How do you win an election, yet still lose the night?
While votes are still being counted, Republicans have held on to their House seat in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District by a ridiculously slim margin—single digits. This is a district Donald Trump carried 60–38 in 2024.
The result isn’t just surprising. It’s ominous.
This race was never about flipping the seat. That remained the longest of long shots. What mattered was the margin. Republicans needed a comfortable win to project strength and momentum heading into next year’s midterms. A mid-teens result would’ve been a flashing yellow light. A Democratic victory would’ve signaled an outright political cataclysm. That didn’t happen, but a single-digit result is something far more threatening. It’s full-throttle "DANGER DANGER Will Robinson!" territory.
While the final tally isn’t yet locked in, Democrats appear to have outperformed Trump’s 2024 margin by roughly 15 points. A swing of that magnitude puts a bullseye on dozens of Republican seats long considered safe in any normal political climate.
But these aren’t normal times.
A shift this large doesn’t just jeopardize the Republican House majority. It puts the U.S. Senate back in play and casts serious doubt on any remaining GOP redistricting ambitions in states like Indiana and Florida. No Republican incumbent—no matter how safe—will want to dilute their partisan advantage with numbers like these hanging overhead. Texas Republicans should be praying that the Supreme Court steps in and tosses out their maps for them.
There’s no sugarcoating what this means. Vulnerable Republican incumbents have already been tiptoeing away from Trump, and that instinct will only intensify. It’s no coincidence he didn’t physically campaign in this district. Polling showed him underwater—47–49%—in a place that should be a fortress of red support.
Buckle up.
The next few months are going to get very interesting, especially if angry and demoralized Republicans start heading for the exits early, as one anonymous senior House Republican recently predicted would happen.
Republicans across the country, spurred by President Donald Trump and encouraged by House Speaker Mike Johnson, are pushing hard to redraw as many congressional districts as possible in order to maintain their House majority after next year’s midterm elections.
They know that losing the majority would cost them everything they’ve built their power around. They could no longer steer investigations designed to protect Trump, bottle up Democratic legislation, or jam extremist messaging bills onto the floor. They’d lose the committee gavels they’ve used to hound political enemies, the messaging platform they rely on to launder right-wing conspiracies, and the institutional leverage to slow-walk or sabotage even the most basic functions of government.
So far, Trump’s efforts have been a bust, despite the terrible political damage he has done to the tradition of once-a-decade redistricting.That process, carried out shortly after the 2020 census, was supposed to create a stable map voters could rely on for 10 years, providing them a predictable landscape they could use to understand who represents them. The process had long acted as guardrail against nonstop map-shopping every time a party felt insecure about the next election.
Instead, Trump’s meddling has turned redistricting into a perpetual power-grab, eroding public trust and encouraging every state to treat its map as a live grenade rather than a settled civic obligation.
Not only have Democrats engaged in retaliatory efforts that will likely leave things roughly where they began, but also a recent legal decision means Republicans’ attempt to gain an extra five seats in Texas may end up reversed, leaving Republicans further behind than where they started.
Trump and Johnson have never hidden the motive behind their effort. One recalcitrant Republican state legislator in Indiana, where the state GOP is warring over whether to redraw the state’s map, said he heard from Johnson, who “just talked about the importance of the House majority.”
Of course, the majority is important to Johnson and Trump. But it’s striking that neither man shows interest in the one thing that would help protect their party’s majority: doing popular stuff.
They could try governing in a way that aligns with what most Americans want, but that would require them abandoning their culture-war extremism, anti-democratic impulses, and Trump-first loyalty—all of which define the modern GOP. Johnson could have his chamber show up to work instead of adjourning for weeks to protect Trump from the release of the government’s files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
But rather than change their message, their agenda, or their behavior that is repelling voters, they’ve chosen to change the maps. And even that doesn’t seem to be working out the way they hoped.
Arch-conservative Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was once one of President Donald Trump’s biggest allies. Now she is the subject of Trump’s scorn and ire, as he turns on her for breaking with Republican leadership and pursuing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels has already dug into the Georgia Congress member’s about-face, concluding, “Whether Greene is actually breaking from MAGA or simply navigating a particularly messy public rupture remains an open question. What’s clearer is that the man who once empowered her is now targeting her—and Greene is discovering that stepping away from Trumpism can be far more dangerous than embracing it.”
That question does remain open, but let’s look at Greene’s transformation from a different angle. And to do so, let’s go back to her Sunday interview on CNN.
“The most hurtful thing [Trump] said, which is absolutely untrue, is he called me a traitor, and that is so extremely wrong,” Greene told Dana Bash. “Those are the types of words used that can radicalize people against me and put my life in danger.”
Bash countered by asking: Wasn’t that language that Greene herself had used for years against her political enemies?
“I would like to say, humbly, I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics; it’s very bad for our country,” Greene answered somewhat surprisingly. “It’s been something I’ve thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated.”
Great, she learned! We will accept steps toward civility wherever we can. But let’s note for a moment that Greene didn’t fear for her life when it was the left that hated her. It was only when Trump went after her that she was suddenly scared about her safety. Maybe we can dispense with the “left is violent” nonsense the right has been trying to sell.
More importantly, we’re once again watching a conservative discover a moral principle only after it landed directly on her own head. This is the defining pattern of modern conservatism: Empathy arrives only when the pain becomes personal.
Conservatives aren’t exactly quiet about their disdain for empathy. World’s richest man Elon Musk has said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Conservative podcaster Josh McPherson declared, “Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.”
Before he became a right-wing political martyr, Charlie Kirk said, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that—it does a lot of damage.”There is even science behind this. One Finnish study that scanned participants’ brains while they conducted an empathy evaluation concluded that “this neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.”
Conservatism has always reserved its compassion for the in-group and weaponized fear against everyone else. Outsiders must be othered, vilified, dehumanized—immigrants are cast as invaders, trans people as threats, and anyone unfamiliar as an existential danger. It’s the same playbook every time.Those tactics were devastatingly effective against gay people for decades, until the marriage equality movement’s breakthrough: coming out. Suddenly conservatives discovered their children, siblings, and coworkers were the very people they had been taught to despise. And once it touched them personally—once the “outsiders” became insiders—public opinion shifted. Not because the right found empathy, but because their self-interest finally collided with reality.
Liberals, for all the caricatures about “coastal elites,” never balked at their tax dollars flowing to rural communities or to disaster relief in red states battered by hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. Blue states have subsidized red states for generations without resentment, because the instinct is simple: They’re our fellow Americans, and we don’t abandon people in need. That’s what empathy looks like—giving help even when the people you’re helping might never vote like you, think like you, or thank you. It reflects a worldview grounded in the idea of a shared national community, not a transactional one.
