<It must be noted that when Robert F Kennedy Jr, the confessional and scandal-prone health secretary of the United States, is the only one involved who is keeping a dignified silence, you have quite a story on your hands.

It must also be noted that, this time, the torrid details Kennedy is remaining dignified and silent about are piling up in dumpster proportions. The telenovela of sex, lies and competitive betrayal that has been amusing and appalling America’s political class over the past week has just had its latest dump (instalment gives it too much literary flair).

It reveals sex “poetry” allegedly written by Kennedy, 71, who remains married, and sent to Olivia Nuzzi, a political journalist aged 32. The time was alleged as during the aftermath of the 2023 presidential election campaign. While Nuzzi may have betrayed some secrets about Kennedy, she in turn has been betrayed, by her fiancé at the time. This was another political journalist, Ryan Lizza, who has arrived late to this story but with the most inflammatory claims, like a firefighter hosing petrol on the inferno.

If you have followed the twists so far, congratulations and take a deep breath. Lizza seems to have released Kennedy’s sex poetry in retaliation for Nuzzi falling in love with Kennedy. Confused? You will be.

Kennedy’s alleged love sonnet opens with, according to Lizza, the deathless line “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest”. This compensates with directness whatever it lacks in Keatsean delicacy. “Drink from me Love,” it continues.

Not everyone would want to drink from Kennedy. He is as wizened as a raisin after self-promoting his belief in sunlight as medicine. He is also a former heroin addict. He has talked of the parasitical worm lodged in his brain and he remains resolutely anti-vaccine. That is not a universal yum-yum beverage of choice.

But there is no time to be revolted, because the poet has not finished and this time he challenges our stomachs in a whole new way. This is the imagery of suffocation and control of female sexual partners that is borrowed from the more violent recesses of internet pornography.

“I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth,” it continues. “I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Don’t spill a drop.’ I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you.”

And there is little time even to dwell on that useful public service announcement against forced oral sex from the man in charge of America’s wellbeing. We learn next that this “poetry” introduces the idea of an “F-word” named after a sex act niche enough to have some people (OK, me) scurrying for help from the internet, where the top result is within Kennedy’s own professional remit, the United States National Institutes of Health. Here the word is described as meaning “a sexual practice, fairly common among men who have sex with other men”.

Truly, this is a story so salacious it pays to imagine it as a soap opera narrated by three of its four central characters. Or, in British terms, it is the poetry from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ crossed with a porno and somehow also about a serving cabinet secretary. Kennedy remains non-speaking for now. He has denied Nuzzi’s claims of a sexual or romantic relationship, saying they met only once for an interview....>

<....First there is Cheryl Hines, 60, Kennedy’s third and present wife, and appropriately, a sitcom actress in shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hines uses the medium of her memoir, Unscripted, published this month, to try to defuse this dirty bomb of revelations from Nuzzi. Hines’s tone is syrupy obfuscation, although she uses an interesting handcuffing metaphor for her marriage. This scandal has, she writes, only served to “tighten our ties that bind”.

Next is Nuzzi, who has written her own memoir, American Canto, to be published next month. An excerpt has been published by Nuzzi’s new employer, Vanity Fair. Her tone has been described as Joan Didion pastiche, but if you were a family member of Nuzzi’s, it might give you cause for concern.

Here, for instance, is a sample passage, describing the politician she loved, she says, brain worm, “range of kinks” and all.

“He was,” Nuzzi writes in American Canto, “the giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.”

The third character is Lizza, a political journalist in his fifties who both lived with and was engaged to Nuzzi. He has been slow off the blocks to write a book, but to catch up with Hines and Nuzzi he is using probably the best vehicle for this material, which is the paid-subscription model of Dickens, although the content would have dearly departed journalists such as Dickens and Didion rolling like brain worms in their graves. Lizza’s latest essay on Substack dropped at the weekend.

Unlike Nuzzi, he does not waste time on extended metaphors about the “gibbous moon”. No, Lizza has an instinct for juicy storytelling, in the model of every man propped at every bar at midnight railing about the lurid failings of his ex, including Nuzzi’s private notes he read after they “fell out” of her bag.

