The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Republican senators are discovering, for the 47th time, that when you hand the nuclear codes to a guy who admires Vladimir Putin’s leadership style, you might eventually get a cozy three-way summit with Putin and Xi to "decide" the fate of Ukraine. President Trump is reportedly floating a trilateral meeting where the U.S., Russia, and China would sit down and sort out someone else’s sovereignty like they’re divvying up a timeshare. Ukraine, naturally, is not on the invite list to the conversation about its own existence. Some GOP senators are now bravely, courageously, saying they’re not thrilled with Trump warming up to Putin like it’s 2016 all over again. They’re suddenly worried that a president who’s spent a decade praising strongmen might sell out an ally, reward an invading autocrat, and undercut NATO — you know, the exact things he’s been openly talking about doing. While Trump fantasizes about a photo-op where he plays global dealmaker between two authoritarian heavyweights, congressional Republicans are trying to remember where they left their spines, their principles, and that whole "party of Reagan standing up to Moscow" branding exercise. What this really is: Trump trying to stage-manage a reality TV peace deal that hands Putin a win, gives Xi a bigger role in European security, and treats Ukraine like a bargaining chip rather than a country. The GOP’s on-camera outrage is cute, but after years of enabling Trump’s crush on foreign strongmen, their shock that he wants to freelance Ukraine policy with Moscow and Beijing feels less like resistance and more like buyer’s remorse with good lighting.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that "America First" means Somalis last, launching a two-front campaign against Somali people: one with airstrikes overseas and the other with federal agents at home. While Trump rants on Truth Social about Somalia being "lawless" and Somalis "violent," his government has quietly overseen more than 400 attacks in Somalia, killing up to 1,500 people — of whom a New America analysis says only about 1.7 percent were militant leaders. So yes, the administration finally found something it can scale: civilian casualties.

Back in the United States, the war comes with subpoenas and battering rams instead of missiles. Homeland Security agents just raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home three weeks before the midterms, trying to build a case to strip a sitting member of Congress of her citizenship and deport her. Her relatives are subpoenaed, her DNA is reportedly seized, and Trump does his usual mob-boss routine: publicly calling her "a terrible person" while insisting he has "nothing to do with it" as his DOJ — already busy harassing Letitia James, ex-FBI leadership, and even Federal Reserve officials — hunts for crimes to fit the enemies he picks on television.

Somali Americans, as Jaylani Hussein notes, are the perfect target in Trumpworld: Black, Muslim, immigrant — the hate trifecta that guarantees applause at rallies and yawns from much of the traditional media. Zaynab Mohamed sums it up: this is what it looks like when a would-be dictator points at his chosen enemies and the security state scrambles to make him happy. The U.S. calls this "counterterrorism" in Somalia and "law enforcement" in Minnesota and D.C., but the pattern is the same: identify a vulnerable group, dehumanize them, unleash state violence, and call it national security.

Steve Inskeep checks in with Ron Brownstein to explore the great MAGA mystery: why Republicans who are visibly exhausted by Trump's policies still march dutifully to the polls and pull the straight-ticket GOP lever like it's a slot machine that only pays out Supreme Court seats. Policy frustration? Sure. Existential dread about where this is going? Absolutely. But party loyalty, negative partisanship, and a decades-long media bubble mean that even people who think Trump is a chaos firehose will keep voting for the arsonist because they’re terrified of the firefighters. What emerges is the real engine of the Trump era: a base that knows it’s getting scammed, doesn’t like the product, but is convinced that abandoning the party would mean handing the country to "socialists," immigrants, and anyone who believes in climate science or counting votes. So the GOP can keep dabbling in authoritarian fantasies, gutting institutions, and mainlining corruption, confident that their own disillusioned voters will still show up, sigh heavily, and press the button for more. It’s not a cult of personality so much as a hostage situation with better branding.

