Trump held a Purple Heart Day ceremony at the White House yesterday:
“Last year, after an assassin tried to take my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas generously mailed me one of his Purple Hearts. Many of the other veterans showed me the same unbelievable gesture of kindness, including three-time Purple Heart recipient John Ford and Gerald Enter Jr., who also came along with us and did us a great, great favor,
“Gerald, John and Thomas, I want to thank you very much. What a great honor to get those Purple Hearts, I guess in a certain way, it wasn’t that easy for me, either, when you think of it.”
Donald Trump will have his post midterm House if he has to kill what’s left of our republic to do it. If we survive that long. Punchbowl News reports:
House Republicans are now aiming to pick up a dozen or more House seats in an unprecedented, Donald Trump-backed redistricting drive, looking to head off a Democratic wave in the 2026 midterms and cement the president’s power.
Republicans are hoping to net a minimum of three House seats in Florida, as we scooped Thursday. Add that to the five seats in Texas, one each in Missouri and Indiana, plus two or three in Ohio, where state law mandates a redraw ahead of 2026.
The Sunshine State effort, officially announced by Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez onThursday, is only the most recent Republican initiative to cushion the blow from what’s expected to be a difficult midterms for the GOP. Republicans are hoping to redraw three districts in their favor, likely those of Democratic Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Moskowitz in Trump-tending South Florida, as well as Darren Soto in the Orlando area.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas is still trying to ram through his newly rigged maps for his liege in the White House. The FBI has agreed to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s request to locate Democratic legislators who have fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum. But it’s not clear what role agents might play in detaining and returning them.
“We are entitled to five more seats,” Trump told CNBC. He’d demand 11,780 of them, but this isn’t Georgia.
No pretense from Trump on Texas redistricting other than he wants the power: “We are entitled to five more seats,” he tells CNBC
Peter Gordon of the Center for American Progress responds:
Every American should be very concerned that a U.S. senator is attempting to turn a state civil issue—that would otherwise be enforced by the Texas legislature’s sergeant-at-arms—into a federal criminal matter. This represents a dangerous step on a path toward authoritarianism and is clear politicization of federal law enforcement.
No. It’s not another step towards. We’re there.
Democrats are not unilaterally disarming. California, Illinois, and New York may respond with their own mid-decade district reshuffle.
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois has provided a haven in his state for Texas Democrats (The Guardian):
“We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them and make sure that – ’cause we know they’re doing the right thing, we know that they’re following the law,” Pritzker said at a press conference on Sunday in Illinois alongside some of the the Texas Democratic lawmakers.
During the early morning hours outside of gate three of the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraqi Police are supported by a US Army M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank (MBT), as they investigate an explosion charred site caused by a Vehicle Born Explosive Device (VBED). Photo link.
It’s been obvious from Day 1 that Generalissimo Trump was seeking any reason whatsoever for deploying troops to the streets of U.S. cities. But there were adults in Oval Office in his first term to tell him firmly, No. Not so the second time around. Trump has already deployed Marines to assist with controlling protests that Trump swore had Los Angeles in flames, but were bite-sized enough that the LAPD could handle them on a slow day.
Now it seems the attempted carjacking of Big Balls has provided the excuse for Trump and Stephen Miller to deploy federal agents to police the streets of Washington, D.C.
“It’s our capital city, it is more violent than Baghdad, it is more violent than parts of Ethiopia and parts of many of the most dangerous places in the world,” White House deputy chief of staff Miller told NewsNation Thursday.
That paranoid declaration will be as good for D.C. tourism as Trump’s tariffs are for bringing down prices.
No word on whether Trump and Miller plan on donning fatigues and flak jackets after they’ve set up a Green Zone around the federal core of the capitol.
Figures from the Metropolitan Police Department found that crime was down 35 percent in 2024 compared to 2023 in the city—a 30-year low. Preliminary numbers from the police found that violent crime was down 26 percent for 2025 so far.
A source told CBS there had been “little to no coordination” between the MPD and federal law enforcement about the plans, adding that the force has not been notified about what the increase in federal law enforcement might look like in D.C.
In the newly gilded Oval Office’s fever dreams, maybe like the image above?
Meanwhile somewhere in the West Wing, Stephen Miller is hard at work saving the country from immigrant invaders:
“Louis XIV’s decoration of Versailles is an expression of the king’s right to rule, the opposite of the president’s role in American democracy. Trump’s decor evokes third-world dictatorship. It reminds me of Robert Mugabe’s palace in Zimbabwe.” Peter York, author of Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World’s Most Colorful Despots, which deconstructs elements of despotic decor, adds: “Indeed, Trump’s own penthouse conforms completely to my recipe for a dictatorial place.”