Rural America, frankly, only exists at the scale it does because of that empathy. Decade after decade, Democratic-led states and urban taxpayers have propped up rural hospitals, rural schools, rural infrastructure, rural broadband, and the postal routes no private company would ever bother to serve.And in return, rural voters handed power to Trump—the man who is gutting the Affordable Care Act subsidies keeping medical clinics open, threatening the Postal Service their communities rely on, dismantling the Department of Education that funds their schools, and killing the broadband investments that keep their towns connected to the modern economy.
In a striking twist, Greene recently signaled a break with her own party’s anti-ACA agenda because “when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE,” she wrote. Her concern wasn’t about principle—it was about her kids’ pocketbooks.
Empathy is what kept those rural communities afloat. By embracing Trumpism, they’ve endangered the very lifelines they depend on. Only now, when the cuts land on their own doorsteps, do they suddenly rediscover concern.
They say, “This isn’t what I voted for,” and they’re right—they voted for other people to get hurt, not them. Now everyone else is supposed to care.And that brings us back to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Because what we’re watching with her isn’t just a political rupture or a messy MAGA divorce: It’s the same dynamic playing out yet again. She didn’t care when Trump’s attacks were aimed outward at immigrants, Democrats, journalists, LGBTQ+ people, or anyone else in his long parade of supposed enemies. She didn’t care when the threats, the dehumanization, and the violence were directed at someone else’s family, someone else’s community, someone else’s life. She was an enthusiastic participant.
But now that Trump has turned the machine on her, suddenly the stakes are different. Suddenly the rhetoric is “dangerous.” Suddenly she fears for her safety. Suddenly she wants civility and responsibility. Because it affects her.
This is the core difference between our politics and theirs. Empathy doesn’t require experiencing personal harm in order to kick in. Empathy doesn’t wait until the wound is on your body. Empathy doesn’t need the fire to reach your house before you grab a hose. They only care when it affects them; we care because it affects anyone.
And so Greene has stumbled into the truth the hard way: The cruelty she once championed was never a tool she controlled—it was a force she fed. And once you unleash a movement built on vengeance and grievance, you don’t get to choose its targets. Not even if you were once favored by it.
What she’s experiencing now isn’t an aberration. It’s the logical end of a political philosophy that believes empathy is weakness, cruelty is strength, and community is something that only applies to the people in your own corner. This is what happens when a movement defines “us” so narrowly that eventually everyone becomes “them.”
In the end, Greene finally found the right answer: dial down the hate, tone down the threats, stop treating politics like a blood sport. But she arrived there due to the only reason her party’s movement ever changes—because it finally hurt her. Empathy wasn’t the revelation. Self-preservation was.
The broad framework for agreement, which was negotiated in part by Sens. Angus King, Jeanne Shaheen, and Maggie Hassan, as well as GOP senators, has “more than enough” members of the Senate Democratic Caucus to advance, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose the terms,” Politico reported.
In exchange for their votes, these handful of “moderate” Democrats—which notably does not include Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—are getting nothing.
Well, that’s not true.
They’re getting a promise of a vote on ACA subsidies in the Senate, which will easily go down in defeat. Not to mention, Speaker Mike Johnson has said he’ll never even bring the matter up for a vote in the House.The deal also fully funds the Veterans Administration and Department of Agriculture, and the operations of Congress, of course, because they have to take care of themselves.
Nothing in that is a victory for Democrats.The surrender is perplexing given how clearly the shutdown was hurting Republicans, so much so that President Donald Trump specifically cited it as one reason for why Republicans got their asses kicked in last Tuesday’s off-year elections.
But instead of letting Trump figure out a way out of his own mess, Democrats inexplicably threw him a life vest on Sunday night.There is one silver lining—this deal will eventually haunt Republicans. Had Democrats succeeded in saving ACA healthcare subsidies, clueless voters would never have known of the Democrats’ role in safeguarding their insurance.
When Republicans vote down Democratic efforts to save health care for millions of Americans, the blame will be crystal clear.
Calling it a “historic victory” with his usual unearned boastfulness, President Donald Trump announced a new effort to make in vitro fertilization—better known as IVF—more accessible.
“In the Trump administration, we want to make it easier for all couples to have babies, raise children and have the families they’ve always dreamed about,” Trump told the assembled press corps in the Oval Office Thursday.
IVF is a medical procedure that helps people struggling with infertility conceive a child by fertilizing an egg outside the body and then implanting the embryo.
Trump’s announcement amounted to two things: most-favored nation pricing on the drugs, and a polite request for companies to cover IVF in their health care plans, without any stick or carrot to compel them to do so.
The most-favored nation part is actually good. Americans spend far more on the same drugs as consumers in other countries. Under this kind of policy, drug makers would be required to offer Americans the lowest price they charge in any other developed nation.
It’s an idea that’s been floated for years by both parties, including under the Biden and Trump administrations, as a way to push back against pharmaceutical price gouging. Americans routinely pay two to three times more for the same medications sold in Canada, Europe, or Japan. Proposals to let Americans import cheaper Canadian drugs have drawn bipartisan applause, but relentless industry lobbying—and similarly bipartisan cowardice—has always killed them off.
Lowering drug prices is a worthy goal, but when it comes to IVF, it barely moves the needle. The $15,000–$20,000 cost of a typical IVF cycle doesn’t include the necessary medications, so even a few thousand dollars in drug savings still leaves families priced out. It’s a modest discount dressed up as a miracle—and a far cry from Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to make IVF free.
“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” he said at the time. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”
It’s almost impressive how easily he promises everything without a plan to ever deliver.
That promise wouldn’t have come cheap.
“The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology says its member clinics performed 389,993 IVF cycles in 2022,” NBC reported at the time. “At a cost of around $20,000 apiece, that would come to $7.8 billion for that one year.” But that’s just a fifth of the $40 billion Trump is sending to Argentina to save his pal Javier Milei. (Of course, demand would soar if IVF were free, so maybe the cost might be … half an Argentina?)
The second part of his announcement, urging companies to cover the expensive treatments, is where the whole thing tips into absurdity.
According to NOTUS, the Departments of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services will provide “guidance” allowing a “new benefit option” that would permit—but not require—employers to offer IVF as a stand-alone benefit. And with no carrot, no stick, and no reason for any company not already offering this to suddenly start.