With Hines’s book fading from the headlines what this now amounts to is Nuzzi v Lizza, both long on “zzzzs” and yet competing for attention. Two exes and hacks flapping open their dirty trench coats at us in a way that is unprofessional, unappetising, unedifying, yet undeniably startling.

For example, Lizza mocks Nuzzi’s portentous book title, American Canto, by titling Kennedy’s alleged sex poetry “American Canyon”, a title which in context reads like an ungentlemanly description of his former love. Each of Lizza’s dispatches is treated as an exercise in suspense. In the first one he leads the reader to imagine he is describing Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy....>

<....However, all along it’s a bait and switch. Instead, he drops the claim that Nuzzi had previously had a relationship with another politician she profiled in the course of her work, Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina. Nuzzi interviewed Sanford for New York magazine in 2019 when he was making a bid for the presidency. Nuzzi’s lawyer, Ari Wilkenfeld, said in a statement that “in American Canto Ms Nuzzi discusses the only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering”.

Is it possible to waft away all the smoke from this stink bomb and see what actually happened between Nuzzi and Kennedy? They both agree they met in Los Angeles in 2023. She interviewed Kennedy during a hike in the course of writing a profile for New York magazine.

Kennedy denies anything further. But even Nuzzi, once you squint through her haze of allusions to wildfires in American Canto, does not allege a relationship in the conventional sense. In the book she writes that Kennedy told her he loved her as part of a close and lengthy correspondence. In interviews Nuzzi has been clear, stating: “We were not sleeping together.”

Lizza also corroborates this claim. He wrote in his latest instalment that Nuzzi had longstanding fantasies about “what it would be like when her secret relationship with a notorious politician finally became public”. He writes that even when he pressed her about Kennedy, Nuzzi maintained: “I’m telling you the truth that I have not had a physical relationship with him. I’ve never had sex with him. I’ve never touched him.”

Lizza writes that Nuzzi had a “near total obsession” with Kennedy and that he finds her claim that it was not a physical relationship “improbable”. Lizza then contrives his trademark cliffhanger, signing off by saying that Nuzzi was scared. “‘If anyone ever finds out,’ Olivia told me, ‘I’m afraid Bobby will kill me.’”

Cue dramatic music and end credits. This story starts as one kind of dirty (fun! filth!) and ends as the horrible kind of dirty, a grubbiness staining all involved. When the screen turns to black, only then do we remember that these are not actors. They are real people, existing out there in the dark.>

<The Georgia election interference case against President Donald Trump and 14 of his allies won’t move forward after a new prosecutor filed to dismiss the charges on Wednesday. Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, appointed himself to the case after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was removed for having a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. The two had dated while working on the same case, though Wade later withdrew from the case after a judge insisted one of them leave. Willis was later removed as well.

The suit was brought over Trump and his allies’ efforts to subvert the state’s 2020 election results, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. While AP reported that it was “unlikely” for legal action against Trump to move forward while he is president, the other defendants still faced charges.

The charges were brought in 2023 using an anti-racketeering statute usually associated with mobsters, with a nearly 100-page indictment detailing how Trump and his allies conspired to undo his defeat in the 2020 election.

AP reported that Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead attorney in Georgia, applauded the case’s dismissal: “The political persecution of President Trump by disqualified DA Fani Willis is finally over. This case should never have been brought. A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare.”

Earlier this year, Trump celebrated when Willis was removed from the case, saying “She is a disaster.”

“She should be prosecuted,” Trump told reporters in September. “She should be put in jail. She’s a criminal.”

Skandalakis then began looking for Willis’ replacement, ultimately choosing himself, as he reached out to numerous prosecutors, who all declined to take on the case. He decided not to pursue the case further, leading Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee to issue a one-paragraph order dismissing the case in its entirety.>

Any guesses on how much Skandalakis was paid off for services rendered?

