Malevolence Compounded by Incomptence: Oveview

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

MAGA people (e.g., Hegseth) have replaced the normals (e.g., Mattis) that populated the first Trump administration. Luke Broadwater at NYT:

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, shared sensitive military information in not one, but two Signal group chats. The I.R.S. has had three different leaders in the span of a single week. A Salvadoran man living in Maryland was deported because of an “administrative error.” And, in yet another misstep, administration officials kicked off a war of threats with Harvard University by sending a letter to the school prematurely, two people familiar with the matter said.

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The administration’s tariff policy has whipsawed back and forth so rapidly that businesses planning their futures can barely keep up.

Also this month, the president fired more than a half-dozen national security officials on the advice of the far-right agitator Laura Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and ticked through a list of officials she deemed disloyal.

In general, however, the president has been reluctant to fire those close to him in part because he doesn’t want to be seen as giving a victory to the news media.

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Also this month, the president fired more than a half-dozen national security officials on the advice of the far-right agitator Laura Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and ticked through a list of officials she deemed disloyal.

In general, however, the president has been reluctant to fire those close to him in part because he doesn’t want to be seen as giving a victory to the news media.

Hot Mess Hegseth

  Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

The Trump administration's incompetence extends across the river into the Pentagon.

Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt and Maggie Haberman  at NYT:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

John Ullyot, former chief Pentagon spokesman, at POLITICO:

The last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon — and it’s becoming a real problem for the administration.

First there was Signalgate, where the secretary shared detailed operational plans, including timelines and specifics, about an impending military strike on the Houthis in Yemen over an unclassified Signal chat group that happened to include a member of the news media.

Once the Signalgate story broke, Hegseth followed horrible crisis-communications advice from his new public affairs team, who somehow convinced him to try to debunk the reporting through a vague, Clinton-esque non-denial denial that “nobody was texting war plans.” This was a violation of PR rule number one — get the bad news out right away.

His nebulous disavowal prompted the reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg, to release Hegseth’s full chat string with the detailed operational plans two days later, turning an already-big story into a multi-week embarrassment for the president’s national security team. Hegseth now faces an inspector general investigation into a possible leak of classified information and violation of records retention protocols.

That was just the beginning of the Month from Hell. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported that Hegseth “brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.”

Next, the Pentagon set up a top-secret briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on China for Elon Musk, who still has extensive business interests in China. After learning about it, the White House canceled that meeting.

Then came the purges. And the news keeps coming. On Sunday night, The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared details about the Yemen strike in another Signal chat that included his wife and brother.

DoD rapid response amplifies Leavitt's claim that the "entire" Pentagon is working against Hegseth. More than 20,000 people work at the Pentagon, including military personnel and veterans who have served for decades. https://t.co/SlmyZL8exS

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 21, 2025

Malevolence Compounded by Incompetence, Pentagon Edition

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

The Trump administration's incompetence extends across the river into the Pentagon.

Daniel Lippman and Jack Detsch at Politico:

Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.

Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

The latest incidents add to the Pentagon’s broader upheaval in recent months, including fallout from Hegseth’s release of sensitive information in a Signal chat with other national security leaders and a controversial department visit by Elon Musk.

Caldwell, Carroll, Selnick and Kasper declined to comment. Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.

Joint statement from Colin Carroll, Darin Selnick, and Dan Caldwell:

All three had their employment terminated by the Pentagon on Friday. Prior to that, they were placed on administrative leave.

The three were the target of an investigation into unauthorized leaks.

Colin… pic.twitter.com/6cti6UFtMk

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 19, 2025

Malevolence Compounded by Incompetence, Higher Education Edition

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender at NYT:

Harvard University received an emailed letter from the Trump administration last Friday that included a series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum so onerous that school officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House.

The university announced its intentions on Monday, setting off a tectonic battle between one of the country’s most prestigious universities and a U.S. president. Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.

The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.

Trump's efforts to discourage international students will hurt American students, especially those from modest backgrounds. Stephanie Saul and Troy Closson at NYT:

For years, American colleges and universities have attracted growing numbers of international students who often pay full tuition, effectively subsidizing domestic students.

But the Trump administration’s recent move to deport hundreds of students here on visas, and his trade war with China, have stoked fears that the United States is no longer a welcoming place for international students. This week, the administration also asked Harvard to hand over lists of foreign students, adding to a sense of panic on campuses.
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Losing foreign students could also be bad for the broader economy, experts say. International students pumped nearly $44 billion into the American economy and generated 378,000 jobs last year alone, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, which promotes international education.

