump when on Thursday they voted down a bill to make an all-GOP congressional delegation. In contrast to an easy approval in the state house, 21 Republicans joined ten Democrats in the state senate to sink the plan to wipe out two Democratic U.S. House districts.

    The campaign lasted four months and included Trump and J.D. Vance, both of whom had repeated personal meetings with gerrymander-shy Republican lawmakers, along with House Speaker Mike Johnson, Governor Mike Braun, Indiana senator Jim Banks, and a host of national conservative groups. As Politico explained, Charlie Kirk even spent the last weeks of his life threatening primaries for Republicans who opposed the effort.

    Now Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, is among many MAGA allies threatening vengeance in primaries for those who dared defy Trump’s orders to help rig the midterms. And Democrats nationally will be happy with the diverted GOP time, energy, and money devoted to Hoosier bloodletting, along with the continued presence in Congress of Indiana Democrats Andre Carson and Frank Mrvan.

    Trump’s effort to make Republican-controlled states redraw their congressional maps to give the GOP enough seats to withstand a potential Democratic wave has been hit or miss. Last week, the Supreme Court gave Trump a big win by overruling lower-court judges and putting back into place a Texas congressional map designed to give Republicans as many as five new House seats. He experienced earlier setbacks in Kansas and Ohio, whose Republicans also declined to wipe out Democratic districts, while Democrats successfully retaliated with a ballot initiative in California that is likely to cancel out or exceed Texas’s GOP gains.

    It’s getting late in the day for any further pre-midterm gerrymandering. Florida Republicans will give it a try despite constitutional barriers, and Virginia Democrats seem likely to counter. But overall, the GOP bid to insulate itself from the wrath of voters in November 2026 is losing momentum. Perhaps Republicans and their leader should focus a bit more on making themselves more popular than they have appeared to be in virtually every 2025 vote.

    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • What Will America Look Like After 3 More Years of Trump?

    [ad_1]

    On and on and on and on.
    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

    Donald Trump has a flexible attitude toward truth and facts, typically embracing whatever version of reality that suits his purposes. His latest rally speech in Pennsylvania was something of a “greatest hits” display of fact-checker challenges on a wide range of issues. But he said one thing that no one should doubt or deny:

    Ain’t that the truth. Trump’s omnipresence in every form of media, his knack for audacious and offensive utterances, his huge echo chamber of followers and supportive media, and his unpredictable and often shocking presidential initiatives all combined to make his first four years in office feel like 40. And that experience was free and easy as compared to his second administration. It began with the appointment of some of the most controversial appointees in living memory, a blizzard of executive orders, and then the passage of the most sweeping single package of legislation in the history of Congress. Toss in the occasional military strike or domestic National Guard deployment, regular raids by masked ICE and border-control agents, and serial disfigurement of the White House, and you’ve got the show that never ends. Three more years could indeed feel like an eternity.

    So what will America look like after three more years of this barrage? As always, the administration’s intentions are opaque. But there are several outside variables that will dramatically shape how much Trump is able to do by the end of his time in office (assuming he actually leaves as scheduled on January 20, 2029). Here are the factors that will decide the outcome of this three-year “eternity.”

    One huge variable is the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections. If history and current polling are any indication, Democrats are very likely to gain control of the U.S. House and bust up the partisan trifecta that has made so much of Trump 2.0’s accomplishments (for good or ill) possible. With a Democratic House, there will be no more Big Beautiful Bills whipped through Congress on party-line votes reconfiguring the federal budget and tax code and remaking the shape and impact of the federal government. A hostile House would also bedevil the administration with constant investigations of its loosey-goosey attitude toward obeying legal limits on its powers, and its regular habits of self-dealing, cronyism, and apparent corruption. The last two years of the Trump presidency would be characterized by even greater end runs of Congress, and in Congress, by endless partisan rhetorical warfare (as opposed to actual legislation).

    It’s less likely that Democrats will flip control of the Senate in 2026, but were that to happen, Trump would struggle to get his appointees confirmed (though many could operate in an “acting” capacity). We’d likely see constant clashes between the executive and legislative branches.