Asked why businesses should bother, one senior administration official said they should want to “bring a healthy baby into the world at the lowest possible cost.” Ah yes, let’s dig through those corporate charters for the part about “bringing healthy babies into the world”—at their own expense.
You want companies to do that, you either force them—or you pay them.
But really, if bringing healthy babies into the world is such a noble goal, why doesn’t Trump find the dollars for it the way he’s found them for Argentina? Because he doesn’t actually care. It’s easier to announce something that sounds compassionate than to spend a dime making it real.
Not much of a victory. Certainly not historic. Just more of the same Trumpian bullshit.
Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.
President Donald Trump won in 2024 because of the economy. He promised voters he’d lower prices on Day 1, and people foolishly believed him. But what does he care? A candidate has one job—to get elected—and he managed to do it.
That same focus on cost-of-living issues also powered Zohran Mamdani’s rise from relative obscurity to becoming New York’s Democratic nominee for mayor. He put affordability at the center of his campaign and surged past better-known rivals. It’s a model Democrats will lean on through next year’s midterms and into the 2028 cycle—not only because it works, but because it’s right. If the government doesn’t exist to make people’s lives better, then what’s the point?
That’s why the latest Economist/YouGov poll should set off alarms for Republican strategists everywhere. Nearly one-half of respondents listed top concerns that reflect the basic costs and conditions of everyday life: inflation (24 percent), jobs (12 percent), and health care (11 percent). Those just happen to be the issues where Republicans are weakest.
Trump broke through with some lower-income voters in 2024, seizing on their anger over rising prices. But that anger hasn’t gone away: It has turned back on him. His supporters still feel the pinch, and no slogan or scapegoat will fix that. Inflation is the one issue he can’t talk his way out of, and it’s only getting worse.
Beyond so-called illegal immigration, which remains a reliably conservative rallying cry, the Republican base is restless over economic anxiety. And that’s fertile ground for Democrats. And they don’t have to win over all those restless voters—just a fraction would reshape the map.
Trump’s approval rating remains deeply underwater (38 percent approve, 54 perce disapprove), with many conservatives souring on his performance. Moderates, meanwhile, have largely abandoned him. Among those who voted for Trump in 2024, a meaningful share—15 percent—now disapprove of the job he’s doing. Between disaffected Trump voters and those who stayed home last time, there’s an opening big enough to matter.
Perhaps the most revealing number in the poll shows how people see the economy itself. Only a small minority (19 percent) think things are improving, and even among Trump voters, less than half say the economy is getting better. Normally, partisans rally around their own president, claiming optimism out of loyalty.
Not this time. A significant slice of Trump’s base thinks the economy is heading in the wrong direction. That’s new—and dangerous—for him.It’s no coincidence that roughly one in five Trump voters think the economy is getting worse, disapprove of his presidency, and list inflation as their top concern. That cluster of discontent could be enough to swing close races or, just as crucially, depress Republican turnout altogether.
Add to that a broad majority of independents who think things are worsening, and Democrats have a real opportunity to expand their coalition.
Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.
Meet Eric Brakey, the executive director of the Free State Project. Those of you who’ve read the excellent bookA Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, by journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, might recognize the group—a collection of cranks who have tried (and hilariously failed) to turn New Hampshire into a libertarian utopia.
It’s a new gig for Brakey, having moved there late last year after serving in Maine’s legislature. He also ran a forgettable 2018 campaign against independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, pulling a laughable 35 percent of the vote as the Republican nominee.
Ahead of Election Day last year, he tweeted, “If Trump wins NH by a single vote today, you will be glad I moved and declared my primary residence in NH.”
Trump didn’t win New Hampshire, but Brakey did get the president he wanted—which makes his recent experience all the more ironic.
On Sunday, returning to Florida from a Royal Caribbean cruise, he posted on X that he had been detained by Border Patrol for an hour and a half while agents dug through his luggage, confiscated his phone and computer, and even read his personal journal. When he’d asked what rights he had as a U.S. citizen, he’d allegedly been told that agents didn’t need a warrant to search anything in his possession, even his electronics.
Brakey said he’d had to explain, in detail, that the Free State Project was a “nonviolent, peaceful libertarian movement” and that his “Defend the Guard” activism wasn’t part of some militia or insurrection plot. Eventually they let him go, he said, but he was “shaken up and in shock.”
And he should be. There is no justification for federal agents to paw through a citizen’s private journals and devices without just cause or a warrant. But this is exactly the kind of authoritarian overreach so many of us warned about in 2024—while right-leaning libertarians like Brakey shrugged it off as liberal paranoia.
They were convinced that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was the real threat to liberty—because she once prosecuted cases, or because she talked about public health rules, or because they imagined she’d sic the IRS on their crypto wallets, or something. Somehow, they decided that a functioning government enforcing basic laws was tyranny, but that a man who bragged about weaponizing the Justice Department was pro-liberty. They mistook accountability for oppression, autocracy for freedom—as long as the boot wasn’t on their necks.
The same people who sneered at supposed liberal hysteria over creeping fascism helped empower a movement that worships unchecked executive power—so long as it targets the “right” people.
Given his experience with Border Patrol, maybe Brakey finally understands what we meant when we said Trump’s America wouldn’t stop with immigrants or liberals. Fascism always runs out of “others” eventually—and when it does, it comes for its own believers, too.
Years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cavorted with neo-Nazis in Berlin. A Daily Kos community member, whose real name is David (which he himself revealed), summarized a local news article about the event, headlined his write-up “Anti-Vaxxer RFK JR. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin ‘Anti-Corona’ Protest,” and moved on with his day.
In 2021, a furious RFK Jr. sued Daily Kos to unmask David’s identity. Four-plus years later, after bouncing between New York and California courts, amicus briefs from The New York Times and 10 other organizations, and endless appeals, our case is still working its way through the courts. Somewhere along the way and after considerable expenses, RFK Jr.’s team figured out David’s identity and sued him directly. Those original suits went nowhere: He filed in New Hampshire—while David lives in Maine—then blew an appeal deadline (his lawyers blamed bad Wi-Fi, no joke).
My most recent comprehensive update on the case is here.
(For the record, I’ve flat-out called RFK Jr. a Nazi. He’s never sued me or Daily Kos for that—just fixated on the lower-profile diarist. It’s been bizarre.)
At this point, two cases remained. The first is ours, still on appeal, aimed at securing a New York precedent to shield media outlets from frivolous suits like this. The second—the case against David—should finally be dead now, after a Maine judge granted summary judgment earlier this month. And the reasoning is hilarious.
