1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.Nc3 g6 4.f4 Bg7 5.Nf3 O-O 6.Bd3 Nc6 7.O-O Bg4 8. Be3 e5 9.dxe5 dxe5 10.f5 gxf5 11.exf5 e4 12.Nxe4 Nxe4 13.Bxe4 Qe7 14. Qd3 Rad8 15.Bg5 f6 16.Qc4+ Kh8 17.Bxc6 fxg5 18.Qxg4 Qc5+ 19.Kh1 Qxc6 20.Nxg5 Bxb2 21.Rab1 Bf6 22.Ne6 Rg8 23.Nxd8 Bxd8 24.Qf3 Qxc2 25.Rxb7 Qxa2 26.Rb8 Qf7 27.Rd1 Bf6 28.Rxg8+ Qxg8 29.Qb7 Be5 30.Qxa7 Qe8 31. Rb1 Kg7 32.Qe3 Qe7 33.Re1 Kf6 34.g4 Qd6 35.Qh6+ Ke7 36.Qxh7+ Kd8 37. Qg8+ Kd7 38.Qf7+ Kd8 39.Qe6 Qd4 40.Qg8+ Kd7 41.Qe6+ Kd8 42.Qxe5 1-0>

To those who would play <stalker>:

This is the way things go; <I alone> decide content. All your pious whingeing and attacks at every turn will in no wise deter me.

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.06.29"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "1"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Minasian, Artashes"]
[Black "Popovych, Orest"]
[ECO "B93"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.d4 cxd4 5.Nxd4 a6 6.f4 Qc7 7.Bd3 g6 8.Nf3 Nbd7 9.O-O Bg7 10.Kh1 b5 11.Qe1 Nc5 12.e5 dxe5 13.fxe5 Nfd7 14.Nd5 Qc6 15.Nb4 Qe6 16.Be4 Nxe4 17.Qxe4 Rb8 18.Nd5 Rb7 19.Bf4 Nf6 20.Nxf6+ exf6 21.Nd4 Qe7 22.Qc6+ Qd7 23.exf6 Qxc6 24.Rae1+ Qe6 25.fxg7 Rg8 26.Nxe6 Bxe6 27.Be5 f5 28.Bd6 Kf7 29.Bf8 Rc7 30.Rf2 Bd5 31.Kg1 Kf6 32.Rd2 Be4 33.c3 Rc6 34.Red1 Ke5 35.Rd6 Rxd6 36.Bxd6+ Ke6 37.Bf8 a5 38.Rd6+ Ke5 39.Rb6 Bd3 40.Rb8 Ke4 41.Re8+ Kd5 42.Rd8+ Ke4 43.Kf2 Bb1 44.a4 1-0>

Been over six weeks now, <fredthebore>: it is my hope that you never return.

<On Thursday, President Donald Trump opened his Truth Social account and did what he almost always does when the narrative turns against him: he declared a group of Democratic members of Congress—combat veterans, no less—“seditious traitors.”

Trump wrote, “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT”

The apparent seditious offense? A short, civics-class video reminding U.S. military personnel of something they learn in basic training: troops must refuse unlawful orders. No insinuations, no subtext, no mention of him. The president also reposted a Truth Social user’s call to “HANG” these individuals, because, he said, it’s what George Washington would have done had he been faced with a digital video in the late 1700s.

But Trump treated it as an attempted coup because he needs something — anything — to drown out the storylines he could not control. And there are PLENTY to smother.

Inflation creeping upward. Markets stalling. A tranche of Epstein files—court documents he’d claimed were put to rest—bleeding into the news cycle again and reigniting suspicions he has long tried to scrub away. Polling that looks less like a glide path and more like a stall. A MAGA base showing cracks, with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s apostasy suggesting the possibility of more. The portrait is of a man hemmed in, hit from multiple angles, losing altitude and cohesion at the same time.

This is where the reflex kicks in. Within hours of the “seditious traitors” post, Trump unleashed the full battery: demands that Democrats be prosecuted, calls for a network to fire Jimmy Kimmel for mocking him, an AI video of himself having a kickabout with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office, and a random quote praising his own greatness. Jake Tapper captured it neatly in a tweet that read like a dispatch from inside the spinning machinery.

Each blast was its own small circus tent, pitched to redirect attention from the facts at hand. None of it had to be credible. It just had to be loud.

This isn’t extraordinary anymore, which is precisely the problem. What began as temperament has hardened into tactic. Trump’s eruptions are no longer expressions of rage; they are instruments he deploys with brutal consistency. He cannot fix the facts that imperil him, so he forces the press to rearrange the frame. And the press, conditioned by years of this choreography, still lunges toward the spectacle.

A Trump outburst carries the gravitational pull of a breaking story, complete with the panel debates and urgent chyrons that let newsrooms feel like they’re doing journalism rather than stenography. And lord knows I’m guilty of taking the very same bait myself.

Which is why this latest eruption shouldn’t be analyzed for its content so much as its timing. The insult is staging; the target is incidental. The real point is the pivot. Those lawmakers could have posted a video about how to check a parachute harness, and he would have transmuted it into treason if that’s what the narrative demanded. The key lies not in what he seized upon, but in what he needed to escape.

There is a moment when a pattern becomes too obvious to ignore, even if it’s been hiding in plain sight for years. Trump manufactures these emergencies because they work—not on the facts, but on the attention economy that now substitutes for civic memory. For as long as he has dominated American politics, he has relied on the same trick: turn every vulnerability into a brawl so noisy that the vulnerability dissolves. We treat each explosion as a fresh outrage when it is, in fact, just the latest iteration of a very old move.

The real work is not in ignoring him or policing his tone. It’s in watching the sequence instead of the spectacle. Because the next time Donald Trump fires off a blast like the one on November 20—and there will be a next time—the important question won’t be what he said or who he said it about. It will be what happened 24 to 48 hours earlier. That’s the real headline. And once you start looking there, the pattern becomes impossible to unsee—not because it stops working, but because you finally understand what it’s working on: you.>

<Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) gave a fiery speech on the House floor on Tuesday that irked at least one Republican in the chamber.

The speech came before a vote on whether to censure Plaskett after it was revealed last week that she texted with Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 House hearing that heard the testimony from Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney for President Donald Trump. According to emails released by the House Oversight Committee that were obtained from Epstein’s estate, Plaskett sought guidance from Epstein – a former friend of Trump’s – about questions to ask.

The censure resolution, which also would have stripped Plaskett of her seat on the Intelligence Committee, failed after three Republicans voted against it and three others voted present.

“You don’t want to talk about what is really happening here,” Plaskett said before the vote. “You want to talk about texting? Texting felons? How often do you text President Donald J. Trump? That’s the individual we should be concerned about. And let me tell you this, I am not gonna support the wealthy and connected who continue to exploit workers and evade taxes, powerful figures with credible allegations who face no consequences, and corporate interests profiting from human suffering while families struggle. And let me tell the people of the Virgin Islands–”

Plaskett was interrupted by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), who made a point of order.

“The gentleman will state his point of order,” the chair said.

“The point of order is you may not call the president of the United States a felon,” Clyde stated.

His remark elicited exasperated responses from Democratic members, several of whom could be heard saying, “He is!”

The chair said the point of order was under consideration and that “members are reminded to refrain, as mentioned a little while ago, from making personality, commentary towards the president. The point of order is not timely, so the gentlelady is recognized.”

Plaskett resumed her speech without further incident.

Trump was convicted in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York. The aforementioned Cohen testified at the trial that he personally wired a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to try to cover up Trump’s affair with her.>

Felon! Felon! Felon!

<It’s clear a divided America has come together—at least when it comes to pedophilia.

We have found common ground! We are against it.

Did it have to be that hard? Of course, in politics, everything is hard, nothing is easy.

On Tuesday after the House voted near unanimously at 427-1 to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Speaker Mike Johnson declared there would have to be amendments made to the bill. (To make it perfect and protect all the elites who patronized the trafficker Epstein?) Johnson said the Senate would have to do it and send the bill back to the house.

That would delay the process for sure.

But then the Senate saw the House vote and Majority Leader John Thune almost immediately made the choice to go along with a procedure known as “unanimous consent,” essentially an automatic vote to unanimously pass the measure the House voted on as is.

Jaws dropped all over. After the fight put up in the House and the Senate and by Donald Trump the last six months, no one could have predicted this weeks ago.

Trump ‘doesn’t care’

The temperature of the country is changing and when Trump realized he could not defeat a motion to release the files over the weekend, he simply caved and told his MAGA folks in a tweet on Sunday: “The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to I DON’T CARE.”

Of course, he does. But Trump declared it all a hoax by the Democrats and the Radical Left Lunatics, then urged House Republicans to vote to release the Epstein files.

He was probably hoping for Johnson’s delaying tactic to work. It didn’t.

Instead, we have Trump and the whole GOP in a major flip.

Trump gave his permission only as a face saving gesture for him. And every last member of Congress voted for releasing the files except one from who thought it hypocritical to vote to release the files.

Heck, even Speaker Johnson, who shut down the House for weeks to avoid a vote, voted to release the files.

They didn’t do it to support Trump but to support the Epstein victims.

Now it’s up to Trump to sign the bill and he said he would.

But something’s up. I don’t trust it.

No good option

If Trump really believed in passage, he’d simply release the files. He didn’t need Congress to do that.

So he must have a Plan B or C to delay, or hope that his personal law firm known as the Justice Department will redact the hell out of the files to render them meaningless.

A reversal of a reversal? A TACO Trump move?

Then again, maybe this is just his feeble way of losing. Trump really has no good option. He’s a loser. Remember he is the man mentioned more than 1,000 times in the first batch of emails leaked last week.

And now he has a unanimous group of Republicans who followed him to say no to the release weeks ago, now following him to say yes.

It’s all because a handful of Republicans led by Rep. Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene dared to stand up to the Bully Trump.

And they beat him.

The unanimous vote wasn’t a vote with Trump, it was defiant vote by a Congress that was finally growing a spine and liberating themselves from the bully....>

<....Mohammed bin Salman

So how did Trump comfort himself during this political loss? He didn’t show sympathy for the victims. Forget America first. His practice is to distract the nation and himself, and he did by rolling out the red carpet for Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka “MBS.”

Yes, the man the CIA said ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2019.

Since that Khashoggi killing, MBS was seen as a global pariah. Not anymore. His mega-wealth is cleansing. He can buy indulgences and favors. And deal. No wonder he’s treated like a king by the would-be-king who doesn’t care about murder, the law or ethics.

MBS has money. Trump’s family is doing deals with MBS. Conflict? Of course not. What’s good for Trump is good for America—right? Nope. But that’s government run by a businessman like Trump these days.

It’s sickening.

But what the heck. Reagan liked Ferdinand Marcos Sr. So did Bush the First. Marcos Sr. was another strongman role model for someone like Trump.

Marcos was hailed for upholding America’s democratic values. That’s almost as rich as Trump’s lavish praise for MBS on Tuesday. When a reporter tried to point out questions about MBS’ involvement in the Khashoggi murder, Trump lashed out at the reporter and defended his rich guest.

It made for quite a split screen for Trump on the day of the biggest loss of his political career. When the GOP came to its senses and voted to release the Epstein files, Trump rallied by consorting with a dictator, a known killer, and human rights abuser. And by railing out against a reporter and the First Amendment.

Trump doesn’t seem to care now. From Tuesday, it’s clear. He wants to be MBS and enrich himself more than he cares about helping Americans.

This week is a turning point. We’re seeing the real Trump. The guy who dumps Marjorie Taylor Greene for going against him on Epstein. And then he turns around and embraces such questionables as the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. And the dictator MBS.

Trump’s losing it. Republicans have toppled their bully. Mark this week as the beginning of the end.>

<What was not said at former vice president Dick Cheney’s funeral on Thursday was as clear as anything that was.

It was a service in sepia. The more than 1,000 people who gathered in Washington National Cathedral — including two former presidents, four former vice presidents and congressional leaders from opposite sides of the aisle — were there to do more than mark the passing of an often controversial individual with whom many had profound disagreements. Their presence in the pews summoned images of a bygone era when raw partisanship was not what defined leadership.

Just as conspicuous was who wasn’t there: any leading figure from the current administration, which dominates the levers of power in today’s Washington as few have before it.

Instead, as if to underscore how much things have changed, President Donald Trump spent the morning sending out social media posts in which he accused a half-dozen Democratic lawmakers of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” All veterans of the military or intelligence, their supposed capital offense was recording a video in which they reminded current armed services members that they do not have to follow illegal orders.

Cheney, who died Nov. 3 at the age of 84, is widely regarded as the most powerful vice president in U.S. history.

His was a singular rise within the institutional and political structures of his day: at 34, the youngest White House chief of staff ever; a six-term Wyoming congressman and second-ranking leader of House Republicans; and a wartime defense secretary before joining George W. Bush’s presidential ticket in 2000.

The darkness of his perceived role in the Bush administration’s aggressive national security policies after 9/11 was such that he was often described as Darth Vader, the villain of the Star Wars franchise — a comparison Cheney said he didn’t mind.

In the final years of his life, his image underwent another transformation, as he joined his daughter, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), in breaking with their party to oppose Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol.

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” the elder Cheney said in a statement announcing he would be voting for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election.

Trump has not made any public comment on Cheney’s death. But he has frequently denounced the Bush administration’s interventionist approach to national security, calling the Iraq War “a big fat mistake” based on a lie that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After Cheney endorsed Harris, Trump responded on social media by calling him “the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris.”...>

<....And while Cheney made no secret of his dismay at how Trump has transformed the Republican Party, it is also worth pointing out a viewpoint the two had in common. Throughout his career, Cheney pushed hard for policies that expanded the powers of the executive branch. He believed in particular that the reform measures passed by Congress after Watergate put too many limits on what the president could do. What Cheney probably did not foresee, however, was how a president like Trump would take those powers to unprecedented levels.

Trump was not mentioned or even alluded to during Thursday’s funeral. Instead, eulogists portrayed Cheney as a genial grandfather, a man of the West who loved fishing. His daughter Liz’s tribute ended with famous words of comfort spoken over Shakespeare’s Hamlet as he died: “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

The restraint was a stark contrast from the anger and passion of a memorial that had taken place in the same cathedral seven years before, during Trump’s first term, for Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), another Republican foe of Trump. McCain’s funeral was a service that the New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser described as “a meeting of the Resistance, under vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows.”

McCain himself had asked Trump’s two predecessors, Bush and Barack Obama, to speak. That, too, was meant to be a signal of what it meant to rise above political grievances, given that both Bush and Obama had beaten McCain in presidential contests.

Neither former president mentioned Trump by name, but in their words praising McCain’s character, it was impossible to miss the contrast they were drawing.

Bush noted: “Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power.”

“John cared about the institutions of self-government, our constitution, our bill of rights, rule of law, separation of powers,” Obama said.

Bush spoke again on Thursday, and recalled his decision to pick Cheney, who was directing the search for his running mate, to take that role himself. “His talent and restraint exceeded his ego,” Bush said. “People always saw something in the man solid, reliable and rare.”

To which Bush might have added, qualities that have become rarer than ever in today’s politics.>

<The Democratic Party has spent the past year defined by low morale, limited power and a lack of clear direction. But two weeks after a series of blowout wins across the country, the party now feels the wind at its back as President Donald Trump’s approval rating plummets, the redistricting wars break in their favor and they gain ground on the economic issues the electorate cares the most about.

Democrats are now facing an unexpected challenge: managing expectations.

Yes, the party’s short-term future now looks bright enough for Democrats to openly discuss winning back control of the Senate, and to start looking more closely at red-state governors’ races for pickup opportunities. GOP-held congressional districts once thought to be reach opportunities are now clear targets, with the party even spending money in a seat Trump won by 22 points last year in Tennessee.

“You can’t help but feel a little bounce in your step,” former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said. “I’m optimistic that they can take back the Senate. I would not have believed that before Election Day.”

The victories in Virginia and New Jersey — and to a lesser extent in California, New York City, Pennsylvania and Georgia — provided hard evidence the broad strokes of the party’s electoral strategy, built around a relentless focus on affordability, was working to win back many of the Latino, Asian and young voters who drifted to Trump in 2024.

The proof of concept, in turn, has unlocked a lot. Candidates who were on the fence about running feel better about their chances. Donors sitting on the sidelines are finally picking up the phone. Intraparty bickering, even over the party’s shutdown fold, seems less urgent when the candidates across the ideological spectrum broadly agree on messaging.

But party leaders are already issuing warnings about overconfidence, and operatives are acknowledging the limits of potential gains in an era of hyper-polarized elections. Matching 2018’s 41-seat pickup in the House is unlikely unless Trump’s approval rating, already at the lowest point of his second term, drops even further. The party’s problems with rural voters, who wield disproportionate power in the Senate, have not been solved. Voters who don’t follow politics — the ones who sunk Democrats in 2024 — are difficult to get a handle on.

“What I want to do is make sure that people don’t get complacent, right? We’ve got to keep our foot on the gas,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin told HuffPost. “You cannot rely on polls or special election wins to guarantee the next election. The only thing that can ever guarantee an election is hard work.”

The House map, shrunken by decades of political sorting and gerrymandering, contains precious few swing seats, meaning a blue wave would crest lower than it did eight years ago. The party’s overall brand remains linked to an unpopular former president. Even party loyalists take it for granted key leaders are hopelessly out of touch.

The immediate challenge is in Tennessee, where Democratic state Rep. Aftyn Behn is trying to pull off a major upset against Republican Matt Van Epps in a district that includes portions of Nashville but stretches from Alabama in the south to Kentucky in the north. Trump won the seat, which came open following the sudden retirement of GOP Rep. Mark Green, by 22 points in 2024.

But anger over Trump’s handling of the economy is reaching even into deep-red areas, and when combined with the party’s advantage in low-turnout contests, Democrats and Republicans both see a narrow path to victory for Behn in the Dec. 2 special election. That has prompted House Majority PAC, a super PAC run by allies of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to spend $1 million on digital and television advertising in the race.

“As Democrats have racked up wins by running on affordability and lowering costs — our momentum continues to build,” said CJ Warnke, a spokesman for the group. “No Republican-held seat is safe, and HMP will do whatever it takes to win the House in 2026.”

Former Rep. Conor Lamb’s win in a western Pennsylvania special election presaged 2018’s blue wave in a similarly deep-red district. In that race, though, Democrats benefited from a massive gap in candidate quality that’s not present in Tennessee, Republicans have slammed the 35-year-old Behn for liberal policy positions and past comments she’s made calling herself “really radical,” all while portraying Van Epps as a clean-cut Army veteran.

“This could be the Conor Lamb race except Behn’s not Conor Lamb and Van Epps definitely isn’t Rick Saccone,” one Democratic operative who works on House races told HuffPost, referring to the lackluster GOP candidate Lamb defeated. “That doesn’t mean there’s no chance to win.” (The operative requested anonymity to speak frankly about the party’s challenges.)....>

<....Beyond the special election, House Democrats have added a handful of seats to their target list, including those held by North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards and Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles. They’re also hopeful they can reignite donor interest in Bob Harvie, a Bucks County Commissioner who is challenging entrenched moderate GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania but who has struggled with fundraising.

Part of the challenge comes from who is turning on Trump. While he is losing the Latino, Asian and young voters he added to his coalition in 2024, his approval rating among older and white voters has barely budged. And many House Republicans represent districts with paltry numbers of voters of color.

This problem is even more acute in the Senate. While Democrats feel strong about their chances to pick up seats in North Carolina and Maine, the next wave of potential pickup opportunities — Iowa, Ohio and potentially Alaska if former Rep. Mary Peltola runs there — are all the heavily white, rural states where Democrats have struggled in the Trump era.

Heitkamp, who was among the Democratic senators who lost seats in the Trump era, believes the party can benefit from an “incredibly depressed farm economy” and anger over the president’s tariffs.

“The challenge for the Democrats right now is to come up with an effective message with real concrete examples of things they would do if they were given power,” Heitkamp said, suggesting the party could potentially propose limits on credit card interest rates. “They need to find those to appeal to people working paycheck to paycheck.”

Optimism may be highest for governor’s races, where candidates have extra leeway to separate themselves from the party’s weak national brand. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, the incoming chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association, said the two gubernatorial victories in 2025 provide the broad strokes of a strategy for the party nationally.

“Our candidates all across America are going to be focused on making life a little bit better,” he said in an interview. “We’re going to elect Democratic governors in places people aren’t expecting them.”

Beshear was tight-lipped about specific targets, but Democrats have long been optimistic about State Auditor Rob Sand’s bid in Iowa and are now closely tracking the candidacy of Cyndi Munson, the minority leader of the state House of Representatives, in Oklahoma. Former Sen. Doug Jones is also considering a bid in Alabama, where he would have a rematch with GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

The optimism was also palpable at a gathering this week in D.C. for Democracy Alliance, a coalition of liberal donors. “It’s been so doom and gloom in the past year,” said one attendee, requesting anonymity to speak frankly about interactions with the donor class. “There’s been an uptick in donors taking meetings.”

Democratic and liberal groups have struggled with fundraising this year ― the DNC, for instance, took out a $15 million loan. It’s created some whiplash. “I’ve had donors go from not picking up the phone to asking what R+25 district they should invest in,” another Democratic operative joked....>

<....There’s also still worry about Trump’s unprecedented fundraising and how it could help the GOP ― his super PAC is spending money in Tennessee, for instance ― and fretting the party is not engaging in enough experimentation while it has a chance.

“We have to be comfortable taking risks, especially in between new cycles,” said Danielle Butterfield, the executive director of the super PAC Priorities USA. “We’ve gotten really good at the science of politics, but we’ve lost the art of campaigning.”

But much of the donors’ focus was also on preexisting problems. Many still wanted to talk about podcasts and influencers, according to attendees. Worries about how well Democrats are doing with voters who don’t follow politics closely — the exact group of people who sank the party in 2024 — are widely shared by both donors and operatives.

“All those voters who turned against us last year are still here, and we’re not going to see them again until 2028,” Democratic pollster David Shor told a crowd at Crooked Con, which the liberal podcast company Crooked Media hosted a few days after the election. “It’s incumbent on us to not forget they exist just because they’re not voting.”

There are encouraging signs. Samson Signori, the campaign manager for Abigail Spanberger’s successful campaign for governor in Virginia, said they found “passive news consumers” made up roughly a quarter of the gubernatorial electorate in the state and were “very persuadable, very swingy.”

“This is a diverse set of folks,” Signori told reporters at a briefing this week hosted by Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank. “They come from all walks of life, all demographics, and from our perspective, it was just about running very tailored paid media communications to them, just driving home the affordability and lowering-cost message.”

Signori said the campaign was still evaluating data, but preliminary results indicate Spanberger won passive news consumers by nine points after Trump won the same group by five points a year earlier.>

<The national redistricting battle triggered by President Donald Trump has cast a long shadow over the race for control of Congress next year — not only fundamentally shifting the House battlefield, but also creating a domino effect that’s shifting new candidates into new seats, ushering longtime members of Congress to the exit and exposing deep political rifts in state parties across the country.

The fight is still playing out across courtrooms, back rooms and Trump’s social media, as Republicans and Democrats tinker with district lines. Developments like this week’s federal court ruling blocking the new Texas maps from going into effect — leaving the ultimate decision to the Supreme Court — also show how much remains to be determined in the redistricting fight.

The battle kicked off when Trump started pushing Texas Republicans to redraw district lines in the hopes of netting the party up to five seats in the state, and later began pressing leaders in other GOP-controlled states.

The new lines add more Republicans to the South Texas battleground districts represented by Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, redraw two districts in Houston and Dallas in a way that will likely force incumbent Democrats into primaries against each other, and redraw Austin to create one deep-blue seat and one additional Republican-leaning seat that stretches toward San Antonio.

But the fate of those plans hangs in the balance after a federal court blocked the map’s implementation and called for the 2026 elections to be run under the same lines as last year’s elections. The Supreme Court’s eventual decision whether to uphold that ruling will have a significant impact on a spate of races, starting with whether Austin-area Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett decides to retire.

There’s also the question of whether the winner of January’s special election to succeed the late Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner will have to immediately run against a longtime Democratic incumbent, and how Democratic Reps. Marc Veasey, Julie Johnson and Jasmine Crockett handle a potentially significant redraw in North Texas that could leave one of them out of a job. The redistricting plan already has Crockett weighing a Senate bid.

California’s retaliatory map from Democrats — a similarly blunt partisan redraw explicitly aimed at canceling out Texas’ GOP gains — has similar potential to upend the Republican caucus there. GOP Reps. Doug LaMalfa, Darrell Issa, Kevin Kiley, Ken Calvert and David Valadao’s districts are becoming significantly more vulnerable to being flipped by Democrats, according to an analysis from the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

One early bit of fallout: Calvert’s decision to seek re-election in a nearby district currently represented by fellow Republican Rep. Young Kim, which will likely trigger an expensive primary between two prominent incumbents. In an early show of force, Kim has already announced plans to spend more than $3 million on ads ahead of the 2026 primary.

Both states also share another dynamic: state lawmakers who voted to draw the new congressional lines hopping into newly competitive races for Congress.

In Texas, GOP state Reps. Briscoe Cain and John Lujan announced their campaigns shortly after the new lines passed, seeking to run in the new, heavily Republican seats in the Houston and San Antonio areas. Others could be considering bids, too, including state Rep. Katrina Pierson, who told CBS News Texas last month she’s “considering” a bid for a redrawn district in North Texas.

There’s been less movement in California, since the lines are just weeks old. But one notable example is Democratic state Sen. Mike McGuire, a party leader facing term limits in the body, who announced plans to take on LaMalfa....>

<....Smaller changes to the maps in other states have had big ripple effects, too.

In Missouri, where opponents of the GOP-led redraw are mobilizing a petition drive that could force the issue into the hands of voters in an upcoming special election, longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s 30-plus-year career in public life is in jeopardy after GOP lawmakers packed his district with Republican voters.

In Utah, a court decision to enact a new map over the protests of Republicans created a new blue seat in the Salt Lake City area — one that could spark a primary focused on ideology as well as electability, an unusual position for Utah’s Democratic minority.

In Ohio, a compromise map shored up Democratic Rep. Emilia Sykes’ battleground seat — in exchange for putting more Republican voters in districts held by Democratic Reps. Marcy Kaptur and Greg Landsman. Sykes’ last GOP opponent, whom she narrowly defeated in 2024, was running again but dropped out of the 2026 campaign after the new map was released, blaming the compromise for his decision.

And in North Carolina, the Republican Legislature’s new lines make Democratic Rep. Don Davis’ re-election more of an uphill climb, even as he continues to signal he’ll press on with his bid to remain in office.

Meanwhile, as incumbents and challengers face pressure and opportunity from the new maps, the pressure on state legislatures to get involved in the redistricting fight on behalf of their national party has also caused significant tensions among powerful lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

In Indiana, the lack of Republican support for a redistricting effort there has led to Trump issuing broadsides at GOP leaders in the state, accusing them of “depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, A VERY BIG DEAL,” and saying he’d support primary challenges against them. One Republican legislative leader was the victim of a swatting incident at his home hours later.

In Maryland, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore is pushing forward with a redistricting commission — even as the state’s top Democrat in the Senate continues to criticize the idea of redrawing the state’s congressional maps after a court struck down a Democratic plan to squeeze more blue seats out of the state just a few years ago.

“What type of country do we want to be? And who are we in this moment when things are so brittle and tense. Do we reflect a different value to show the path forward as states, or do we fight to the death one election at a time?” state Senate President Bill Ferguson told NBC News about why he’s holding firm against pressure to move forward with a Democratic-led redraw there.

And even in states where redistricting efforts were successful, some lawmakers raised warnings about the conduct of their own parties.

“There’s nothing conservative about using our supermajority to grab more power,” Missouri Republican state Rep. Bryant Wolfin, who voted against the redraw there, said on the floor this summer before his party passed the new lines.>

<One of the truisms of American politics over the past few decades has been that voters want their presidents to be someone you’d like to have a beer with, a regular guy — yes, it’s only guys — you could relate to. Since politicians are very rarely regular guys, they often go to great lengths to create a persona designed to at least give that impression. Mostly that has meant pretending to be a Real American by riding horses, going hunting or driving around in a pick-up to prove they aren’t some effete city slicker. Sometimes they try to fake it by being a Rust Belt kind of fellow or a military man. But the most important thing is to not act like some wealthy nob, even though most of them are, lording your superiority over the common folk whose votes are necessary for victory.

In 2016, Donald Trump took that strategy and blew it to smithereens. He flaunted his wealth at every turn, refusing to do the standard meet-and-greets in diners and living rooms in favor of big rallies where he stood above the crowd and regaled them for hours on end. Instead of wandering around state fairs and talking to the locals, he would land in a field in his personal helicopter and take some kids up for a ride. And all those people who insisted that they couldn’t stand a city boy fell in love with the rich, braggadocious New Yorker.

But in a way, Trump did have the common touch. He liked fast food and sports and, most importantly, he shared all their gripes and complaints and articulated them in the same terms some used themselves. For all his crowing about his money and showing off, he really didn’t put on airs. He was just like them.

He wasn’t, of course, and he reportedly had nothing but contempt for his followers. But for all of Trump’s flashy displays of wealth, he was never really a member of the Billionaire Boys club either. He was a climber, always on the outside looking in.

But since he won the presidency the second time, it’s different. He’s one of the Big Money Boys now, and that club loves him as much as any MAGA redhat.

So far, the most indelible image of Trump’s second term is the line up of wealthy tech oligarchs standing right behind him at his inauguration: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, Amazon CEO and Washington Post publisher Jeff Bezos and his then-fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and, of course, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. All of them were there to demonstrate their fealty to the man who would be king. And why not? After fomenting an attempted coup, inspiring an insurrection and being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and massive fraud, Trump’s ballsy reelection was the most impressive act of legerdemain they had ever seen, proving once again that rich men can do whatever they want.

Trump spends a good deal of his time as president these days exhibiting his exemption from all accountability. He brazenly parades his corruption right out in the open now, caring nothing for the fact that the American people are angry about the economy and resent that their needs are going unmet.

Trump spends a good deal of his time as president these days exhibiting his exemption from all accountability. He brazenly parades his corruption right out in the open now, caring nothing for the fact that the American people are angry about the economy and resent that their needs are going unmet. He is swallowing a firehose full of money for himself and his family, selling access to himself and the White House, blackmailing institutions and accepting “gifts” from foreign countries and individuals alike.

And he’s more interested in entertaining Saudi princes and tech broligarchs than he is in holding the rallies that were a constant feature of his first term. Even in the middle of the longest government shutdown in history, Trump invited CEOs and billionaires to the White House for a lavish meal to thank them for their generous donations to his $300 million ballroom pet project. They dutifully bowed with great respect.

Donald Trump can get away with anything — and so can they.

The biggest scandal of his political career has unsurprisingly turned out to be a sex scandal. He has, after all, been dogged by them since his first wife Ivana confronted his then-mistress — and future second wife — Marla Maples on the ski slopes of Aspen in 1989. And in 2016, the Access Hollywood tape nearly ended his presidential campaign. From Stormy Daniels to E. Jean Carroll to all the women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault over a period of decades, it’s hardly surprising that his long friendship with deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein would eventually result in some very close scrutiny by the public. Nothing could have been more predictable....>

<....Aside from the horrors of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s alleged underage sex trafficking operation, this scandal has revealed itself as yet another example of the culture of impunity the elite members of our society enjoy. In 2008, Epstein himself was given a sweetheart plea deal by federal prosecutors, and in retrospect it’s hard not to conclude that it was the result of his relationships with all these rich and powerful men. Trump was one of them, a close friend of Epstein’s for over 15 years, but he was hardly alone.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told FBI Director Kash Patel that he’s been informed “there [is] one Hollywood producer worth a few $100 million, one royal prince, one high-profile individual in the music industry, one very prominent banker, one high-profile government official, one high-profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician and at least six billionaires” that were part of Epstein’s orbit. That, one suspects, is just the tip of the iceberg.

As the fight over releasing the Epstein files — which the president opposed after having promised in 2024 to do so — played out, Trump’s followers were getting restive. Even after he flipped to endorse the release at the last possible minute and signed the bill into law, they know something’s wrong but they aren’t able to fully accept that their leader is one of those hated elites they’ve always loathed. Last week, even Mike Cernovich, one of the most hard-core MAGA influencers and purveyor of the Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy theory, wrote on X, “During a recent visit in DC, the talk of everyone was how overt the corruption was. It’s at levels you read about in history books. In nearly every department.” No kidding.

We are living in a period of unimaginable wealth among the upper 1%, who are getting richer by the day. Elon Musk, despite how badly Tesla’s stock performs or how outrageous he behaves, was just given a trillion dollar payday by the company’s shareholders. As the world’s richest man, he does what he wants. In fact, according to a new report by Oxfam, the 10 richest people in the United States have seen their collective fortune grow by nearly $700 billion since Trump secured a second term.

With all that money they can buy any number of lawyers, harass their enemies, reward their friends and elude any consequences for their criminal behavior. Just like Trump. He’s their leader now.>

“More explosive early resignations are coming,” the unnamed figure told Punchbowl News on Monday. “It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”>

Source: Huffington Post.