    Conversely, if Republicans hold onto both congressional chambers, then all bets are off. Trump 2.0 would roll through its final two years with the president’s more audacious legislative goals very much in sight and limited only by how much risk Republicans want to take in 2028. You could see repeated Big Beautiful Bill packages aiming at big initiatives like replacing income taxes with tariffs or consumption taxes; a complete return to fossil fuels as the preferred energy source; a total repeal and replacement of Obamacare and decimation of Medicaid; a fundamental restructuring of immigration laws; and radical limits on voting rights. Almost everything could be on the table as long as Republicans remain in control and in harness with Trump. And with his presidency nearing its end, you could also see Trump tripling down on demands that Republicans kill or erode the filibuster, which could make more audacious legislative gains possible.

    The U.S. Supreme Court will also have a big impact on how much Trump can do between now and the end of his second term. Big upcoming decisions on his power to impose tariffs will determine the extent to which he can make these deals the centerpiece of his foreign-policy strategy and execute a protectionist (or, if you like, mercantilist) economic strategy for the country. Other decisions on his power to deport immigrants and on the nature and permanence of citizenship will heavily shape the size and speed of his mass-deportation program. The Supreme Court will soon also either obstruct or permit use of National Guard and military units in routine law-enforcement chores and/or to impose administration policies on states or cities. And the Supreme Court’s decisions on myriad conflicts between the Trump administration and the states could determine whether, for example, the 47th president can sweep away any regulation of AI that his tech-bro friends oppose.

    A separate line of Supreme Court decisions will determine Trump’s power over the executive branch — most obviously over independent agencies like the FTC and the Fed, but also over millions of federal employees who could lose both civil-service protections and collective-bargaining opportunities.

    Even a president as willful as Trump is constrained by objective reality. His economic policies make instability, hyperinflation, and even a 2008-style Great Recession entirely possible. If that happens, it could both erode his already shaky public support but also encourage him to assert even greater “emergency” powers than he’s already claimed.

    Trump’s impulsive national-security instincts and innate militarism could also lead to one of those terrible wars he swears he is determined to avoid. It’s worth remembering that the last Republican president was entirely undone during his second term by economic dislocations and a failed war.

    Let’s say Trump has the power to do what he wants between now and the end of his second term. What might America look like if he fully succeeds, particularly if his policies are either emulated by state and local Republicans or imposed nationally by Washington?

    • A country of millions fewer immigrants, with immigrant-sensitive industries like agriculture, health care, and other services struggling.
    • A more regressive system of revenues for financing steadily shrinking public services.
    • A fully shredded social-safety net feeding steadily increasing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor, and old and young, Americans.
    • Cities where armed military presence has become routine, particularly during anti-administration protests or prior to key elections.
    • Elections conducted solely on Election Day in person, with strict ID requirements and armed election monitors, likely on the scene during vote counting as well.
    • A new “deep state” of MAGA-vetted federal employees devoted to carrying out the 47th president’s policies even after he’s long gone.
    • A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
    • An economy where AI is constantly promoted as a solution to the very problems it creates.
    • A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
    • A scientific and health-care research apparatus driven by conspiracy theories and cultural fads.
    • A public-education system hollowed out by private-school subsidies and ideological curriculum mandates.
    • And most of all: a debased level of political discourse resembling MMA trash talk more than anything the country has experienced before.

    Some of these likely effects from Trump 2.0 are reversible, but only after much time and effort, and against resistance from the MAGA movement he will leave as his most enduring legacy.

    And if Trump bequeaths the presidency to a successor (either a political heir like J.D. Vance or a biological heir like Don Jr.), then what American could look like by 2032 or 2036 is beyond my powers of imagination.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Now the Trump Administration Is Coming After Our Fonts

    [ad_1]

    He’s the narrow type.
    Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

    If I had to pick a word to describe Calibri, the sans-serif typeface that was the default font for Microsoft apps from 2007 to 2024, it would probably be “inoffensive.”

    Sure, Microsoft’s “extremely readable” font has had its critics over the years, but they’ve mostly just complained that it’s too plain, that it lacks personality. I’d bet that for most people, Calibri became a ubiquitous, thoughtless part of their normal life, from office memos to book reports, and few probably realized it was designed and implemented to be a more readable typeface on digital screens — which it has been. Even Microsoft has said that customers didn’t really have strong feelings about it, unlike with other fonts. Everybody thought it was … fine. But it turns out we were all wrong: According to the Trump administration, this 21-year-old boring font is weak and woke.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday barred the use of Calibri at the State Department and brought back the serif Times New Roman, which was the agency’s official font from 2004 to 2023. This was necessary, he said, to reverse the “wasteful” and distasteful shift to Calibri ordered by his Biden administration predecessor, Antony Blinken. Rubio alleged that change — which provoked little meaningful controversy at the time — was yet another example of woke radicalism run amok, since the change was recommended by the State Department’s now-disbanded DEI office because Calibri is considered to be easier to read for people with disabilities like dyslexia or vision problems. Per the New York Times report:

    While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.