Katie Zacharia just set a new Trump-era land speed record: shortest tenure as White House press secretary. The Guardian’s podcast walks through how she managed to get catapulted off the presidential clown car faster than you can say “bad chyron,” and—more importantly—how this is part of a very familiar pattern. When men in Trumpworld screw up, they get a Fox contract, a book deal, or a new title with the word “senior” stapled to it. When women slip up, they get a one-way ticket to the underside of the bus and a press leak about how they were always a problem anyway. The hosts trace the predictable gender split: men are allowed to be "colorful," "loyal," or "misunderstood"; women are "liabilities" who must be rapidly removed for the good of the Dear Leader’s optics. It’s the Trump HR philosophy: fail up if you’re a guy, fall off a cliff if you’re not. Meanwhile, the episode pivots to Trump’s increasingly frosty relationship with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the not-at-all-terrifying possibility that the United States might simply decide to slide fully into Vladimir Putin’s DMs. Because if there’s one thing this administration loves more than punishing women, it’s flirting with authoritarian strongmen. So we get a two-for-one special: a workplace culture where misogyny is a feature, not a bug, and a foreign policy where backing a democracy at war is optional, but appeasing the Kremlin is always on the table. Women in the West Wing are disposable; Ukraine’s sovereignty is negotiable. The only truly non-negotiable thing, as ever, is Donald Trump’s ego.

The Trump DOJ showed up to court waving a list of 20,000 supposed noncitizen voters in California, and Los Angeles County promptly responded with the bureaucratic version of "this is trash." A sample of 200 names from DOJ’s magic list revealed that about a quarter may actually be born in the United States, nearly half aren’t even active voters, and almost three-quarters have never voted at all. So basically, the Justice Department’s big noncitizen-voting scandal is mostly Americans who don’t vote — truly the greatest threat to the republic. Naturally, armed with this flaming spreadsheet of nonsense, the Trump administration is demanding that California, in the middle of an election, pull out every ballot cast by anyone on DOJ’s list, segregate them, and run real-time citizenship investigations before those votes can be counted. Local officials politely point out that this scheme could mean thousands of lawful ballots never get counted and the results can’t be certified on time. The DOJ’s response? Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter shrugs and offers to "help," conceding they’re only "kind of the most confident" about their own accusations — a fascinating new prosecutorial standard that pairs nicely with authoritarian vote suppression. Meanwhile, Democrats have finally sued Trump in federal court for his broader multi-front campaign to purge voter rolls, block ballot counting, and threaten election officials. The president screams about "vote dilution" by phantom noncitizens while his administration tries to literally stop real citizens’ ballots from ever being tallied. It’s not election integrity; it’s election vandalism with letterhead.

The Trump White House has apparently decided that the best way to end a brutal European land war is to dispatch Steve Witkoff, a Trump-connected real estate developer turned "envoy," to hand Vladimir Putin an updated peace plan. Because when you're dealing with a war of aggression, why not send a guy whose main qualification is knowing how to finance a luxury condo. Jared Kushner, naturally, is dialing in from whatever gilded bunker he's using as a home office, continuing the proud tradition of U.S. foreign policy being run like a family side hustle. The sales pitch to Moscow? Trump has already agreed to lift sanctions on Russian diesel sales and taken other steps the Kremlin finds delightful, and in return he's leaning on Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries. Kushner reportedly "was very direct" in pressing Trump's demand that Ukraine holster its only real leverage, while Trump publicly muses that he’s not sure Zelensky even wants peace and warns that if Ukraine doesn’t take the deal, things will "get worse" for them. So the message from Washington is clear: Putin gets economic relief, Ukraine gets blamed, and the Trump administration gets to cosplay peacemakers while quietly rewarding the guy who launched the war. European leaders and NATO officials dutifully showed up in Oslo to help shape a "framework agreement," only to watch the whole thing be dragged back into the Trump family’s personal mediation reality show. The White House is now openly using U.S. sanctions policy as a carrot for Putin and a stick for Kyiv, trying to strong-arm a democratic ally into concessions while flattering an authoritarian who invaded them. Diplomacy, Trump-style: you break the international order, then send your buddies from the building trades to see what they can get for it on the open market.