Summary judgment means that the facts can’t be in dispute and that the judge can rule as a matter of law. The fatal problem for RFK Jr.? He refused to deny that he cavorted with neo-Nazis.
From the decision, RFK Jr. alleged that David claimed he:
Helped cause the Samoa Measles Outbreak;
Opposed all vaccines;
Expressed “dangerous vaccine conspiracies” that caused the death of 234,000 Americans;
Wanted to cause the death of all black people;
Said Covid19 was designed to save Jewish people; and
Knowingly joined, supported, and associated with a neo-Nazi party in Berlin.
The judge dismantled those claims one by one. Here’s an example, given the outrageousness of the claim:
iv. Plaintiff “wanted to cause the death of black people”Defendant has never written or said this statement [...] On January 4, 2022, Defendant posted on X, without comment, a link to an article, authored by thegrio.com, titled "Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is harming black people—and his family legacy—with his vaccine misinformation campaign.” [...] Plaintiff does not offer sworn evidence to the contrary.
To make it crystal clear, a reposted tweet from a respected publication on how RFK Jr. is reportedly harming Black people turned into a legal claim that RFK Jr. “wanted to cause the death of all black people.” He really is a piece of shit.
Let’s do another one:
v. Plaintiff “said Covid19 was designed to save Jews”Defendant has never written or said this statement. [...] On July 16, 2023, Defendant posted on X, without comment, a link to an article, authored by the Washington Post, titled “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests covid was designed to spare Jews, Chinese People.” [...] Complaint supports Defendant’s assertion that he repeated the third-party content without embellishment. Plaintiff denies Defendant posted the link without embellishment, but cites no admissible record evidence to support the denial.
Again, RFK Jr.’s lawyers took a simple link to a Washington Post article and created an alternate reality in which David claimed COVID was “designed to save Jews.” RFK Jr.’s lawyers should be disbarred for wasting the court’s time with these egregious lies.
But the kicker is the Nazi-rally bit, the whole reason this fiasco started.
Defendant establishes as true, and Plaintiff admits, that Plaintiff joined the protest rally in Berlin as a speaker. [...] Plaintiff argues that Defendant’s statement [that it was organized by neo-Nazis] supports a defamatory inference that Plaintiff joined a neo-Nazi party or movement as a member. Although a defamatory inference may be actionable, the statement that Plaintiff joined the protest, which is true, does not reasonably give rise to an inference that Plaintiff joined the organizations sponsoring the protest.
In other words, RFK Jr. and his lawyers didn’t argue that the rally wasn’t organized by Nazis, just that he didn’t join the Nazi party as a member. Cool beans, bro. Except David never said RFK Jr. was a Nazi, just that he joined Nazis at their rally—and that turned out to be factually true. RFK Jr. didn’t even bother to dispute that part.
So chalk one up for the First Amendment.
And thank you—to our community and to Public Citizen—for funding this defense, and to David for standing strong throughout it all. He went up against RFK Jr. and emerged victorious. That couldn’t have been easy.
RFK Jr. is a dangerous loon who cavorts with neo-Nazis, and he can go fuck himself.
President Donald Trump is so stupid and clumsy with words, he just endorsed Ukraine’s annexation of Russian territory. But hey, it’s better than the opposite!
In one of his patented Truth Social rants, his target is, for once, warranted. Let’s break down the post:
After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.
The battle lines have barely shifted for months. Drones dominate the battlefield, preventing Russia from making meaningful advances, but also stopping Ukraine from doing the same. Tanks and armored vehicles are mostly absent and obsolete; progress comes in small infantry groups trying to dodge drone detection. Anything exposed in the open is dead.
That’s why the Russia-Ukraine War, despite staggering casualties, has become primarily economic. Both sides are targeting each other’s infrastructure. Russia can feed the front with endless waves of men, but if Ukraine keeps degrading its enemy’s oil and gas industry—Russia’s one real economic engine—that’s a different story.
With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not?
NATO is Europe … and the U.S. (and Canada). It would really help if the U.S. lent assistance, but this is still a welcome change in Trump’s rhetoric for several reasons:
He’s not trashing NATO. Maybe we’ve survived his obsession with leaving the alliance.
Just last week he insisted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should “make a deal,” meaning surrender territory. Now he’s suggesting Ukraine could restore its 2014 borders … for the moment.
One of the problems Ukraine had at the start of this Trump presidency was the notion that it couldn’t possibly defeat Russia. Remember the infamous “You have no cards!” ambush at the White House? Trump no longer believes that.
Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like “a paper tiger.”
The Trump administration’s unlikely hero remains Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has argued this point since Day 1. Most of Trump’s orbit—Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and the MAGA movement—are pro-Russia or openly hostile to Ukraine. Rubio, with a small cadre of congressional Republicans, resisted.
Somehow, Trump is now anti-Russia. The trick may have been convincing him that Russia is weak. Nothing enrages him more than weakness, and on the battlefield, Russia is exactly that.
When the people living in Moscow, and all of the Great Cities, Towns, and Districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this War, the fact that it’s almost impossible for them to get Gasoline through the long lines that are being formed, and all of the other things that are taking place in their War Economy, where most of their money is being spent on fighting Ukraine, which has Great Spirit, and only getting better, Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that! Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act. In any event, I wish both Countries well.
That is all one sentence. Trump remains a butcher of language.
It’s true that Russia—despite being a major oil producer—is experiencing fuel shortages thanks to Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure. It’s also true that Ukraine has fought with extraordinary spirit. Two truths in one Trump sentence might be a record.
But his leap to suggesting Ukraine might “go further than that” is bizarre. Is he endorsing Ukraine invading Russia? Annexing Russian territory? Ukraine just wants its land back, Crimea included. Can we stick to that?
We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all!
Now this is something. The U.S. doesn’t supply weapons to NATO; NATO isn’t an army. But if Trump means the U.S. will funnel weapons through NATO to Ukraine, that’s a major reversal. More likely, it’s incoherent babble. Still, if he really does intend to use NATO as a laundering mechanism for U.S. support, Ukraine’s prospects brighten considerably.
Europe has to step up—not just with weapons, but with money. Ukraine’s domestic arms industry is cranking. What it needs most is financing for its long-range missiles to keep hammering Russian infrastructure. If Trump wants to frame U.S. support as “NATO’s business” to dodge MAGA fury, fine. As long as the weapons flow, Russia will struggle against a U.S.-E.U. one-two punch.
The irony is that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin once had Trump in the palm of his hand. Flattery and promises of a Nobel Peace Prize could have helped him starve Ukraine into submission. But Putin, too arrogant to debase himself and suck up to Trump the way other world leaders did, may have overplayed his hand.
