Donald Trump endorsement puts maga cult candidates at risk of being political losers

Trump’s Grip on the GOP Slips Again With Tennessee Loss
Echo report published in the New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore.

Nothing in politics, not even Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party cult, is eternally unshakable. 

In fact, the 47th Trump has had some embarrassing high-profile setbacks in gubernatorial primaries earlier this year, including losses by his endorsed candidates in Iowa, Georgia, and South Carolina. Now he’s suffered his first 2026, loss in a congressional primary: 

Hard-core MAGA ultra and flamboyant Islamophobe Andy Ogles lost to former state agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher in Tennessee last night. 

As in the earlier contests lost by Team Trump, the winner naturally asserts he will be a stronger supporter of the Boss than the loser he dispatched. But it does add up to a growing tendency of MAGA-esque Republicans to disregard Trump’s actual preferences. (Ya' Think❓🤔)

Ogles is a two-term House Freedom Caucus militant who has been a trouble magnet in Washington. He’s had a campaign finance scandal and an inflated-résumé scandal, but he is probably best known for smearing Muslims, notably New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom Ogles wants to deport. Then again, there are lots of Muslims Ogles would like to deport: Ogles’s demise, however, was partially a by-product of Trump-supported GOP hubris: the gerrymander the Tennessee legislature carried out in May when the U.S. Supreme Court signaled the destruction of Voting Rights Act restraints in Louisiana v. Callais.  Also, the remapping was mostly designed to kill off the state’s one majority-Black congressional district, but the ripple effect was to expose Ogles to a lot of unfamiliar territory and voters. Just as importantly, though, Trump’s backing did not inhibit other leading Tennessee Republicans (notably Governor Bill Lee and former governor Bill Haslam) from supporting Hatcher, who outspent and out-hustled the incumbent. 

Additionally, Hatcher got some unacknowledged help from clean-energy interests who went after Ogles for his obnoxious record on environmental issues.

Trump and Muslim haters weren’t the only people disappointed by the outcome in Tennessee; Democrats were hoping to place the district in play in November behind Columbia mayor Chaz Molder. The stolid Hatcher will be a tougher opponent than the erratic Ogles.

Donald Trump did have one big win in Tennessee yesterday, when U.S. senator Marsha Blackburn turned back two rivals to become the GOP nominee for governor (Lee is term-limited). 

Blackburn, (aka "Medusa Blackie") however, should be grateful Tennessee is the rare southern state without primary-runoff requirements; she won only 43 percent of the vote against John Rose and Monty Fritts. Blackburn’s onetime antagonist Taylor Swift hasn’t publicly commented on the outcome.

Donald Trump said he does not think about consumers! Yes, he said that!

Donald Trump Is Now the Un-Populist

Donald Trump, on May 12, 2026, while taking questions from reporters about the Iran conflict. When asked if he was considering Americans' financial situations during negotiations, he responded, "Not even a little bit."

Published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore

From the expensive and unnecessary ballroom to the illegal Iran war, to blatant self-dealing, Donald Trump is ignoring the will of the people — to his Growing Old Party's peril.

Less than four months from now, early voting begins in the 2026, midterm general elections. Political scientists differ on exactly when voting intentions are formed, but the consensus is that for the vast majority of the electorate, it happens well before the last-minute rush of campaigning. Most Republicans, whose control of Congress is at risk in November, are acutely aware that they are running out of time to convince swing voters that their sour perceptions of Donald Trump’s job performance — always the single most important variable affecting midterm outcomes — are erroneous. And at almost every turn, the president seems to be on a mission to make that as hard as possible.

While assessments of Trump’s handling of a broad range of issues have remained well underwater for over a year now, there are particularly and especially salient negative perceptions of how well he’s dealt with high living costs (arguably the issue that most determined his 2024 victory over Kamala Harris) and whether his strange and aimless war with Iran was a good idea. Trump’s two biggest problems are dangerously interactive, since the Iran war’s effect on global energy prices has clearly boosted domestic inflation, and his prosecution of this “war of choice” has come to symbolize his refusal to focus on the public’s actual concerns. For all the interminable discussion of a GOP “affordability agenda,” it’s getting very late in the year for that agenda to suddenly appear.

And, most recently, despite the intense loyalty congressional Republicans have consistently shown toward Trump, an unprecedented revolt has broken out, for the moment shutting down the legislative process. The growing GOP grievance is that Trump is continuing to elevate personal hobbyhorses (e.g., his White House ballroom project, which he now wants taxpayers to subsidize, and his bizarre new slush fund for alleged victims of Biden administration persecution) over the measures Republicans need to stay in office.


The implications of this revolt go beyond smooth executive-legislative relations or even the unity of the GOP. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump from the perspective of ethics, policy, the U.S. Constitution, or the health of democratic institutions, his prowess as a gut-level politician has been universally, if grudgingly, respected. An essential ingredient of the loyalty he has inspired in the Republican ranks has been his ability to bend traditional conservatism to “populism,” a voter-friendly blend of themes and proposals that probably saved the GOP from the irrelevance it seemed to be courting before he came down the escalator in 2015. He famously convinced a party in love with “entitlement reform” to lay off trying to slaughter the sacred cows of Social Security and Medicare. He talked Republicans out of a near century of free-trade orthodoxy because culturally conservative blue-collar voters hated NAFTA. And he convinced the militarist wing of the GOP that massive defense spending didn’t require actually using it in unpopular “forever wars.”

