THE BENIGN EXPLANATION FOR TRUMP'S MRI REMARKS ISN'T GREAT FOR HIM EITHER

AP won the internet yesterday with this snarky headline:

Trump says he’ll release MRI results but doesn’t know what part of his body was scanned

AP reports:

President Donald Trump said he’ll release the results of his MRI test that he received in October.

“If you want to have it released, I’ll release it,” the Republican president said Sunday during an exchange with reporters as he traveled back to Washington from Florida.

He said the results of the MRI were “perfect.”

... Trump added Sunday that he has “no idea” on what part of his body he got the MRI.

“It was just an MRI,” he said. “What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.”

Here's a fuller version of that last quote. Trump was nasty to the reporter who asked him the specifics of the MRI. (The reporter was a woman, of course -- Trump hates female reporters who ask him unflattering questions.)

“What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” the reporter asked

“I have no idea, it was just an MRI- what part of the body?" Trump fired back. "It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it — I got perfect part, which you would be incapable of doing! Goodnight, everybody. You, too!”

Many people assume that if he denied it was a brain MRI, then that's exactly what it must have been.

"If Trump denies they did a MRI of his brain, then it sounds like they did a MRI of his brain," opined Bluesky user Zobear....

"If you had an MRI and didn’t know what it was taken for, it definitely was the brain," agreed Bluesky user bd-nola....

"Tell us you had a brain MRI without saying you had a brain MRI," said comedian Hayden Black.

"Trump’s reply to what the MRI scanned being 'it’s not the brain' is a dead giveaway it was definitely the brain," observed Bluesky user kbethany.

But I have a confession to make: I had an MRI in 2022 and I didn't remember what part of the body it was for until I looked it up this morning.

I'm a fairly healthy 66-year-old who had good employer-based medical coverage three years ago and now have Medicare (traditional) and a good Medicare supplement. So I get attentive medical care. I'm being monitored for a few conditions that aren't life-threatening or significantly life-impairing, but the doctors want to make sure they don't get worse. My memory was that the MRI was for one of those conditions, which was focused below the neck. It was for another condition below the neck.

So maybe I have dementia too! But I don't think so. I'm not a brilliant thinker, but I come here every day and write these posts and I think they're a sign that my brain is working fine. No doctor has ever asked me to take that cognitive test Trump talks about incessantly.

Obviously, Trump's doctors give him that test. They must be monitoring something -- maybe the aftereffects of a stroke or mini-stroke? I'm sure they think he's at risk of dementia -- his father had it.

But it's possible that he's getting so much medical care, for so many conditions, that he genuinely can't remember why he had the MRI, despite having a perfectly adequate memory. (He certainly has a high-functioning memory when it comes to grudges.)

We've seen the hand bruise and the swollen ankles and the stumbles. We've seen the naps. We know that the White House has acknowledged that Trump suffers from chronic venous insufficiency. And we know he's been talking about heaven a lot, which suggests that his health isn't great and he's sharp enough to understand that.

Regular readers know that I don't think Trump has dementia -- mild cognitive impairment, maybe, but not dementia, at least for now. (MCI can lead to dementia, but doesn't always.) On the other hand, I think Trump's physical health could be quite bad. This doesn't mean he's on the verge of death -- doctors can keep people in poor health alive and more or less functional for a long time -- but it could mean his body is more at risk of failure than his mind.

REPUBLICAN RESISTANCE TO TRUMPISM SEEMS AWFULLY SELECTIVE

This is good, I guess:

Republican-led committees in the Senate and the House say they will amplify their scrutiny of the Pentagon after a Washington Post report revealing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea several weeks ago....

Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s top Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.” The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

The leaders of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Alabama) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), followed suit late Saturday.

If Hegseth ordered a "double tap" in order to kill people on the vessel who were no longer capable of doing harm, that's a war crime -- or, since we're not officially at war, a simple murder. If this is a law-abiding, civilized country, there should be agreement across the political spectrum that it's unlawful to issue orders of this kind.

But I don't think the public gets it. As I noted yesterday, in a recent CBS poll that was terrible for President Trump otherwise, respondents said they approved of using the military to attack boats suspected of smuggling drugs into the United States by a 53%-47% margin.

If Americans want drastic actions taken to deal with the problem of substance abuse in America, I'm not surprised. Here are some numbers from a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation survey:

... a majority of adults say they have felt the impact of the substance use crisis facing the country. Two-thirds say either they or a family member have been addicted to alcohol or drugs, experienced homelessness due to addiction, or experienced a drug overdose leading to an emergency room visit, hospitalization, or death.

Three in ten U.S. adults (29%) say they or someone in their family have ever been addicted to opioids, including prescription painkillers and illegal opioids like heroin.

I think ordinary Americans feel that the widespread availability of opioids and other bad drugs is evidence that people in power don't care about them -- and as a result, many Americans are inclined to take Donald Trump at his word when he says he's cutting through the bullshit and actually solving the problem. It's worth pushing back against this, but it won't be easy.

If Americans approve of boat bombings that aren't legal, that's no surprise. We've all consumed many hours of film and television featuring cops and soldiers who flout the law because, the plot tells us, it's the most effective way to get the bad guys.

In Washington, I'd like to see some bipartisan concern about Trump's corruption, and his warm embrace of high-rolling criminals, like this clemency beneficiary:

President Trump has set free a private equity executive who had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of victims.

David Gentile, 59, a onetime resident of Nassau County, N.Y., had reported to prison on Nov. 14, and was released on Wednesday....

More than 1,000 people submitted statements attesting to their losses, according to prosecutors, who characterized the victims as “hardworking, everyday people,” including small business owners, farmers, veterans, teachers and nurses.

“I lost my whole life savings,” one wrote, adding, “I am living from check to check.”

I'd also like to see bipartisan outrage about the pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. The New York Times tells us in a rare pull-no-punches headline that Hernández "flooded America with cocaine."

He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.

At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

That's a drug story and a story about Trump's love of high-level corruption -- his own and other people's.

I know that the president's pardon power is all but absolute. I know that it's a lot easier to target Hegseth, whom many Republicans might want to drive from office even though they remain loyal to Trump.

But if, as the conventional wisdom now tells us, Republicans are slowly breaking with Trump and looking ahead to a post-Trump future, I'd love it if they'd focus on the way Trump wallows in corruption and hands out pardons because he likes the recipients -- or because they've done something for him.

And because the AI and crypto industries own virtually everyone in our government, I assume it's unreasonable to hope that there'll ever be oversight of this corruption:

Since January, [David] Sacks, 53, has occupied one of the most advantageous moonlighting roles in the federal government, influencing policy for Silicon Valley in Washington while simultaneously working in Silicon Valley as an investor. Among his actions as the White House’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar:

* Mr. Sacks has offered astonishing White House access to his tech industry compatriots and pushed to eliminate government obstacles facing A.I. companies. That has set up giants like Nvidia to reap an estimate of as much as $200 billion in new sales.