And that arrogance might ultimately help doom him.
President Donald Trump is so disastrously incompetent he once managed to bankrupt a casino in Atlantic City. Now, from the Oval Office, he’s trying to do it again—in Las Vegas.
In June 2025, Las Vegas welcomed 400,000 fewer visitors than in June 2024—a more than 11 percent nosedive. International arrivals plunged, as did hotel occupancy.
This didn’t happen by accident. Trump has spent months antagonizing America’s northern neighbor—and a key Vegas tourism source. He suggested Canada should become the 51st U.S. state and called its prime minister at the time “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.” He later claimed he wasn’t “trolling,” doubling down that statehood would make Trump’s tariffs “totally disappear.”
Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney fired back, saying his country “is not for sale” and dismissing Trump’s fantasy as laughable and offensive. Even Trump’s own ambassador to Canada warned the rhetoric was unprecedentedly toxic for relations. And in tourism, words have consequences. Canada is America’s No. 1 source of foreign visitors. Insult them enough, and they stop coming.
Trump’s near-blanket tariffs on Canadian goods turned the insults into policy, triggering a full-blown trade war. The result: Car crossings were down 37 percent year-over-year in July, and air arrivals dropped 26 percent. Duty-free sales along the border have been cut nearly in half, wiping out millions in spending. Indeed, each one percent drop in international travel costs the U.S. $1.8 billion in export revenue per year—money that fuels jobs and generates tax revenues. July 2025 marked the seventh straight month of plunging traffic, with surveys showing Canadians now feel distinctly unwelcome.
And when the biggest slice of your foreign tourism market dries up, the ripple is felt everywhere. In July, arrivals from Germany were down 14.7 percent compared with last July. Arrivals from China dropped by 13.8 percent and from Switzerland by 12.7 percent. Tour operators abroad now steer customers toward anywhere but Trump’s America. Tourism revenue is projected to fall from $181 billion in 2024 to $169 billion in 2025, a $12.5 billion-hit to the economy.
And that might just be the tip of the iceberg. A Reuters analysis of the underlying data suggests the tourism slump could cost up to $71 billion in the United States’ gross domestic product.
In Las Vegas, the damage is personal. Empty casinos mean shorter shifts, slashed hours, and layoffs. Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, calls the city’s waning tourism the “Trump slump.”
“If you tell the whole world that they’re not welcome, they’re not going to come,” he told Time magazine. “The lifeblood for Las Vegas is Southern California. What folks are telling our members is that the raids and crazy tariffs and this uncertainty, [are causing] people to pull back.”
In a late July post on Truth Social, Trump called the U.S. “the ‘hottest’ and most respected Country anywhere in the World.”
The numbers tell a different story. From struggling casinos to struggling cities, his legacy is the same: reckless mismanagement, xenophobia, and empty chairs where excitement used to sit. The lights on the Vegas Strip still flicker, but thanks to Trump, the seats are getting empty.
Pemiscot County, Missouri, lost its Walmart. Now it may lose its only hospital.
This deeply conservative corner of rural America is getting a front-row education in what it means when Republicans say they want to “run government like a business.”
Businesses exist to make money. And they don’t waste their time in poverty-stricken Pemiscot County, home to less than 16,000 residents who have a median household income that barely clears $40,000. It’s Missouri’s poorest county. Why would any profit-driven, efficiency-minded system waste a dime here?
The Guardianpaints a grim picture: “Three stories of brown brick just off Interstate 55 in the town of Hayti, the 115-bed hospital has kept its doors open even after the county’s only Walmart closed, the ranks of boarded-up gas stations along the freeway exit grew, and the population of the surrounding towns dwindled, thanks in no small part to the destruction done by tornadoes.”
This is one of those rural counties I’ve written about: dependent on the federal government they hate.
Now, thanks to President Donald Trump and his Medicaid-gutting budget law, Pemiscot Memorial Hospital is hanging by a thread.
“If Medicaid drops, are we going to be even collecting what we’re collecting now?” Jonna Green, the chair of the hospital’s board, asked the Guardian. With roughly 80 percent of the hospital’s revenue coming from Medicaid and Medicare, any cuts to a hospital already on the edge of insolvency is a death sentence. “We need some hope,” she added.
She doesn’t need hope. She and her neighbors need to stop voting for Republicans.
Trump won 74 percent of the vote in the county last year. Rep. Jason Smith, their Republican congressman, did even better, winning with 76 percent of the vote. And Smith was thrilled to support the law that could shutter this hospital, saying in a statement, “The One, Big, Beautiful Bill is nothing short of the greatest piece of working-class tax relief in a generation. President Trump didn’t just sign a bill into law—he unleashed America’s Golden Age.”
Sure. If “Golden Age” means no hospital.
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley won 73 percent of the county. He had warned that Trump’s tax bill would devastate rural hospitals—and then he voted for it anyway.
However, just days after that vote, he tried to reverse course, introducing a bill to “protect” the same rural-hospital funding he had just voted to gut.
“I’m completely opposed to cutting rural hospitals period,” Hawley told NBC News. “I haven’t changed my view on that one iota.”
Except … he already had.
Last week at an Axios forum, Hawley doubled down, warning against “experiment[ing]” with the “vitally important” federal funding that keeps rural hospitals afloat.
But when it mattered—when it came time to vote on a major bill—he chose instead to cut rich people’s taxes. He had a choice between Missouri hospitals and billionaire handouts, and he picked the billionaires.
And here’s the kicker: that “vitally important” funding he says he wants to protect? It doesn’t even come from Missouri. Missouri is a moocher state, propped up by federal dollars primarily from blue states like California, Illinois, and New York. Hawley’s constituents hate the federal government, but they sure love its money.
As for Pemiscot County, they wanted a smaller government to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. In fact, many voices quoted in that Guardian story insisted what Republicans did was okay because they knew that one guy. Not even kidding—check out this passage:
“We got a guy around here, I guess he’s still around. He’s legally blind but he goes deer hunting every year,” Baughn Merideth, a county commissioner, told The Guardian. “There’s just so much fraud … it sounds like we’re right in the middle of it.”
So this one “guy” in Pemiscot County—if he’s “still around”—is so full of fraud that it’s acceptable for the county to lose its only hospital. (Also, “legally blind” doesn’t mean can’t-see-anything blind. In fact, Iowa’s Department for the Blind says that only about 18% of legally blind people are totally blind.)
Trump supporters will bend themselves into knots to avoid blaming those enabling the crises they face.