    In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead. …

    Mr. Rubio’s directive, under the subject line “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” served as the latest attempt by the Trump administration to stamp out remnants of diversity initiatives across the federal government. …

    Echoing President Trump’s call for classical style in federal architecture, Mr. Rubio’s order cited the origins of serif typefaces in Roman antiquity. 

    Julius Caesar would never have used Calibri, so neither should Donald Trump’s federal government, where addressing the needs of the disabled is nowhere near as important as demonizing diversity and fetishizing trad aesthetics.

    [ad_2]

    Chas Danner

    Source link

  • Give Thanks for Incompetence Destroying Trump’s Second Term

    [ad_1]

    Photo: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    A funny thing happened to Donald Trump in the past month. After spending much of the year on a sort of revanchist blitzkrieg that terrified the left and convinced many that his second term would far outpace his first, Trump has begun to genuinely fail. And the failure, for those who followed the last time closely, is familiar: Rising autocracy is headed off by rank incompetence.

    The collapse of the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James speak to the rot at the heart of the Trump administration. Lindsey Halligan, predictably, was found to be appointed illegally after her predecessor was driven out of office after rightly concluding that the cases did not have legal merit. The Senate never confirmed Halligan, and her interim appointment couldn’t be indefinite as a matter of law. In a fascist society, where the rule of law means nothing, it would not have mattered that the deeply underqualified Halligan was illegally appointed or that the cases were incredibly weak. The dictator decrees his political enemies must go to prison, and they are marched off. MAGA was plainly hoping, on some level, this was true now. Trump would get his glorious revenge for his own state and federal indictments, cowing all the Democrats who dared to resist him.

    But Comey and James are not going anywhere. Trump is free to pressure his sycophantic attorney general, Pam Bondi, to bring indictments against anyone he so chooses. He can prosecute through Truth Social posts. What he’s not entitled to, though, is actual legal victory. We do have judges in his country and we do have juries. If Halligan’s cases against Comey and James somehow reached the trial stage, it’s hard to fathom how she’d win. For all the talk, sometimes justified, of college-educated liberals living in their own bubbles, MAGA is plainly worse. What sophisticated political movement would try to attack its enemies this way? Compare the ham-fisted Halligan saga to how the late Dick Cheney ran roughshod over his opposition.

    Trump’s second term has been less internally chaotic than his first, with fewer resignations so far or leaks. Trump has retained one chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and one press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. The infighting that so characterized Trump’s early years in office is mostly absent. The administration seems united around the goals of punishing immigrants, imposing tariffs, and slashing the social safety net. Trump even wised up to the political damage Elon Musk was doing to his administration and drove him out. DOGE hollowed out the government, but Musk is no longer the face of this hollowing. Trump was able to get Musk to fade from view, which is no small feat.

    Old habits, though, die hard. Trump is thirsty for revenge, and he has thrown off the guardrails of the first term during which plenty of conventional Republicans still functioned within his orbit. John Kelly, his chief of staff from 2017 to ’19, and William Barr, his attorney general in ’19 and ’20, were two powerful members of his administration who openly defied him. Those days are gone. The Justice Department completely belongs to Trump. This is unsettling and has brought back all the predictions of American democracy’s imminent collapse. Trump is certainly behaving like a strongman, and the law to him is merely a suggestion. If there’s strength to be found in this approach — the Republican Party is fully MAGA controlled — the weaknesses are now being made plain.

    With no one, at all, to discipline Trump, half-baked cases against his political enemies are concocted. For years, his supporters and critics have treated him like a public-relations Svengali with every controversy distracting, successfully, from some other matter and his popularity remaining durable. Sometimes, though, a failure is a failure. Trump gains nothing by having his indictments blow up in his face. His margin for error is also much smaller than it was in the past. He’s a lame-duck, second-term president now. His approval rating has fallen close to 40 percent. Americans are angry that he hasn’t tamed inflation. Republican politicians themselves, while still unstintingly loyal, are starting to consider their futures. Trump will turn 80 next year. The odds of him violating the Constitution to seek a third term are remote and even if he did, it’s difficult to see how a four-time GOP nominee in his 80s with an underwater approval rating could defeat a standard Democrat who has triumphed in a primary. In the first term, Trump could always bounce back because there was the promise of tomorrow — another term, another campaign. That’s all gone now. Trump is in twilight.