Now comes the terrifying possibility that the man who made Republicans “populists” is himself becoming the ultimate un-populist. Trump is not just ignoring (or, because he can only acknowledge praise of himself, actively denying) public opinion; he seems to be courting unpopularity. Americans really dislike his beloved tariffs, and although Trump has the perfect legal excuses to stop pursuing them, he still persists. Trump can’t stop bashing Obamacare, even though he got badly burned on the subject in his first term and has no coherent replacement for it. His war in Iran was the rare U.S. war that was unpopular from the get-go, but he can’t seem to let go of it, and it’s an even bet he’ll start another war before suppertime. The political “outsider” who was too rich to bribe is now the consummate insider grabbing money with both hands to enrich his family and friends and the most disreputable of his supporters.

Most astonishing of all, the veteran entertainer who understood the intense resentment of working people for elites who seemed to mock them while fleecing them is now becoming the elitist-in-chief. He is explicitly annoyed that people struggling to make ends meet don’t appreciate they are living in a “golden age” in which stock markets climb dizzily upward on record corporate profits. He’s angry that Americans don’t just take his word for it that they need to pay higher prices for gasoline or light and heat so that he can win some more wars and peace prizes. And he is indifferent at best to how very bad it looks that he is devoting more time to his many tacky and self-glorifying vanity projects than to his day job. Many regular folk used to enjoy watching Trump thumb his nose at the powers that be. Now he’s the Man, the very opposite of a plucky underdog.

For Republicans who desperately need his help to retain their offices and their power, it increasingly appears that Trump has lost touch with the country. Yes, he’ll help them in the midterms by rigging congressional districts and perhaps interfering with the vote itself, but not by bending to adverse public opinion. It would be one thing if like some second-term presidents of the past, he drifted toward lame-duck status and began ceding power to his allies and successors. But no: Trump dominates news media and the political landscape more forcefully and ubiquitously than ever. (The more Trump talks, the more he contradicts himself and his advisors.)

He’s in danger not only of squandering his party’s midterm-election hopes, but of handing his putative heir J.D. Vance an anvil and the GOP an indelible MAGA brand — even as the idea that he has restored “American greatness” becomes ridiculous to all but his fiercest acolytes.

It’s possible, of course, that such assessments once again underestimate the 47th. Perhaps, against all expectations, he will snap out of his extended fugue state and begin listening to the public and his party leaders. But, Donald Trump would be well advised to make his 80th-birthday wish Make Trump popular again. In the meantime, the candle  he’s already🕯️ blowing out is his own.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans abandoned their message about "affordabability"- guess it had too many letters difficult to spell

 Echo opinion published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore: Trump Waging War on His Own Affordability* Strategy #SIASD

(This opinion essays seems prophetic, in my opinion, creates the sense of a looming world wide depression.  #ImpeachTrumpNow❗ #SenatorSusanCollins)

Donald Trump’s “war of choice” against Iran is a big departure from his administration’s alleged determination to focus on improving the domestic economy and addressing concerns about affordability before crucial midterm elections this November. 

But, aside from the Donald Trump's spectacular failure to stay on message, there is a more specific problem with the sudden lurch into a regional war in the Middle East. 

To the extent Trump had an actual affordability agenda (other than calling concerns about living costs “a hoax”), a central pillar was keeping energy prices low by demolishing any obstacles to maximum exploitation of fossil-fuel resources. Aside from the beneficial effect this might have on prices for other goods and services influenced by energy costs, the “drill baby drill” mentality was designed to reduce gasoline pump prices, one of the most visible inflation indicators from the perspective of regular folks.

Suddenly, the United States has produced an energy-price crisis for itself and for the whole world, Reuters reports:

Traffic through the Strait ​of Hormuz was closed for a fourth day after Iran attacked five ships, choking off a key artery accounting for about 20% of global oil and LNG supply. …

The conflict risks triggering a renewed spike in inflation that could choke off economic recovery in Europe and Asia if the war is prolonged in a region that accounts for just under a third of global ​oil production and almost a fifth of natural gas.

Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, on Tuesday said it may be forced to cut production by more than three million barrels per day ​in a few days if oil tankers cannot move freely to loading points, according to two Iraqi oil officials.

While other countries face the most dire immediate economic consequences from a war that Trump is now projecting to last a month or more (“whatever it takes,” to be precise), it’s about to affect Americans too:

American motorists will pay more at the pump amid spiking oil prices due to the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran, with experts predicting gasoline prices could rise sharply this week.

The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, a type of oil primarily produced in the U.S., jumped 6.2% on Monday to $71.19 per barrel, according to data from FactSet. Brent crude, the international benchmark, surged nearly 9% to $79.31 per barrel on Monday, its highest point in more than a year.

Gas prices in the U.S. will move higher, according to GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan, who predicted that some gas stations could be charging as much as 30 cents more per gallon. 