“I feel very classy right now … like a big railing covered with brass or a pillar that looks like it’s made of marble,” was Donald Trump‘s non sequitur response to a question about Common Core educational standards during the Miami GOP debate in March. But his words could have applied to a description of his 30,000-square-foot penthouse occupying Trump Tower’s 66th through 68th floors. There, amid gilt furniture, diamond-and-gold-plated double doors and, yes, pillars made of marble, Trump, 69, lives with his wife, Melania, 45, and 10-year-old son, Baron, under Versailles-inspired painted ceilings…
If the Republican frontrunner is elected to office, expect to see gilt galore. “A president can go into any room and make any changes he or she sees fit, without qualification,” says Seale. “If you don’t like the Red Room red, then you can redo the entire room in chintz with no red. But the truth is, most presidents are so busy, they don’t have time to fool with the decor. Right now, the White House is essentially the same as when Richard Nixon lived there.
Melania, who studied architecture and design at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia (but left to model before graduating), also appears to have a penchant for all that glitters. “For season five, I created the Apprentice set and the residents’ homes in the style of the Trumps’ penthouse,” says Van Patter. “Melania called me after the install and said, ‘We love the gold antiques and cherubs and want to order more from wherever you got them.’ I call it Trump-a-coco.”
Technically, the penthouse owes less to the Rococo school and is more “influenced by the French Baroque Louis XIV architectural style through a prism of the 1980s,” says David Desmond, an L.A.-based decorator known for French-period interiors in large-scale residences of 30,000 square feet…
Today they put up gold and white striped umbrellas in the new driveway that used to be the Rose Garden.
Early in President Donald Trump’s second term, plenty of ink was spilled on the question of whether his 2024 voters regretted their votes. The verdict – including my own – was generally that this theory was overblown.
There were anecdotes, yes, but it didn’t seem to be an especially measurable phenomenon. More than six months in, that could be changing, at least somewhat.
It’s probably still too simple to say that lots of Trump supporters regret their votes. But to appropriate a phrase you might have heard from your parents once upon a time: Many Trump voters aren’t mad (or fully regretful); they’re just disappointed.
It found just 69% of 2024 Trump voters agreed that they are “very confident that I made the right choice.” That’s fewer than the 78% of Kamala Harris voters who said the same of her. It’s also down slightly from the 74% of Trump voters who said they were very confident in their vote back in April.
That doesn’t mean the other 31% of Trump voters are full of regret. Indeed, most of them (19% of the total) said they’re still “confident” in their votes but that they had “some concerns.” But about 1 in 10 Trump voters said either that they regretted their votes to some degree, had “mixed feelings,” or wish they hadn’t voted. That group has grown slightly since April.
And all told, 14% of Trump voters said if they could redo their 2024 votes, they would either vote for Harris (6%), vote third-party (5%) or not vote at all (3%). That’s more than the 8% of Harris votes who would have picked a different option than their candidate.
Many Republicans have also questioned Trump’s tariff policies and said he’s not focused enough on inflation. But perhaps Trump’s most problematic episode with his base is his administration’s ongoing Epstein files fiasco.
The UMass poll shows just 38% of Trump voters said the administration has handled the situation well, and 33% say it’s hiding information. That’s 1 in 3 Trump voters who think there’s a cover-up, to some degree. These numbers echo other data that suggest this is by far Trump’s worst issue with his base. All of it has combined to lead some prominent influencers who had supported Trump to distance themselves from him.
[…]
Whatever the case, it’s certainly something worth watching right now. There’s plenty of reason to believe Trump voters could be somewhat more disillusioned about their votes than they were a few months ago. And the data suggest that might indeed be the case.
The White House has been trying to contain fallout from the so-called “Epstein Files” for weeks after a Justice Department memo concluded there were no more significant disclosures to be made in the case. Vice President JD Vance is holding a strategy meeting with other top officials Wednesday evening to work on their handling of the Epstein case, CNN reported.
Maxwell, 63, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in a sex trafficking scheme to abuse girls with Epstein. Her attorneys have taken an appeal of her conviction to the Supreme Court.
“She was asked about maybe about 100 different people. She answered questions about everybody and she didn’t hold anything back,” her attorney David Oskar Markus said of her meetings with Blanche. “She never invoked a privilege. She never refused to answer a question. So we’re very proud of her.”
Wonderful. We can now focus on all the people Trump and MAGA hate. And, by the way, Ghislaine says she is very happy in he new country club prison and looks forward to a presidential pardon for he patriotic willingness to fully cooperate.
@suzannecloud:What should the Dems do if Trump calls off the midterms (for whatever reason) and the Republicans support it?
I’m going to take the liberty of rewriting this question just a bit: What should Dems do if (or, really, when) Trump takes illegal actions to subvert the midterms and Republicans support it?
Trump can’t just say “no midterms” and expect it to mean anything, but he could, say, order ICE agents to raid election offices, or seize ballots—criminal-dictatorial acts that would make the results of any subsequent election impossible to accept. In situations like that, I suspect things would get out of hand very quickly. Democrats can’t really plan for stuff like that, but they do need to look inside themselves and ask whether they’re courageous enough to resist in ways that might get them arrested or worse.