    [ad_2]

    Ross Barkan

    Source link

  • Trump Is Fighting With Architect Over His Too-Big Ballroom

    [ad_1]

    The ballroom construction project at the White House seen from the top of the Washington Monument on November 17.
    Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

    Add Donald Trump’s architect to the list of people who are upset over the president’s plans to build a massive new White House ballroom that dwarfs the house itself. The Washington Post reports that Trump has argued with his handpicked classical-revival architect, James McCrery II, over the ballooning ballroom design:

    [McCrery] has counseled restraint over concerns the planned 90,000-square-foot addition could dwarf the 55,000-square-foot mansion in violation of a general architectural rule: don’t build an addition that overshadows the main building. A White House official acknowledged the two have disagreed but would not say why or elaborate on the tensions, characterizing Trump and McCrery’s conversations about the ballroom as “constructive dialogue.”

    But Trump will not be restrained, of course, and now says the ballroom will have an even larger capacity (1,000 people, up from 650) and cost more than $300 million, which is $100 million more than he originally announced:

    Trump’s intense focus on the project and insistence on realizing his vision over the objections of his own hire, historic preservationists and others concerned by a lack of public input in the project reflect his singular belief in himself as a tastemaker and obsessive attention to details … Multiple administration officials have acknowledged that Trump has at times veered into micromanagement of the ballroom project, holding frequent meetings about its design and materials.

    The Post adds that McCrery has kept his criticism private as he tries to deal with his megalomaniacal client’s revisions and keep the job. He is reportedly “worried that another architect would design an inferior building, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking.”

    Though Democrats continue to make as much noise as they can, there remains no indication that anyone will be able to stop Trump from building — and overshadowing — whatever he wants.

    [ad_2]

    Chas Danner

    Source link

  • Trump Refutes Health-Decline Story by Calling Reporter ‘Ugly’

    [ad_1]

    “To do this requires a lot of Work and Energy, and I have never worked so hard in my life,” Trump posted on social media.
    Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump’s personal physician released a letter claiming that he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” This assertion (which, we later learned, Trump dictated) has only become more ridiculous as the president has displayed health issues typical of a 79-year-old, from falling asleep in public to showing up to events with a huge bruise on his hand. But these obvious signs of aging have only made Trump, and everyone in his administration, insist more forcefully that he possesses almost superhuman health and energy levels.

    So unsurprisingly, Trump was infuriated to wake up to a front-page story in the New York Times on Wednesday that described his declining health.

    The story was actually pretty mild. The only big revelation was that compared to his first term, Trump has fewer public events on his schedule and his workday is shorter:

    According to a Times analysis of the official presidential schedules in a database maintained by Roll Call, Mr. Trump’s first official event starts later in the day. In 2017, the first year of his first term, Mr. Trump’s scheduled events started at 10:31 a.m. on average. By contrast, Mr. Trump in his second term has started scheduled events in the afternoon on average, at 12:08 p.m. His events end on average at around the same time as they did during the first year of his first term, shortly after 5 p.m.

    The number of Mr. Trump’s total official appearances has decreased by 39 percent. In 2017, Mr. Trump held 1,688 official events between Jan. 20 and Nov. 25 of that year. For that same time period this year, Mr. Trump has appeared in 1,029 official events.

    Mr. Trump still regularly comes down to the Oval Office after 11 a.m., according to a person familiar with his schedule. This routine is a holdover from his first term: After he complained about being overscheduled in the mornings, Mr. Trump kept so-called executive time hours in the White House residence before he headed downstairs for work.

    The article just summarized thornier Trump health concerns, like the White House’s dubious explanations for his persistent bruising and his lack of transparency about a recent MRI and two “annual” physicals this year. The piece notes that Joe Biden was also vague about his health problems, and it includes a quote from a physician who says it’s “commendable” that Trump can still board Air Force One using a long flight of stairs.

    But Trump did not appreciate Times reporters Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman’s attempts to be delicate while discussing this sensitive issue. He responded with a Truth Social tirade that did not provide any detailed answers to many questions about his health. Instead, he broadly claimed that his capital-E “Energy” is only increasing, and he’s “never worked so hard” in his life.