France is helpfully running a demo of the "how to break a democracy with spreadsheets and riot cops" package. President Emmanuel Macron’s government, having discovered that people get mad when schools crumble and living costs explode, has responded with the classic centrist favorite: curfews and "massive" police deployments. Over 2,500 people have been scooped into police custody, historic buildings are on fire, and the interior minister is publicly admitting they "underestimated" the unrest, which is one way to describe losing control of multiple cities. Instead of, say, funding schools and public services, the government is bragging about shaving a few decimal points off a 3.6 trillion euro debt while interest payments balloon to 91.2 billion. Public services get strangled, people revolt, and the response is to lock down Paris and Lyon at night like they’re testing a beta version of a police state. Macron solemnly distinguishes between peaceful protesters and "radical far-left groups" and "criminals" — because nothing calms a legitimate social uprising like smearing it as a plot to "bring down the republic" while sending in more armor. Hovering over all this is Marine Le Pen, sitting on top of the polls and waiting to inherit a country already acclimated to curfews, hyper-militarized policing, and emergency-style governance. Macron’s approval is at 15%, his parliamentary support is fractured, and he’s ramming budgets through without final votes. It’s a familiar story: centrist technocrats gut the social contract, then act shocked when the far right shows up to collect on the chaos tab. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness; it dies under floodlights, with riot shields and a deficit-reduction plan.

Thomas Kean Jr. dared to say the quiet part out loud: maybe the president shouldn’t sabotage a $16 billion rail tunnel that millions rely on just because New York and New Jersey didn’t clap hard enough for Dear Leader. He publicly broke with Trump’s blue-state punishment crusade, promising to challenge “anybody who gets in my way, including this president” over the Gateway tunnel funding freeze. In a normal party, that’s called representing your constituents. In Trump’s GOP, it’s called a resignation letter with extra steps. Republican leadership has now helpfully underlined the point by cutting off his life support. Trump-aligned super PACs and the Congressional Leadership Fund are yanking millions in ad buys from Kean’s race (and a few other lost souls) and redeploying the cash to more compliant districts. The message is clear: you can lose your seat while worshipping Trump, but you absolutely cannot keep your seat while crossing him, especially on his pet project of weaponizing federal dollars against disfavored states and cities. So Kean’s Democratic opponent is out-raising him by over $2 million, national Republicans are packing up the circus tent, and his campaign is insisting everything is fine and "well-funded." Technically true, if you define "well-funded" as "until the next internal poll hits Mar-a-Lago." The GOP isn’t even pretending to be a party anymore; it’s a protection racket where infrastructure, constituents, and basic governance all come second to Trump’s need to punish the wrong ZIP codes.

Ana Reyes, a U.S. District Judge and therefore one of those pesky people whose job is to apply the law, refused to let the Justice Department skip out on a key hearing over East Potomac Park — the bit of public land Trump dreams of converting into his own championship-style golf shrine. The DOJ tried to nope out of the proceeding, and Reyes responded by doing the unthinkable in Trumpworld: she insisted the government actually show up and answer questions.

The Trump administration’s response was not "we respect the independence of the judiciary" but rather Trump personally branding her a "crazed lunatic" — because nothing says "I’m totally not abusing power" like publicly smearing a federal judge who gets in the way of your taxpayer-subsidized fairway fantasy. After Reyes had the nerve to yell at a government attorney for their attempted vanishing act, Team Trump promptly alleged she was biased, as if basic accountability is now a form of mental illness. Authoritarian vibes with a side of municipal golf greed — the Trump special.