<Several women who were victimized by deceased child predator Jeffrey Epstein are now accusing President Donald Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ) of publicizing their identifying information on purpose.

That's according to a Wednesday article in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the DOJ failed to redact of dozens of women's names from emails it received from Epstein's estate. One spokeswoman for the House Oversight Committee — which released the emails earlier this month — said the committee's subpoena specifically instructs the DOJ to redact victims' names, though one document shows the full names of 28 victims.

"Many of the victims believe this is being done intentionally," wrote attorneys Bradley Edwards and Brittany Henderson, who represent hundreds of Epstein's accusers.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Berman (who former President Bill Clinton appointed to the Southern District of New York in 1998) ordered the DOJ to provide him with its privacy process, including how it makes redactions to protect victims. Berman, who presided over Epstein's 2019 criminal case until he died in prison, is tasked with approving requests to unseal documents relating to the case.

"Our request is simply that the identity of all victims be protected," attorneys for victims wrote in a letter that Berman attached to his decision. "These women are not political pawns. They are mothers, wives, and daughters."

Last week, Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law, which compels the DOJ to publish all remaining documents and evidence pertaining to Epstein's two federal criminal investigations. The law requires the DOJ release the documents within a 30-day window, and gives Attorney General Pam Bondi the discretion to redact both the names of victims and anything that could jeopardize an ongoing investigation.

Attorneys for the victims have reportedly provided the DOJ with a list of approximately 300 names in order to ensure all victims' personal information is redacted. FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly authorized nearly $1 million in overtime expenditures earlier this year on having roughly 1,000 agents redact the full Epstein files. Agents were reportedly told to flag all mentions of Trump in the files. The effort was known as the "Epstein Transparency Project" (which some referred to derisively as the "special redaction project").>

<The officers came to arrest Larry Bushart shortly before midnight on Sept. 21. Mr. Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tenn., had posted a meme on Facebook after the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10. It was a picture of Donald Trump along with Mr. Trump’s comment in response to a school shooting at Perry High School in Iowa in 2024: “We have to get over it.” The meme was headed by the caption, “This seems relevant today.”

Mr. Bushart shared that meme in a Facebook thread promoting a vigil for Mr. Kirk in nearby Perry County, Tenn. The Perry County Sheriff’s Office obtained a warrant for Mr. Bushart’s arrest, claiming that the post was a threat of “mass violence” at a school. The sheriff’s office did this even though the meme referred to a shooting that took place more than a year before at a school in Iowa. The only connection — if you can even call it a connection — was that the Iowa school also had “Perry” in its name.

Mr. Bushart’s bail was set at $2 million. Unable to pay, he spent 37 days in jail before prosecutors dropped the charge.

In my 25 years working as a lawyer on free-speech cases, I have seen a lot of overreach. I have never seen anything quite like this. With the help of a local attorney, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is preparing a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the Perry County sheriff and others, seeking damages and a ruling that what happened to Mr. Bushart violated the First Amendment.

This episode recalls the abuses that gave rise to modern First Amendment jurisprudence more than a century ago. The socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for giving an antiwar speech and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Though the Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction, it later changed course, holding that the government may punish political advocacy only when it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action or when it amounts to a genuine threat.

Today, the rare Americans who spend time behind bars for online posts are typically involved in cases in which their words at least sound menacing: a New Jersey mother’s furious if ambiguous Facebook post about the judges in her child custody case; a Texas teenager’s dark, sarcastic comment, in the context of an online debate over a video game, that he would “shoot up a kindergarten” (to which he reportedly added “lol” and “j/k”).

However troubling those prosecutions were, officials could at least plausibly claim they feared violence. In Mr. Bushart’s case, there was no plausible cause for concern. When my organization asked Perry County Schools for any records relating to the meme, a school official said he had none.

Mr. Bushart’s case would be alarming even if it were the sole instance of institutional overreaction to a response to Mr. Kirk’s killing. But it is not unique. A recent review by Reuters of court records, local media reports and public statements found that more than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, investigated or disciplined by employers for comments about the Kirk assassination. Mr. Bushart, too, lost his job — because he was in jail.