Whatever fraud may exist in Pemiscot County, it pales in comparison to the waste of maintaining a critical medical facility in a county where the population has plunged from nearly 47,000 in the 1940s to under 16,000 today. When the hospital closes, more people will leave. The area’s death spiral will accelerate.
“This is our home, born and raised, and you would never want to leave it. But I have a nine-year-old with cardiac problems. I would not feel safe living here without a hospital that I could take her to know if something happened,” Brittany Osborne, Pemiscot Memorial’s interim CEO, told The Guardian.
Meanwhile, Green—the hospital board chair worried about cuts—follows a Facebook group that recently posted a meme of Trump with the caption “Isn’t it great having a real president again?”
She says she needs “some hope”?
Hard to think of a worse place to go looking for it.
Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.
In early December, I warned that Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plans could backfire on Republicans. The core problem? Manpower. It takes a lot of resources to round up undocumented immigrants—and that’s feasible only in red states, where Republican governors are likely to lend their own law enforcement forces to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In sanctuary cities, federal agents are mostly on their own.
This dynamic has serious implications for the 2030 census and reapportionment. Undocumented immigrants are counted in the census. If deportations and fear-driven migration to safer states reduce the population in Republican strongholds like Florida and Texas, those states might gain fewer House seats than expected. Meanwhile, blue states like California, Illinois, and New York—previously on track to lose representation—could see those losses softened.
That was the theory at the time. Now we’re seeing some proof it may be playing out.
A new piece in The Times of London offers a telling anecdote: A Miami construction manager witnessed a raid where 15 to 20 federal agents and police officers stormed his job site … and arrested just two undocumented workers. “It was just an obscenely outrageous show of force, over the top, it just seemed like too much,” the manager said.
And that’s with local police support. It’s exactly why Trump’s crackdown struggles in sanctuary cities—no local cooperation, plus mutual aid networks that sound the alarm when ICE is nearby.
In Miami, the consequences are stacking up fast.
First, it’s choking Florida’s booming construction industry. “In January the Associated Builders and Contractors—a trade organization—said the construction industry would need to attract 439,000 workers this year to meet demand,” reported the Times.
Without them? Soaring labor, housing, and construction costs.
But instead of recruiting more workers, Florida is bleeding them. And another Trump action is making things even worse. “The legal workforce is expected to shrink further after the administration succeeded in removing temporary protection status (TPS), a type of immigration status, from 472,000 Venezuelans,” the Times notes. “Hundreds of thousands of people from other nationalities are also likely to lose their TPS.”
Republicans often claim that slashing the immigrant population will lower housing prices. The worst offenders include right-wing Cuban retirees, like Havana-born Jose Martinez, who came during the Mariel boatlift. “Sorry but it’s true, we don’t know who these people are,” he told the Times. “We came here the right way, we came legally. These people are different. Some of them are criminals.”
Apparently, “the right way” meant getting Cold War favoritism that Cubans enjoyed at the expense of every other Latino group. And as any honest observer will tell you, that policy was horseshit. The Mariel boatlift? It included tens of thousands of criminals because Fidel Castro emptied his prisons into Florida.
Here’s the problem for Republicans: Florida’s economy can’t sustain its torrid growth without new housing—and developing new housing requires labor. Instead, labor shortages—and Trump’s tariffs—will jack up costs, deterring people from moving there. In addition, the deportations themselves will further mitigate the state’s population growth, impacting the census count and the state’s projected pickup of four electoral votes and House seats.
And just as I predicted, immigrants are fleeing Florida. That same construction manager? After the raid, another of his crew members—one with legal work status—left for Georgia, where immigration enforcement is lighter.
Los Angeles, despite Trump’s best efforts to crack down, may now become a magnet for immigrants. With tens of thousands of homes needing rebuilding, and no local labor force to do it fast, immigrant workers will go where they can earn and live in peace.
Trump has unleashed policies that are scrambling economic and demographic trends. The fallout could be huge—and it’s unlikely to benefit the people who cheered him on.
Last week, Rep. Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey’s hotly contested Democratic gubernatorial primary with 34 percent of the vote in a six-way race. New Jersey is one of just two states holding off-year governor’s races in 2025, the other being Virginia.
Sherrill is now the frontrunner heading into November’s election. Her Republican opponent, former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli came shockingly close to winning four years ago. But like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, he benefited from Donald Trump not being on the ballot or in office. This time around, Trump is all in, loudly endorsing Ciattarelli—much to Sherrill’s delight, no doubt.
Sherrill immediately pointed to the sky-high Democratic turnout as both the key to her win and a preview of November.
“We had almost 800,000 people voting in this primary. That’s unheard of,” she told the Washington Post. “It shows you the passion people have, shows you what’s coming in November here.”
And that’s underselling it. Democratic turnout now stands at 814,669, a genuinely extraordinary number. The closest comparison is from 2017, which saw 503,682 votes. In 2021, it was just 382,984 (an unopposed primary), and only 195,171 in 2013.
Republicans also hit a record of 459,574 votes, up from 339,033 in 2021 and the mid-200,000s in 2013 and 2017. But even with this boost, they still lag far behind Democrats’ surge.
This turnout is especially encouraging given New Jersey’s sharp rightward shift in the 2024 presidential election. Vice President Kamala Harris carried the state just 52-46, compared to President Joe Biden’s 57-41 win in 2020—a net 10-point swing to Republicans, largely driven by weak Democratic turnout. That’s clearly been fixed.
Holding New Jersey’s governorship—and reclaiming Virginia’s—matters. But what’s really exciting is what this says about the 2026 midterms.
Conventional wisdom says that the party in the White House gets shellacked in the midterms—especially with an unpopular president. But Biden and Democrats already broke that rule in 2022. Nothing’s carved in stone.
Meanwhile, Republicans got obliterated in Trump’s first term during the 2018 midterms, when Democrats flipped 41 House seats and seven governor seats. His second term is off to an even worse start, and with these early signs of hyper-engaged Democrats, the vibes are good.
Sure, 2026 is still a long way off. But if these numbers spook enough Republicans in swing districts, Democrats might be able to grind this narrowly divided Congress to a halt.
I served in the U.S. Army 36 years ago. And my son—who’s had opportunities I never did as a Salvadoran immigrant—chose to follow in my footsteps, joining the California National Guard.
After spending a year in the Middle East, he returned home and was activated to help in the aftermath of the wildfires that devastated Southern California in January. He was stationed in Altadena, a hard-hit, working-class city, where he did what the Guard is meant to do: help people in crisis.