Donald Trump is now doing hostage diplomacy as a spoiler alert. Asked about reports that the U.S. is closing in on a deal for the release of Stephen Hubbard, an American jailed in Russia, Trump bragged that he’s asked his good friend Vladimir Putin to let Hubbard go and told reporters to "remember that question for a couple of days from now." Because nothing says serious negotiations with a hostile foreign power like treating a U.S. citizen’s freedom as a cliffhanger for the next episode of the Trump Show. This isn’t foreign policy, it’s a cross between a game show and a hostage auction. Rather than a clear, transparent process run by diplomats, we get Trump publicly hinting that he can personally conjure a release from Putin, as though the U.S. government is just a prop and the State Department is the studio audience. The message to autocrats is obvious: jail an American, wait for Trump to need a ratings bump, and enjoy the leverage. Great news if you’re Putin, slightly less great if you’re an American traveling abroad who’d prefer not to be used as a campaign stunt.

Trump has decided subtlety is for losers and is now running on a platform of "vote Republican or America literally burns." At midterm rallies, he's warning that if Democrats win Congress, the U.S. will morph into a Mad Max reboot: burning churches, economic collapse, mutilated children, open borders, and the total destruction of Western civilization. You know, normal stuff for the guy who already occupies the Oval Office. Axios helpfully notes that even if Democrats take Congress, Trump is still president with veto power, but that kind of civics detail really ruins the vibe of an end-times roadshow. Instead of just scaring voters, he's also trying to buy them: Trump is promising $5,000 checks to every adult American if Republicans keep control of Congress. The price tag? Over $1 trillion, with absolutely no plan to pass it, let alone pay for it. So the message is: Democrats will bring a 1929-style Great Depression, but Trump will personally hand you a giant stimulus check as long as you keep his enablers in charge. Fiscal conservatism has now entered its performance-art phase. The rest of the pitch is the greatest hits album of right-wing panic: Democrats will "mutilate your children" via imaginary secret school surgeries, "get rid of the border" and unleash foreign prison populations, take away all your guns so "wild animals" can eat you, and decimate farms that his own tariffs and Iran war are already kneecapping. Actual Democratic proposals—like targeted gun regulations, tech-based border security, and more support for rural communities—are quietly existing in the background, rudely contradicting the horror movie Trump is selling. So the 2026 midterm closing argument from the White House is basically: vote GOP or face societal collapse, gender-bending kidnappers, obese mountain lions, and financial ruin—but also here’s a fantasy $5,000 check if you comply. It's not a campaign; it's a hostage note written on Treasury letterhead.

President Trump and Vice President Vance are rolling out a whistleblower "incentive program" from the Oval Office, which is a bit like asking Richard Nixon to design your secure document disposal system. The White House is bragging that Trump’s "Task Force to Eliminate Fraud" is rooting out "rampant abuse of taxpayer dollars," which is an interesting branding choice from a man who turned the presidency into a family rewards program and treated the Secret Service like his personal hotel loyalty tier. Instead of strengthening independent inspectors general, career auditors, or actual enforcement agencies, they’re dangling cash bounties and buzzwords about "zero tolerance" from the same crew that never met a grift they couldn’t upgrade to first class. Real whistleblower protections involve shielding people from retaliation; this crowd’s idea of "protection" historically involves doxxing them on Truth Social and demanding their prosecution on live TV. So when Trump and Vance say they’re "giving Americans the accountability they deserve," what they mean is: We’re building a hotline for loyalists to narc on political enemies and call it fiscal responsibility. The whole thing sounds less like a governance reform and more like a reality show pitch: "America’s Next Top Informant," produced by the guy who tried to extort Ukraine for campaign dirt and then called that a perfect phone call. If this administration truly had "zero tolerance for fraud," the Oval Office would be the first crime scene they tape off.

The Trump administration looked at the federal agency tasked with protecting elections from hackers and thought: "What if we used them to cook up an excuse to throw out votes we don’t like?" Political appointees at DHS told CISA, the government’s cyber defense shop, to secretly buy a voting machine, hack it, and then quietly hand the results to the White House—oh, and don’t tell the vendor if you find any security holes. Because nothing screams "confidence in democracy" like using the federal government as your personal oppo-research malware lab.