At my organization, we have tallied 80 attempts to punish academics over their remarks about Mr. Kirk since his killing, resulting so far in about 40 investigations or disciplinary actions and 18 terminations. By comparison, during all of 2020, amid the national reckoning over racial justice, we tallied 98 attempts to punish academics involving speech about race, resulting in over 55 investigations or disciplinary actions and 24 terminations. In other words, the Kirk crackdown is approaching, in just a few months, what that fraught year produced in its entirety.

The government has helped to normalize this repression. Following regulatory threats from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, ABC briefly suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after Mr. Kimmel discussed Mr. Kirk’s killing in a monologue. The State Department said it revoked visas held by foreigners who celebrated the assassination online. The Defense Department has reviewed service members’ social media posts about Mr. Kirk; at least a dozen service members have been suspended or relieved of duty because of their comments.>

<President Donald Trump is finding new and growing pockets of resistance on Capitol Hill, raising questions over whether he can hang on to his dominance over the GOP.

In the span of a month, Trump has encountered GOP grumbling or outright defiance on a growing number of fronts. Much of the pushback has come from the Senate, where select Republicans have rejected his nominees, rebuked him over trade, and shrugged at his desire to end the filibuster. But that willingness to buck the president has more recently expanded to the House.

The most striking example came with the release of the Epstein files as one-time MAGA allies forced Trump’s hand and delivered him a rare legislative defeat. The episode culminated in a dramatic falling out with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who refused to back off the vote, and her sudden resignation announcement last Friday.

Trump still enjoys deference from the vast majority of congressional Republicans, and his willingness to primary anyone who dares to oppose him means his sway over the GOP is likely to extend longer than most second-term presidents.

The friction also defies what until now has been a compliant GOP Congress that quickly passed his agenda and changed Senate rules to speed his nominees through a Democratic logjam.

Yet Trump is fighting a creeping narrative that his hold over Washington is slipping, and that he will soon be a lame-duck president with diminished influence. Not only are his allies turning against him — Greene was one of three Trump supporters to allow the Epstein vote — but Republicans have seemingly grown comfortable breaking with him on policy.

In some cases, that break is registered delicately or in private, as happened with Trump’s plan to import Argentinian beef. At other times, Trump is running into Republicans who flatly reject his requests as a bridge too far.

He moved some Republicans into his corner with his calls to end the filibuster earlier this month, finding receptiveness from MAGA allies and those up for reelection next year. But the majority stood by the 60-vote threshold.

He found similar pushback to his proposal for $2,000 tariff rebate checks and a moratorium on state AI laws he wants tucked into Congress’s annual defense bill.

The White House emphasized Trump’s legislative accomplishments to dispel the idea that congressional Republicans are working at cross purposes.

“The president’s legislative agenda is a historic success,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, citing the tax bill Republicans passed by July 4 and their willingness to claw back funds from NPR and PBS. “The President has gotten massive amounts of his agenda through Congress in the face of total Democratic obstruction.”

Separately, Trump has fumed that the pushback is being exaggerated by a handful of Republicans he tarred as “lowlifes” on Sunday, mentioning Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) by name.

Massie helped deliver the signatures needed for Democrats to force a vote on the Epstein files, putting Republicans happy to sit out that fight in a bind. Paul has similarly helped Democrats force votes on Trump’s tariffs in the Senate.

Congressional leadership continues to operate in lockstep with the White House, helping blunt some of the negative headlines. Using a procedural maneuver, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) effectively turned off the ability of Democrats to force a House vote on Trump’s tariffs.

In the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has spent months working to get the White House’s blessing on a new package of sanctions on Russia.

Yet the two leaders are, to a certain extent, constrained by congressional math and have increasingly had to advise Trump on what cannot get through the House and Senate....>

<....Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead a whistleblower office, withdrew his name last month in the face of insurmountable Republican opposition, owing to racist texts he allegedly sent. Trump’s ambassador to Kuwait is likely to face the same fate over allegations of antisemitism and his past comments on Israel.