* Mr. Sacks has recommended A.I. policies that have sometimes run counter to national security recommendations, alarming some of his White House colleagues and raising questions about his priorities.

* Mr. Sacks has positioned himself to personally benefit. He has 708 tech investments, including at least 449 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence that could be aided directly or indirectly by his policies, according to a New York Times analysis of his financial disclosures.

I guess I'll take whatever bipartisan oversight we can get, but I want more.

THIS IS WHY I RARELY USE THE WORD "DISTRACTION" IN REFERENCE TO TRUMP

Are we on the verge of war with Venezuela?

President Trump is shutting down Venezuelan airspace “in its entirety” amid a surge in drug trafficking from the South American nation, he announced Saturday morning.

“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY. Trump wrote in a morning Truth Social post.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The measure comes just two days after the president said he would begin bombing land-based drug trafficking targets.

“The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon,” Trump told reporters.

This is happening just after Trump renewed talk of Joe Biden's autopen:

In an angry social media post, President Donald Trump said that he would terminate every document his predecessor Joe Biden signed with an autopen and that if Biden lied about using one, he would be charged with perjury....

“Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect,” Trump said on Truth Social. “The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States.”

You'll say that all this is an effort to distract us from news that's bad for Trump: the passage of a bill calling for the release of Jeffrey Epstein files, or the revelation that Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike to kill survivors of a boat bombing by U.S. forces, undoubtedly in violation of the laws of war.

But Trump already had a distraction. This week, two National Guard troops were shot in D.C. by an Afghan national who came to the U.S. during the Biden years, even though he was ultimately approved for asylum by the Trump administration. I want to be completely cynical here: If Trump had chosen to do so, he could have milked this shooting incident for days. He could have wrapped himself in the flag and made the Marine who was fatally shot, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, a household name. We've seen how the right does this -- think of Laken Riley or Charlie Kirk. But Trump doesn't seem at all interested, and when asked about her, he quickly began talking about himself.

Q: Do you plan to attend Sarah's funeral? TRUMP: I haven't thought about it yet, but it's certainly something I can conceive of. I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 27, 2025 at 7:54 PM

Trump (and his handlers) seem to be actively preventing this story from being America's main focus.

And I'd argue that the bombing of alleged drug boats is actually a good issue for Trump -- in a recent CBS poll that was otherwise terrible for him (40% job approval, 60% disapproval), Trump's boat attacks received majority support.

But a war in Venezuela? Not so much.

And I can't see how pardoning the narcotrafficking ex-president of Honduras could be a shrewd distraction for Trump.

Trump looks for distractions sometimes, but more often he seems to be the one who's distracted. It's as if he has no attention span and is trying to match the rapid-topic-switch energy of Fox News or social media. And I'm not sure why his aides (particularly Stephen Miller and Russell Vought) and his media propagandists didn't want Trump and the rest of the right-wing movement to go into sustained-mourning mode after Beckstrom died, the way they all did after Kirk's death.

I think Trump's team is rather manic -- think about Miller's demand for greater and greater arrest and deportation numbers. And Vought's crew has so many missions to accomplish in Trump's term that they filled a 900-page manual. You might be surprised to learn that Project 2025's economic plan isn't exactly "Let's move all the jobs to the U.S." The manual calls for "A hemisphere-centered approach to industry and energy."

First, the United States must do everything possible, with both resources and messaging, to shift global manufacturing and industry from more distant points around the globe (especially from the increasingly hostile and human rights-abusing PRC) to Central and South American countries. “Re-hemisphering” manufacturing and industry closer to home will not only eliminate some of the more recent supply-chain issues that damaged the U.S. economy but will also represent a significant economic improvement for parts of the Americas in need of growth and stabilization.

You thought these guys wanted all the factories moved stateside? Silly you!

The people around Trump have him pushing what's been called "the Donroe Doctrine":

“He believes this is the neighborhood we live in,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Latin America until June, who continues to advise the White House. “And you can’t be the pre-eminent global power if you’re not the pre-eminent regional power.”

... Mr. Trump’s approach appears purely pragmatic: What is in it for the United States?

Stronger control of the hemisphere, and particularly Latin America, promises major benefits. Ample natural resources, strategic security positions and lucrative markets are all in play....

Some foreign policy analysts believe that Mr. Trump would like to divide the world with China and Russia into spheres of influence. In recent months, top U.S. officials have explained their strategy in those terms.

And this makes sense to Trump at a cruder level.

To a president who grew up in New York — where businessmen, politicians and mob bosses battle for turf — controlling a neighborhood is common sense, former officials and analysts say.

So what appear to be distractions are just evidence that the zealots, and their semi-informed leader, are in a hurry to remake the world in their image. Trump wants to exploit the hemisphere for profit -- and also wants to prosecute every enemy Joe Biden pardoned. He seems distracted because there's a lot of evildoing left to be done, on multiple fronts.

WE SHOULDN'T LET TRUMP'S IMMIGRATION VIEWPOINT BE AMERICA'S DEFAULT

President Trump went on an anti-immigrant tirade yesterday, as AP reports:

President Donald Trump says he wants to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations and is promising to seek to expel millions of immigrants from the United States by revoking their legal status. He is blaming immigrants for problems from crime to housing shortages as part of “social dysfunction” in America and demanding “REVERSE MIGRATION.”

His most severe social media post against immigration since returning to the Oval Office in January came after the shooting Wednesday of two National Guard members who were patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital under his orders.

Trump's Truth Social posts were full of falsehoods -- I'd call them "lies," but I'm certain that Trump believes every word he wrote. AP tries to debunk some of the untruths.

The president said on Truth Social that “most” foreign-born U.S. residents “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels” as he blamed them for crime across the country that is predominantly committed by U.S. citizens.

There are roughly 50 million foreign-born residents in the U.S., and multiple studies have found that immigrants are generally less likely to commit crimes than are people who were born in the country.

The perception that immigration breeds crime “continues to falter under the weight of the evidence,” according to a review of academic literature last year in the Annual Review of Criminology.

“With few exceptions, studies conducted at both the aggregate and individual levels demonstrate that high concentrations of immigrants are not associated with increased levels of crime and delinquency across neighborhoods and cities in the United States,” it said.

A Census Bureau report issued late last year and based on 2023 figures says that the majority of foreign-born residents are naturalized citizens.

And despite Trump's obsessive invocation of Joe Biden in one of his Truth Social posts and elsewhere in his public statements -- he vowed to "terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen" -- the Census Bureau notes that most of the immigrants in this country came here long before the presidencies of Biden and Trump:

Among immigrants, 15.2% have graduate or professional degrees -- a higher percentage than in the general U.S. population. This includes 325,000 foreign-born doctors. Among immigrants aged 16 and older, 63.7% are in the workforce, the Census Bureau says; the civilian labor force participation rate for Americans overall is 62.4%.