CISA’s career staff, whose job description traditionally did not include staging pretext for a coup, balked. Not least because the people with the skills to actually do that kind of testing had already been laid off in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency purge—Trump’s favorite combo platter of incompetence and authoritarian fantasy. The appointees eventually backed off, but the message was clear: the administration was far more interested in manufacturing future fraud claims than in securing the vote.

Meanwhile, Trump has spent his second term hollowing CISA out like a pumpkin on November 8th. Over 1,000 employees gone, a proposed $700 million budget cut, and election officials across the country saying CISA was "literally nonexistent" during the crucial prep period for the midterms. State officials are now scrambling to replace federal election security with their own money, while losing the one thing they can’t DIY: federal intel on foreign threats. And since the White House has been declassifying sensitive CISA materials to feed its conspiracy fan fiction about 2020, states no longer trust D.C. enough to share information in the first place.

Yet the White House, via spokesperson Lauren Bis, insists Trump has done more than any president to ensure "free and fair" elections—if by "free" you mean free of functioning oversight, and by "fair" you mean the outcome is only valid if Dear Leader approves. Cybersecurity experts are openly saying there’s "no fucking way" states will ever fully cooperate with CISA again. So congratulations to this administration: they didn’t just undermine faith in elections; they kneecapped the one federal agency built to keep the system from being hacked, then tried to repurpose it to hack democracy itself.

The sitting President of the United States spent his post-court-hearing cooldown period doing what any serious statesman would: rage-posting photos of a national park and calling it "Trash Island" because a judge isn't rubber-stamping his golf-flavored renovation scheme fast enough. On Truth Social, Trump helpfully offered the judge some "study" materials — pictures of crews ripping trees out of East Potomac Park — as if the federal judiciary is now just an annex of the Trump Organization's landscaping department. This isn’t just a tantrum about tree removal; it’s the same old pattern where any institution that doesn't instantly bend to Trump's financial whims gets publicly smeared and personally targeted. A judge questions his plan to privatize and "upgrade" public space, and the president responds by trying to delegitimize both the land and the court. The message is clear: national parks are garbage until they can be turned into luxury fairways, and judges are just zoning boards who haven’t yet learned to say "yes, Mr. Trump" on command. So while the Park Service nominally manages East Potomac, Trump is out here branding it like a distressed asset on a bankruptcy spreadsheet, warming up the crowd for whatever opaque, sweetheart redevelopment deal he’s chasing. Public land becomes "trash," judicial independence becomes a PR obstacle, and the presidency once again functions as a glorified real estate marketing arm. American democracy: now with more site prep and fewer checks and balances.

Turns out the army of podcast uncles who helped sell Trump to disaffected young men aren't aging like fine wine so much as like unrefrigerated milk. New polling shows Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and noted alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate are all bleeding support among young men, the very demographic they lovingly groomed with three-hour rants about "free speech" and how doing your own research mostly means watching more of their content. Trump’s numbers with young guys have cratered too, as reality rudely intrudes in the form of an Iran war and an economy that doesn't accept grindset memes as payment. The vibes-based foreign policy and the White House’s botched handling of the Epstein files are even irritating the MAGA content machine itself. Rogan is annoyed about the war, Tucker is mad about the war and Israel, and J.D. Vance has had to admit the administration "screwed up" its Epstein messaging, which is Republican for "we faceplanted so hard even our base noticed." Researchers also keep pointing out that podcasts weren't actually magic Trump-brainwashing rays, but don't worry: influencers still command massive reach and trust, which is great news if you think the future of democracy should be decided by whoever gets the most views on a TikTok about liver supplements. So the manosphere still matters, just less as a coherent Trump propaganda arm and more as a chaotic ecosystem of guys with ring lights occasionally turning on their own monster when the wars get too real or the grift stops being fun. Young men are souring on Trump, sour on the GOP, and not exactly thrilled by Democrats either, which is how you get a political system increasingly shaped by whichever shouty millionaire can best monetize male loneliness. Truly a robust civic culture the founders would recognize — assuming they subscribed to at least three premium Patreons.

