MAGA and Mixed Messaging

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.

JACK BLANCHARD with DASHA BURNS at POLITICO:

After a remarkable weekend of radio silence from officials, the Trump administration has shifted gears and is now trying to blitz the airwaves with positive messages making the case for war — which the president himself said “can be fought ‘forever’” on Truth Social last night.

Count ’em: Over 13 hours yesterday, we got Trump speaking at the White House. VP JD Vance went on Fox News in primetime. Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a press conference on the Hill, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his top Gen. Dan Caine did the same at the Pentagon. Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and NATO Ambassador Mike Waltz both did Fox last night. And press secretary Karoline Leavitt went to bat on social media — pushing back at MAGA influencers critical of the administration.

The reason for the shift is clear: As Leavitt’s lengthy post on X laid bare, the White House feels pressure to push back on heavy criticism — most crucially, from across its MAGA base — that a convincing case for war has not been made.

And the anger on the American right is real. Tucker Carlson. Megyn Kelly. Matt Walsh. Mike Cernovich. Candace Owens. Sean Davis.There are plenty more.

Here’s the problem: The White House response is not landing well. Trump’s strategy of offering different lines to almost any reporter who calls is mixing the message. And we’re now up to at least 19 of these ad hoc phone interviews since war broke out three days ago. (For those keeping track, yesterday’s callers included CNN’s Jake Tapper, NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer, the Daily Telegraph’s Connor Stringer, Fox News’ Bret Baier, Rachael Bade, Washington Reporter’s Matthew Foldi and the Sun’s Harry Cole. We should also add WaPo’s Natalie Allison and CNBC’s Joe Kernen, who Playbook missed from the weekend tally.)

Through this mish-mash of rapid-fire questions and snatched phone calls Trump has at times dabbled with regime change and freeing Iran, then insisted it was all about the nukes. At one point, the campaign might only last a couple of days, he said. Then suddenly it was “four to five weeks.” No wonder Walsh and Cernovich sound confused. And the poll numbers are only getting worse.

An even bigger problem erupted on Capitol Hill last night, where the generally on-message Rubio and Speaker Mike Johnson set out a very different justification for war. Their claims that the attacks were necessary because Israel was poised to strike Iran anyway — meaning America would have been hit in response — have gone down incredibly badly with “America First” types who already feared the U.S. was being dragged into Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s war.

Draft Executive Order to Take Over Elections

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments

Zachary Roth at Democracy Docket:

President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that his military strike against Iran may have been driven in part by claims that the country interfered in the last two U.S. presidential elections.

In response, democracy advocates warned that a dangerous and unconstitutional plan is coming into view, in which Trump uses an Iranian war to claim a national emergency that allows him to take control of the midterm elections.

On Truth Social, Trump linked to an article by a far-right news site, and also posted the text of the article’s headline:

“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.”

The article claims that “Iranian intelligence sought to undermine Trump’s reelection bid in 2020 through a variety of election influence efforts.”

Matt Cohen, Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:

A draft executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who have said they are in coordination with the White House.

A version of the order, dated April 12, 2025, has been circulating among anti-voting groups, and some progressive groups, since last year.

Peter Ticktin, a Trump ally and a leader of the effort, provided the April 12 version to Democracy Docket. It’s titled: “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference.”

A social media account affiliated with the Maryland chapter of the Election Integrity Network — the anti-voting coalition led by conservative lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell — originally posted the April 12 version last spring.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that it had obtained an early version of the order, but it did not publish it.

The Post additionally referred to what may be a more recent version of the order, which it said “claims China interfered in the 2020 election.” The version provided by Ticktin to Democracy Docket does not mention China or 2020.

Lawyers and legal experts have explicitly said that an order giving the president the power to take control of elections would be blatantly unconstitutional.

Trump said Friday he has “never heard about it.”

 READ THE DRAFT ORDER

Non-Coordination Coordination in Texas

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Shane Dolmacher at NYT:

“Running out of money,” read the post on the social media platform X, “less than $400 remains in my pocket.” It landed on Nov. 13, from an obscure account called @pie0myWesley with just three followers. Anyone else stumbling upon it might have assumed it was a random musing from someone who had seen better days.