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International student enrollment had been on an upward trajectory for decades. Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied foreign students, said the revenue they bring in helped some public universities weather the Great Recession.

Dr. Khanna’s research found schools that could attract students from abroad were often able to avoid raising in-state tuition for domestic students and major research and instructional cuts.

“To keep doors open for local students, you need to let in more international students,” he said.

"Retaliation Is Real"

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

 Zachariah Hughes at Anchorage Daily News:

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski told a room full of Alaska nonprofit leaders that the tumult of tariffs, executive orders, court battles, and cuts to federal services under the Trump administration are exceptionally concerning.

“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

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“It’s called the checks and balances. And right, now we are not balancing as the Congress,” Murkowski said.

She expressed alarm at how the judiciary was increasingly being treated as a partisan entity, saying it was putting America in “a very dangerous place, because you stop believing in the rule of law.” And she called on Alaskans to “be affirmative” in protesting on behalf of programs they want to remain in place so that elected leaders are kept aware of where support and frustration exist among constituents.

“I think it’s important the concerns continue to be raised rather than letting the fatigue of the chaos grind you down,” Murkowski said.

Jade Walker at CNN:

Defy President Donald Trump and retribution will be swift. That’s the message the White House is sending to Harvard University after the school refused to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies, audit the viewpoints of students, faculty and staff and alter rules for on-campus protests. In response, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in federal grants at Harvard. The IRS is reportedly making plans to rescind the university's tax-exempt status. The Department of Homeland Security canceled two federal grants worth $2.7 million and threatened to strip Harvard of its ability to enroll international students unless it turns over its disciplinary records. And Trump trashed the school in a rant on his Truth Social site. As the university grapples with the sudden loss of funding, Harvard researchers are scrambling to figure out what to do about studies that are already in progress. Yet even as each school weighs having to cut budgets and staff, nearly 800 faculty members have signed a letter urging the university to resist the Trump administration’s demands.

Another Step Toward Authoritarian Rule

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

 Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein and Hassan Ali Kanu at Politico:

Though Trump has long admired foreign authoritarians, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s repressive regime is in some ways the beta test for Trump 2.0. Bukele calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Trump said he would be a dictator on Day 1. And Trump has floated or deployed many of the same tactics Bukele used to consolidate power: removing judges, intimidating political adversaries, bypassing due process and evading term limits.

Now, Bukele is actively helping Trump sidestep court orders in the United States.

During a White House visit Monday in which the two leaders bantered like old friends, Bukele insisted on one thing: He will not release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native Salvadoran who was living in Maryland until the U.S. illegally deported him last month. The upshot of that declaration: It gives Trump cover to maintain that he is powerless to implement a judge’s directive that the U.S. “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s immediate return from a brutal El Salvador prison. The Supreme Court upheld that directive last week.

Lawrence Hurley at NBC:

If an immigrant who the government claims is a gang member can be deported to El Salvador without any due process rights, then why not a U.S. citizen?

That was the nightmarish scenario immigration advocates and constitutional law experts were considering on Monday after President Donald Trump again pushed a provocative plan to deport U.S. citizens who have been convicted of unspecified crimes.

Trump discussed the issue in the White House with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has agreed to deposit people deported from the U.S. into a notorious prison.

“We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” Trump told reporters. “I’d like to include them.”

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"It is pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional," said Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

Pocketbook Politics

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Ramesh Ponnuru:

In the same interview, Bessent also dismissed concerns that Trump’s tariffs have pummeled stocks on the ground that “the top 10 percent of Americans own 88 percent of equities.” It’s certainly true that wealthy people have most of the wealth. Gallup reports, however, that 65 percent of people in its middle-income category — making $40,000 to $100,000 — own stocks, either directly or through their retirement plans. It’s probably not much comfort to them to hear that billionaires are losing more money to the tariffs than they are.

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Fox News tried out several other defenses of the tariffs. It published an article theorizing that Trump’s tariffs are a “calculated” ploy to create global economic uncertainty that would cause investors worldwide to buy U.S. assets and consequently lower our interest rates. At least one Republican congressman swallowed this story, but interest rates have refused to cooperate — so much so that Trump cited the “queasy” bond market in suspending some of his tariffs. If interest rates decline as a result of the tariffs, though, it still might not be good news, since it could be a side effect of lower economic growth.