NBC heads to a key Pennsylvania district and discovers that, shockingly, some voters prefer their presidents to have an actual plan when they start or escalate wars. Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict is going over about as well as a Truth Social stock tip, with residents describing his approach as confused, erratic, and basically made up on the fly. Instead of coherent policy, people are getting the usual Trump foreign-policy cocktail: tough-guy talk, zero strategy, and a White House that treats war like a mid-season ratings stunt. Voters in a swing district — the supposed heart of Trump’s ‘I alone can fix it’ mythology — are now openly questioning whether maybe, just maybe, the Commander-in-Chief should know what he’s doing before playing missile roulette in the Middle East. So while Trump world brags about ‘strength’ and ‘winning,’ the folks who would be paying the actual price of another endless war are noticing that the emperor not only has no clothes, he also has no briefing book, no plan, and no idea how any of this ends. Perfect conditions, historically, for disastrous decisions made by one very insecure man with the nuclear codes.

Navi Pillay wins the Nobel peace prize for helping document genocide in Gaza, so naturally Trump’s response is to sanction the International Criminal Court like it’s a rogue hedge fund instead of, you know, the place that prosecutes genocide. Having already gone after 13 ICC judges and prosecutors personally—cutting them off from bank accounts, credit cards, and basic financial life support—he’s now escalating to sanctions on the entire court, aiming to choke off its money, its email, its phones, and even its ability to work with human rights groups. The message from Washington: crimes against humanity are fine, but charging the credit card of someone investigating them is a step too far. Marco Rubio, now secretary of state and apparently moonlighting as Trump’s legal bodyguard, is out here spinning this as a brave stand for “American sovereignty,” warning that ICC prosecutors might one day go after Trump officials for detaining migrants. That would be quite a trick, since the ICC doesn’t even have jurisdiction over crimes committed inside the United States. What it does have jurisdiction over: crimes committed on the territory of member states—where other countries, in a shocking twist, also have sovereignty. Trump and Rubio’s actual position is that the U.S. and Israel enjoy a kind of VIP platinum-tier right to commit war crimes abroad with zero consequences, and everyone else is just supposed to clap politely. Most of the world isn’t buying it. Aside from Venezuela—now a handy U.S. vassal state since Trump had Nicolás Maduro snatched—and Chad, which is on the U.S. military-aid drip, governments are largely sticking with the ICC. The EU could actually do something useful here by activating its "blocking statute" to order European banks and companies to ignore Trump’s sanctions, just like it did with Cuba and Iran. And if Dutch banks get nervous about U.S. retaliation, Brussels has its "economic bazooka"—the Anti-Coercion Instrument—that already scared Trump off his Greenland cosplay-colonial project. The punchline: the ICC’s own Rome Statute makes it a crime to intimidate or retaliate against court officials for doing their jobs. Trump and Rubio’s sanctions are basically a case study in that offense. So the international court that prosecutes war crimes may now have grounds to investigate the guy trying to shut it down for investigating war crimes. The Trump presidency: always finding new ways to turn the rule of law into performance art.

Trump’s Education Department project is basically the libertarian fever dream speedrun: starve the agency, fire the staff, then act shocked when it can’t function and declare that as proof it should be abolished. The administration has already slashed the Education Department’s workforce and built a maze of interagency workarounds so that when they finally take a sledgehammer to the building, the grifters can keep the contracts flowing from somewhere with fewer pesky rules. Democrats, belatedly noticing that turning the federal education apparatus into a smoking crater might be bad for students, are planning to use every parliamentary booby trap they can find if they win back the House or Senate. Think aggressive oversight, budget riders, and legislative tripwires designed to make it harder for Trump’s people to quietly disassemble the department and scatter its functions to whichever agency is currently being run by a Federalist Society intern. It’s less “save public education” and more “hide the matches and hope the arsonist gets bored,” but in Trump’s America, that apparently counts as a bold defense of institutions. The bigger play here is ideological: Republicans have spent decades demonizing the Education Department as a socialist indoctrination factory, and now they finally have an administration gleeful enough to try to kill it from the inside. Turning education policy into a patchwork of underfunded state fiefdoms and private voucher playgrounds isn’t a bug, it’s the goal. If Democrats manage to slow-walk the demolition, it won’t be because Trump world suddenly discovered a love of public schools—it’ll be because someone in Congress finally read the fine print on what happens when you let a reality TV landlord redevelop federal agencies like they’re another failing casino.