In the second of Trump's anti-immigrant rants last night on Truth Social, he asserted that

hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.

I recently returned from a trip to Minneapolis and other parts of Minnesota, and I can assure you that this is not the case. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you that Trump's numbers are wrong: there are an estimated 80,000 Somalis in Minnesota, not "hundreds of thousands," which means they're slightly more than 1% of the state's population of approximately 5.8 million.

All this is accompanied by the usually fact-challenged nonsense portraying immigrants and refugees as parasites:

A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America....

It doesn't seem to matter how many times fact-checkers debunk claims of massive payouts to immigrants -- the haters just keep returning to this talking point.

Obviously, we'll never persuade committed Republican voters that immigrants aren't leeches. But there are pepople in the middle who don't seem certain what to think about immigrants but apparently default to the belief that immigrants are takers.

I think that helps explain the results that show up in poll after poll, like a recent national survey from Marquette University. When asked, "Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries?," 58% of respondents favored deportation, while 42% were opposed. But when they were asked in a follow-up, "Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record?," support for deportation dropped to 44% and opposition rose to 56%.

That tells me that many Americans believe that the typical immigrant who's in the country illegal isn't working, isn't contributing, isn't trying to be a responsible individual -- and that seems to be because the loudest voices create that impression of undocumented immigrants and foreign-born people in America in general. I don't know how we turn that around, but if we could find a way, it seems that a majority of Americans would reject Trump's sinister view of the foreign-born.

KOCHISM + PALEOCONSERVATISM = TERRORISM?

Two National Guard troops were shot in D.C. yesterday, reportedly by an Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal. He'd worked with Americans during the Afghan War and was let into the U.S. in 2021, after the fall of Kabul. Republicans have long criticized the Biden-era program that vetted Lakanwal, but both CNN and ABC are reporting that the Trump administration granted asylum to Lakanwal in April of this year.

Josh Marshall says:

With DC shooter now identified as an Afghan national not the antifa secret agent White House hoped for a good time to remember the Trump admin has gutted domestic anti-terrorism capacity and reassigned many to finding grandmothers to arrest at immigration hearings.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) November 26, 2025 at 11:06 PM

This a point also made by former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, now a Trump critic:

Maybe the admin should reverse its decision to de-prioritize counter terrorism in favor of deportations

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— Adam Kinzinger (@adamkinzinger.substack.com) November 26, 2025 at 10:15 PM

Kinzinger says:

So in this terrible shooting of these Guard members today, one of the least surprising development[s] was the immediate jump to blame the left -- one person calling for deploying the military against the left -- and what we find out is it was actually an Afghan national that actually was granted his asylum under Trump, but I don't blame Trump for this. But the reality is, the FBI has pulled, and all of the defense security establishment has pulled, all of their focus on anti-terrorism and put it on the deportation. I'm just going to say that: a terrorist attack, and for the last year, the defense establishment and the FBI have pivoted from anti-terrorism to deportation. Use that for what you will.

Clearly, there's blame to go around. You might hear about a Justice Department inspector general's report from this past summer stating that 55 Afghan nationals let in under the Biden-era Afghan refugee program were found to be on terror watch lists. But please note that Trump Justice Department concluded that vetting and monitoring of these individuals continued, to the apparent satisfaction of the current team at DOJ:

After investigations, the FBI eventually removed 46 evacuees from the watchlist, determining that they posed no threat to the homeland.

However, nine remained in the terror database as of July 2024 and eight were in the US....

Despite the 55 individuals flagged, the DOJ inspector general determined that overall “each of the responsible elements of the FBI effectively communicated and addressed any potential national security risks identified.”

I'm not ready to jump to A.R. Moxon's conclusion:

Republicans are purposely and strategically incompetent on antiterror; they hope for violent attacks they can frame as terrorist, to justify accelerating the terrorist violence they’re already enacting against the US civilian population.

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— A.R. Moxon (@juliusgoat.bsky.social) November 27, 2025 at 7:23 AM

But I think Republicans have less motivation to be diligent on terrorism. They know that the George W. Bush administration missed the 9/11 warning signs, then had stratospherically high approval ratings in the aftermath of the attack.

Also, Republicans are reluctant to use government to solve problems that don't affect them personally and don't affect people they care about (mostly their rich donors). That's an Ayn Rand/Koch brothers approach to government. They don't really want to preserve government social programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, because they don't need them. They assume they can pay to shield themselves from consumer fraud. They're certain they can afford to live far from environmentally contaminated areas, and can relocate to dodge the effects of climate change. The schools their kids attend don't seem to have much gun violence.

They'll police social behavior -- banning abortions, cracking down on LGBTQ people -- because doing so wins them votes. They're pro-gun because their voters love guns. After 9/11, they focused on jihadist threats here and abroad because it was good politics, and because neo-imperialists gained the upper hand in their party.

But now the dominant strain of the Republican Party is "America First" (with an asterisk indicating that military adventurism aimed at Latin America is cool). They've lost interest in protecting Americans from terrorism. Why bother? They have good security, and so do their rich friends.

That's why the Trump administration doesn't seem to be trying very hard to prevent attacks of the kind we saw yesterday. The Trumpers are obsessed with native-born left and centrist critics -- "the enemy from within," they call us -- and with immigrants from Latin America. They don't seem to care about other dangers. And that may at least partly explain why yesterday's attack happened.

THE BALLROOM IS SUPPOSED TO BE TOO BIG

There's something hilariously earnest about the lede of this Washington Post story:

Trump wants a bigger White House ballroom. His architect disagrees.

President Donald Trump has argued with the architect he handpicked to design a White House ballroom over the size of the project, reflecting a conflict between architectural norms and Trump’s grandiose aesthetic, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Trump’s desire to go big with the project has put him at odds with architect James McCrery II, the people said, who has counseled restraint over concerns the planned 90,000-square-foot addition could dwarf the 55,000-square-foot mansion in violation of a general architectural rule: don’t build an addition that overshadows the main building.

You're saying that the addition might overshadow the main building because of its size? For Trump, I'm sure that's the point.

Trump is obsessed with this project, as we all know.

Trump’s intense focus on the project and insistence on realizing his vision over the objections of his own hire, historic preservationists and others concerned by a lack of public input in the project reflect his singular belief in himself as a tastemaker and obsessive attention to details....

Multiple administration officials have acknowledged that Trump has at times veered into micromanagement of the ballroom project, holding frequent meetings about its design and materials.

One positive aspect of this is that Trump has less time to obsess over other possible monuments to his own grandiosity. But I'm sure he hasn't forgotten about them:

In Sept., the IRS granted tax-exempt status to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcar...

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— Zach Everson (@zacheverson.com) November 23, 2025 at 8:22 PM

Maybe a "charity" called the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy is just another way of funneling money into Trump's pocket. But I'm sure Trump would like to be memorialized at Rushmore somehow. As AP reported in 2021:

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on Thursday said she gave former president Donald Trump a $1,100 bust depicting the president on Mount Rushmore last year because she knew it was something he wanted to receive.