    Trump’s other counter-argument: “The writer of the story, Katie Rogers, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.” (He did not mention her co-author, Freedman, for some reason. )

    So, as you can see from this Truth Social post, Trump remains astoundingly healthy and mentally sharp. Could a man who’s running low on energy tap out such a lengthy diatribe filled with so many forceful capital letters and nearly coherent arguments? I think not!


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Margaret Hartmann

    Source link

  • The Only Oath Trump Respects Is to Himself

    [ad_1]

    Convicted insurrectionist and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, with a tattoo of Trump surviving an assassination attempt.
    Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    In recent days Donald Trump has gone completely medieval on six Democratic members of Congress, all of them military or intelligence-agency veterans, who ran an ad reminding their former comrades in arms that they aren’t obliged to obey illegal orders. In a blizzard of Truth Social posts, Trump called the lawmakers “traitors,” accused them of “seditious behavior, punishable by death,” and suggested they be locked up immediately. Soon thereafter, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Senator Mark Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy captain, might be called back to active duty in order to be court-martialed over “serious allegations of misconduct.”

    Subsequently the FBI contacted the six Democrats to arrange interviews and investigations about their involvement in the ad. One of them, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, said, “The President directing the FBI to target us is exactly why we made this video in the first place.” And the four House members who participated in the ad (Jason Crow of Colorado, Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, and Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire) released a joint statement defiantly responding to the FBI move: “No amount of intimidation or harassment will ever stop us from doing our jobs and honoring our Constitution.”

    Team Trump is obviously going far beyond anything it needed to do to address the ad. As Jonathan Chait noted, “The Trump administration could have deployed an obvious defense: What are you talking about? We’re not issuing or planning any illegal orders.” The ad did not accuse the administration of having already issued illegal orders. It simply observed that “this administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.” That’s a rather incontrovertible statement, given Trump’s deployments of National Guard units in various cities, and of Marines in California, to deal with entirely legal protests. Yes, the White House seems to believe a vast number of Americans are traitors and insurrectionary conspirators. But the fact remains that Trump fully expects members of the military to engage in rare domestic law-enforcement activities that at least skirt the laws and the Constitution. It’s a legitimate problem.

    Even if you believe all orders by this president are by definition lawful, or that they must be obeyed even if they aren’t, there’s a pretty serious inconsistency problem for the administration. You know who else takes the position — and takes it to an extreme — that oaths taken to defend the Constitution outrank any orders that might violate it, even from a president, and even after uniformed service has ended? Trump’s allies in the Oath Keepers organization. This right-wing group recruits active and retired military and law-enforcement personnel who are asked to put into practice their elevation of oaths over orders and over laws they deem unconstitutional. They don’t just appeal to the patriotic conscience: They have defined views on the many laws and public policies they feel no compunction to obey, beginning with absolutely any regulation of firearms and extending to private-property rights, which they consider sacrosanct. And indeed, when the Oath Keepers believe politicians are plotting to violate their rights, they are committed to do something about it preemptively, which is why the group is deeply invested in an array of far-right conspiracy theories.

    The Oath Keepers (along with the similarly militant Proud Boys) have been on the radical fringe of the MAGA movement and were very involved in planning and executing the January 6 insurrection. A significant number of the Capitol rioters arrested, investigated, prosecuted, and imprisoned for involvement in that assault on the 2020 election results were Oath Keeper and Proud Boys rank and file. They were among the 1,500 “J6 patriots” pardoned by Trump on the first day of his second term. Five Oath Keepers who were convicted of playing a particularly large role in organizing the insurrection received commuted sentences and were set free the same day as the pardons. They included Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, a sort of Johnny Appleseed of sedition in the name of constitutional rights.

    So if people like Rhodes and his confederates are viewed as MAGA heroes for acting violently on their constitutional convictions while breaking laws and defying the legitimacy of a duly elected president of the United States, why should six Democratic members of Congress get treated as “traitors” for the mere suggestion that illegal orders might be issued and should be disobeyed? Aren’t they “oath keepers” too, without all the conspiracy theories and weapons caches?