That experience changed him. Even after being deactivated, he still drives an hour each way, several times a week, to keep helping as the city and its residents rebuild. That’s who he is. And yeah, I’m tearing up just thinking about it. I am so incredibly proud of him.
He signed up to serve his community, not to be a pawn in President Donald Trump’s fascist cosplay. But now? His unit has been activated again, and this time not to help people.
You can’t imagine the rage I feel.
Trump has spent his entire presidency railing against dissent. Now that he’s losing in Congress, in the courts, and in the court of public opinion, he’s escalating—using peaceful protests as a pretext for his dream of military dictatorship.
In January, my son and his fellow first responders were welcomed by Southern Californians with food, gifts, and gratitude. Today, Trump is sending them into those same communities as symbols of repression. He’s destroyed the goodwill they built—and he doesn’t care.
He wants confrontation. He wants escalation. He wants violence, because he thinks it gives him license to go even further.
Trump is trying to break this country before it breaks him.
I’m scared for my son. But I’m proud. Proud of him. Proud of this community. Proud of the people in the streets refusing to back down. This moment feels inevitable. We saw it coming. We warned it was coming. We hoped it wouldn’t, but now it’s here.
So yes, I’m scared. But I’m also burning with righteous fury. And that fury is stronger than Trump’s cruelty or the bloodlust of his followers.
With House Republicans narrowly passing President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—which is designed to blow up the national debt, cut taxes for the rich, and partially pay for that by gutting programs for the poor and working class—you’d think MAGA conservatives would be cheering. But many of them aren’t.
Let’s back up.
Trump defied historic voting patterns in 2024 by winning voters making under $50,000 a year, 50 percent to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ 48 percent. He tied her among voters making over $50,000, at 49 percent. And when the threshold was raised to $100,000, the income divide got starker: Trump won the under-$100K crowd, 51 to 47 percent, while Harris won the over-$100K vote, 51 to 47 percent.
That flipped the old partisan narrative. In general, Republicans were the party of the working class, and Democrats the party of those with more money.
While culture-war hysteria around transgender people and immigrants drove much of Trump’s support, his promise to lower prices “on Day 1” clearly resonated with economically desperate voters. Exit polls back this up. He won 76 percent of those who had faced “severe hardship” from inflation in the previous year, and 52 percent of those who’d faced “moderate hardship.” Meanwhile, Harris dominated among those who said they’d faced “no hardship,” winning 78 percent of them.
As former Daily Kos reporter Kerry Eleveld once said in our old podcast, “Democrats are the party of voters who don’t have to look at prices when grocery shopping.”
That’s why we see so many variations of “this isn’t what we voted for” in all these “Leopards Ate Faces” stories. Yes, we could scream, “IT WAS ALL THERE IN PROJECT 2025!” But let’s be honest: Most voters aren’t policy wonks. For those doing price math in the grocery aisle, politics isn’t a priority. Trump’s promise may have been absurd, but it was simple and seductive.
But falling for those lies has a cost. On the economic front, Trump and the Republican Party are governing like they always have—for the ultrawealthy, connected, and powerful, at the direct expense of their own voters. As I’ve written repeatedly, it’s like Trump is trying to hurt his base.
Early Thursday morning, House Republicans voted to gut Medicaid, which disproportionately helps rural Americans. Their tax cuts for billionaires effectively raise taxes on low-income voters—i.e., their core voters in last year’s election. MarketWatch, reporting on a University of Pennsylvania analysis of a close-to-final draft of the GOP tax bill, noted:
The top 0.1 percent of households would rake in over $390,000 in after-tax income.
The top 1 percent would gain $44,190.
Households making $51,000 to $92,999 a year would get an additional $815.
The lowest-income households, though, will see their after-tax income shrink by $940.
Yes, that voter making under $50,000, they get to deal with Trump’s price-raising tariffs and a tax hike.
On Reddit’s r/conservative subreddit, the reactions to the House passing the bill were surprisingly muted.
Some echoed traditional deficit concerns, such as the commenter who noted, “Conservatives are supposed to want less government spending and less debt. This bill will add trillions of dollars of debt over the next 10 years. We're not even kind of moving in the right direction.”
But a surprising number took umbrage at the gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.
One top commenter the subreddit—i.e., not a troll—wrote, “I'm all for cutting waste fraud and abuse on Medicaid and SNAP, but … I think if the medicaid/SNAP changes go through as is, GOP will get mauled in the mid-terms.”
Another top commenter noted, “[I]t's not that I like high taxes, it's that I think high taxes on the lower, middle, and upper-middle-class are much more damaging than high taxes on the ultra-rich. It's both about keeping taxes low on most people, and about preventing the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people. It's also frustrating because Trump has repeatedly spoken out in favor of such tax hikes on the richest taxpayers as a way of making budgets and tax breaks work.”
This commenter also called the Medicaid provisions “cruel,” and on SNAP, they said, “[I]t's going to deny benefits to some people we would probably prefer have them. for example the people who are going to be hit hardest are the people who live in areas where jobs are scarce, who have difficult lives with a lot of barriers to getting anything done, and who have other life responsibilities like caring for family members or doing something else important in their community that they don't get paid for.”
If only there was a party that worked to protect such people …
All over social media, Trump voters are realizing they’re the ones being labeled as “fraud and waste.” Like this gem on Threads:
Again, we can point to Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for a second Trump administration—and note how it promised to gut SNAP and Medicaid. Yes, we warned them. But pointing fingers now isn’t useful.
What is useful? Turning this betrayal into motivation.
No, we won’t win over all Trump voters. Many are too far gone. It’s a cult.
But we don’t need all of them. We don’t even need most. We just need a small shift.
In Pennsylvania, Trump won last year by 120,266 votes. In Michigan, it was 80,103. And in Wisconsin, 29,397. Altogether, that makes for just 229,766 votes in an election where 155,512,532 were cast—or just 0.15 percent of all ballots. That’s how small of a shift we’re talking about, though obviously, the bigger the better.
I can’t recall ever seeing a party so eagerly swing a baseball bat at its own voters—many of them new to the Republican coalition.
The pain is real. And yes, most of us are impacted in some way. But if we can turn that pain into political clarity for even a slice of those voters, we can begin to reverse the damage—and take back our future.
The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
Seems pretty clear-cut, right?
But read carefully—”no person shall be elected” to the office. And therein lies the keys to Donald Trump’s fantasies of a third term, saying to NBC’s Kristen Welker. “There are methods which you could do it.”
So how exactly would Trump become president without being elected president?