The gift was presented to Trump when he visited South Dakota on July 3 for an Independence Day fireworks celebration. The Mount Rushmore miniature stood 4 feet (1.3 meters) and depicted Trump alongside former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

It's widely understood that adding a fifth face to Mount Rushmore would be impossible -- The New York Times published a good explainer in June. However:

Perhaps more likely than a fifth president on Mount Rushmore are other ideas already in motion. Mr. Trump himself has proposed a National Garden of American Heroes, a sculpture garden to honor 250 Americans. His administration already has a list of potential honorees, but not a place for them. South Dakota officials are pitching the Black Hills as a home, within view of Mount Rushmore.

I suspect that the National Garden of American Heroes could evolve into a National Garden of Trump, and that Trump might not only want it placed "within view of Mount Rushmore" but might also want it to be so large and unsubtle that it begins to overwhelm Mount Rushmore, the way Trump's ballroom, if it's ever built, would overwhelm the rest of the White House.

I've never been to Mount Rushmore. Maybe it isn't possible to build a tacky, oversize monument to Trump that diminshes Rushmore's grandeur. But if there is a way, it's easy to believe that Trump will find it.

And no, I don't think we'll ever have a time when Trump is so widely reviled that nothing is built in his honor and anything that honors him is destroyed or remade. In the reddest parts of America, alas, I think Trump will remain a sacred figure.

Maybe we should be pleased that Trump is micromanaging the design of his ballroom -- this monomania probably allows us to avoid a Trump monument building boom all over the country.

WHAT IS CHUCK SCHUMER REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT -- ELECTABILITY OR BLOCKING PROGRESSIVISM?

Even before I knew any of the specifics, I assumed that the Democratic senators involved in this dispute with Chuck Schumer were right:

A group of influential liberal senators is directly challenging Senator Chuck Schumer’s approach to the midterm elections and President Trump....

The coalition of at least half a dozen senators, who call themselves the “Fight Club,” is unhappy with how Mr. Schumer and his fellow senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand, the head of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, have chosen, recruited and, they argue, favored candidates aligned with the establishment.

The mutinous mood of the senators — who include Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — reflects the widespread doubts among the Democratic base that party leaders in Congress have a strong vision and a winning strategy for returning to power.

... Other senators who have participated in the group’s actions have included Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

They are focused on contested primaries for open seats in Minnesota, Michigan and Maine.

Schumer's candidates, you won't be surprised to learn, lean moderate. He insists that his concern is electability.

The “Fight Club” senators ... worry that leadership is using a dated playbook and risks dampening the party’s energy and desire for new kinds of candidates.

Alex Nguyen, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, disputed that notion. “Our North Star is winning the Senate majority in 2026 and any decision is made to achieve that goal,” he said in a statement.

But is that true? Is Schumer trying to ensure victories -- or is he trying to keep the Democratic caucus as middle-of-the-road and corporate-friendly as possible?

Let's look at Minnesota. Members of the Fight Club have released a video endorsement of Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan for the Senate seat being vacated by Tina Smith.

“All the way, she’s taken on powerful corporate interests,” Mr. Van Hollen says in the video.

Mr. Markey echoes, “Powerful corporate interests in every battle.”

It seems clear that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee prefers Representative Angie Craig. Craig won her House race last year in part by swinging right:

“I really believe that voters want someone who has a moderate, centrist voting record,” Crag said.

She distanced herself from Biden on immigration issues, traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border with 17 GOP lawmakers and appearing on Fox News to discuss the need to address what she called a “national security issue.” She also ran ads condemning the influx of fentanyl into the United States, which the GOP has blamed on lax border security.

Another point of contention was Biden’s effort to forgive college loan debt, which she said rankled those without a college degree.

And Craig supported a GOP attempt to overturn the Biden administration’s protections for thousands of small streams, wetlands and other waterways that the GOP called an environmental overreach....

Steven Schier, professor emeritus of political science at Carleton College, said ... [the] messaging Craig adopted to appeal to conservative voters had a definite Republican cast.... “At times I watched her ads and asked, ‘Wait a minute, is she a MAGA candidate?’” Schier joked.

Craig might appeal to Trump voters, but Flanagan inspires - I know this is crazy talk - voters in her own party.

Annie Wells, whose crop art recreation of Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s Senate campaign poster hung in the State Fair Agriculture Horticulture building, doesn’t want a candidate who tries to meet Republicans in the middle.

“She’s one of the Democrats that’s actually trying to stand up and do things,” Wells said. “I’m frustrated with a lot of the Democrats that are not being bold enough in response to what’s happening at the federal level.”

... listen to how Flanagan recently framed her campaign against Craig —in classic Midwestern style, without naming or directly attacking Craig — in front of more than 1,000 supporters at at a brewery in northeast Minneapolis: “Will we send Washington the same old people and the same old solutions — or will we be bolder and fight harder and get more done for people?”

Flanagan is of Native American descent and grew up on public assistance. She was the executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund of Minnesota, where she helped lead a successful battle to raise the state's minimum wage. She's proudly anti-Trump and anti-plutocrat.

Trump and Republicans have “ransacked our government” and are “spitting in the faces of millions of people” who stand to lose health care or food assistance, Flanagan said at [a] rally....

Flanagan also lobbed attacks at corporations and big-money politics.

Voters need to elect people who “have the guts to fight against these powerful corporate interests who are pulling the strings these days,” Flanagan said.

In a poll of the potential matchup conducted early this year, Flanagan beat Craig 52% to 22%. She's clearly the candidate Democratic voters would prefer.

But is Craig a better general election candidate? Not really.

GQR poll (Released September 20)

Minnesota Senate (initial vote)
🟦Peggy Flanagan 46%
🟥Republican candidate 44%
—
Minnesota Senate (initial vote)
🟦Angie Craig 47%
🟥Republican candidate 43% https://t.co/y283I76hI1 pic.twitter.com/LQY6we2Xwo

— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) October 10, 2025

Minnesota might be nearly a purple state in a good year for the GOP, but 2026 is likely to be a bad year for the GOP. So why not favor the candidate preferred by the party's own voters?

Also, there's a good chance that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will be running against Royce White, a former pro basketball player who lost to Amy Klobuchar in the race for Minnesota's other Senate seat by nearly 16 points last year. White, who's raised the most money of any GOP candidate, has an been seen with "ALEX JONES WAS RIGHT" tattoo written on his head and has some thoughts about various issues:

“Women have become too mouthy,” White said on [Steve] Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “As the Black man in the room, I’ll say that.” Elsewhere, White denounced the “Jewish lobby” and the “Jewish elite” and called Israel “the linchpin of the new world order.” He described the L.G.B.T.Q. movement as “Luciferian” and wrote that it’s “the brainchild of radical feminists and their cucked men.”