    The inescapable conclusion is that Trump respects oaths taken to him and his causes, not to the presidency or to the Constitution. He has repeatedly placed himself above all laws, and his understanding of the Constitution is defined by his famous comment that “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” His position atop an inviolable chain of command governing the military is personal, not institutional. In his mind, he is in the process of saving America from destruction every day and thus is the sole legitimate object of patriotic duty. No wonder he so often identifies opposition to his will with “insurrection” and is enraged by reminders of the limits of his power. That’s the real crime committed by the six Democrats he wants to jail or hang.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Trump’s Healthcare Plan Is Just a Mirage

    [ad_1]

    Is Mike Johnson really telling Trump what to do on health care policy? Probably not.
    Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    There was an enormous hullabaloo in Washington over the weekend when reports surfaced that Donald Trump was about to unveil a health-care deal without much in the way of advance consultation with his congressional Republican vassals. According to multiple accounts, the plan would include a two-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies due to expire at the end of the year with new (and fairly minor) eligibility limits and a “skin in the game” requirement of minimum premium payments. There would have also been some sort of Health Savings Account option in a gesture to conservatives who want to get rid of health insurance and encourage people to pay health-care providers directly. But by and large, the proposal as presented was very much along the lines of what was being discussed behind the scenes by both Republican and Democratic senators and was politically feasible, recognizing that some lawmakers in both parties won’t support any deal at all.

    But Monday came and went without the expected presidential announcement, and next thing you knew Trump was headed to Mar-a-Lago for Thanksgiving. It’s possible that the rollout of what would have inevitably been labeled “Trumpcare” was simply delayed until next week. But all along, the prospects of a presidentially brokered health-care deal depended on speed, stealth, and a my-way-or-the-highway declaration from Trump that his plan had to be backed by virtually every congressional Republican, much like his One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It sure looked like that sort of Trump blitz was in the works, until it wasn’t.

    According to The Wall Street Journal, the mouse that roared in putting a hold on Trumpcare 2025 was none other than House Speaker Mike Johnson:

    Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) cautioned the White House that most House Republicans don’t have an appetite for extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, according to people familiar with the matter, showing how hard it will be politically to stave off sharp increases in healthcare costs next year for many Americans.

    The message from Johnson, in a phone call with administration officials, came as President Trump’s advisers were drafting a healthcare plan that extended the subsidies for two years.

    The warning underscores the hurdles facing any deal in coming weeks.

    The narrative all but writes itself: House Republicans, emboldened by their successful defiance of Trump over the Epstein Files Transparency Act, are refusing to take orders from Trump to bless the signature health-care initiative of the much-despised 44th president. And instead of going into a hate-rage and ordering purges, the newly chastened 47th president is going back to the drawing board.

    That’s one interpretation of what’s happening. Another is that this version of “Trumpcare” is largely a feint — or to be less charitable, a scam. The only reason Republicans have even considered an Obamacare-subsidy extension deal is that the huge premium spike on tap if nothing is done could become a big issue in midterm elections already prospectively dominated by affordability concerns. They could have nestled an extension into the OBBBA but didn’t, which is a pretty clear indication of their underlying wishes. But for purposes of midterm “messaging,” lofting trial balloons and agitating the air over health-care costs is nearly as valuable as actually doing something about the problem. It’s possible that’s what Trump is doing before he manages to blame the failure to act on the Radical Left Democrats.

    Even if Trump is serious about the issue and has a come-to-Jesus meeting with the allegedly rebellious Mike Johnson to force support for a Trumpcare proposal, there’s a very convenient poison pill he could put into the mix to sabotage any actual deal that might divide his own party. Despite safeguards placed in the original Affordable Care Act to ensure no direct federal payments for abortion services, the anti-abortion lobby has long demanded more extensive prohibitions to make sure states don’t pony up the money to provide abortion coverage in Obamacare policies. The debate over the extension of subsidies provides a fresh opportunity for these people — who have felt marginalized ever since Donald Trump rejected their call for a national abortion ban — to prove they are still an indispensable element of the GOP/MAGA coalition. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has promised Democrats a vote on Obamacare-subsidy extensions by mid-December, is also on record demanding tighter restrictions on abortion coverage. Rejecting such restrictions is a red line for many Democrats, who will already be under pressure to make minimal concessions to the GOP on an issue that could otherwise represent midterm dynamite for the opposition party.