Johnson, meanwhile, reportedly delivered Trump the news that the votes aren’t there for a healthcare plan the White House had been preparing to roll out earlier this week.

Is the party looking past Trump?

The points of friction have become so common and so pointed that Trump is facing inevitable questions about whether the party, seeing he only has three years left in office, is preparing to move past him.

There is an ideological dimension to that question. The MAGA wing of the party has grown frustrated with Trump on foreign policy, including his bailouts for Argentina and escalating military operations near Venezuela, and Greene is seen as encapsulating that frustration.

In announcing her retirement, she claimed that Trump was not focusing enough on domestic concerns, including the cost of living.

Trump, meanwhile, has given oxygen to a more self-serving reason some Republicans may be bucking him: political ambition.

He blamed Greene’s dissatisfaction on his discouraging her from running for Senate or governor in Georgia, something Greene denies. On Sunday, she also disputed reports that she was eyeing the presidency in 2028.

Anonymous White House allies have separately fumed over the impression that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Trump’s 2016 rival, is laying the groundwork for a 2028 run by intermittently breaking with Trump and his allies.

For now, the midterm elections provide Republicans with their most immediate reason to break with Trump, especially for purple district lawmakers looking to distance themselves from the president’s underwater approval ratings.

The glaring exception is incumbents locked in competitive primaries or fearing headwinds if Trump comes out against them. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) stand as two examples and have stuck closely to his agenda so far this year.

Trump can also expect criticism from retiring Republicans who feel insulated from his attacks. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), in particular, has been on a tear after announcing he will step down from Congress next year.

This past week alone, he accused the Pentagon of amateurish behavior over its investigation of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), which Democrats have denounced as politically motivated, and panned Trump’s yo-yoing foreign policy on Russia as “embarrassing.”

“I don't play nice when it comes to a few things. I don't want to be an a**hole across the board, but when it comes to Ukraine, it's time to be aggressive,” Bacon told the Washington Examiner on Monday.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), another centrist, has been more selective in breaking with Trump, but decided to retire after a bitter feud with the president over his opposition to Medicaid cuts in the tax law.>

<Another insider deal scandal and another brick out of the wall in the ever more inexorable fall from grace of Phil Mickelson. That is the belief of the American’s critics, anyway. Although as ever with the maverick left-hander, who as a golfer has always attempted to marry his propensity for self-immolation with ridiculous recovery, not everything is as seems.

At this point it must be said that Mickelson, 55, is denying the charges that he “tipped off” investors in a chat forum about a controversial oil project off the Santa Barbara coast in California, a few hours north of his sprawling family residence.

Furthermore, Mickelson has enlisted the services of a defamation lawyer to take legal action against those who accused him of leaking insider information about Sable Offshore and an impending $200m investment into the stalled venture. On the group chat he was reported to have sent this message: “Big Daddy Trump ready to swing his 14 inch in front of Newsom’s face will drive up any stock.”

Mickelson, who has tweeted more than 100 times about Sable Offshore, regularly targeting California regulators in protests, insists he made no trades and broke no rules. Hence the action. “While I may have been willing to ‘let it go’ in the past, I’m no longer going to sit quietly and take it when those lines are crossed,” the golfer said.

Inevitably, that “past” has been alluded to, especially to his 2016 involvement in an insider trading case tied to a food company. He ultimately was not charged, but the United States Securities and Exchange Commission did label him a “relief defendant” and he was forced to return over $1m in profits he made in the trades.

Former friend Billy Walters, the legendary Las Vegas gambler, was sentenced to five years imprisonment and has since claimed that had Mickelson agreed to testify he would not have been sent down.

‘Saudis are scary motherf------’

That was when the Mickelson halo started to slip and was referenced in a recent podcast that has gone viral. In “What the Hell Happened to Phil Mickelson?”, Pablo Torre interviews Alan Shipnuck. The former is a journalist facing the prospect of being sued in this oil spill, while the latter is a long-time golf writer who penned Phil: The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorized!) Biography of Golf’s Most Colourful Superstar.