The Cave-In Caucus

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

Paul Kane at WP:

First, they threatened to block House Speaker Mike Johnson’s path to claiming the gavel in early January. Then they threatened to block a funding bill to keep federal agencies open in mid-March.

Then, in recent days, they threatened to block a resolution that would unlock the process to push ahead with President Donald Trump’s tax-and-border agenda.

Each threat from leaders of the House Freedom Caucus ended with the same result: capitulation. After caving on each round of threats, these far-right conservatives vowed that the next time would be different — if their demands were not met precisely as they sought.

This collection of several dozen Republicans, after a decade of rabble-rousing that helped push aside three other speakers, has yet to fully buck Johnson (R-Louisiana) on any major initiative this year. In their minds, these are Freedom Caucus victories, after they piled up pledges from establishment Republicans to supposedly bend to their will.

“We’ve demonstrated now for the third time that we can deliver on the president’s agenda,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), chairman of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters after Thursday’s vote to advance the budget resolution.

Last month their caucus provided the key votes to fund the government and pass the first version of the budget resolution.

To some former allies, the gang has morphed into an attention-seeking group that will ultimately support whatever Trump wants, giving up their past ideological purist ways on issues like bringing down the national debt.

Malevolence Compounded by Incompetence

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Malevolence --  Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein and Meryl Kornfield at WP:

Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.

Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events.

But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.

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Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment, according to the person and the records. Some of those raising the alarm worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the database to go after people the president dislikes, the person said.

Incompetence -- Naftali Bendavid at WP:

President Donald Trump regained the White House in large part by trumpeting his ability to get things done, accusing his opponents of ineptitude and senility and promising that on Day 1 he would restore basic competence to government.

And, he said, it wouldn’t even be hard.

But 2½ months in, agencies such as the Social Security Administration have struggled to provide basic services. Trump’s team issues edicts, then reverses them. A leaked Signal chat suggests top security officials were unfamiliar with the basics of protecting military secrets.

Crucial government workers have been fired, then rehired. A much-ballyhooed immigration detention center at Guantánamo Bay has faced logistical problems. Trump’s team told laid-off workers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to contact a particular individual if they felt they were being discriminated against; she turned out to be dead.

These and other missteps are now being compounded in dramatic fashion by a roiling stock market and bond sell-off prompted by Trump’s tariff policies, raising fears of a collapsing economy. Trump’s formula for calculating the tariffs has been widely panned by economists. And on Wednesday, he paused many of the levies just hours after they took effect, even while leaving a 10 percent blanket tariff in place and further hiking duties on imports from China.

On Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a glitch in the system that is used to exempt some freight from tariffs, CNBC reported, adding to the confusion over the chain of abrupt policy shifts.

Americans have long harshly judged leaders who seem, fairly or unfairly, to lack competence, whether it was President Joe Biden’s troubled withdrawal from Afghanistan, President George W. Bush’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina or President Barack Obama’s introduction of a vaunted health-care website that immediately crashed.

Decline

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Editorial at The Dispatch:

For the most ardent—and online—defenders of Donald Trump on the intellectual new right, “Make America Great Again” has been displaced as the organizing ideological slogan by, “Do you know what time it is?” The point of this juvenile rhetorical question is that the postliberal elite who support and staff the Trump administration have an almost gnostic insight invisible to the rest of us. In their invincible faith in what often seems like an unpatriotic love of political power, they insist that the old rules—of American global leadership, free markets, limited government, fidelity to the Constitution—have passed their sell-by date. What is required is “new thinking” and “fresh ideas.”

What are these new and fresh ideas? For some, they are literally monarchism or autocracy. For others, they are mercantilism and a division of the world into “spheres of influence.” In short, their foreign policy was ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was hatched in the 15th century.

In service of these ideas, Donald Trump has literally made America—and Americans—poorer, bringing the United States to the brink of a recession in recent weeks by threatening to unilaterally impose one of the most regressive tax hikes in U.S. history. He’s momentarily been talked into standing down, but an economic environment in which the whims of one famously mercurial man can upend the international trade system and wipe out trillions of dollars in stock market value is not one conducive to sustained growth. For the next 90 days—and really, for the remainder of Trump’s term—decision-makers at businesses across the country and the world will be forced to speculate: Are the president’s tariffs merely a negotiating tool, or an effort to fundamentally remake the global economy? Even key White House officials seem not to know.