At the State Fair this summer, his behavior was Trumpian:

Craig made the rounds to the more conservative-leaning Farm Bureau booth and went in for a handshake with Republican Senate candidate Royce White at his fair booth last week.

White declined the handshake, saying he thought Democrats were “communists.”

That's his response to the moderate Democrat.

I realize that the GOP might find a more electable candidate than White. I realize that Trump might not be as unpopular next November as he is now. But the odds are that this will be a good year for Democrats in Minnesota no matter who runs. So why would Schumer put his thumb on the scale for Craig, unless he'd actually prefer a centrist to a progressive?

Is he still afraid of the wrath of the Baileys? Or does he fear the possibility of progressive change?

YOU CAN'T PROPAGANDIZE YOUR WAY PAST PERSONAL ECONOMIC PAIN

Axios notes today that even many Republicans hate the Trump economy.

Voters increasingly disapprove of the way President Trump is handling the economy and believe his policies are raising prices, according to a new poll from CBS News/YouGov.

... The discontent is ... showing up in significant numbers among Republican voters, as the affordability crisis is affecting sentiment within Trump's own base.

... Trump's approval on the economy has fallen to 36%, down from 51% in March, per the poll.

A majority say his policies are raising food and grocery costs.

... Four in 10 Republicans say he portrays prices and inflation as better than they really are. This group was also more likely to say prices are going up.

Trump's poll numbers are bad, but his worst numbers are on the economy in general, and inflation in particular.

On the economy, why is Trump struggling to maintain the support of his base, which is still mostly with him on immigration (and other subjects, like crime)? The reason is simple: People judge the economy based on their own experiences of it. They don't feel they need news outlets or experts to tell them how to feel about it.

Which means that the propaganda tricks that Trump, his fellow Republicans, and the right-wing media use to keep them on board on other issues don't work as well.

It's fairly easy to make Americans -- especially right-wing Americans -- angry about undocumented immigrants: just play up every violent crime committed by an immigrant, claim that immigrants are disproportionately violent, and never mention the fact that most immigrants are here to work and actually contribute to the economy by providing labor and then spending their wages on goods and services sold by Americans. Most Americans don't have enough direct contact with these demonized immigrants, so they believe what Republican politicians and their favorite media sources tell them.

Most Americans don't know from personal experience whether crime is rising or falling (it's falling now), so they trust politicians and media outlets (not always right-wing outlets) that tell them crime is unusually scary nowadays.

It's easy to use propaganda to sell a war, as we learned in the early 2000s -- people didn't come to the question of Iraq with a knowledge base of their own, so they trusted what they were told.

And Americans don't necessarily understand economics in the abstract. They think it's bad for the government to have debt (even though, up to a point, it really isn't). They think federal budget outlays for certain programs (foreign aid, for instance) are much higher than they actually are.

But they know when they're hurting. They know when this is happening to them and don't need validation from experts:

Soaring electricity prices are triggering a wave of power shutoffs nationwide, leaving more Americans in the dark as unpaid bills pile up. Although there is no national count of electricity shutoffs, data from select utilities in 11 states show that disconnections have risen in at least eight of them since last year, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA). In some areas, such as New York City, the surge has been dramatic — with residential shutoffs in August up fivefold from a year ago, utility filings show.

In Pennsylvania ... power shutoffs have risen 21 percent this year, with more than 270,000 households losing electricity, according to state data through October. The average electricity bill in the state, meanwhile, has risen 13 percent from a year ago, as utilities upgrade electric grids to accommodate a burst of new data centers....

And while I know that many people believe that Americans don't understand their own economic situations and therefore were propagandized to believe in a mythical Biden "vibecession" -- Paul Krugman thinks we may be in a Trump "vibecession" now, or at least an economy that's not as bad as people think it is -- people actually know when they're struggling. Here's a story from December 2024, shortly after Democrats lost the presidential election:

Credit card defaults are at their highest level since 2010 as consumers feel increasingly stretched.

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Dec. 29), card lenders wrote off $46 billion in seriously delinquent loans in the first nine months of this year, a 50% jump over 2023. That’s the highest level in 14 years, the report said, citing industry data compiled by BankRegData....

“High-income households are fine, but the bottom third of U.S. consumers are tapped out,” said Mark Zandi, the head of Moody’s Analytics. “Their savings rate right now is zero.”

... the share of consumers carrying at least some card debt is pervasive, at 74.5%, per PYMNTS Intelligence research. While that percentage is more or less static across income levels, it leaps to more than 90% for consumers living paycheck to paycheck and having trouble paying their bills.

... The research also showed that roughly 40% of struggling consumers reached their limits with some regularity.

They're paying off that debt at near-record-high interest rates. They were unwise to think that Trump could lower prices -- prices generally don't decrease unless there's a recession -- but they haven't received any other form of relief, and many prices are still rising. And they know it.

In 2024, Trump could persuade millions of voters that he'd been a pretty good president in his first term because he had the good fortune to coast on three of the best years of recovery following the 2008 crash. He said that that none of the disruptions of the 2020 pandemic year could be blamed on him, and millions of Americans, lacking expert knowledge of epidemiology or public health, took him at his word.

But he can't bullshit them now. They know their own economic struggles. Propaganda doesn't work when they're shutting off your electricity.

WHY MAMDANI'S OVAL OFFICE RHETORIC REMINDS ME OF OBAMA'S 2004 CONVENTION SPEECH

I was at Emptywheel reading passages from the transcript of Zohran Mamdani's Oval Office press conference with Donald Trump, and I think I understand why Trump seemed so pleasantly surprised by the mayor-elect.

We know that Mamdani shrewdly edited his message so it would resonate with Trump. He was able to do that because a fair amount of what Mamdani wants actually is what Trump wants, or at least what Trump thinks he wants. I genuinely believe Trump wants a contented, prosperous America, even though his policies can't possibly get us there. Obviously, Trump wants a country that gives much more power to straight white men and that's universally right-wing, and he wants to brutalize everyone who's uncomfortable with the means he uses to get us to his utopia. But I think he wants the citizens of his autocracy to be happy, the way Fox News tells him we could all be happy in a purely right-wing America.

So the policy goals Mamdani stressed sounded good to him.

Mr. Trump: You know, we had some interesting conversation, and some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have. A big thing on cost. The new word is “affordability.” ...

Mr. Trump: What we did is, we discussed crime. More than ICE, per se, we discussed crime. And he doesn’t want to see crime, and I don’t want to see crime, and I have very little doubt that we’re not going to get along on that issue. And he wants to — and he said some things that were very interesting, very interesting, as to housing construction, and he wants to see houses go up. He wants to see a lot of houses created, a lot of apartments built, et cetera. You know, we actually — people would be shocked, but I want to see the same thing....

He wants to see no crime. He wants to see housing being built. He wants to see rents coming down, all the things that I agree with. We may disagree on how we get there. The rent coming down — I think one of the things I really gleaned very, very much today, he would like to see them come down ideally by building a lot of additional housing. That’s the ultimate way. He agrees with that, and so do I.

But, if I read the newspapers, and the stories — I don’t hear that. But I heard him say it today.

If you consume large quantities of right-wing propaganda, as Trump does, you believe that Democrats -- and democratic socialists -- want to deliberately harm America. They want America weakened and impoverished. They don't want American citizens to benefit from government programs -- they want Americans enslaved by government. They want crime to be high. They want whites and males and heterosexuals and cis people to be oppressed. And Mamdani specifically, because he's a Muslim, is seen as a Trojan horse who'll subject non-Muslims to "Sharia law" and force women into burqas.

Mamdani went to the White House and said: I want to make the city better. Trump was gobsmacked! "If I read the newspapers, and the stories — I don’t hear that"!

It all reminds me of Barack Obama's 2004 Democratic convention speech, the one that made him famous and a presidential contender, even before he'd been elected to the Senate. Because they'd been led to believe that Black people and Democrats were at war with them, millions of Americans were gobsmacked hearing Obama say this:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Obama won two presidential elections and is still broadly popular -- but he couldn't unite the country, because you can't govern even as a left-centrist without being the object of hate on the right.

By going to the White House and charming Trump, Mamdani bought himself some time. But the truce won't last very long.

Mamdani clearly tickled Trumps dick with his looks and charm but Gov. Wes Moore did the same. Trump called him handsome and told him he was doing a good job. A few months later he wanted to send the National Guard to Baltimore and lied on him. Trump’s unstable and erratic. pic.twitter.com/ODGNomhjdf

— Candidly Tiff (@tify330) November 22, 2025

Yes, Trump met Moore at the 2024 Army-Navy football game and then falsely stated that Moore had referred to him “the greatest president of my lifetime,” a lie that Moore called out. And now:

ICE may be gearing up to bring more agents into Baltimore and other parts of Maryland, according to public records analyzed by WYPR and federal procurement experts.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security posted two contracts at the end of October requesting proposals for “administrative office space in support of law enforcement operations” in Baltimore and Hyattsville, Md. The Baltimore facility will be between 11,500 and 18,500 square feet, while the Hyattsville space will range between 3,750 and 5,000 square feet.

“ICE is definitely on the footprint of those contracts, and it is a fair amount of space,” said Dan Meyer, a partner at Tully Rinckey, who specializes in federal employment. “I was kind of doing some back of the napkin calculations [for the Baltimore location]. That's anywhere from 60 to 100 special agents. That's a lot of space.”

So Mamdani's White House visit was a nice moment. It makes clear that Mamdani is good at managing people, including people who are suspicious of him. That's a good skill to have, and he'll continue to need it, especially with Trump.

RESISTANCE IS FINE, AS LONG AS IT'S CENTRIST RESISTANCE, APPARENTLY

I know I should be writing about Marjorie Taylor Greene's decision to leave Congress (which is effective a day or two after her congressional pension kicks in), or President Trump's love-bombing of Zohran Mamdani in the Oval Office yesterday (I think Josh Marshall is right that Trump responded to Mamdani's charisma and charm -- "It’s of a piece with [Trump] being a pushover for any good looking guy he could imagine being a movie leading man" -- and that he was also impressed by how many reporters are following Mamdani, and wants some reflected glory).

But I'm still thinking about that video from six "security" Democrats, the one that led to Trump's overreaction this week. It's actually a bold attack on Trump, from a party that became very conflict-averse immediately after Election Day 2024 and only gradually (and reluctantly) came around to the idea of fighting back, and even then only on specific issues. What happened here?

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community. The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution. Don’t give up the ship.

[image or embed]

— Senator Elissa Slotkin (@slotkin.senate.gov) November 18, 2025 at 8:31 AM

How could this have been released? Why didn't high-priced consultants and party leaders pull these six aside and tell them to pivot to kitchen-table issues?

I don't know for sure, but I think it's telling that the Democrats in this video aren't progressives. Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly are centrists from swing states; Representatives Chris DeLuzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow are all among the 86 House Democrats who voted yesterday in favor of a ridiculous Republican resolution condemning socialism ("Whereas many of the greatest crimes in history were committed by socialist ideologues, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolás Maduro ... Whereas the United States was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed...").

Democratic Establishmentatarians and the party's most trusted consultants believe that their advice on how to respond to Trump -- which was "Say nothing" for months, and then "Say nothing unless you're talking about kitchen-table issues" -- is simply a quantifiable best practice in 2025. I don't buy this, obviously. Ordinary citizens and a few rogue elected Democrats have put other topics on the agenda over the past year, and now Trump is flailing and very unpopular.

I think the Establishmentarians didn't want to fight Trump on most issues, and didn't want to seem like "the Resistance" overall, because they thought that would empower progressives -- Democrats (and others) who would then call for serious economic changes that would reduce the gap between the haves (some of whom are Democratic donors) and the have-nots.

The Establishmentarians didn't object to the video above because it came from the left-centrist wing of the party. It came from members of Congress who fit into a category the Establishmentarians think can win back power for the party: Democrats who can campaign on their national-security bona fides and who don't rock the boat on economic inequality. The Establishmentarians can point to the fact that candidates fitting this profile -- gubernatorial candidates Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger -- won by bigger margins than Mamdani earlier this month.

The fact that this video exists tells me that "Stick to kitchen-table issues" wasn't a hard-and-fast rule for the Democratic Establishment -- the real rule was "Keep progressives in the background." This video didn't break that rule.

"MEAN TWEETS" GETS A NEW MEANING

When I watched this video, in which six Democratic members of Congress with military or intelligence backgrounds urge members of the U.S. armed forces not to obey unlawful orders, I thought it might backfire.

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community. The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution. Don’t give up the ship.

[image or embed]

— Senator Elissa Slotkin (@slotkin.senate.gov) November 18, 2025 at 8:31 AM

Instead, President Trump has overreacted, in a way that I think normie voters find unsettling.

In a series of unhinged posts on his social media site, Truth Social, Trump boosted an anonymous user’s message that read, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” ...

In another message, Trump himself called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” that members of Congress would release such a video.

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” the president wrote, in still another message. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand - We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET. President DJT.”

Trump's threats didn't get the reaction he clearly wanted.

This was too much even for Senate majority leader John Thune, who acknowledged when pressed that he disagreed with the president’s call for the execution of his colleagues. And it provoked a rebuke from National Review and Fox News legal analyst Andy McCarthy: “There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all.”

Even Trump’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, had to sort of walk back Trump’s statement a few hours later, leading to the remarkable spectacle of a breaking news alert informing the public that, no, the president did not want members of the opposition party killed.

Trump has gotten away with this kind of chest-thumping for years. What's changed now is that the noise he's making online is accompanied by a terrible standard of living in America.