By the time it was published in 2022, a pre-release of a segment in the book concerning LIV Golf – the Saudi-funded breakaway league that was in the process of launching – had ensured that the Mickelson halo had not just slipped but was now wrapped around his ankles.

“The Saudis are scary motherf------ to be involved with,” Mickelson told Shipnuck. “They’re scary motherf------ to get involved with. We know they killed [Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it [joining LIV]? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”

Those words were uttered almost exactly four years ago and still the chills return on reading. Mickelson’s reputation was damaged beyond repair, or so they said, and in this latest podcast, Shipnuck and Torre discuss his broken legacy.

But Shipnuck conceded to Telegraph Sport that with Mickelson, perhaps golf’s arch escapologist alongside Seve Ballesteros, the game might never be up and for that reason it is worth analysing whether he can be classed as pariah or legend, maybe even neither or both.

As far as his profession is concerned, only his most ardent naysayers can deny his standing purely from the achievement perspective. Around the same time as Shipnuck’s sensational tome dropped, so, too, did a work from Sports Illustrated golf correspondent, Bob Harig, which analysed the rivalry between Mickelson and Tiger Woods.

The point made was Mickelson was never classed alongside his nemesis. Yet that should not overshadow his brilliance....>

<....‘He kept pace with Tiger’

“When I was compiling it, what was straight away amazing to me was that although Phil didn’t come within, what, 35 wins [PGA Tour titles] of Tiger, nobody else in that era got close to Phil. I mean, Phil won 45 times, mostly in Tiger’s time,” Harig told Telegraph Sport. “That went underrated for a long time and that’s because it took him so long to win a major. Tiger had eight before Phil had one – and Phil started four years before him.

“But then when he figured it out, he kept pace with Tiger and with that record-breaking victory as a 50-year-old in the [US] PGA in ’21 has won a major more recently than Tiger. The only major he has not won is the US Open, but he has finished second six times, so must be rated as the most unlucky player not to complete the career grand slam. But still, he was not given credit, even before LIV. Just think he was never voted player of the year, but he’s probably a top-10 player all time. That’s got to affect someone.”

Shipnuck concurs. “He was the can’t-miss kid. He won a PGA Tour title when he was an amateur in college and on becoming a pro, knocked them off at a fair clip. But then everything changed for him. Tiger came along. And he went from being the headliner to an act some way lower down on the bill.”

Harig points out that Mickelson has always credited Woods for making him work harder and at least being able to narrow the chasm (although Woods’s litany of injuries must also be considered a huge factor). Yet there was one area in which he could approach the undisputed No 1 – in their earning powers.

“Tiger was earning say $120m a year, but Phil got to $80-90m,” Shipnuck said. “He had some blue-chip financial companies and was great with clients. But he had a big burn factor, whether that be through all the gambling or the skeleton head of a T-Rex that [wife] Amy bought him, or a meteor she also gave him as a birthday present. In his book Billy Waters claimed that Phil lost hundreds of millions in gambling. He could have sat on his haul and became richer and richer, but didn’t, because Phil does not do things the easy way.

“There’s a story about his PR manager and some of the Tour’s media staff, trying to get him to put out a [media] fire after criticising the taxes in California. They told him: ‘Look, Phil, people struggling with money don’t want to hear about a guy earning $40m a year complaining about the money in his pocket.’ Phil thought about it and said: ‘It’s $50m a year.’”

Mickelson is extraordinarily generous. Last month, former Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar revealed that, as he awaited a liver transplant, Mickelson anonymously donated $20,000 to his GoFundMe. It was also unknown that, at the same time, Mickelson donated $7,000 to help pay for the funeral costs of the donor, 21-year-old Bryce Dunlap who died from a brain injury. “There are loads of stories like that about Phil,” Harig said. “He’s not doing stuff like that for publicity.”

Many might find it difficult to equate that individual, with the superstar being charged with blowing up the professional golfing landscape and there can be no doubt that his influence was crucial in the formation of LIV. Sources say he was offered $200m to sign and helped draw up the LIV blueprint.