But the financial volatility of recent days is just one symptom of a broader, more deliberate descent. Decline doesn’t solely mean impoverishment; it means degeneration, to sink backward and down. And that is what the United States’ current leadership class is choosing for this country by willfully dismantling the free-market system, abandoning America’s role as a global leader, and degrading the separation of powers and rule of law. Even worse, it is doing so based on a suite of false assumptions: that Americans are weak, unable to compete in an open market, and incapable of responding to any incentives or exhortations more high-minded than rank self-interest or partisan contempt. The underlying assumption, held by leaders across the political spectrum, is that appealing to America’s loftiest ideals for reasons unrelated to partisan advantage is for suckers.

We reject that premise. Those American ideals, inherited from the Founders and fortified by later generations, are what brought the United States to the heights from which it is now slouching.

Why Trump Backed Down

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Mike Allen at Axios:

President Trump's boosters hailed his decision to pause tariff increases for countries around the world as a strategic masterstroke, Axios' Marc Caputo reports. But few are buying the spin. Trump buckled under tremendous, mounting-by-the-minute pressure from CEOs ... friends ... GOP senators ... the markets ... and bond prices. Trump himself admits he blinked when "people were getting a little queasy" about the bond market.

Why it matters: Inside the White House, the episode highlighted the competing views and roles of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as they animated Trump's risky game with trade.

Inside the room: Both men were advising Trump in the Oval Office when he decided to post a message on Truth Social announcing the tariff pause for 90 days while the administration negotiated with as many as 75 countries.The stunning move, which rallied cratering markets globally, was based on three factors, according to three sources familiar with the meeting:Panic: The real credit, "Trump's advisers admit privately, should go to the bond markets," the N.Y. Times reports. "Trump's decision was driven by fear that his tariffs gamble could quickly turn into a financial crisis. And unlike the two previous crashes of the past 20 years — the global financial crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020 — this crisis would have been directly attributable to only one man."

Michael Birnbaum, Natalie Allison, Cat Zakrzewski and Theodoric Meyer at WP:

[From] Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets and the growing concerns of a worldwide recession, urging him to do something.

By late Wednesday afternoon, Trump was saying he had been thinking about switching course “over the last few days.”

The final decision, he said, “probably came together early this morning, fairly early this morning. Just wrote it up. We didn’t have the use of, we didn’t have access to lawyers,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “We wrote it up from our hearts.”

“But this was something certainly we’ve been talking about for a period of time, and we decided to pull the trigger, and we did it today, and we’re happy about it,” he added.

Late Tuesday night — after Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. show ended on Fox News — Trump had an extensive, roughly hour-long phone call with a group of Republican senators who had appeared on the episode, according to three people with knowledge of the conversation. Some of the senators had expressed concern about the tariffs. That evening, Trump was also watching bond markets, “where people were getting a little queasy,” he said Wednesday.

Before the end of the last commercial break during the Hannity interview, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) asked the host for “15 seconds to speak directly to the president” on tariffs, Kennedy told The Washington Post, because Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) had told Kennedy that Trump would be watching the show. Kennedy and Graham were among those in the group interview with Hannity, along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), and Republican Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Some of the senators expressed a desire for Trump to negotiate with other countries coming to the table on tariffs, and several of them spoke to the president after the show ended.

Full Metal Authoritarian

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

The president singling someone out and telling law enforcement "go find some crimes this guy did" is really bad.

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 9, 2025

DOGE

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin at WP:

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Alexandra Ulmer, Marisa Taylor, Jeffrey Dastin and Alexandra Alper at Reuters:

The use of AI and Signal reinforces concerns among cybersecurity experts and government ethicists that DOGE is operating with limited transparency and that billionaire Musk or the Trump administration could use information gathered with AI to further their own interests, or to go after political targets.

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said DOGE’s use of privacy-focused Signal adds to growing concerns over data security practices after top Trump administration officials came under fire last month for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

“If they’re using Signal and not backing up every message to federal files, then they are acting unlawfully,” she said.

Reuters’ interviews with nearly 20 people with knowledge of DOGE’s operations – and an examination of hundreds of pages of court documents from lawsuits challenging DOGE's access to data – highlight its unorthodox usage of AI and other technology in federal government operations.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, some EPA managers were told by Trump appointees that Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk, the two people said.

Democrats' Generational War

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

Maeve Reston and Dylan Wells at WP:

Democrat Saikat Chakrabarti decided to challenge Rep. Nancy Pelosi for her San Francisco congressional seat when he watched in disbelief last year as his party chose a 74-year-old member she had backed to lead the House Oversight Committee over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his 35-year-old former boss and one of the party’s most powerful communicators.