    So perhaps Congress and the White House are significantly farther away from a health-care deal than it appeared just yesterday. But let’s not credit Mike Johnson for too much courage or clout. If Trump really wants a health-care deal based on Obamacare-subsidy extensions with the conservative bells and whistles, he can get it with the appropriate ham-handed ultimatums combined with take-it-or-leave-it blandishments to Democrats. He really ought to do so, because health-care costs aren’t going away as an issue and Trump has no better plan for coping with them than he did when he took office in 2017 and “Trumpcare” became a joke.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • Trump’s Gains With Latino Voters Are Evaporating

    [ad_1]

    President Trump’s current standing among Latinos has regressed back to where it was when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
    Photo: Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

    In June, the Pew Research Center’s analysis of validated voters in 2024 gave us the most definitive information on how Donald Trump won the presidency over Kamala Harris and all the underlying trends. And it left little doubt that the most important gains Trump made between his 2020 defeat and his 2024 win were not among young voters or Black voters or white working-class voters, but among Latino voters:

    In 2020, Joe Biden won Hispanic voters by 25 percentage points, and Hispanic voters supported Hillary Clinton by an even wider margin in 2016. But Trump drew nearly even with Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, losing among them by only 3 points.

    This big shift among Latinos voters was decisive. And since Latinos make up the most rapidly growing segment of the electorate, a lot of the “realignment” talk surrounding Trump’s return to power stemmed from a theory that Latinos were undergoing a sort of delayed ideological sorting out that meant they might keep trending Republican and become a solid part of the GOP coalition. If true, that might have been disastrous for Democrats.

    But a new study from Pew, long an authority on Latino voters, suggests otherwise. Trump’s appeal to Latinos is clearly sagging and could erode even further if he doesn’t change his policies on immigration and the economy:

    70% of Latinos disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president.

    65% disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration.

    61% say Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse.

    Even among the Latinos who voted for him in 2024, Trump’s job-approval rating has dropped from 93 percent at the beginning of the year to 81 percent right now. Fully 34 percent of these Trump voters say his second-term policies “have been harmful” to Latinos. And 2024 Harris voters seems to loathe him universally. Overall, Latino voters view what’s happening under Trump 2.0 with great trepidation:

    Hispanics are pessimistic about their standing in America. About two-thirds (68%) say the situation of U.S. Hispanics today is worse than it was a year ago, while 9% say it’s better and 22% say it’s about the same.

    This is the first time that most Hispanics say their situation has worsened in nearly two decades of Pew Research Center Hispanic surveys. When we asked this question in 2019, late during Trump’s first administration, 39% said the situation of U.S. Hispanics had worsened and in 2021, 26% said this.

    When asked about how the Trump administration’s policies impact Hispanics overall, far more say they harm Hispanics than help them (78% vs. 10%).

    That’s a significantly darker outlook than Latinos had in 2019, shortly before they gave Joe Biden 61 percent of their votes.

    Since Latinos trended away from Biden in 2024 in no small part because of his economic policies, this finding could be especially important:

    When asked about the overall U.S. economy, Hispanics’ views are mostly negative and unchanged from 2024. Some 78% say the economy is in only fair or poor shape, while 22% say it’s in excellent or good shape. In 2024, 76% gave the economy a negative rating. 

    Unsurprisingly, Trump’s mass-deportation policies are distinctly unpopular among one of ICE’s chief target populations, as it has become clear that they are not at all focused on “violent criminals”:

    52% of Latino adults say they worry a lot or some that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. This is up from 42% in March …

    19% say they have recently changed their day-to-day activities because they think they’ll be asked to prove their legal status in the country.

    11% say they now carry a document proving their U.S. citizenship or immigration status more often than they normally would.

    Yes, concerns about Trump’s immigration policies vary among those with different countries of origin, but the overall picture remains negative:

    Across Hispanic origin groups, about two-thirds of Central Americans and Mexicans disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration. By comparison, 63% of South Americans, 58% of Puerto Ricans and 50% of Cubans say the same.

    Puerto Ricans are by definition American citizens by birth, and Cuban Americans, long a Republican stronghold, are increasingly either American born or were naturalized some time ago. But Republican hopes for big Mexican American voting margins in states like Texas and Arizona may be in vain as long as Stephen Miller is in charge of deliberately cruel immigration policies.

    Even if Trump manages to improve his current standing among Latinos, the idea that they are in the process of permanently trending Republican like the white Southerners of an earlier generation seems delusional. And if current trends persist, Latinos could contribute to a significant Democratic midterm victory in 2026.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link