I believe that Trump won the 2024 election because millions of Americans thought conditions in America during his first term were fine -- and relatively normal. You'll say, "Well, what about COVID?" I think many Americans blame the pandemic year on the virus, not on Trump. They don't understand the ways he mismanaged public health, and they know his critics made some mistakes. So by 2024, they gave him a mulligan on 2020. They recalled 2017 through 2019 as pretty good economically, and also as a period of peace overseas. By 2024, when they'd lived through a wave of inflation that left many of them with lingering debt and still-high prices, as well as war in Ukraine and Gaza, they imagined that a second Trump presidency could be -- yes, really -- a return to normality.

Trump's biggest fans used a sarcastic phrase to dismiss his critics: "mean tweets." This was shorthand for: Trump is an excellent president, though even we'll admit that he can be an obnoxious blowhard on social media. But his bark is worse than his bite. He's a much better president than Biden, and he'd be much better than Harris. He'll be so good you libs will have nothing to complain about except your only legitimate complaint about his first term -- mean tweets."

Those of us who were paying attention knew his first presidency was bad and his second presidency would be much worse. We knew he planned to staff his administration with crazy loyalists, not competent institutionalists. We could see that he intended to pursue the burn-it-all-down agenda of Project 2025, and the war-in-the-streets deportation plans of Stephen Miller. We foresaw that he'd turn the Justice Deparftment into his personal mob law firm and that he'd sic the law on all of his enemies. And we knew his beloved tariffs would be recklessly inflationary.

It sucks to live in America now, unless you're a right-wing billionaire. "Mean tweets" are coinciding with hard times and nationwide chaos and disruption. I think Trump might have gotten away with his death threats in his first term, or even early in this term. Now they're bad news for him.

"THE FEVER WILL BREAK," PART CMLXXXIV

The lead story at Breitbart for most of this morning was this:

Former President George W. Bush and his family are reportedly planning to retake the Republican Party from President Donald Trump once he is out of office, according to a recent report.

There are allegedly “rumors” stirring that there is a “plot to end the so-called ‘Bush Exile'” as part of an effort to take control of the GOP from Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) policies, according to the Daily Mail....

If you don't find that absurd on the face of it, here's what the Daily Mail story tells us about a recent Bush family gathering intended to launch the plot:

Behind the scenes, and still with deep connections around the country, a shadow Republican Party is lying in wait to take over when Trump is gone....

In August this year ... George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, the former Florida Governor, were among family luminaries who gathered for a secret, and potentially very consequential, event at the dynasty's summer retreat in Kennebunkport on the Maine coast...

Unpublicized and with no media present, a total of 65 friends of the family gathered there and poured money into a pot to help kick off a new Bush political run.

Tech entrepreneur Jonathan Bush, 56, cousin of 'W' and Jeb, and brother of TV personality Billy Bush, will bid to become Governor of the moderate state of Maine in 2026.

If he wins, it would be the third state governorship held by the Bush family.

Both George W. Bush and Jeb Bush used their governorships - of Texas and Florida respectively - as springboards for presidential runs.

Alas for the Bushes, Jonathan has a few blemishes on his record.

The Daily Mail revealed in 2018 that he had confessed to 'numerous physical altercations' with his ex-wife Sarah Selden, according to court papers from a Massachusetts family court during a 2006 custody battle over the couple's five children.

In the court papers his wife alleged he 'screamed at her, directly into her face, calling her a 'w****'… while pushing her into the wall and repeatedly slamming his closed fist into her sternum, his hand landing just inches from their baby who was crying.'

Jonathan has expressed remorse, and voters might accept his insistence that he's a better person now. But I fully expect Donald Trump to send out the bat signal that Republican primary voters shouldn't vote for anyone from the Bush family, and I expect his word to be enough to kill Jonathan's candidacy. (Recall that Jeb's son George P. ran for attorney general in Texas in 2022 and lost the primary to Ken Paxton by 20 points.)

I can imagine Jonathan getting very favorable coverage from Joe Scarborough, The New York Times, The Bulwark, and other centrist pundits and media outlets. Maybe Maine Republicans are different enough from other Republicans that they'll vote for a consciously anti-Trump candidate.

But nationwide, Trump still commands the GOP's loyalty. Here's more evidence: Fox News has just released a brutal poll that has Trump's job approval/disapproval at 41%/58%, down from 46%/54% two months ago. Three quarters of Republicans tell the Fox polling unit that they've been hurt by Trump's economic policies. And yet he still has 86% job approval among Republicans. They're upset with him, but they just can't quit him.

You can also see this in a couple of stories sampling public opinion in Marjorie Taylor Greene's congressional district. The message of both stories -- from The Washington Post and NBC -- is that Greene's voters still support her but are also still loyal to Trump. The Post reports:

Half an hour into the Walker County GOP meeting, Chairwoman Jackie Harling turned to “the elephant in the room” — the explosive breakup of President Donald Trump and their congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

As Harling put it: “Mom and Dad are separated.” ...

“We got Donald Trump trying to take care of the world,” said the chair, Jim Tully, pacing in front of the lectern. “Got Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to take care of the country.” ...

Local Republicans are holding out hope that Trump and Greene will make up, just as Trump has made up with other Republicans now serving in his Cabinet.

And from NBC:

... Angela Dollar, a local Republican official in Floyd County, part of Greene’s district[, said,] “I can like two people who don’t like each other. My hope is they’ll reconcile.”

... Though she said she still supports the president, [Susan] Cooper rejected the idea that Greene is a “traitor.”

“I would much prefer him not say that,” she said....

While mall walking with his wife in Dalton, Richard Houston said he has voted for both Greene and Trump and still supports both.

Right now, these voters don't want to be forced to choose between two bomb-throwers -- and if they ever break with Trump completely, it will be because they see someone else as more likely to be an effective bomb-thrower.

There's no evidence that Republicans will ever turn to old-fashioned institutionalist Bushites. FiftyPlusOne has been keeping tabs on early polling of the 2028 Republican primaries, and the detail to note is that Nikki Haley fares very, very poorly, as do Mike Pence and Tim Scott. The top tier clearly consists of J.D. Vance (who leads all of these polls by double digits), Marco Rubio, Trump's sons ... and Ron DeSantis, the most Trump-like Republican outside Washington. The specific names may change, but I don't think the Republican Party will ever be a party the Bushes can be comfortable in. I'm not sentimentalizing them, but they didn't want to tear the entire system down. The current Republican Party does.

LAME-DUCK TRUMPISM LOOKS A LOT LIKE NON-LAME-DUCK TRUMPISM

I understand why many people are saying that President Trump looks like a lame duck.

For the first time in his second term, President Donald Trump was confronted by his fellow Republicans. And he fell in line.

Rather than face a massive defection of Republican votes in the House, Trump flipped to support a bill to force the Department of Justice to release non-classified files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

He's getting pushback from Republicans on other issues -- for instance, Senate Republicans rejected his call to eliminate the filibuster, and many Republicans are grumbling about his support for H1-B visas.

But for now, it appears that every day following congressional Republicans' defiance of Trump on Epstein will look more or less like every day before that defiance. Here's St. Paul yesterday:

Unbelievable, ICE unloaded Pepper spray directly in the face of protesters yesterday in St. Paul MN -

[image or embed]

— Guardrails of Democracy (@demguardrails.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 11:19 AM

Will a reportedly weakened Trump stop doing this? No, because the Republicans who defied him on Epstein strongly approve of this and want it to continue -- and he wouldn't stop even if they objected. There's pushback in the lower courts, but he won't be stopped by the Supreme Court. And here in New York City, we know this is coming as soon as Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor on January 1.

Immigration is the issue on which Trump's support is strongest among Republican members of Congress and the GOP rank-and-file. But what about healthcare? On that subject, there's very little daylight between congressional Republicans and Trump. Republicans have hated Obamacare since before Trump entered politics. The Democratic capitulation on the shutdown happened because Republicans refused to do a clean extension of Obamacare subsidies. I'd believe that the Trump era is over and Trump is genuinely a lame duck if there was any chance that Republicans might extend the subsidies now. In a saner world, they might look at a poll showing them losing the 2026 congressional vote by double digits and agree to defy Trump again in veto-proof numbers, this time on extending the subsidies. Instead, they're talking up the terrible ideas they've had since the pre-Trump era -- health savings accounts and junk plans that don't protect consumers from massive medical bills.

Most of Trump's tariffs are still in place. I assume congressional Republicans are hoping the Supreme Court will do the job they're afraid to do by ruling against Trump on tariffs, but as I've noted a few times, the case before the Court involves only one method of imposing tariffs, and Trump could use other methods to reimpose them. Would Congress try to stop him? That's highly unlikely.

And Trump's corruption and self-dealing continue without interruption. Jamelle Bouie writes:

This week, President Trump welcomed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia with a lavish reception at the White House. Part of the president’s relationship with Prince Mohammed includes lucrative ties between the Trump Organization and Saudi firms, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars....

Earlier this month, top Swiss business leaders arrived at the White House bearing lavish gifts fit for a king. The chief executive of Rolex gave President Trump a gold-plated desk clock. Not to be outdone, the chief executive of a gold-refining company presented him with a 2-pound gold bar engraved with 45 and 47, in honor of his two presidencies. A week later, the president rewarded Switzerland with a favorable break on tariffs, reducing them from 39 percent to 15 percent.

This summer, The New Yorker reported that the Trump family had earned $3.4 billion through deals it had arranged since Trump entered the White House in 2017. The Trump Organization is also expanding its operations around the world, developing more than 22 properties in at least 10 countries, whose leaders have every incentive to flatter the president with gifts and handouts.

Do you see any pushback anywhere? I don't.

I think many of us are imagining a time when Trump is so unpopular that Republicans, in effect, become moderate Democrats in order to defy him. That simply won't happen. It won't happen because many of Trump's policies are simply mainstream Republicanism -- and it won't happen based on the history of the GOP the last time it had a very unpopular president.

George W. Bush's approval ratings were consistently in the mid- to low 30s for most of his second term, eventually slipping into the 20s -- yet no mainstream Republican candidate in the 2008 presidential primaries was willing to break with him on support of the Iraq War. Ron Paul ran for president as an opponent of the war, but he didn't win a single state and he earned only 35 delegates, of the 1,087 he needed to win. A typical poll from 2007 showed Bush with 75% job approval among Republicans -- a low number, but a number that's too high to make apostasy a winning strategy for Republicans. (In the latest NPR/Marist poll, in which Trump has a 39% job approval rating overall, 89% of Republicans approve of the job he's doing.)

Trump is very unpopular. Trump may continue to be very unpopular. But he's still in charge, and it's likely to be a while before much can be done about his misrule. The immediate future, sadly, is likely to look a lot like the recent past.

MANY AMERICANS THINK AUTOCRACY IS AWESOME

At Liberal Currents, Dan Holtmeyer states the obvious:

This is the rotten core of Trump, beneath all the makeup and slurred words and mafia-boss cruelty: He thinks the government and all of its personnel, its buildings and its power are his.

The rubble of the East Wing, which was destroyed earlier this fall with the deliberation, public input and care given to your average sand castle demolition, made this unmissably clear. But this is the thread that runs from Jan. 6, 2021, to the billions of dollars in federal spending held hostage and the hundreds of thousands of civil servants fired this year.

It is the connective tissue between his talk of an illegal third term, his persecution of political enemies, his mobilization of armed forces against immigrants and citizens, his potential war for no reason with Venezuela. He thinks those are his employees, his generals, his military, his agencies, his money, to wield as he pleases.

Holtmeyer says this is a betrayal of

the founding principle of popular sovereignty in this country, an idea that stretches back millennia: The people are the source of a government’s power....

In other words, our leaders work for us. The multitrillion-dollar institution collectively known as the federal government belongs to all of us, not to just some of us, and certainly not to our elected leaders.

But even now, at least 40% of the country is fine with Trump's approach to government. The number would probably be even higher if the economy were in better shape. Even people who don't know much about politics or civics know, in some vague way, that we have multiple branches of government and, in theory, checks and balances. They know we have a legislature and courts -- but they're willing to accept a regime that says, in effect, the president is the government.

Many of us like autocrats. The people who like autocrats the most might be the ones who grew up with autocratic fathers or pastors. Also, our culture has embraced autocracy as a model for leadership since the Reagan-era backlash to the 1960s.

The Reagan era saw a rise in what I think of as business porn -- tales of swashbuckling corporate leaders who did things their way and earned massive profits. The media called these hero CEOs "rock stars," but it was an odd name for them, because we knew that rock music was made communally, often by frenemy collaborators (John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the ex-lovers in Fleetwood Mac). Also, rock music was, at least according to myth, a rebellion against "the Man." Each of these hero CEOs was "the Man."

But we were disillusioned with government after Vietnam, Nixon, and the energy crises of the 1970s, so some of us liked the idea of rule by autocrat. Starting with Lee Iacocca -- whose mega-selling memoir was published five days before the 1984 election, in which Ronald Reagan won 49 states -- much of America made CEOs into heroes, including CEOs who were proudly evil, like the layoff-mad "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. CEOs continued to be glamorized well into the era of Big Tech leaders such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

As for Reagan, his poll numbers never dipped below 40%, even after we learned that his administration was selling arms to Iran and using the profits to channel weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras. Congress had blocked military aid to the Contras, but Oliver North told a congressional committee that the president wanted the arms shipments to happen, and that's all that mattered. Millions of Americans agreed that, in effect, the president is the government.

The other cultural trend that reflected this worldview was the rise of vigilante-cop movies starting in the 1970s. Again, millions of Americans embraced the idea that cops should cut through the legal bullshit and operate according to their own moral code. This is a common "copaganda" trope in police procedurals to this day.

Millions of Americans don't want a governmentr run by humble "servants of the people" who respect the law. They want leaders who tell us they are the law. And now we're in this mess.