For Chakrabarti — a 39-year-old software engineer turned political operative who ran Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset primary campaign in New York — it was another sign that the Democratic Party is dominated by an older generation of leaders who he says have lost touch with Americans’ day-to-day struggles. Though Pelosi, 85, stepped down from leadership in 2022 to elevate the next generation, he argues that nearly four decades in Congress “is enough” and that the party needs younger leaders who can do away with a “culture of caution.”

“People are looking for fighters,” said Chakrabarti, who rankled many House Democrats with his confrontational tactics while briefly serving as Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff in 2019. “This old generation of leadership, they’ve been around for so long that they don’t recognize that this Republican Party is a completely different Republican Party. They’re just hoping that the backlash of Trump will build up and we’ll let the pendulum swing back our way.”

Chakrabarti is just one in a growing group of Democratic candidates who are launching 2026 campaigns rooted in those themes — and forcing the party to face an uncomfortable conversation about the role that its gerontocracy has played in its declining popularity.

Midterm Risks for GOP

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

Unless Trump backs down on tariffs, his party will have political hell to pay.

Nate Cohn at NYT:

There might not have been anyone marching in pink hats, and congressional Democrats might have been “playing dead,” but the Democratic special election strength looks just as large as it did in 2017 and 2018, before the so-called blue wave flipped control of the House.

Perhaps this shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise: It’s what happened the last time Mr. Trump won. But it’s not what triumphant Republicans or despondent Democrats had in mind in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, when there was seemingly no “resistance” to Mr. Trump and the “vibes” seemed to augur a broad rightward cultural shift.

The tariffs announced Wednesday, however, introduce a political problem of an entirely different magnitude for Mr. Trump and his party. No party or politician is recession proof. Historically, even truly dominant political parties have suffered enormous political defeats during major economic downturns.

In none of those cases — not even with the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff — could the president be held responsible for the downturn as self-evidently as today. And whatever it may have felt like after the election, the Republican Party is not even close to politically dominant.

If anything, Mr. Trump and the Republicans today could be especially vulnerable, as so much of his political strength is built on the economy. Throughout his time as a politician, he usually earned his best ratings on his handling of economic issues. He’s benefited from his reputation as a successful businessman and from effective economic stewardship in his first term. He won the last election, despite enormous personal liabilities, in no small part because voters were frustrated by high prices and economic upheaval that followed the end of the pandemic.

In New York Times/Siena College national surveys last fall, more than 40 percent of voters who backed Mr. Trump in 2024 but not 2020 said that the economy or inflation was the most important issue to their vote.

The Trump Slump and the Team of Yessirs

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

 Michael Wilner at LAT:

A second day of market devastation shook Washington on Friday, vanishing more than $5 trillion in value in one of the largest 48-hour losses on record — an extraordinary rout caused not by pandemic, war, terrorism or bank failure, but by policy set by the American president.

The policy, announced by President Trump on Wednesday, would levy steep tariffs on nearly every nation in the world in the coming days, starting with a base tariff rate of 10% but climbing higher for some of the largest U.S. trading partners, including China, South Korea, Japan and the European Union.

The market drop has prompted a small but influential group of Republican senators to partner with Democrats in a nascent effort to wrest back control over tariff policy from Trump.

Natalie Allison et al. at WP:

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

In Trump’s first term, top aides including Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, and Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, successfully constrained Trump’s tariff agenda.

Aides frequently sought to steer Trump in particular directions during heated Oval Office conversations, according to current and former officials. Trump’s White House then was beset by internal quarrels that spilled into public view, his team of advisers not just clashing on matters of personality but over deep ideological differences.

“In the first term,” a senior White House official said, “everyone thought they were president.”

This time, there was far less internal fighting. The president’s team mounted remarkably little dissent to a sweeping overhaul of trade policy, according to interviews with more than a dozen people inside and outside the administration, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks.

 

 

 

Unforced Errors

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic:

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.).

Aaron Blake at WP:

The big storyline coming out of Tuesday’s elections was that Elon Musk’s decision to insert himself into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race looks like a massive unforced error. Republicans not only lost the race by 10 points, but they actually did better in the race that Musk didn’t play or spend heavily in: state schools superintendent.

Musk spent political capital that’s already in short supply for him, and it turned out to be counterproductive, if anything.

This has led to all kinds of speculation about what happens to Musk from here. Politico has even reported that President Donald Trump told his Cabinet that Musk will soon depart his high-profile role, with the White House offering something of a non-denial denial.

But whatever happens next, the writing has been on the wall for some time that the Elon Musk experiment is failing politically. Tuesday’s elections just made it so Republicans could no longer ignore what was in front of their faces.

Vibe Shift

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

Tal Axelrod at Axios:

The verdict is in: President Donald Trump's voters are lively when he's running for the White House. They're downright lethargic when he's not.

Why it matters: This is not just the assessment of Democrats. It's coming straight from the vice president and leaders of the MAGA movement. And it can have massive implications for the results of key gubernatorial races this year and for next year's midterms.

Catch up quick: Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate in Wisconsin's Supreme Court race, lost by 10 points in a 50-50 state. Trump endorsed Brad Schimel, and Elon Musk bankrolled millions of dollars in ads and events, swooping into Wisconsin the weekend before Election Day to juice turnout.While Republicans won two House special elections in Florida by about 15 points, those were drops from over 30-point margins in the same districts just last November.

Zoom out: Low-propensity, working-class voters helped fuel Trump's 2024 win.But MAGA luminaries are fretting that those same voters only turn out when Trump's name is on the ballot, making the GOP base less intimidating in off-year races and putting narrow congressional majorities at risk.

Vice President Vance wrote on X: "The political problem on the Republican side of the aisle is how to get our base to vote in off-cycle elections. We've seen the establishment (finally) accept Donald Trump's leadership of the Republican Party. Now it's time to try to actually learn from his political success."

Holly Otterbein at Politico:

While many of the president’s allies are sympathetic to his argument that the tariffs will encourage companies to invest in domestic manufacturing and production, they fear that imposing new trade barriers will cause short-term economic harm, drive up prices, potentially throw the U.S. into a recession, and jeopardize Republicans’ chances of hanging onto control of Congress in the midterms.

Just four in 10 voters view Trump’s handling the economy and trade favorably, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in late March.

 

Wisconsin and Florida: Bad Signs for GOP

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

Alex Isenstadt at  Axios:

The GOP also survived a late scare in a Florida special election. But losing in Wisconsin — letting Democrats keep their 4-3 court majority — has major ramifications for voting and abortion rights, along with future House redistricting.Republicans kept the House seat in Florida formerly held by national security adviser Mike Waltz, with Randy Fine holding off Democrat Josh Weil.

Republicans also held the Florida seat formerly held by Rep. Matt Gaetz before he resigned from Congress in November. Jimmy Patronis defeated Democratic candidate Gay Valimont.

1. 2026 looks scary for MAGA without Trump on the ballot.Republican House candidates in Florida fell far short of Trump's performance in November. The margins of victory for Patronis and Fine were about half of the margins for Waltz and Gaetz.

...

Republicans lost in Wisconsin, even with $25 million poured in by Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world and the face of DOGE. Musk campaigned in Wisconsin and cast the race in apocalyptic terms.

2. Democrats are flooding cash into races

In FL-1, Patronis was outraised 3-1.
In FL-6, Fine was outraised by nearly 10-1.
In Wisconsin, Crawford outraised Schimel nearly 2-1.

3. Republicans dodged a bullet in Florida. Last week Republicans were sweating the race for Waltz's seat, where a poll conducted by Trump strategist Tony Fabrizio showed Fine narrowly trailing. But Fine won by 15 points.  Florida defeat would have raised alarms among Republicans about the political impact of Trump's agenda. Speaker Mike Johnson's narrow House majority won't shrink, and there won't be headlines about a special election shocker.

The Great Grovel

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

John F. Harris at Politico:

Prestigious law firms have cowered at his threats to tank their business; Paul, Weiss, which fought against Trump in his first term, pledged $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Trump has supported. And Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, reached a deal with Trump to provide $100 million in free legal work to administration-friendly causes — before Trump had taken any action against them.

One of the country’s most storied news networks, ABC News, settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that will go to his future presidential library, and another, CBS News, appears poised to settle for millions more. The Washington Post and the LA Times, both legacy papers owned by Trump-friendly billionaires, have adjusted the content of their editorial pages in ways that pleased the White House. And Columbia University, alma mater to Alexander Hamilton, agreed to nine policy changes in an effort to unfreeze $400 million in federal funding. Other universities hired Republican lobbyists to stay on the president’s good side.