According to sources Mickelson was offered $200m to sign to LIV - PA/Steven Paston According to sources Mickelson was offered $200m to sign to LIV - PA/Steven Paston Yet as his statement to Shipnuck suggests, he was not at all certain to jump and saw the potential leverage in his long-running dispute with the PGA Tour. For at least a decade he had repeatedly knocked on the commissioner’s door – first Tim Finchem and then Jay Monahan – to argue that the game’s big names were being underpaid. His fraternisations with LIV secured him a Tour ban, even before a ball had been hit in the upstart league, and at that point it was war.

All these years on and the irony is that Mickelson has been proven right – Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and the other Tour behemoths are playing for cheques three times what they were until the Saudi tanks turned up on the country club lawns shooting their petro-dollars at the clubhouse.

That must improve Mickelson’s image, but his problem is that, other than in the majors, for the overwhelming majority he is out of sight and out of mind. LIV attracts minuscule viewing figures in comparison with the Tour and although he is playing well enough – indeed, remarkably so for a competitor of his age – the spotlight has nothing like the glare he commanded before. Personal experience says he remains the individual they head to see – alongside that fellow freak show exhibit, Bryson DeChambeau – but even at LIV there is the occasional heckle from the galleries....>

<....Outside the ropes, Mickelson has become prolific on X, where his followers have witnessed a drastic change in his politics. Formerly a Democrat who voted for Barack Obama and was in no way supportive of President Trump in his first term, Mickelson has flip-flopped. A quick glance at his timeline will emphasise his new online persona of golf’s very own Elon Musk.

“History has proven that the only thing that can stop a person with a gun, is another person with a gun…”

“Being an American is a privilege, NOT A RIGHT. This is not immigration, it’s an INVASION.”

These were two offerings from last week. Mickelson has emerged as a hero of the right and is plainly revelling in the role. He has long threatened to move to Florida where he would pay far less tax, but as Shipnuck says, “he loves the juice”.

“That’s why he loves the gambling, the insider deals, having a bet in pro-ams, taking on those miracle shots,” Shipnuck said. “He just loves the juice, loves to be the smartest person in the room and that’s why I think he rang me. He just could not resist showing how clever he was. He was playing both sides of the street, the Saudis, the Tour. And he needed to let that be known.

“He’ll never live those quotes down. And now you get into this late period, Phil, over the last decade where he’s being investigated by the SEC and he’s become this Right-wing internet troll. It’s a mixed legacy and it’s all of his own making.”

There is a way back, but Mickelson is not in control. He received a generational fortune from LIV and is their employee and that means obeying whichever direction the Saudis wish to take. But in many respects, Mickelson’s legacy needs peace to break out.

“The only way for Phil to salvage his reputation is if the PGA Tour and LIV somehow come to an agreement to reunify the sport,” Shipnuck said. “Then Mickelson can claim victory as an agent of change who tripled his peers’ earnings, gave them much more of a voice in their governance and forced the PGA Tour to improve its product.

“But, given that a rapprochement between LIV and the Tour now seems highly unlikely, Mickelson is destined to be remembered as a greedy, duplicitous schemer who broke professional golf.”

Whichever side of the fence you sit on, that would be a sad conclusion to a career that brought so much joy to so many people. Does Mickelson care, has his ego been hurt?

“Of course Phil’s ego has suffered,” Shipnuck said. “For most of his career he was adored and now he is reviled. He was going to be a Ryder Cup captain, the voice of golf sitting in the 18th hole tower next to Jim Nantz [the NBC commentator] and, eventually, an honorary starter at the Masters. With his endorsements he would have been clearing $40m a year easy – and would have still been cherished.

“All of that is gone now, and he’s playing out the string as a non-factor in a B-list league. That has to hurt for a consummate showman. And yet I doubt Phil has any regrets. That’s not how he’s wired. In his mind, LIV has been a smashing success and any day now people will realise what a genius he is. And that is the great and tragic paradox of Phil Mickelson.”>

<It’s Thanksgiving week at the White House, which usually just means turkey pardons and awkward speeches. But not this year! This season, President Donald Trump and his team are more interested in going after female journalists instead.