Republicans spent the last year carving the country up like a rotisserie chicken, dreaming of a glorious 10-seat House cushion from redistricting. After $133 million in TV ads and a national map-slicing spree that looked like a Rorschach test drawn by Karl Rove, their private nightmare scenario is now… a net gain of one seat. That’s right: a coast-to-coast gerrymander-a-thon to move the needle roughly the size of a rounding error.

What started as the "great redistricting war of 2026" has turned into the "wow, that was expensive" war story Republicans tell each other in green rooms. Courts nuked their Missouri map, Utah got forced into creating a Democratic-leaning district, and Gavin Newsom decided to cosplay as a functional party leader and engineered four new solid-blue seats in California, plus a bonus swing seat Democrats think they can also pocket. While the GOP tried to math their way into permanent power, Democrats quietly built their own little map-based guillotine on the West Coast.

Meanwhile, the political climate has gone from "manageable drizzle" to "hurricane of voter rage" thanks to the Iran war, rising inflation, and Trump’s approval sinking like a crypto scam coin. Latino voters in Texas and Florida, whom Republicans briefly hallucinated as a locked-in Trump coalition after 2024, are now fleeing the GOP faster than their mapmakers can draw new lines. Those five new GOP-favored seats in Texas and four in Florida? Party strategists are now hoping to salvage maybe 2–4 in Texas and 2–3 in Florida while nervously watching polls where Democrats are leading even in districts Trump supposedly would have won by double digits.

At the end of this democracy-mutilation tour, Republicans’ worst-case math looks like this: they gain 7 seats from their red-state gerrymanders, Democrats gain 6 from California and Utah, and the whole sprawling, anti-majoritarian project nets the GOP a lonely single seat. And if a blue wave does wipe out even some of these Trump+10 districts? Don’t worry, Republicans already have a scapegoat lined up. After spending years twisting the system to protect him, they’ll blame Trump for the losses and pretend the real problem was not enough gerrymandering.

Donald Trump has decided that the U.S. State Department is now just his Truth Social account, issuing a “Complete and Total Endorsement” of Benjamin Netanyahu and warning that “anyone other than Bibi” is the “wrong Leader” for Israel. Subtle as ever, he announces that if Israeli voters pick someone else, America will “have to do this work ourselves,” which he is “not inclined” to do. So the president’s official foreign policy is now: elect my favorite indicted strongman or you’re on your own. Very normal superpower behavior. JD Vance, meanwhile, is suddenly a born-again believer in not interfering in foreign elections. Asked to back Netanyahu, he shrugs that he’s “not anti-endorsing him; I’m not pro-endorsing him” and insists he only endorses “American candidates.” This would be more convincing if he hadn’t flown to Hungary earlier this year to stump for Viktor Orbán, the right’s favorite illiberal democracy cosplayer, who then lost after 16 years in power. Apparently, meddling in foreign politics is fine as long as you’re helping an authoritarian buddy and not contradicting Trump’s latest fan letter. Vance still manages to squeeze in a little flattery, calling Trump’s backing “the most effective endorsement in American or international political history,” like he’s auditioning for a future endorsement of his own. And he is: the vice president coyly says he hasn’t decided about running in 2028, but is pretty sure Trump will rush to bless him “right away, right at the beginning.” U.S. foreign policy, domestic politics, and the 2028 presidential race all reduced to one man’s endorsement economy and a veep who thinks principles are something you announce on cable, then waive for your favorite autocrats.