One way, Trump said, would be to swap tickets with Vice President JD Vance. He would run on a ticket with Vance and get elected vice president. Then, Vance would give up the office out of the goodness of his heart and resign, or maybe Trump would just shiv him, who knows. Trump wouldn’t care either way. Regardless, he would then become president.
Except that won’t work.
The 12th Amendment says, “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
Well, that seems pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, that’s not the only avenue for Trump to try and sneak in.
We’ve already noted that the first is clearly off the table. However, the rest are not.
The Constitution doesn’t actually set requirements for speaker of the House, saying only, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”
While every speaker has been a member of the House, it’s clear that there’s nothing requiring that to be the case. Hence, a Republican House could simply elect Trump as speaker, and then elevate him after both the president and the vice president resigned to pave his return to power.
A plain text reading of the Constitution makes this absolutely possible, though the courts would have to wrestle with the intent of both the 12th and the 22nd Amendments—which collectively make clear that really, two presidential terms is enough. But in this case, Trump wouldn’t be elected to the presidency, he would be elevated to the job.
The more practical impediment to this scenario is that two people would now need to surrender their chances to be president of the United States so fucking Trump could continue trashing the country and the world. People don’t want that, not even Republicans, and that’s before Trump’s policies really do a number on our economy.
Not to mention, those two people will both have gone through a grueling national campaign, won the votes of tens of millions, and for what? To quit and give it all up right after taking the oath to office?
Moving down the list, president pro tempore of the Senate is supposed to preside over the Senate in the absence of the vice president (hence the Latin “for the time being”), which the Constitution pretends is the president of the Senate (and in practice, just means a tie-breaking vote if necessary).
Like the House speaker, the Constitution doesn’t provide any qualifications for the role, so by tradition, the majority party picks its oldest member for the mostly ceremonial position. It is currently Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Presumably a Republican Senate could pick Trump as president pro tempore. But that would require the House to be in Republican hands as well, otherwise a Democratic speaker would ascend to the top. At that point, assuming the whole Republican Party is singing from the same choir book, it would just be easier for the House to make him speaker.
And finally, there’s that secretary of state job. Imagine Trump as secretary of state? Dear god. In any case, it would be a short-term charade. But now you’re talking about four people giving up their chance to be president—the elected president, the elected vice president, the speaker of the House, and the president pro tempore of the Senate. Trump may be deluded enough to think that many people would clear the path for him, but that would fly in the face of human nature. A not-president Trump would have zero leverage over an actual president.
And of course, that’s still assuming that the effort would survive legal challenges based on the 22nd Amendment. After all, it’s clear what the framers of that amendment intended—to prevent another Franklin D. Roosevelt from happening. That is, to prevent another president from entrenching themselves in the Oval Office.
But it does say a lot about Trump that rather than focus on the job at hand, he’s obsessing over a third term. He wants power for the sake of power itself, jealous of despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Of course, he’s going to indulge in these sorts of fantasies.
Last Tuesday, a Democrat pulled off an upset win in a deep-red Pennsylvania state Senate seat where President Donald Trump won by 15 percentage points last year.
Add that into the list of other special elections Democrats have overperformed in this year, and it’s clear why Republicans are suddenly sweating the special election in Florida's Sixth Congressional District.
Florida’s Sixth District was vacated by Republican Mike Waltz, who you might now know as the world’s most incompetent national security adviser. Last year, Trump won the district by 30 points—a huge margin—so it shouldn’t be, by any stretch of the imagination, competitive.
And yet …
A poll by St. Pete Polls for news outlet Florida Politics finds that Republican nominee Randy Fine is leading Democrat Josh Weil by a measly four points, 48 percent to 44 percent. That puts a Weil victory within the poll’s margin of error. Even worse for Republicans is that an internal poll from Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s 2024 pollster, finds Fine down 3 points to Weil, according to Axios. The same pollster had Fine up 12 points in February.
But let’s take a breath. Normally, undecided voters end up voting in line with their district/state’s partisan lean, which is R+14 for Florida’s Sixth, according to the Cook Political Report. That means it’s 14 points more Republican than the country as a whole. So, in a normal election, I would expect the Republican would win this seat with roughly 57 percent of the vote to the Democrat’s 43 percent—a spread of 14 points.
That, in itself, would flash some warning signs in GOP hallways. In November, Waltz won the seat with over 66 percent of the vote, in what ended up being a good cycle for Republicans overall.
But this isn’t a normal election. This is a special election in April, in a climate in which rank-and-file Democrats are seething over the state of the nation. Turnout will be the name of the game, and by all indications, Democrats are far more motivated than Republicans.
In the St. Pete/Florida Politics poll, Weil leads among those who have voted, 51 percent to 43 percent. As of Thursday, in early-voting returns, registered Republicans have just a five-point advantage in who has voted so far. The chances of an upset are small, but they do exist—shockingly. And a lot of that could be because, according to that St. Pete’s/Florida Politics poll, 51 percent of the district’s likely voters approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 45 percent disapprove. Remember, he won by 30 points in November. Given that, it’s not so surprising to see Fine’s anemic early performance.
Uncertainty over this district reportedly played a role in the Trump administration pulling Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be U.N. ambassador. The nomination had already been languishing as House Republicans were loath to (temporarily) lose her vote, given their razor-thin majority in the chamber.
But pulling Stefanik’s nomination doesn’t solve the GOP’s bigger problem. Its ability to maintain party discipline in the House has been genuinely impressive, and has been driven almost exclusively by Trump’s strong-arm efforts to threaten members who stray with primary challenges. They fear Trump. And Elon Musk, who might fund those challengers if a representative crosses the president.
But what happens if Trump is also alienating voters to such an extent that districts that backed him by 30 points are now competitive?
Put another way, Trump keeps his troops in line because they think his backing will give them the best chance to win reelection in 2026. So what happens if being closely tied to Trump makes it less likely they survive? What good is weathering a Republican primary only to end up getting steamrolled by a Democrat in the general election? It’s quite the conundrum, isn’t it?
The closer the margin in Tuesday’s special election, the bigger that conundrum for Republicans. And if Democrats pull off a big upset?
And that brings us back to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Because what we’re watching with her isn’t just a political rupture or a messy MAGA divorce: It’s the same dynamic playing out yet again. She didn’t care when Trump’s attacks were aimed outward at immigrants, Democrats, journalists, LGBTQ+ people, or anyone else in his long parade of supposed enemies. She didn’t care when the threats, the dehumanization, and the violence were directed at someone else’s family, someone else’s community, someone else’s life. She was an enthusiastic participant.