Short of Republicans embracing outright, violent criminality, I think Dems need to have two goals, which I’ve largely cribbed from Marc Elias.
Be hyper-vigilant and hyper-litigious against GOP efforts to choose the electorate, through attacks on registration, familiar kinds of voter suppression, and more speculative ones, like, say, deploying armed federal agents to polling places.
Prepare both legal and street-level responses to GOP efforts to steal elections post facto. They will try to get votes tossed, they will try to deny certification, they might even refuse to seat duly elected officials. Democrats should do whatever they can to pre-empt that kind of thing, but also be ready to fight it in court and maybe even with their bodies. Brooks Brothers riots, but for good rather than evil.
An important side note, though, is that they shouldn’t carry themselves like weaklings, fretting constantly about how Republicans might victimize them next year. That carries loser stench. They should treat all GOP efforts to cheat as totally expected and bound to fail. Insist that fair elections are non-negotiable. Try what they might, Republicans will not get away with any of it. Republicans feel empowered when they suspect they won’t meet resistance, and “I’m worried Republicans will try X, Y, Z” communicates something subtly but critically different from “We’re ready to stop X, Y, Z.”
That last is especially important. I know that my writing here on the blog often sounds weak and despairing these days but I’m determined to try to fight it. Brian’s advice about how to communicate the resistance strategy is sound. It’s impossible to know if the Dems can prevail in this battle. But it’s important to acknowledge that they are going to do this and that they are ready to resist. From what I’m seeing right now, they seem to be willing to do that.
Trump: Colbert has no talent. Fallon has no talent, Kimmel has no talent. They are next. They are going to be going. You know when Howard Stern went down? When he endorsed Hillary Clinton pic.twitter.com/U5nGeQvVx4
South Park‘s second episode of the season “is coming in hot,” per The Guardian’s Zach Vasquez. Delayed a week apparently to capitalize on current events (creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker work fast), after hammering Donald Trump in the opener, this episode mocks Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Not that the how didn’t tease its next Trump 2.0 target in advance.
In the episode, titled “Got A Nut,” school counselor Mr. Mackay loses his job due to President Donald Trump cutting the Department of Education’s budget, so he decides to sign up to join ICE (“I’m proud to work for ICE,” declares one masked ICE recruiter, ironically). Mackay watches an orientation video from Noem where she says, “A few years ago, I had to put my puppy down by shooting it in the face, because sometimes doing what’s important means doing what’s hard.” (Noem previously admitted to killing her 14-month-old dog for exhibiting aggressive behavior).
This is followed by Noem shooting several other random puppies in the face, which becomes a running gag throughout the episode. Mackay and his ICE squad then descend on the Dora the Explorer live show to arrest people in the crowd. “Remember only detain the brown ones!” Noem shouts. “If it’s brown, it goes down!” Another running gag is Noem’s face repeatedly melting, only to be patched up by a beautician support team.
You know you’re a senior citizen when all the commercials feature music you listened to as a teen or in college. Hanging around with Gen Z-ers, one must be careful not to make pop-culture references so old they make the young-uns return blank stares. Imagine a Gen Z-er watching The Shining and being puzzled by Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny!”
So when Mackey’s performance on the ICE squad earns him a trip to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump in a Fantasy Island parody, Trump’s portrayal as its Ricardo Montalbanish proprietor and JD Vance as dwarf actor Herve Villechaize may be lost on many viewers under 30.
Nonetheless, if your targets aren’t reacting, your satire isn’t hitting.
Earlier this week, Homeland Security posted an image on X from South Park‘s preview that depicted an ICE raid, along with a link to a recruitment site to join U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The official South Park X account shot back: “Wait, so we ARE relevant? #eatabagofdicks.”
In just six months, President Donald Trump has remade global trade and upended a century of precedent.
Trump on Thursday placed higher tariffs — again — on just about every country in the world. Even as some countries’ tariff rates came in lower than they had feared, practically all goods coming in to the United States face a significantly higher tax than when Trump took office in January.
The new trade regime will put in place the highest tariffs America has imposed since 1933, during the Smoot-Hawley era — a tariff bill that contributed to the deepening of the Great Depression.
CNN’s David Goldman reports, “Despite a milder-than-expected impact so far at home, there’s already some evidence Trump’s tariffs are — slowly — reigniting inflation and slowing the US economy.”
“A less productive economy requires fewer workers,” John Silvia, CEO of Dynamic Economic Strategy, tells the Associated Press. “But there is more, the higher tariff prices lower workers’ real wages. The economy has become less productive, and firms cannot pay the same real wages as before. Actions have consequences.”
Still insistent that foreign countries will pay the tariffs, not American importers and consumers, Donald Trump boasted on Wednesday(Associated Press):
“I think the growth is going to be unprecedented,” Trump said Wednesday. He said the U.S. was “taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs,” but did not provide a specific figure for revenues because “we don’t even know what the final number is” regarding the rates.