And the indirect effects could be even more severe, as Canadian energy expert Rory Johnston told our own Benjamin Hart:

I think if this lasts a couple more days, we’ll see it reflected at the gas pump in terms of overall gas prices. 

Diesel will be even more acutely affected. I think the big impact will be on freight and shipping rates, and that’s going to hit consumers more on the price of produce, the price of random consumer goods. That’s the type of stuff that diesel will complicate more. So I think you will see an impact at the price of the pumps, but the biggest impact won’t be as visible to consumers immediately. It will take a while to work through the supply chain.

As part of their furious spin about a war that’s already unpopular outside Trump’s Republican base, administration gabbers are arguing that Trump’s expansion of fossil-fuel production is giving him the strategic flexibility to wreck global oil markets without catastrophic consequences, notes the New York Times:

The Trump administration said that it has more leeway to act aggressively in the Middle East because the world is flush with oil and gas, thanks in part to record U.S. production, and has less to fear than it once did from energy price shocks.

The ongoing war in Iran could put that theory to the test.🤥

While it may be comforting to Americans to be told they won’t be paying as much for this war as they might have had Trump not impatiently brushed aside environmental fears about fossil fuels, it doesn’t explain the decision to subordinate economic policy to another Donald Trump (bone spurs❗🦴❗)military adventure. 

Yes, MAGA true believers are buying Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear-weapon and missile programs posed an immediate threat to the United States, but other Americans are not persuaded at the moment. So, Donald Trump's reckless decision thrusting in this radical direction sure looks like a conscious choice to subordinate the daily concerns of our American people to a globalist agenda and an alliance with Israel that already troubles a majority of Americans.

Shortly before the 2024, presidential election, I was filling up my car with gas in California, and someone had placed on the pump a little decal of Trump pointing at the per-gallon prices and saying, Biden did this! If pump prices continue to go up in 2026, it will be even easier to show that Trump did this❗ And the price will be paid not just by consumers, but by Republican candidates whose affordability arguments have been blown up by the explosions in Iran.

*Affordability is defined as the state of being cheap enough for people to be able to buy. 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans will experience the voter impact of negative Trumpzism in 2026 elections

Trump Started 2025 Strong, Then His Approval Rating Crashed

Echo published in The Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore:

Donald Trump’s (🤥as usual) false ❗claims 🙄😡about💢 a landslide victory and a huge mandate in 2024, were always ridiculous. Nevertheless he began his second term with some of the highest job-approval ratings he’s ever had as president. 

Yet, per Gallup polling, he never hit 50 percent job approval during his first term, but Silver Bulletin’s refined polling averages showed him at 51.6 percent the day after his second inauguration. 

With a disapproval rating of 40 percent, that gave him a double-digit positive net approval rating of 11.6 percent. His net approval stayed positive until early March, going underwater on March 12, and staying there for the rest of the year.

Trump’s poll numbers took a big plunge in April around the time he imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs. 

Although it recovered modestly through June, his poll numbers then began a steady decline, that dipped to terrible around Thanksgiving, when his net approval hit minus-15 percent (41.2 percent approval, 56.2 percent disapproval). He has seen a slight improvement in the month since, but as of December 23, Trump's job-approval average at Silver Bulletin stands at 42.1 percent with disapproval at 54.3 percent.

At this point in 2017, during Trump’s first term, Gallup had his job approval at 36 percent, precisely where Gallup shows him today. 

On this date in 2021, Joe Biden’s job-approval rating per Gallup was at 43 percent. In fact, the only post–World War II president to match Trump’s current poor job approval at this point in his presidency was Trump, in his first term.

Obviously, Trump has always had a polarizing effect on Americans. But Silver Bulletin’s tracking of strong approval versus strong disapproval shows the latter consistently ahead in much of 2025, matching the general erosion of Trump’s popularity. 

At present, 25.2 percent of Americans strongly approve of his job performance, and 44.1 percent strongly disapprove.

Since June, Trump has been underwater in assessments of his job performance on all four major issues tracked by Silver Bulletin’s polling averages. His net approval is currently at minus-8.3 percent on immigration, minus-20.5 percent on trade, minus-21.3 percent on the economy, and minus-28.8 percent on inflation.

Unsurprisingly, specific polling outlets have different takes on Trump’s popularity. But overall, the downward 2025, trend shows up nearly everywhere. 

Rasmussen Reports (long a Trump favorite) has a daily tracking of presidential job approval that showed his net approval as positive or roughly neutral for two-thirds of the year with a decided downward swing in autumn. As of December 23, Rasmussen has the president’s job approval at 44 percent positive and 54 percent negative. Raz also measures strong approval versus strong disapproval, currently placing the former at 29 percent and the latter at 44 percent. Perhaps a more alarming trend is evident in the highly reputed AtlasIntel findings, which had Trump’s net job approval at minus-5 percent as recently as September but shows him at minus-20 percent in mid-December. One traditionally pro-GOP pollster, InsiderAdvantage, has shown Trump’s net job approval as positive all year long. More typical has been Fox (Fake❗ ) News, which placed the president’s net job approval at single-digit negative levels for most of 2025, but then showed it lurching downward to minus-17 percent in mid-November and minus-12 percent in mid-December.

Tracking presidential job approval by party affiliation is a bit difficult due to differences in ways of determining such affiliation. 

Yet,  Gallup’s monthly polling is typical in showing Trump only modestly losing ground with self-identified Republicans over 2025. He was at 91 percent during Inauguration Week and still at 89 percent in December, though there was a dip to 84 percent in November. But, among self-identified independents, Trump’s approval rating was at 46 percent during Inauguration Week and is at 25 percent in December.

How will Trump’s loss of popularity affect the 2026, midterm elections❓ It won’t help, obviously, if he continues to lose ground. Gallup showed his 2018, job-approval rating at 39 percent in January and 40 percent in November, when his party lost 41 House seats. But the usual low-turnout midterm electorate is slightly less aligned with overall public opinion than the high-turnout presidential electorate. Another factor is that, while Trump has been and remains unpopular, the Democratic Party’s approval ratings aren’t great either (though typically midterms are referenda on the president’s party more than choices between competing parties).

The polling number that most corresponds to midterm vote intentions is the so-called generic congressional ballot, which simply asks respondents which party they want to control the U.S. House of Representatives. According to RealClearPolitics’ polling averages, Democrats currently lead on the generic ballot by 3.7 percent. Decision Desk HQ’s averages put the Democratic advantage at 5.3 percent. The two parties were very nearly tied on the generic ballot prior to the 2024 election, in which Republicans eked out the fragile House majority they still have today.

Of course, unexpected things could happen between now and November 2026 ,that might change the currently strong odds that Democrats will at least flip the House and make gains in the Senate. With gerrymandering still underway, we don’t even know exactly what the landscape will look like. It is reasonable to presume that Trump is more likely to be a drag on his party than a boon, based on everything we know about the negative public attitudes toward him over time. Donald Trump is obviously just not a very popular politician, and those who love him fiercely get only one vote.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans in denial about the 2025 special election results- Trumpzi-ism WAS on the ballot!

Hip❗ Hip❗ Hurray❗  🎈❗ Somebody must roadblock this despicable Trumpzi tyrant.: Trump’s Low Approval Rating Is Hurting Republicans in Polls- opinion published in New York Magazine  Intelligencer, by Ed Kilgore.

One of the major narratives that came out of the very poor showing of Republicans in the 2025, elections is that the GOP struggles to win when Donald Trump is not on the ballot. 

Certainly Donald Trump himself shares that (delusional😕😦😟) belief, as he said on Election Night in no uncertain terms on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT.”

This was cold comfort for Republicans who understand that Trump isn’t going to be on the ballot in 2026, either. 

Nevertheless, the narrative may not even be true. Polls keep showing that Trump is increasingly a drag on his party and that his weaknesses in the electorate very much resemble the GOP’s weaknesses on November 4. (Duh❗ Ya'think❓- Mr. Kilgore is insulting my intelligence with this logic....like the folksy sage Yogi Berra is supposed to have observed, "You can see👀 a lot by just lookin'❗)

There’s now little question that Donald Trump's low job-approval ratings have been steadily sliding downward for the past couple of months. On September 20, his net approval average at Silver Bulletin was at minus-7.5 percent (44.9 percent approval, 52.4 percent disapproval). On November 20, it was at minus-14.1. percent, which is a new low for his second term. The intensity of his unpopularity is high and rising: 45.2 percent of Americans strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, again per the averages at Silver Bulletin.

On particular issues, his net approval remains underwater on all the major categories: immigration (minus-7.2 percent), trade (minus-18.8), the economy (minus-20.2), and inflation (minus-34). The numbers for immigration, the economy, and inflation are at second-term lows. The last two are noteworthy given the importance of “affordability” in the 2025, Democratic victories (reflected in Trump’s own messaging beginning the moment the November 4 results were in) and, beyond that, the importance of these issues in Trump’s 2024 victory.

A poll from Fox (Fake❗) News released on Wednesday probed more deeply into public sentiment on the economy and showed that the administration’s argument that high prices were caused by Joe Biden isn’t working anymore:

By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, voters say Trump is more responsible for the current economy than Biden (62% vs. 32%). Unsurprisingly, there’s a large partisan gap, as Democrats are nearly 40 percentage points more likely than Republicans to blame Trump. Somewhat surprisingly though, 42% of Republicans blame him, while a 53% majority says Biden is responsible. Among independents, 62% say Trump and 29% Biden.

Not all polls break down the electorate, but those that do are pretty consistent in showing that Trump’s 2024, coalition is shrinking back from the hard-core MAGA base. New polling from The Argument reinforces that impression forcefully:

Republicans are hemorrhaging support with the young, nonwhite, and disengaged voters who powered Trump’s victory in 2024. Here are a few tidbits to show just what I’m talking about:

• Democrats are winning 25% of nonwhite Trump 2024, voters. Among white voters, this number is just 4%.
• Among registered voters who didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump in 2024, Democrats receive 62% of the vote — a 25-percentage-point lead. Among the white voters of this group, Democrats lead by two points; among nonwhite nonvoters, they lead by 48 points.

Democrats win 64% of young voters in our survey, for a lead of 28 points. (For context, in 2024, they won this group by just 10 points.)

Exit polls from the 2025, elections showed exactly the same pro-Democratic trends among young and non-white voters in New Jersey and Virginia. If the numbers persist into 2026, it’s hard to imagine Republicans hanging on to their control of the House — particularly if Trump’s effort to change the landscape through gerrymandering continues to flounder. In addition to Trump’s popularity issues, and despite their own well-known problems, Democrats are now opening up a significant lead in the congressional generic ballot, an approximation of the House popular vote next year. 

According to RealClearPolling, the average Democratic lead on the generic ballot is 4.8 percent, another 2025, high. At Decision Desk HQ, the Democratic lead is 5.4 percent; Republicans led by 5.3 percent there at the beginning of 2025. The Argument explains what these trends might mean in the results:

If the election were held today, Republicans may be facing a blue wave larger than the 2018 midterms, which resulted in a commanding Democratic House majority. Put simply, they are in really bad shape.

How bad❓ Consider this: In our survey fielded right after the election, Nov. 10-17, Republicans trailed by four percentage points among registered voters. When we pushed undecided voters to pick a side, that deficit expanded to six percentage points. And after that was filtered to just those who said they were likely to vote, it grew even further, to 7.6 points.

So neither the GOP nor its leader are doing that well at the moment, particularly on the affordability issues* that they now recognize are so crucial to swing voters. Some Republican candidates in 2026 will choose to cleave to Trump even more fiercely, and others may try to achieve some distance, but they’re probably joined at the hip for better or worse.

*Meanwhile, ⚠️ Tresury Secretary Scott Bessent says parts of the Trumpzi economy are in recession:  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that some parts of the U.S. economy have already slipped into an economic downturn.  "I think we are in good shape, but I think that there are sectors of the economy that are in recession," Bessent told CNN host Jake Tapper.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW #25thAmendment

Governor Gavin Newsom created a political current for his future success with PROP 50 strategic victory

Excellent echo essay published The New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore.

Truth be told, when California governor Gavin Newsom announced back on July 31, 2025, that he was going to pursue a constitutional amendment to retaliate against Donald Trump’s Texas gerrymandering power grab, I was skeptical it could work.

First of all, it involved firing at a moving target. Though there was never any doubt Texas Republicans would do as they were told, the actual new congressional map wasn’t finally put into place until the end of August, nearly a month after Newsom made his move. 

Second of all, the time frame was really constrained: Any proposed amendment had to clear the California legislature almost instantly and then survive legal challenges. 

Third of all, the nonpartisan citizens redistricting commission that Newsom wanted to push aside was well-established (created by voters in 2008, and extended to congressional redistricting two years later) and widely popular, particularly among Democrats and good-government types. 

And fourth of all, he and his allies would have very little time to raise the vast funds necessary to explain this arcane issue to voters, persuade them to give redistricting (albeit temporarily) back to politicians, and mobilize them to vote in an off-year special election.

In addition, Newsom was picking a fight with one of the few Californians better known than himself: his predecessor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who regarded the nonpartisan redistricting system as an important part of his own legacy.

Newsom and his allies (including virtually every Democratic pol in the state, along with national Democratic celebrities and pro-Democratic constituency groups, especially unions) methodically got the job done. 

They didn’t wait for the Texas power grab to be consummated before laying the groundwork for the ballot initiative, making it initially contingent on what happened in the Lone Star State. 

They went right ahead and secured legislative approval of an actual congressional map so that voters could see what they were voting for instead of trusting the pols to get it right. Enough money was lined up to give Prop 50 (as it came to be known) a big financial advantage over its opponents (a coalition of Republicans and allegedly independent good-government advocates). 

And most of all, Newsom & Co. settled quickly on a message that made Prop 50 a referendum on Donald Trump and his many terrible works.

The strategy closely resembled what Newsom did to defeat a Republican-led 2021 recall effort that would have removed him from office: making it a partisan contest in which the Democrats who outnumber Republicans about five to three in the Golden State would prevail if motivated and united. 

But beyond that, the Prop 50 campaign focused on Trump — not just the gerrymandering scheme the initiative countered, but his ongoing battle with California across a broad landscape of legal and policy issues. So, while Prop 50 opponents were consigned to abstract arguments over complex systems for drafting and approving congressional maps, Prop 50 proponents could simply produce visceral and threatening images of a very unpopular president. 

And because Trump really did start the redistricting fight, Prop 50 could be presented as a righteous measure to prevent a proliferation of gerrymandering this year and on into the future. The campaign turned a retaliatory power grab into a good-government measure of its own.

Prop 50 got some breaks, too. The “No on 50” coalition was divided on tactics and strategy between those who wanted to keep the high nonpartisan ground and those who wanted to demonize Newsom. 

Schwarzenegger, who was probably unhappy with any association, however indirect, with Trump (the nominally Republican actor went so far as to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024), gave the “No on 50” cause little more than lip service. And Trump himself seemed to be on his worst behavior in the months that preceded the vote.

In the end, it was no contest, but still, the numbers are remarkable. With 75 percent of the vote counted (California, which sends mail ballots to all registered voters, counts votes slowly), Prop 50 is leading by a margin of 63.8 percent to 36.2 percent, and the “yes” margin is likely to go up as a “blue shift” (the typical Democratic lean in the last-counted mail ballots) develops. 

That’s already a higher percentage of the vote than the last three Democratic presidential candidates secured in California, and for that matter, a higher percentage than Newsom’s in his two gubernatorial elections and his recall win. On a bad Election Night for Donald Trump, it was the largest and noisiest blow to the 47th president of them all. And most obviously, Prop 50, intended to flip five U.S. House seats, could pay major dividends in the 2026 midterms, particularly since Republican gerrymandering efforts are currently stalling in Indiana and Kansas.

The big win for Prop 50 will also boost Gavin Newsom’s all-but-certain 2028 presidential candidacy. 

To this Californian, it feels like Newsom has been running for that office for decades. But he deserves whatever juice he gets from his anti-Trump efforts in 2025. Prop 50 represented a master class in persuasion and a strategy executed to perfection. If Newsom’s future campaign is as competent, he’ll be in good shape.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end murdering people on the high seas especially when the Coast Guard is trained to intercede

An echo opinion published in the New York Magazine Intelligencer

Trump Wants to ‘Kill People’ Without War By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015.

Pete Hegseth confirms the killing.

In response to press questions about his administration’s escalating attacks on fishing boats (without proof of cause) in the Caribbean and the Pacific that were allegedly involved in drug trafficking, Donald Trump drew a rather jarring distinction, as CNN reports:

Trump insisted that he could continue to launch strikes against alleged drug traffickers without Congress first passing an official declaration of war. “I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”

It’s clear that Trump’s intention was to rule out any congressional interference with his constitutionally dubious use of military force in a struggle — don’t say war! — with so-called “narco-terrorists.” 

But, the line he drew between “war” and “killing” revealed a more fundamental element of his thinking. There has always been a bit of a contradiction between Trump’s horror toward “forever wars” — not to mention his aspirations as a global peacemaker — and his more general bloodlust. He wants America’s enemies and rivals to have no doubt about his willingness to unleash incredible levels of violence if he deems it necessary. He has dismissed laws of warfare that protect civilians or prohibit the torture of potential informants. He has appointed a “secretary of war” who believes “lethality” must be central to every national-security calculation. And in all sorts of contexts, he’s rejected any restraints on retribution against anyone who crosses him.

What this apparent disconnect between aversion to war and pure enjoyment of violence shows is that Trump remains a faithful disciple of the Jacksonian tradition in American foreign policy. Like Old Hickory, Trump rejects alliances, entanglements, or commitments to deploy military force, but at the same time believes use of maximum violence to eliminate any direct threat to perceived American interests is essential to maintaining the peace and deterring bad actors.

Trump wants a huge military that is so feared that it rarely needs to be used, and he hates the idea of limited “forever” wars that don’t instantly achieve their purposes. That probably includes any armed conflict that would last long enough to require congressional authorization or oversight. 

So Trump has no problems with, and in fact glories in, killing people as the best possible guarantor of an America-friendly world order based on fear rather than messy treaties and rules. Sudden strikes on fishing boats that may or may not be engaged in “narco-terrorism” are right in his wheelhouse. The message to a dangerous world is Don’t tread on me 🐍— or get yourself killed. It’s chilling but entirely in character for the 47th cruel president.

P.S. Maine Writer- Donald Trump, with maga Evangelicals like Speker Mike Johnson claim to be Christian but the Bible is very clear in the Ten Commandments, "Thou Shalt Not Kill".  The commandment "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13) is more accurately translated as "Thou shalt not murder," and it prohibits the unjust taking of a human life. The Hebrew word used, ratsach, specifically refers to wrongful homicide.

Trump pulled the rug out from under the ambitious Elise Sefanik

Awwww 😊😉😄❗ It's tough to be Elise Stefanik❗

An New York Intelligencer report by Ed Kilgore:

You have to figure Elise Stefanik has been getting pretty antsy lately. She announced way back on November 10 — so long ago that DOGE was just an evil glimmer in Elon Musk’s eyes — that Donald Trump had offered her the Cabinet-level position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It must have seemed like a pretty sweet gig: no management responsibilities at all, but a lot of public attention (just like her predecessor Nikki Haley), and the chance to please The Boss by attacking his growing list of global enemies.

"Right Now, the U.S. Is Ceasing to Be a Democracy"

Spiegel Magazine International 

There was one catch, though: Stefanik’s confirmation by the Senate (expected to be a breeze) was postgponed until after April 1, when two House vacancies in Florida created by earlier Trump appointments (Matt Gaetz as attorney general, briefly, and Michael Waltz as White House national security adviser) would be filled by a special election. Before then, the fragile GOP majority in the House meant Stefanik had to stay in that chamber to supply her vote on big measures like the House budget resolution and the continuing resolution that kept the federal government running.

Once those were out of the way, and two new Floridians sworn in, Stefanik would finally be able to head to the U.N. building and take the next step up the ladder that some figured would eventually make her a presidential possibility herself.

But just a few days before the Florida special elections, lightning struck, via a Trump post on Truth Social:

So instead of strutting her stuff on the international stage and burnishing her “rising star” image, Stefanik will be stuck in the House as just another slave to Trump’s every whim.

What happened❓ Well, if Trump is telling the truth 🤥(never a given😧), there remains the fear that even with fresh troops from Florida, the margin in the House is too narrow for comfort with the “one big, beautiful bill” implementing the president’s legislative agenda still on tap and not sure to reach the House floor until late spring or even summer. 

With Stefanik’s seat vacated and with a Democratic governor of New York able to delay filling it for some time, all it would take is two or three defections (depending on absences) to screw everything up and derail tax cuts, budget cuts, a debt-limit increase, and all the other weighty items planned for the budget reconciliation bill.

What you have to wonder is why this situation wasn’t evident before Stefanik was nominated, as GOP senator Lisa Murkowski remarked shortly: "They just figured that out NOW❓"

The perilous situation of House Republicans was actually worse at the beginning of this Congress, before two House Democrats died. 

Are there new jitters about Mike Johnson’s ability to manage his troops? Is it possible Republicans are afraid they’ll lose one of those Florida special elections, or perhaps the New York special election Stefanik’s departure would have triggered? Is the myth of Trump 2.0 as a fast-moving and irresistible force crushing all opposition perhaps slightly hollow? Or is this all a ruse and the extremely ambitious House Republican Conference chair said or did something to displease the man upstairs (meaning Trump, not God)?

That’s unclear, but for the moment it sucks to be Elise Stefanik. Not that long ago she was on the shortlist to become Trump’s running mate and presumptive political heir. Now she’s a prisoner of the House, a body that is determined to surrender all its power to Russell Vought and Elon Musk.

It’s true that Trump’s thunderbolt, by taking away her nice new job, included an explicit suggestion that she will “join my administration in the future,” and that’s no small thing, particularly given the high likelihood that the GOP will lose control of the House in 2026, making House Republicans even less significant than they are today.

But who knows what the future will bring and which jobs will be open when Stefanik’s mere floor vote stops being essential? Nah, it would have been better if the New York representative had arranged to be first in line to quit her House seat after the election.

Catholic convert JD Vance did not learn anything about how to be faithful to the core belief of all Christianity

Pope Informs J.D. Vance He’s Wrong About Migrants, Christianity

An echo essay published in the Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore

Not that long ago, Catholic “traditionalists” were known for their intense commitment to papal authority. 

But, that was when conservative popes like John Paul II and especially Benedict XVI reigned over the Vatican; today, “traditionalists” like the convert J.D. Vance probably relish a squabble with the Holy Father. 

If so, the vice-president sure got one, as Pope Francis has released an encyclical to U.S. bishops that insists on assistance to migrants as an obligation as old as the church itself and seems to take a pretty firm whack at Vance’s theological defense of an “America First” approach to immigration matters.

Vance started this fight with his recently acquired (convert) faith, blasting those same U.S. bishops (many of them conservatives on other matters) for resisting ICE raids on Catholic churches and schools that provide services and shelter to undocumented immigrants. He even suggested on Face the Nation last month that the bishops were acting out of concern not for migrants but for “their bottom line,” the government money they have received for helping refugees resettle. Vance went on to explain to Sean Hannity that his relative lack of charity for immigrants was rooted in the early church concept of ordo amoris (rightly ordered love):

There’s this old-school [concept] — and I think a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” he said.

He continued: “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”

Vance’s efforts to be more Catholic than the pope have now elicited a definitive rebuke. Francis’s encyclical calls the Trump administration’s program of mass deportation a “major crisis” and an effort to apply brute force to a global migration trend that calls for sensitivity and compassion: “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” Francis noted that Christ himself “did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life, and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own. The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration.”

Having presented basic church teachings on immigration, Francis briskly turned to Vance’s ordo amoris defense of nativism:

Christian love ✝️is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups … The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

Catholic writer Elizabeth Bruenig put it more plainly in a recent meditation on Vance’s version of the faith:

The decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

Perhaps Vance is preparing an erudite response to Francis’s encyclical that will put the pontiff in his place and cheer MAGA Catholics who regard migrants as cat-eating criminal scum rather than replicas of the baby Jesus in his flight into Egypt. But Vance may not be as smart as he thinks he is. Evaluating a recent speech by the vice-president claiming religious liberty as a legacy of the early church, the National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters demolishes Vance’s “lousy attempt at historiography” and concludes he is “an ingenu [i.e., immature] or a demagogue. Or both.”

In the words of the headline of Winters’s piece, Vance is “in over his head” when he tries to pose as a wise doctor of the church equipped to instruct Catholic bishops and presumably even the Pope. America’s two Catholic presidents, John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden, never did that. 

Perhaps he should ground his politics not in the Bible or the writings of the early church fathers but in sacred MAGA texts like The Art of the Deal.😡😢

Vote Harris/Walz: DonOLD Trump positioning his failed campaign to ignite another 2024 election coup

Is Our System Strong Enough to Block Another Trump Coup Attempt? By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015 (In New York Magazine).

January 6th Shaman Jacob Chansley

In this 2024, close and very intense presidential contest, there are two possible outcomes we can count on absolutely: Either Donald Trump will win, or Donald Trump will falsely claim he’s won. We won’t necessarily know for sure which of these realities prevails right away. Based on what happened in 2020 and the likely pattern of election returns this time around, we’ll probably get the Trump victory claim on Election Night (it occurred at around three in the morning in 2020) or the morning after, while confirmation of the actual winner by media consensus may not occur until a few days later (it was on Saturday, November 7, in 2020, when the Associated Press and every other major media outlet called the race for Joe Biden) once late-counted mail ballots are in. What does not seem to be on the table is any gracious concession of defeat by the 45th president, who has repeatedly and redundantly precondemned the election as “rigged” against him. If he does win, the MAGA party line suggests, that means he should have won by a vast, historic landslide without all the “election interference” engaged in by his enemies.

But while election denial from Team Trump is a near certainty should he lose or the result be in doubt, there are encouraging signs that the system Trump stress-tested in 2020 is now stronger. Indeed, this week, we are hearing from two unlikely sources some highly reassuring words about the resiliency of the institutional barriers to a second attempted postelection coup.

Probably no one galvanized preelection fears about a 2020 Trump coup more than journalist Barton Gellman. While many of us writers warned for months about the implications of Trump’s near-daily attacks on voting by mail, Gellman laid out a fully developed scenario in September that eerily anticipated what Team Trump would do, up to and including a challenge to the confirmation of Biden’s win by Congress on January 6, that would depend on Mike Pence refusing to “count” Biden electors.

So it’s worth noting that Gellman is feeling much better about 2024, despite Trump’s very bad intent, as he explains at Time:

The threat remains acute. Trump, backed this time by Republicans who have adopted his pre-emptive election denial, will try again to defy the voters if they choose Harris. …

But the arc of the evidence, based on interviews with state, local, and federal election officials, intelligence analysts, and expert observers, bends toward confidence. Since 2020, the nation’s electoral apparatus has upgraded its equipment, tightened its procedures, improved its audits, and hardened its defenses against subversion by bad actors, foreign or domestic. Ballot tabulators are air-gapped from the Internet and voter-verified paper records are the norm. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2022 make it much harder to interfere with the appointment of electors who represent a state’s popular vote, and harder to block certification in Congress of the genuine electoral count. Courts continue to deny evidence-free claims of meddling. The final word on vote-certification in key swing states rests with governors from both parties who have defied election denialism at every turn.

The system, according to everyone I asked, will hold up against Trump’s efforts to break it.

Gellman puts a lot of stock in the pre-2024, training of nonpartisan election officials who have assessed what happened in 2020, and have contingency plans for both legal and political attacks on their work. He also points out that even though Trump has a more compliant Republican Party that in 2020, he does not control the federal government. And like others, he reminds us that in the end, Joe Biden was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2021, despite all the Trump-engineered chaos. He also takes a long look at the possibility that precisely because they’ve been denied many legal avenues for challenging the results, MAGA folk may resort to overt violence at the state or local levels to impede the vote count:

Neither violence nor the threat of it is likely to have any meaningful impact on the vote count. Since 2020, state and county officials have taken extensive steps to build in layers of security. In Maricopa County, the tabulation center is now surrounded by a sturdy wall, guarded by law-enforcement teams, and surveilled by drones. In Durham County, North Carolina, says elections director Derek L. Bowens, “we also activate our emergency-response center on Election Day and we have patrols of polling locations.” Staff members in every precinct will wear an “alert badge” that summons help at the press of a button. Police officers in all 50 states will be carrying pocket guides to election law, and law-enforcement groups like the National Sheriffs Association are teaming up with election officials for contingency planning.

Gellman isn’t the only prominent writer who is simultaneously sure Trump will try to pull off a coup, but confident he won’t succeed.

Anti-Trump conservative columnist David French of the New York Times concluded that everything the former president tried in 2020, has now been foreclosed by a combination of legislative reforms and court rulings. He adds to Gellman’s arguments the insight that massive legal penalties meted out to 2020’s most notorious election deniers could have a chilling effect on similar mass lying in 2024:

It is … no mystery as to why right-wing media was notably restrained after the 2022 midterm elections. In spite of MAGA’s losses — and in spite of the fact that MAGA politicians were calling the outcome rigged — right-wing media largely ignored (or debunked) their fantastical claims. The liability risk was simply too great to amplify Republican lies.

French also hedges his predictions by worrying that the strengthening of the election system could simply lead MAGA folk into more openly seditious behavior:

Given the hysterical rhetoric around this election, including the common right-wing (evil👿❗) refrain that Kamala Harris is a “Marxist” who has “destroyed” America and may even put Christians in “gulags,” I’d be surprised if the post-election period is entirely peaceful.

We might even see an attempted repeat of Januar 6, but this time with protesters actually using firearms and attempting a longer occupation of the Capitol. 

I’d fully expect to hear revived talk of secession, this time even more serious than it was after Biden won in 2020.

(Secession❓ 😟Maine Writer note: So, whatever happened to "I pledge allegience to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation......"

But as both Gellman and French illustrate, it’s not easy to get from mere chaos to DonOLD Trump taking the oath of office next January 20. If enough people around the former president come to realize that chaos isn’t a strategy, perhaps we can avoid another attempted coup.