The account instead appears to be connected to the Republican Senate campaign of Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas. And one of its followers is @TxGopFighter, with seeming connections to an outside group helping Mr. Hunt’s candidacy. The two anonymous accounts have spent months sharing strategic information, private polling, messaging advice and media-buying data in what may be an effort to skirt federal law.

That law prohibits candidates from coordinating in private with independent groups such as super PACs. The Hunt campaign and those allies, however, are doing so with a pair of social media accounts in plain sight for those who know where to look.

...

Dozens of candidates use so-called red boxes on their websites to make suggestions for how super PACs should spend money to support them. They include both top Democratic candidates in the Texas Senate race: James Talarico, a state legislator, and Representative Jasmine Crockett.

“Spanish speaking voters need to hear radio ads in the RGV, San Antonio and El Paso that there is no Democrat who Donald Trump fears more than Jasmine Crockett,” read the instructions on Ms. Crockett’s website.


The 2022 Senate campaign of JD Vance in Ohio pushed past a previous boundary, when an allied super PAC with more cash than the campaign committee posted reams of private data to a Medium account. In 2023, a super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his presidential bid posted research, polling and messaging advice.

Usually, such communication goes in one direction. The Hunt accounts are distinctive in that they appear to include communications by people on both sides of the supposed firewall. At least two times, the accounts replied to each other on X.

War With Iran

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

The United States has gone to war against Iran. America has only one ally—Israel—in this operation (the Arab states of the Gulf, which fear the Iranian regime, are targets of Iran, but so far are not participating in the attack), and both Washington and Jerusalem are making claims about “imminent” threats that require “preemptive” strikes. But we should dispense with such statements: Iran is not presenting immediate danger to the United States or Israel. Even President Trump, in a recorded address, didn’t bother overly much with such excuses; instead he presented a farrago of charges and accusations going back a half century that included everything from killing American troops in Iraq to terrorism. These indictments are all grounded in truth, but none presents a rationale for immediate attack. Trump ended by calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government.

Shibley Telhami, University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll:

As the Trump administration mobilizes U.S. military forces in the Middle East and President Donald Trump threatens possible military actions against Iran if it does not reach a negotiated deal with the United States, Americans have to contend with the possibility of being at war in the Middle East once again. Our latest University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll finds 21% of Americans favor the United States initiating an attack on Iran, 49% oppose, and 30% say they don’t know.

The latest poll was carried out by SSRS, February 5th – 9th, among a sample of 1,004 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

 

The Akin Ploy in the Texas Senate Race

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  Other campaigns have tried variations of the "pick your opponent" ploy.

Republicans are doing it in Texas.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP:

Republicans in Texas, and nationwide, are looking to boost Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) in the closing days of the state’s Democratic Senate primary.

GOP spending on the race, which includes television ads and text messaging mobilization, underscores Republicans’ hope that Crockett, a congresswoman from Dallas, defeats Texas state Rep. James Talarico in the primary Tuesday. Some Republican operatives and leaders believe Crockett would be easier to defeat in November.

“I think Talarico is dangerous,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is locked in a high-stakes Senate primary of his own against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, said last month. “He’ll probably beat Jasmine Crockett, and he’s capable of raising a lot of money. And if you look at the head-to-head with Paxton, it’s tied.”

A group with ties to longtime Republican operatives has been sending text messages to voters in recent days that tout Crockett’s opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an issue that polling shows motivates the Democratic base. One Texan who regularly votes in Democratic primaries received the text messages, according to operatives working on the Texas races.

The GOP's Nazi Problem

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

.Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

Lies in the SOTU

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments.  Also, predictable ones, such as Trump's lies.

CNN:

President Donald Trump made numerous false or misleading claims in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

Many of them were long-debunked falsehoods familiar from his rallies, interviews and social media posts. These include various lies disparaging the fairness of US elections, his false claim that he ended wars that were never actually wars or never actually ended, and his fictional “$18 trillion” figure for supposed investment in the US over the past year.

The subject on which he was most frequently inaccurate was the economy. Among other things, Trump overstated the performance of the economy during this presidential term to date, overstated the inflation he inherited from the Biden administration, used highly misleading figures when discussing gasoline prices, and wrongly asserted, twice, that foreign countries are paying the tariffs that are actually being paid by US importers.

 

Click here for fact check of some of Trump’s remarks: