<Donald Trump reigns like a great Ju-Ju from a mountain made of many tribes. Supporting him in his glory is an unlikely coalition of blue-collar workers, redneck hillbillies, Gen Z men, conservatives, Latinos and Hispanics, black voters, disaffected female Democrats, evangelicals, Catholics, and, in the filthier corners, those who chant “Russia is our friend” and have flown the swastika flag.

The recent protests across America are a sign that the magic mountain is wobbling. The president has so far managed to keep his best tribes together with a mixture of charisma, boosterism, interest-group politics and the ruthless intolerance of dissent. The general cultishness of his movement also goes a long way. This week, however, the pressure of Trump’s berserk tariff strategy has opened the biggest cleavage among his supporters so far.

Elon Musk, the figurehead of his libertarian cheerleaders, has been spearheading a campaign to soften Trump’s tariffs before they unleash an age of economic and geopolitical havoc. This has not gone down well with the protectionists.

On Monday, Musk posted a video of the economist Milton Friedman praising the innovation, human flourishing and peace that free trade can provide. “Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil,” Friedman said, turning one over in his hands. It was the “magic of the price system” that caused them to work together so beneficially across the borders of race, politics and culture, he pointed out.

The post on X was a shot across the bows of the economically nationalist spur of Trump Mountain, whose totems include the likes of Steve Bannon and the president’s chief adviser on trade and tariffs, Peter Navarro. By all accounts, this tension within Trump’s inner circle is threatening landslide after landslide.

As part of his campaign, Musk has been demanding free trade with Europe, which now groans under American tariffs of 20 per cent. In a sombre interview, which he posted on X, he was unequivocal. “At the end of the day, I hope it’s agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America,” he said.

This happened to align precisely with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s “zero-for-zero” tariff proposal, which she made to the US on Monday in an effort to avert a tit-for-tat trade war. Given Trump’s declared view that the European Union was created solely to “screw” America, Musk’s statement represented a sharp break with the orthodoxy. To some in the protectionist camp, he was siding with the enemy.

Soon Navarro was publicly snubbing Musk’s demands on Europe. “Elon Musk sells cars,” he sniped. “He’s simply protecting his own interests, as any business person would do.” He then accused the Tesla boss of leading a “car assembler” rather than a manufacturer, using “cheap foreign parts” which “doesn’t work for America.”

In retaliation, Musk said Navarro was “dumber than a sack of bricks”. He argued: “By any definition whatsoever, Tesla is the most vertically integrated auto manufacturer in America with the highest percentage of US content.”

Trump’s landslide victory of 2024 defied gravity in its ability to bring together voters with wildly divergent interests and beliefs. To a great extent, this was a protest vote on steroids, an expression of disgust with the discredited old liberal order and an enthusiasm for Trump’s move-fast-and-break-things agenda. As time goes by, however, it is increasingly looking like a one-off miracle that is unlikely to survive contact with the sort of reality Trump is beginning to unleash upon his supporters.

The president himself is a 3D model of contradictions. When it comes to domestic politics, he supports deregulation and cutting down the size of the state. Internationally, however, he is fiercely opposed to free trade. The problem should be obvious: the former is impossible with the latter. Domestic and international policies feed into each other. He can’t have both.

Does Trump believe he can force his way through this binary? Or is he entirely oblivious to it? Either way, with the president’s inner circle pulling itself apart and his diverse cheerleaders poised to feel the pain in their pockets, Trump Mountain may be about to come tumbling down.>

<White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses.

Leavitt suggested the effort would be limited to people who have committed major crimes, but Trump has also mentioned the possibility of sending people who commit lesser offenses abroad.

Any such move on the part of the Trump administration is certain to be challenged in court. It is also not clear what legal authority could be used to justify expelling U.S. citizens from their homeland.

“These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders on American streets,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

“The president has said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that. He’s not sure, [and] we are not sure if there is,” Leavitt continued. “It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly in the effort of transparency.”

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that he “love[s]” the idea of removing U.S. citizens, adding that it would be an “honor” to send them to El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele — an eager partner in Trump’s schemes.

Trump also proposed the idea in March, when Tesla vehicles were being vandalized and set ablaze in protest of CEO Elon Musk’s heavy-handed involvement in the Trump administration. Musk has been running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, taking credit for huge cuts to the federal workforce and federal services.

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

The administration has argued that housing people in El Salvador saves taxpayer money.

Several planeloads of immigrants flown there last month remain incarcerated as a lawsuit challenging their deportation proceeds through the federal court system. The immigrants, mostly men from Venezuela, were accused of being gang members and deported without the chance to defend themselves. Court documents and reports that have emerged since their removal suggest many believe they will be targeted by the very same gangs Trump has accused them of being affiliated with.

Trump used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send the immigrants to El Salvador, officially categorizing the gang Tren de Aragua as a hostile power and the immigrants of being members. It is not clear whether he would attempt to use the same law or a different power to remove citizens.

Critics say the administration’s policy is a clear violation of due process protections enshrined in the Constitution.>

The film gave us the term gaslighting, which describes a certain type of psychological manipulation. To succeed, it requires those who are targeted to become so disoriented that they begin to doubt themselves, to become confused, and to question their own perception of reality. Clinical psychologists say that as gaslighting plays out, not only do its victims start to deny reality; they begin to accept the false reality of the person gaslighting them....>

<....Gaslighters are manipulative and controlling, comfortable belittling and insulting others. They are accomplished at denying, lying, and projecting. And sometimes, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough, they make it to the White House. When they do, the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation.

At that point, the enormous machinery of the federal government, supported by outside groups and media outlets, becomes part of a massive and relentless disinformation campaign. The aim is to provoke distrust, confusion, and disorientation, which corrodes people’s confidence in institutions and undermines their grasp of reality. The ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilize and cohere.

When there is no objective truth, when everyone gets to make up their own reality, their own script, and their own facts, authoritarians thrive.

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,” Garry Kasparov, a Russian pro-democracy leader, wrote in 2016. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

AS DISINFORMATION INCREASES, and as more and more individuals and institutions go silent, it becomes ever more important for truth tellers to speak up, if only to assure those who don’t believe the propaganda that they’re not losing their mind.

They need to do for their fellow citizens what the police inspector did for Paula Alquist.

Getting through America’s epistemic crisis—where there’s no agreed-upon reality, where there’s a breakdown of a society’s system for deciding what’s true—won’t be quick or easy, especially because the Trump administration still has more than 1,350 days to go. The task of reconstructing truth is a generational one, and a lot of pieces need to come together.

It starts by asking the right questions, such as the one recently posed by Kristin Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University: “How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”

People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”

I’ve struggled to offer an answer; so have those I’ve reached out to for counsel. I have yet to receive a menu of compelling options. But I am certain that what needs to inform the answers to these questions, and what needs to precede a comprehensive plan of action, is knowledge.

That means turning to experts on the history of disinformation, such as Thomas Rid, who can talk about how societies have addressed these questions in the past; political psychologists, such as Australia’s Karen Stenner, who can help develop the language for how to reach people awash in distortions and deceptions; and experts in psychology and neuroscience, such as Jay Van Bavel, whose work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, cooperation, intergroup bias, and social media. It includes turning to cognitive scientists such as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, who study how people reason, make decisions, and form attitudes and beliefs; philosophers of science such as Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, who argue that social forces explain the persistence of false beliefs; Peter Pomerantsev, who specializes in overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization; and political scientists such as Brendan Nyhan, who works on subjects including misperception and conspiracy theories....>

<....Experts in the field of misinformation say that we know a lot about different kinds of misinformation, who is targeted and why, and the means to spread it. What we don’t know, at least not yet, is how to stop it. (Interventions in which people had placed hope a few years ago—including fact-checking, warning labels, and digital-literacy training—have a somewhat mixed record.)

“Things that can break down trust began rapidly scaling over the past decade or so, whereas the things that can rebuild trust just do not scale,” Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who works on disinformation, told The New York Times. Figuring out how to scale up trust and truth is a central challenge of our time. It will take individuals and groups working together to insist on seeing the world as it actually is. Think of it as a dissident movement, an American Solidarity movement.

I HAVE A HUNCH, OR AT LEAST A HOPE. As Donald Trump’s malevolence intertwines with his incompetence, public disenchantment will grow. We’re already seeing signs of that as public fury at Elon Musk is being directed at Tesla. We’ve also seen it in town halls in red districts, where Republican members of Congress are being met not just with anxiety but also with anger. Republicans are being told to stop holding in-person town halls with constituents. And we see it in the rising panic caused by the stock-market collapse, the result of Trump’s carelessly destructive tariff policy, which is destabilizing the world’s trading system and shattering the American-led world order.

I imagine there will be more, much more, to follow, as the injuries Trump inflicts on Americans catalyze widespread fury and opposition.

Trump is an agent of chaos, and chaos has a human cost.

If disenchantment with Trump and Musk and the rest of this freak show leads to mass protests, it could be an inflection point, not just against Trump’s policies but also against the vertigo-inducing disinformation he promotes during almost every one of his waking hours.

I’ve long wondered how long it will take Americans to stop tolerating the unrelenting conflict and antipathy, which divides not just citizens but also families, that is endemic to life in the Trump era. The answer may be that they will stop tolerating it at the point when the quality of their life is degraded, when preventable diseases spread, when car prices and egg prices skyrocket, when 401(k) accounts start losing significant value.

At that point, Trump-style nihilism may lose its appeal; his disinformation campaign may begin to blow apart, and people may be reminded that living in truth is better than living within lies.

The drama has a long way to go, but the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.>

<Donald Trump’s 2024 election sent many finance types into spasms of anticipatory ecstasy as they imagined freedom from regulations, taxes and unfamiliar pronouns. “Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at ‘woke doctrine’ and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people,” The Financial Times reported a few days before Trump’s inauguration. It quoted one leading banker crowing — anonymously — about finally being able to use slurs like “retard” again. The vibes had shifted; the animal spirits were loose.

“We’re stepping into the most pro-growth, pro-business, pro-American administration I’ve perhaps seen in my adult lifetime,” gushed the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman in December.

One Wall Street veteran, however, understood the risk an unleashed Trump posed to the economy. After Trump’s victory in November, Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, which provides macroeconomic research to major financial institutions, estimated that the chance of a recession had climbed to 75 percent. “The prospect of an escalation of the trade war is likely to depress corporate investment while lowering real household disposable income,” said a BCA report.

The surprising thing isn’t that Berezin saw the Trump tariff crisis coming, but that so many of his peers didn’t. You don’t have to be a sophisticated financial professional, after all, to understand that Trump believes, firmly and ardently, in taxing imports, and he thinks any country that sells more goods to America than it buys must be ripping us off. All you had to do was read the news or listen to Trump’s own words. Yet Berezin was an outlier; most of the people who make a living off their financial acumen had less understanding of Trump’s priorities than a casual viewer of MSNBC.

On Monday, as stocks whipsawed on shifting news and rumors about the tariffs, I spoke to Berezin, who is based in Montreal, about how Wall Street had gotten Trump so wrong. He told me that many investors who pride themselves on their savvy are in fact just creatures of the herd. “All these cognitive biases that amateur retail investors are subject to, the Wall Street pros, are, if anything, even more subject to them because they’ve got career risk associated with bucking the trend,” he said.

People in finance, said Berezin, are more likely to be punished for being too cautious and pessimistic than for being too hopeful and aggressive. Last year, for instance, a famed strategist named Marko Kolanovic left JPMorgan Chase abruptly when his gloomy predictions about 2023 and 2024 turned out to be wrong, or least premature. Mike Wilson, also known for his bearishness, stepped down from his post as chair of Morgan Stanley’s Global Investment Committee, though he stayed with the company. “You don’t get fired for being bullish, but you do get fired for being bearish on Wall Street,” said Berezin.

Some investors also felt a cultural affinity with the new administration that further clouded their judgment. When wokeness was ascendant, plenty of people in tech and finance quietly seethed at being guilt-tripped and forced to feign concern about social justice. “When the opportunity came to jettison all that, they were happy to do it,” said Berezin. “And Trump enabled them to do it.”

So last October, when Scott Bessent, soon to become Treasury secretary, said that Trump was really a free trader who used tariffs as a negotiating tactic, Wall Street was eager to believe him. “It’s escalate to de-escalate,” Bessent told The Financial Times.

This claim was obviously absurd. Trump has been obsessed with tariffs, which he called “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” for decades. In his 2018 book “Fear,” Bob Woodward reported that Trump scrawled “TRADE IS BAD” in the margin of a speech he gave after the G20 summit. It makes sense that Trump would see things this way. When he makes sales, whether of Trump University courses or Trump-branded cryptocurrency, he is usually taking advantage of the buyer, and he views global trade through the same zero-sum lens....>

<....It’s widely known that during his first term, the so-called adults in the room thwarted some of Trump’s most destructive whims. There have been far fewer such figures in the Trump sequel, resulting in the wholesale degradation of American governance. The conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer just directed a purge of the National Security Council. Thanks to Elon Musk’s haphazard cuts, employees who once worked to prevent the spread of diseases like Ebola are gone, as are nuclear safety experts. There’s no one in the executive branch willing to publicly push back on Trump’s threats to take over Canada. Somehow, traders failed to recognize that there would eventually be economic fallout from such profound misrule.

“The markets should have put two and two together that if you’re talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, you’re probably going to be more radical on trade as well,” said Berezin.

But Wall Street professionals, like so many other ostensibly smart people, refused to see Trump clearly, mistaking his skill as a demagogue for wisdom as a policymaker. “I don’t think this was foreseeable,” a mournful Ackman posted on X on Monday. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount.” What an odd assumption to make about a man who bankrupted casinos.

Berezin thinks Wall Street still hasn’t come to terms with the cost of the nascent Trump presidency. “I do think that at this point we might have passed the event horizon, meaning that even if Trump backs off from the tariffs, there’s been enough damage done to the U.S. economy, to the global economy, to investor confidence, consumer confidence, that we’re probably going to see a recession regardless of what happens,” he said.

He points out that while public attention is focused on the stock market, there are alarming signs in the bond market. Usually, if stocks go down, so do yields on U.S. Treasuries, because they become more desirable to people looking for a safe place to park money. At least right now, that’s not happening, which he thinks could signal a crisis of confidence in the stability of the U.S. government and the debt it issues.

“If we’re moving to this new world where the U.S. just can’t be trusted, then do we really want to hold a lot of Treasuries?” he said as he sketched out investors’ thinking. “Do we really want to use the dollar as a reserve?” It turns out that there’s a price for taking all the soft power America has accrued since World War II and setting it on fire. Who knew.>

<Trump told Republicans to ignore their inner guide and vote for his budget bill at a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Dinner on Tuesday evening.

“They have to do this. We have to get there,” he told GOP members. “We had a great meeting today but just in case there are a couple of Republicans out there, you just got to get there. Close your eyes and get there. It’s a phenomenal bill. Stop grandstanding. Just stop grandstanding!”

Critics complain Trump holds most of his Republican supporters in a cult-like embrace, but the president's sway appears to be wavering over the issue of national deficit and the trillions of dollars debt this budget bill would require.

Republicans traditionally oppose many Democratic presidential incentives if they can be argued as increasing the national debt or hurting taxpayers. It was one of the chief reasons the GOP cited in its struggle to halt former President Joe Biden’s push for student loan relief for college students throughout his term. This was despite massive college debt acting as a brick wall to many young college graduates buying a home or starting a family.

Historically, Republicans have tended to use the raising of the debt ceiling as a tool to stymie Democratic initiatives, but rarely wield it against GOP presidents like Trump. While the party sometimes passed budget bills without everything Trump wanted, the debt limit rarely presented itself as a wedge from GOP members, and Trump added almost $7.8 trillion in debt during his first term.

Today, however, GOP fiscal hawks are blanching at the prospect of a budget that boosts the nation’s debt ratio by nearly 50 percentage points. Further complicating that effort are Trump’s own trade wars, his massive government layoffs of government employees (many of whom are veterans) and online brawling between Trump advisors.

“I’m tired of the fake math in the swamp,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a Freedom Caucus leader, who proclaimed himself “a no” after meeting with Trump today.>

<Attorney General Pam Bondi just made a significant escalation in the feud between President Donald Trump's administration and the federal judiciary — and she's hoping to enlist the Supreme Court to the White House's side.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Bondi made it clear she didn't appreciate having to abide by a lower court order in a memorandum sent to various heads of federal agencies. The memo was written as part of an order from U.S. District Judge John D. Bates (an appointee of former President George W. Bush) instructing Bondi and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to tell agencies they were prohibited from implementing parts of an executive order Trump handed down targeting the law firm Jenner & Block.

In Trump's initial executive order, he prohibited the firm's attorneys from entering government buildings (a virtual impossibility for lawyers who practice in Washington D.C.), stripped attorneys of security clearances and imposed various other sanctions. The Janner & Block executive order is part of a pattern of other related orders explicitly targeting law firms that worked for Trump's political opponents.

The attorney general didn't mince words for the "unelected" judge who authored the decision, which she said "invaded the policy-making and free speech prerogatives of the executive branch." She also notably expressed hope that the Supreme Court would step in and explicitly allow the administration to sidestep lower courts.

"Local district judges lack this authority, and the Supreme Court should swiftly constrain these judges’ blatant overstepping of the judicial power," Bondi wrote.

While some law firms cut deals with the administration in order to roll back his orders, other firms — like Janner & Block — sued to prevent the orders from going into effect. Janner & Block was one of three firms that found success in their litigation against the White House. WilmerHale and Perkins Coie were also targeted and successfully fought back in the courts.

Bondi's memo comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to ignore orders from federal judges striking down Trump's policies and enlist the High Court in its fight. When U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the return of an immigrant the administration admitted was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, the administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The 6-3 conservative supermajority halted the deadline imposed by Boasberg to bring the man back to the United States, and allowed the administration to continue deporting immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.>

<Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), after months of irritation that other countries won't follow President Donald Trump's order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America," has introduced congressional legislation that would formalize the change and require other countries use the name as well.

But at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing marking up her bill, Democrats ridiculed the situation by forcing votes on amendment after amendment on a raft of possible odd names for the gulf, Politico reported on Wednesday.

"One amendment would have renamed the Gulf of Mexico the 'Gulf of Ignorance.' Another would have dubbed it the 'Gulf of Helene,' after a major hurricane that wreaked havoc off the coast of Florida last year," reported Ben Jacobs. "In a similar vein, Democrats threw out calling it the 'Gulf of American Should Rejoin The Paris Accord' — the global emissions reduction pledge from which Trump has on two separate occasions withdrawn the United States."

Perhaps the grandest attempt to troll House Republicans came from ranking member Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), who introduced an amendment to rename the entire planet Earth to "Donald Trump." “Let’s skate to where the puck is going,” said Huffman, adding that the amendment would be an opportunity for Republicans to “show how mindlessly cultish you are.”

Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) criticized Huffman over this amendment, saying it was not relevant to the proceedings since it didn't involve renaming the Gulf of Mexico — a point Huffman conceded.

All of this comes as the White House has tried to force news agencies at press briefings to adopt the name "Gulf of America," going so far as to ban the Associated Press' team from events, as well as from the Oval Office and Air Force One, for not complying with this directive.

This week, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, himself a Trump appointee, ruled the administration violated the First Amendment by retaliating against the Associated Press, writing, “The Constitution forbids viewpoint discrimination, even in a nonpublic forum like the Oval Office.”>

There is no getting round the Gulf of Ignorance, as exemplified by Marjorie Traitor Greene and her meretricious gang.

<In the latest twist of political theater, 'Forrest Trump' reminded the world that "stupid is, as stupid does," as he paused his economically reckless tariff crusade for 90 days.

In the movies Tom Hank's [sic] famous character was shown to have far more business acumen than the US leader. But Donald Trump has once again proven that his self-proclaimed genius is little more than a hollow myth built on bluster and bankruptcy.

His reckless tariff crusade, which he insisted would “Make America Great Again,” has instead triggered chaos across global markets, wiping out trillions in value and shaking investor confidence.

It comes after Trump's outrageous comment about his 'ass' and China's unexpectedly dramatic retaliation.

And now, in a humiliating climbdown, he has announced a 90-day pause on his disastrous trade war - a desperate face-saving exercise cloaked as strategy.

Let’s be clear: this is not a calculated move by a master negotiator.

This is a panicked retreat by a man who doesn’t understand the very basics of international trade or economic cause and effect.

Trump’s approach to tariffs has been as simplistic as it is catastrophic - slap them on, bark about winning, and expect the rest of the world to capitulate.

But the world didn’t play along.

Nations like China and the European Union didn’t fold; they hit back with their own countermeasures, sending shockwaves through American agriculture, manufacturing, and tech industries.

Trump seems genuinely baffled that other countries don’t operate like contestants on one of his reality shows.

He thought they’d buckle, maybe throw in a compliment or two while handing over economic concessions.

Instead, they retaliated with precision, exposing the paper-thin logic behind his tariffs and demonstrating that the global economy is not his personal playground.

This blunder isn’t an isolated miscalculation. It’s part of a long, embarrassing pattern.

Trump’s record in business is littered with failure - six bankruptcies, failed casinos, a fraudulent “university,” a defunct airline, and an endless string of flopped ventures.

If failure were a product, Trump would have patented it. Yet somehow, he’s managed to con millions into believing he’s a financial wizard.

In truth, he’s perhaps the most economically illiterate president in US history.

And let’s not let his advisers off the hook.

The chorus of enablers around him - people who should know better - have fanned the flames of this trade war.

Either they’re too cowardly to challenge his whims, or they share his delusions. In either case, they’re complicit in the damage done.

Now, after markets tumbled and pressure mounted, Trump has blinked.

The 90-day delay is not a show of strength. It’s an admission of failure. And yet, with characteristic gall, he will undoubtedly frame this debacle as a victory.

He’ll claim, as he already has, that countries are “kissing his a**” - a statement as vulgar as it is delusional.

In reality, no one is kissing anything. They’re rolling their eyes at a man whose presidency continues to careen from one economic misstep to the next.

This isn’t leadership. It’s not strategy. It’s a farcical bluff that’s finally being called out.

Trump may try to spin his way out of this corner, but the truth is plain to see: this 90-day pause isn’t a triumph - it’s a surrender. And the world knows it.>

<The Pentagon has fired the commander of its base in Pituffik, Greenland, after she refuted remarks that Vice President JD Vance made during his contentious visit to the semi-autonomous Danish territory last month.

On March 31, three days after Vance’s visit, Col. Susannah Meyers wrote an email to the multinational staff at the Pittufik Space Base in which she struck a far more unified tone than the vice president did in his speech.

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base,” Meyers wrote in her email, which was first reported by Military.com.

“I commit that for as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly — together,” she added. (Under a 1951 defense agreement with Denmark, when the installation was known as Thule Air Base, the flags of the United States, Greenland and Denmark are required to be flown on the base.)

During his hourslong trip to the Arctic island, Vance accused Denmark of failing the people of Greenland and said they would be safer under U.S. rule. Vance and second lady Usha Vance had a frosty reception from the territory’s residents, who have largely made it clear that they do not want to be a part of the United States.

On Thursday, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted a statement on X announcing that Meyers had been let go “for loss of confidence in her ability to lead.” His statement suggested that Meyers had behaved in a partisan manner, despite the fact that her email explicitly dismissed politics.

“Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense,” Parnell wrote in his post, which linked to the article on Military.com.

Meyers is not the first to be punished for displaying less than total fealty to Team Trump. The White House has also purged the Justice Department of career lawyers and replaced them with loyalists. Just last week, a DOJ prosecutor was suspended from his post — two weeks after his promotion — for telling a federal judge that the government had deported a Maryland man to El Salvador by mistake.>

<Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who currently leads the Department of Health and Human Services, is apparently under the impression that he’s doing excellent work. In fact, this week, the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist boasted that his response to a measles outbreak should be seen as a “model for the rest of the world.”

As a report in The Guardian noted, the comments came “after Kennedy attended the funeral of a third measles victim over the weekend.”

If RFK Jr. meant that international observers should look to his example as how not to respond to a burgeoning public health threat, then yes, it’s fair to say his work deserves to be recognized as a “model for the rest of the world.” But I’m reasonably sure that’s not what he meant.

Either way, Kennedy’s overlapping failures continue to pile up. NBC News reported:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for people to get the measles vaccine while in the same breath falsely claiming it hasn’t been ‘safety tested’ and its protection is short-lived. ... In an interview Wednesday with CBS News, Kennedy said the Trump administration was focused on finding ways to treat people who choose not to get vaccinated.

Kennedy’s on-camera comments were dangerously ridiculous. He talked about treating measles — despite the fact that there are no approved treatments for measles — before claiming that measles cases are inevitable because the vaccine “wanes very quickly,” which is the opposite of what science tells us.

This coincided with Kennedy downplaying the efficacy of measles vaccines (which was needlessly reckless), describing autism as “an epidemic“ (which isn’t true), insisting that autism is caused by “an environmental toxin“ (which also isn’t true) and dismissing scientific research on autism as “invalid“ (which is bonkers).

All of this was from a single afternoon, which was part of a busy week for the Cabinet secretary.

Within the last seven days, the public has learned that more top vaccine regulators at the Food and Drug Administration have either left or been forced out following the resignation of Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, who opposed Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies” about vaccine safety.

That coincided with his new efforts to target fluoride in drinking water.

We’ve also seen RFK Jr. disseminate discredited misinformation, pointing to nonsensical and ineffective “cures” for measles patients. We’ve seen him appear completely ignorant about major developments at the agency he ostensibly leads. We’ve seen reports that Kennedy met with the families of two girls who died from measles in West Texas, where he reportedly said to one grieving family member, “You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.”

In case this weren’t quite enough, Kennedy also said he’d rehire many of the key officials from his department that he’d recently fired, though Politico reported soon after, “Turns out, it wasn’t the plan at all. HHS has no intention of reinstating any significant number of the staffers fired as part of a mass reduction-in-force on Tuesday, despite Kennedy’s assertion that some had been mistakenly cut.”

Remember, all of these developments have unfolded over the last seven days.

As unsettling as the news has been, none of it is surprising. RFK Jr.’s anti-science reputation was well established long before Donald Trump nominated him. That an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is behaving like an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is painfully predictable.

The fact remains, however, that 52 Senate Republicans were given an opportunity to protect Americans from Kennedy and they failed spectacularly.>

<Roughly 11 weeks into his second term, Donald Trump has issued well over 100 executive orders, more than in the first two years of his first term, but two of those orders were unusual — not just for him, but for the American presidency.

Late Wednesday, without warning, the Republican incumbent signed two first-of-their-kind orders targeting two former Trump administration officials who’d defied him. In the first EO, the president directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Homeland Security to launch a “review” into Christopher Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was “one of the heroes“ of the post-2020 election crisis.

In the second, Trump also directed the Department of Homeland Security to investigate Miles Taylor, a former high-ranking DHS official who became a prominent Trump critic, alerting the public to allegations that he personally witnessed the president’s corruption and ineptitude.

There was barely a pretense in the executive orders that the targeted former officials had done anything wrong. Indeed, the closer one looked at the stated rationales in support of the directives, the more they appeared ridiculous.

But that was hardly the most important problem with the underlying effort. As The New York Times reported, the broader significance of the orders was that Trump’s demands for investigations “are starting to become more formalized through written presidential decrees as he seeks to use the power of public office to punish people and companies he has cast as enemies and silence potential critics.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump crossed a new line. ... The memos send a stark message: To oppose Mr. Trump will mean risking punishment at the hands of the federal government. ... Mr. Trump is openly using his control of the executive branch to satisfy his desire for retribution against people he perceives as working against him. And his officials are readily helping him.

Tthere are countries abroad where tactics like these are common. But they’re authoritarian countries, not liberal democracies.

A related Washington Post analysis characterized this as “a big moment” as the president “crosses the Rubicon.”

I can appreciate why the media landscape is crowded right now, but to see this as a one-day story seems like a mistake. Trump — who ran on an authoritarian-style platform, who’s trying to concentrate power while expressing indifference to the rule of law — ordered investigations into Americans he doesn’t like.

He has an enemies list, and this week, he began using the power of the presidency to target some of those on that list, despite the inconvenient fact that their only “crime” was telling truths Dear Leader didn’t want to hear.

White House says it’s working on new trade deals, but it’s hiding the countries’ names If the pushback is muted, Trump will do what he’s always done: assume that he can get away with such an abuse, while preparing to keep going down the same radical and dangerous path.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but if the president can sic the Justice Department on his critics and perceived enemies, and this isn’t seen as a dramatic scandal, who’ll be next? How far down his enemies list will he go?

When I wrote about this yesterday, I received a note from a regular reader who joked, “Joe Biden should’ve pardoned more people.” That might be true, though I’m not convinced it would matter: Trump has already said that, as far as he’s concerned, his predecessor’s presidential pardons don’t really count.

I’m reminded anew of J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative legal scholar put on the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush who published a Bluesky thread on Wednesday’s orders, calling them “shameful” and “constitutionally corrupt” and accused Trump of “palpably unconstitutional conduct.”

If there’s limited pushback, it is an invitation to Trump to engage in still more palpably unconstitutional conduct.>

<Massive protests across the country this past weekend turned out millions of energized Americans unified in opposition to Donald Trump. They came just as Trump had dropped a megaton bomb into the global economy, forever altering free trade, and shaking even his most staunch defenders.

Markets will rebound, because that’s what they do. But Trump will not.

He has caused lasting damage to the economy. Prices were rising before, and will rise more, with some experts saying inflation could soon go up to 4%. Consumer confidence has crashed. The Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell warned of high inflation and a slowdown in economic growth because of Trump’s huge global import taxes, and so did J.P. Morgan’s chief Jamie Dimon. And several financial barometers now point to a Trump-induced recession. Some GOP members of Congress are speaking out. Even if it’s not enough to stop Trump now, it’s enough to torpedo the GOP and MAGA coalition.

Elon Musk broke with Trump, calling for a free trade zone with Europe, in a battle that escalated in three days and got pretty ugly. Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager who went all in on Trump, joined other billionaires in slamming him this week, saying the economy will head into a “economic nuclear winter.” Only three months ago, this guy, who’d previously backed Democrats, said of Trump, “We’re stepping into the most pro-growth, pro-business, pro-American administration I’ve perhaps seen in my adult lifetime.”

How does a hedge fund manager who’s made billions for himself and others get so conned by a guy who filed for bankruptcy four times, including with casinos he owned? Blinded by reality, whipped up by sheer madness over DEI in the workplace and driven by a “wokeness” witch hunt—all of which pales in comparison to what they’re facing now—people like Ackman deluded themselves. We’ve seen it repeatedly.

But no more, not when they’re losing billions. Having thought that Trump would never really inflict this much damage—it was all a negotiating tool, right?—they now see that Trump will do exactly what he promises to do.

Just as Trump said during campaign rallies, he’d use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants, even though it’s only to be used in wartime. Just as he said he’d deport between 11 and 18 million people, which would have to include millions of hard-working, law-abiding people who’ve been in this country for decades, even though defenders said it would only be criminals—”the worst of the worst.”

We’ve now had Venezuelan migrants, people who committed no crimes, sent to the brutal El Salvador mega-prison CECOT. And the conservatives on the Supreme Court that Trump himself created just ruled that, yeah, it was wrong, that those people deserve due process—but told plaintiffs they made a procedural error in challenging it in Washington rather than Texas, and have to start over, while Trump can attempt to resume the deportation flights. As if we’re in normal times.

The women on the court—the three liberals and Amy Coney Barrett—offered a blistering dissent, with Justice Sotomayor suggesting this was opening the door to sending any of us to a mega-prison outside the country and then have the courts deal with it when they get around to it.

That abominable action itself doesn’t spare the Trump defenders-turned-critics from the harsh criticism they should receive at having helped elect this madman. But it’s still a good thing we’re seeing them breaking. It may not last, but fractures are always an opportunity through which opponents can drive a wedge.

And Democrats are taking advantage. Coming off of a big win in Wisconsin and over-performing in Florida, they’re aiming for Virginia’s general elections later this year and are now targeting many more House seats on the map held by Republicans, including in districts Trump won by double digits.

On top of the recent surge by Democrats at the polls, the nationwide protests on Sunday sent a clear message. Millions in big cities and small towns across rural America spoke up. And it came as Trump is losing the support of some of his previously most ardent defenders.

Even as he’s engaging in horribly dangerous actions in these first 100 days, and as the GOP sits by or cheers him on, we should recognize that Trump is floundering big time. The opportunity is there for Democrats to hit him hard, and band together with others to take Trump and the GOP down.>

<As Democrats look to midterms and beyond, President Donald Trump has issued an executive order that a new column from The Atlantic claims could alter the outcome of future elections.

The order, which was signed Wednesday, is asking the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to set a new standard for voting machines, requiring poll workers to ask for voter identification, and requires all mail-in ballots to be received by election day.

The order also requires a recertification of all election equipment, including vote-counting and ballot-marking machines.

Yes, the EAC is a federal agency that oversees election standards, but they are independent from the executive branch. “The EAC, like the Federal Election Commission, is designed to be insulated from partisanship. An executive order cannot supplant a statutory requirement.”

In fact, the commission is designed to be devoid of political digressions and distractions. "It has four members (two from each party), and three commissioners are needed to approve anything."

Columnist Paul Rosenzweig penned the order “is nothing less than an attempt to disenfranchise his opponents and forestall electoral defeat.”

He made clear the order is overstepping the role of any President. “[Trump] is asserting an executive-branch role in governing the mechanics of a federal election that has never before been claimed by a president. The legal theory undergirding this assertion—that the president’s authority to enforce federal law enables him to control state election activity—is as capacious as it is frightening.”

He later added, “This is an attempt to completely rework the constitutional rules that structure the American election system… In short, the theoretical legal underpinnings of Trump’s executive order portend a near-limitless authority to use federal resources to ensure that Trump and other MAGA Republicans never lose another election.”>

<The penguins and seals won.

Donald Trump’s retaliatory tariffs, which he said would bring back manufacturing jobs, boost the economy, pay off the national debt and cure warts, were less than a week old when he announced he had substantially scaled them back for 90 days. “[B]ased on the fact that more than 75 countries have called representatives of the United States,” Trump explained Wednesday on Truth Social, “I have authorized a 90 day pause, and a substantially lowered reciprocal tariff during this period of 10 percent — also effective immediately.”

The exception was China, a country Trump said has shown the world a “lack of respect” and has had a history of “ripping off the U.S.A.” Trump bumped China’s tariffs to 125 percent.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands, populated by penguins and seals and also subject to the tariffs, offered no comment.

“I’m glad Trump folded,” former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger posted on Threads, asking, “What did we go through that for?”

“I’m not saying he’s insane,” a longtime Republican source told me. “But his administration is the most sloppy, unprofessional, arrogant and stupid group of people ever assembled in government.” Others, however, are saying he’s insane.

On April 4, Trump announced in a “Liberation Day” Rose Garden event that his tariffs “are already delivering wins for Americans.” Trillions had been invested, he insisted, and Americans were happier than pigs in slop over the tariffs.

But by Wednesday, he'd changed his tune.

“We’ve been ripped off by everybody for 35 years,” he said in the Oval Office while signing a series of executive orders. “Everybody wants to make a deal,” he added while reversing course. Earlier on the South Lawn, while meeting with race car drivers, Trump said we are “transitioning to greatness,” in explaining why he caved.

More than one Washington wag said, “I thought he was against transitioning.” My GOP source, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, said, “We got everything we wanted with this guy, didn’t we?”

The real reason Trump caved was the stock market. After several days of spectacular losses, it responded with a record surge on Wednesday after Trump backed off the tariffs. “He saw the writing on the wall,” a GOP member of Congress explained. “With one signature, he was killing the economy. With one social media posting, he was able to reverse that. We’re on a yo-yo and he’s pulling the string.”

Tuesday, the markets had also surged early until White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt showed up in the briefing room for her weekly visit to brandish her political pom-poms as Trump's one-person pep squad. As soon as she said Trump was doubling down on the tariffs and planned on hitting China harder, the markets tanked again and Trump freaked out.

Wednesday, he had just two things on his public schedule: that meeting with race car drivers on the South Lawn — a grip-and-grin public appearance — and another session in the Oval Office to sign executive orders. The first was originally open to the press, while the second was not. Speculation was that Trump would wait until the last possible moment and then open up the second event to the press pool as well. “He likes cliffhangers. He loves to tell us to stay tuned for the next exciting episode and we fall for it every time,” one White House reporter explained.

And, sure enough, Trump did just that. It’s all part of the chaos in a blender of the new Trump regime. Once the markets rebounded, Trump had the impetus he needed and the courage to jump in front of the cameras and give us another round of “Why Biden sucked” coupled with “the press still sucks” and then ending with why a law firm sucked.

He used the opportunity to field questions and tell us why he shoots rainbows and unicorns from his backside. During the nearly hour-long meeting in the Oval Office with the press pool, he discussed water pressure, opined on Asian carp, insulted Harvard, claimed the country was making $2 billion a day on tariffs (that he just paused), and then accused former employee Miles Taylor (author of “Anonymous”) of being a traitor. That’s no small accusation coming from the president, since a treason conviction carries the death penalty as a possible punishment. Never mind. Trump also went after Christopher Krebs, the former federal employee who said the 2020 elections were fair. Trump can’t have that, so he’s claiming the “rigged” election was in part Krebs’ responsibility. He said the Department of Justice will investigate both men.....>

<....That wasn’t all. Trump once again blamed Biden for everything that’s ever gone wrong on the planet, since Eve encouraged Adam to eat the apple. Trump said the U.S. was in dire straits before he blessed us all with his presence, and assured us that he pushed the pause button on the tariffs not because of anything any other country did, but because he had a good feeling about doing so. He also said he’d negotiate directly with Iran on the “nuclear question” for as long as he could — based on his “feel” of the situation. What they have to negotiate remains unspoken since Trump — like other presidents before him — believes Iran shouldn’t be allowed to have nuclear weapons. That’s what they call a “deal breaker."

There are those who don’t appreciate Trump’s “feel” for anything. “He creates problems and then pretends to solve them,” my GOP source, a member of Congress, explained. “We enable him and we haven’t learned yet how to battle this stupidity. The country and the world is suffering from the whims of a madman.”

That may be true, but so far no one in the GOP has stood up to Trump and the Democrats are still trying to figure out how to handle him. The press? We gave up long ago. Now we’re just part of the circus.

Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, has made the rounds on social media talking about the problem. He’s a frequent guest on Jim Acosta’s Substack show, as well as on Joe Walsh’s show and others. Cohen’s frequent rant is that Trump only cares about Trump and the rest of us are screwed.

Nothing drives that point home more than watching some of my colleagues in the press pool serve up softball questions to Trump that amount to asking “Can you tell us why you’re so great?” Trump usually responds to those with “that was a really good question,” if you need a prompt to understand what I’m talking about.

Lost in the haze of Trump’s befuddled narcissism and fascism is the often ignored reality: This is not normal. There are many who were and are ready for something outside the box. That’s why they voted for Trump. That’s why many don’t abandon him even now. “He speaks his mind. He’s great,” my favorite Missouri in-law tells me.

But, let’s look at then and now.

When I was eight years old, man landed on the moon and measles was nearly a thing of the past. Today, millions believe both that the moon landing was faked and that the measles vaccine causes autism. In Texas, children are dying of measles again as the once nearly-eradicated disease makes a comeback.

When I was a child, we sang “Give Peace a Chance.” In the Oval Office on Wednesday, the president of the United States boasted about the U.S. having weapons, “some of which you wouldn’t believe,” and he said he wasn’t above using them on Iran.

But wait, there’s more.

When meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House earlier this week, Trump doubled down on his declaration that he wanted to develop Gaza, which he described “great oceanfront property.” He proposed a “Gaza Freedom Zone” that, naturally, would be free of Palestinians. Netanyahu and Trump both said the Palestinians should just move out.

When I was a child, the New York Times broke the story of the Pentagon Papers. The Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal. A crooked president fell. Today, the New York Times has Maggie Haberman, who has been accused of being a shill for Trump. The Washington Post? It declined to endorse Kamala Harris for president for fear of angering Trump.

President Ronald Reagan, a key architect of the tragedy that is today’s Republican Party, opposed tariffs and supported a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. He believed that tariffs destroy economies and the country needs immigrants. Trump is happy sending immigrants to prison, deporting them and denying student visas to college-aged students while trying to wreck the economy with tariffs....>

<....The Supreme Court backed the Washington Post and the New York Times in their battles against Nixon. Today, the Supreme Court is allowing Trump to extradite immigrants — even those like a father in Maryland who has committed no crime — to foreign prisons.

The popular destination is El Salvador, the new Gitmo and soon-to-be Super Max that may even house native-born U.S. citizens, if Trump has his way. Where’s Snake Plissken when you need him? “Welcome to the human race.”

Trump is also busy pushing voter suppression, and as long-time White House reporter Jon-Christopher Bua mentioned on X, Wednesday’s outing on the South Lawn and in the Oval Office was “another Trump opportunity to deflect & Flood The Zone — keeping the story far away from his reversal on tariffs & his possible market manipulation. Trump is a master of distraction. As you know, In politics as in comedy, timing is everything!”

Trump is a failed comedian, a successful politician and an absolute menace to the world. His current administration takes two steps backward for every step forward. Fire the FAA safety inspectors — then rehire them. Have DOGE come in and club a government office to death, then rehire those who got fired because they're essential personnel. Levy tariffs. Remove tariffs. Levy tariffs again. Put them on pause. Nothing is done by reason. It’s all by Trump’s “feel” for the moment, enabled by those who kiss his ring and nether regions every time they’re in the same room with him.

The press can’t push back because he’s co-opted us. Our constitutionally mandated job is to hold truth to power. That doesn’t make us fake news. it makes us vital. Since Trump now controls the corporate media, most independent and responsible voices have been chased away to Substack or other social media venues where their voices are lost among the cacophony of extremists.

Trump is greedy. Trump is arrogant. Trump doesn’t deserve the respect that comes with the Oval Office and Trump doesn’t care — as long as you pay attention to him.

I recently asked his niece, Mary Trump, if she believes Donald loves anyone. I’m not even sure he loves himself. She agreed, but says that her uncle never got love as a kid and never learned it as an adult. Empathy isn’t in his bag of tricks.>

<Republicans are growing anxious about an emerging Texas primary engulfing one of their longest-serving senators, fearful that a hugely expensive intraparty feud will have major ramifications across the map in next year’s midterms.

And they want President Donald Trump to stop it.

Behind the scenes, Senate GOP leaders have personally asked Trump to back Sen. John Cornyn, who has occupied his seat for more than two decades and narrowly lost his bid to become Senate majority leader last fall.

But the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, is sending loud signals that he plans to enter the race, endearing himself to MAGA loyalists who want Trump to back the controversial firebrand.

Adding to Cornyn’s challenges: Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt is now also making moves to enter the GOP primary and has privately contended to White House political advisers that he’s the only one who can win both a primary and a general election, according to a person involved in the discussion.

All that has added up to one overriding fear: that a Texas Senate GOP primary could end up costing their party at least $100 million, siphoning money from other critical battlegrounds, according to several Senate GOP sources. Plus, they worry that a wounded GOP nominee could end up giving Democrats a chance in what would otherwise be a long-shot pickup opportunity as former Rep. Colin Allred weighs another Senate run.

Top Hill Republicans hope Trump can help clear the field with a Cornyn endorsement. Senate Majority Leader John Thune confirmed to CNN that he’s spoken to Trump about it in recent weeks.

“I’m hoping that in the end, he can,” Thune said when asked about Trump supporting Cornyn. “Obviously we’re supporting Sen. Cornyn. He’s done a great job for Texas and for the country. And we need him back.”

The battle puts Trump at the center of the simmering feud between the party’s insurgent and establishment wings that has dominated GOP primary politics since the 2010 midterms, forcing him to pick sides and risk angering some of his most loyal supporters.

Cornyn, 73, a longtime fixture in Texas politics with deep ties to the business and donor community, has taken steps to try to align himself closely with the president, including a launch video featuring footage of Trump praising him from 2019 and even posting a photo on X of him reading “The Art of the Deal.”

In an interview last week, the Texas senator told CNN he is “prepared” for a primary fight, but he would not comment on Paxton or Hunt until they formally enter the race. (He said he would speak “endlessly” about Paxton if he jumps into the race.)

Asked about Trump, Cornyn said he speaks to the president regularly and believes he will “make an endorsement when he’s ready.”

“I have a very good relationship; look forward to supporting him and his agenda as I always have,” Cornyn said of Trump. Asked whether the president’s backing could make a difference in the race, Cornyn said: “I think his endorsement would be important, yeah.”

But both Paxton and Hunt have tried to show daylight between Cornyn and Trump.

In perhaps the clearest sign of his intentions to run against Cornyn, Hunt argued the senior senator was ready to “move on” from Trump after the 2020 elections.

“Now, he’s scrambling to rewrite history — hoping voters will forget he ever turned his back on the very movement that built our momentum and delivered the majority for Republicans, specifically the Senate,” Hunt, a hard-right Republican and combat veteran, told CNN.

“The United States Senate is not a retirement community. It’s a battleground for the soul of this nation,” said Hunt, 43, who won his Houston-area House seat in 2022. “And in times like these, President Trump doesn’t need fence sitters — he needs warriors.”

And Hunt is now benefiting from a seven-figure ad buy from an outside group looking to bolster his name ID across the state, something that will be critical given how infrequently House candidates win statewide in Texas.

Behind the scenes, multiple conservatives are making the case to Trump’s political team to ditch the long-serving senator — some equipped with private polling showing Cornyn losing in a primary, according to three people familiar with the outreach. They argue Cornyn has lost the GOP base in recent years, after voting with most Republicans and all Democrats to certify Joe Biden’s election win and partnering with Democrats to pass a major gun safety bill, a move that came in the wake of the Uvalde school massacre in 2022.

“There are high-level people who are behind Paxton in a way they’re generally not in primary challenges,” said one Senate GOP operative.

But this person also outlined a scenario that is worrying national leaders, describing Paxton as a “very rough general election candidate in what looks like could be a bad cycle.”.....>

<....After previously criticizing Trump over the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Cornyn worked through the last election cycle to rebuild his ties with the president, appearing with him at a campaign event in Nevada — and waiting on the tarmac last October when the president arrived in Austin for a podcast interview with Joe Rogan. Cornyn often points to his work as the Republican whip during Trump’s first term to help usher through the 2017 tax law and many of his nominees, including to the Supreme Court, and boasts of voting with Trump more than 90% of the time in his first term.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and his team have made this case to White House officials, according to a person familiar with the discussion. And Scott has made clear to Hunt that they are fully behind Cornyn as their nominee when the pair met in recent weeks, according to two people briefed on that meeting.

The goal: curtail GOP primaries and focus the party’s limited resources on critical pickup opportunities such as Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire — while defending Republican seats in places like Maine and North Carolina.

“We worked hard to try to clear primaries to try to minimize the amount of money spent in Republican primaries, and that strategy proved effective and allowed us to pick up the United States Senate in the last cycle,” Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who led the NRSC in the 2024 cycle, told CNN last week. “So any time we can try to minimize the impact of a primary like in Texas, that’s going to help us win the general election.”

Cornyn, for his part, recently told CNN he can defeat any possible challengers: “There’s a reason why I’ve won 19 contested elections: Always be prepared.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are salivating at the idea of running against Paxton, who is a lightning-rod figure in Texas. Paxton, 62, was nearly removed from office by fellow Texas Republicans less than a year ago amid a long-running federal corruption probe. (Those charges were dropped by the Biden administration in its final weeks in office, and Paxton has denied wrongdoing.)

But the cloud of allegations will undoubtedly give Paxton’s opponents ample fodder in a Senate campaign, according to GOP and Democratic operatives.

Allred, a former congressman who lost by 8 points to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz last year, is “seriously considering” another run and will make a decision this summer, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

In a recent memo obtained by CNN, the Texas Democratic Party praised Allred’s race against Cruz, in which Allred overperformed the 2024 presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, in “nearly every county, demographic and metric” and did “particularly well” in the competitive turf along the Texas border that would be critical to a 2026 race.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who leads the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said her party is building a “blue wave” because of “anger” toward Trump.

“A large blue wave can affect any state,” she told CNN when asked last week about her party’s chances to pick up the Texas seat.

But many conservatives discount talk that Allred could win in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide since 1994. And given that, they argue Texas should elect an unyielding conservative firebrand — like Paxton, dismissing his political baggage....>

<....Indeed, as conservatives flocked to Washington in February for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a small band of MAGA supporters arrived early to hear Trump’s longtime political ally Caroline Wren talk about the right’s potential 2026 primary targets.

In her view, moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins wasn’t a worthy target because of Maine’s blue tilt: “Let’s just leave her alone. Don’t waste your time.”

Then she turned to Texas. “But how about John Cornyn in Texas? He’s up. Who would like to see a Sen. Ken Paxton?” she said as the crowd cheered.

It’s that burst of right-wing enthusiasm that has put Republicans on Capitol Hill in an awkward spot when asked about Cornyn’s reelection bid.

A number of Republicans in the delegation refuse to say whether they will back Cornyn, with some clearly waiting for Trump to tip his hand and others unsure how the primary fight will shape up.

“I’m gonna stay out of that minefield,” Rep. Keith Self, a Texas GOP member of the House Freedom Caucus, told CNN.

Cruz has been noticeably silent — even though Cornyn raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Cruz’s reelection bid last year. Cruz’s initial silence is reminiscent of Cornyn’s 2014 reelection, when the senior senator faced a tea party-inspired challenger whom he vanquished in the primary. Cruz stayed neutral in the primary before backing Cornyn in the 2014 general election.

Twice in recent weeks, Cruz refused to respond when asked whether he’d back Cornyn. Asked by CNN last week whether he would endorse Cornyn, Cruz said: “Call the press office.” And then he let the elevator doors close when asked whether he had spoken to Paxton or Hunt about their potential bids.

But a Cruz spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.>

<Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is blaming what he calls “young men” playing video games instead of working, as he defends Republicans’ plan to gut Medicaid—slashing what Democrats say is $880 billion from the vital health program that provides medical care to one in five Americans.

“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed — what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled,” said the Speaker. Johnson’s own Louisiana district has a disproportionately high rate of Americans on the life-saving program: CBS News this week reported Medicaid is a “lifeline” for people in his district.

Johnson blamed what he suggested is a large number of male gamers on Medicaid for “draining resources.”

“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day,” he again declared.

“We have a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid. Just one tiny example. The estimate is $51 billion a year, in Medicaid is lost to fraud. That’s unconscionable,” the Louisiana GOP lawmaker claimed.

But rather than target professionals who may be bilking the system, or other factors including paperwork errors, Johnson has chosen to repeatedly target what he claims are “29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.”

The nonpartisan health policy organization KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) reported in February that “data show most Medicaid adults are working or face barriers to work. Many Medicaid adults who are working low-wage jobs are employed by small firms and in industries that have low employer-sponsored insurance offer rates.”

KFF also reports that the vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients under the age of retirement (65) are already working, with no work requirement.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that adding a work requirement would only serve as a barrier to Medicaid participation, and therefore spending, but would not increase the employment levels for otherwise eligible recipients.

“In Arkansas,” KFF reports, “implementing Medicaid work requirements resulted in more than 18,000 people losing coverage.”

Adding work requirements also increases monitoring and implementation costs at the state level.

Critics blasted Johnson.

“Of course, nothing says ‘dignity’ like ripping healthcare away from poor people based on outdated, classist stereotypes,” wrote Wall Street investment banker Evaristus Odinikaeze. “Young men on Medicaid aren’t ‘playing video games all day,’ they’re often underpaid, overworked, or struggling in a rigged economy. This is just MAGA cruelty dressed up as moral judgment.”

Annie Shoup of the nonprofit Protect Our Care wrote: “We know that people on Medicaid who are able to work already do. This will only hurt people and prevent them from getting the health care they deserve, including caregivers who are staying at home caring for family members.”

The organization Social Security Works added, “Medicaid pays for two-thirds of nursing home care in America. That’s what Mike Johnson wants to rip away from seniors and people with disabilities.”>