Their latest target is Kate Bennett, who is a former CNN White House correspondent and the author of Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography. She posted on X (formerly Twitter) that Donald Trump seems to reserve his worst insults for female reporters. Kate Bennett added that she believes that it is not only because they’re women but because they’re typically the ones asking the tough questions. And honestly, it does sound like a reasonable theory, considering the patterns.

Now this is where the White House Rapid Response team comes in, and rather than disagreeing with Kate Bennett’s point, they proved it! We are serious because they snapped on a post:

“Give this a thought: how big of a scumbag you must be to have been fired from CNN of all places.”

Aside from being schoolyard-level in its audacity, the attack was also factually wrong, as expected. Kate Bennett wasn’t fired at all because she left CNN in 2023 to work in strategic communications and now serves as VP of brand strategy at the government communications firm Invariant. Her departure was public and (contrary to the White House’s parrots) completely voluntary.

And yet, a few days ago, at Mar-a-Lago, CBS’s Nancy Cordes tried to correct Donald Trump. That’s when he called her “stupid” repeatedly, because surely it’s normal for a strong leader to bully a veteran journalist. Before that, Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey was hit with a “Quiet, piggy.” ABC’s Mary Bruce got labeled “a terrible person” for asking about Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who was murdered. And the New York Times’ Katie Rogers is, according to the president, “ugly inside and out.”

Yeah, we’re sensing a theme too. Donald Trump’s defenders (like white House press secretary Karoline Leavitt) insist he’s just “frank.” Others notice that the only people he routinely targets are the ones who hold him accountable, and somehow, a considerable number of them happen to be women. Now we have to remember that these are some of those same women who have reported r— threats, online harassment, and were almost doxxed after being targeted. The Media Freedom Coalition warned that when powerful institutions attack women journalists, it’s an attempt to silence them, on top of being an uncalled-for insult.

And Kate Bennett’s observation makes more sense for this very reason, as women are often the ones who push past rehearsed talking points and who won’t sit back when truth is bent into propaganda. But why deal with that when you can take part in some good old name-calling? Honestly, this moment isn’t about whether one likes Donald Trump or hates him, but isn’t the presidency being used to intimidate people whose job is to hold him accountable?

Looks like women should stay quiet if they want to be safe, even in 2025!>

<One funny aspect of the Substack business is that you’re constantly living in the shadow of posts you wrote a year ago. How come? Well, most paid subscribers opt for the annual option.¹ If you see a spike in your Stripe numbers, it’s often because of renewals from the anniversary of a successful newsletter from years past. So lately, I’ve been reminded that at this point last year, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, I was writing a lot about how Democrats had screwed up.

Once Joe Biden was finally forced out, choosing Kamala Harris rather than opening up the process was an understandable option. As compared to the alternative, a probable landslide if Biden had remained on the ballot, Harris likely at least saved Democrats a couple of Senate seats. But she was still a suboptimal choice given her mediocre electoral track record.

Less forgivable was the highly risk-averse campaign Harris ran, in which she almost seemed to go out of her way not to distance herself from Biden. But the clearest blunder was simply Democrats’ decision to renominate Biden in the first place without any semblance of a real primary. His age-related decline was obvious to overwhelming majorities of Americans by mid-2023, at which point there would have been plenty of time to have a competitive race.

In fact, having covered politics for 18 years now, I can’t think of a clearer example of when a strain of partisan groupthink was proven more decisively and consequentially wrong than after Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27 last year. If you’d been arguing that coverage of Biden’s age merely reflected media bias, then after that debate, you probably ought to have reexamined your priors about pretty much everything. But to the 86 percent of us who recognized that Biden was too old to run for another term, the whole thing had seemed like a predictable, slow-moving car crash.

Still, there were plenty of opportunities to acknowledge one’s error, particularly in the 24 dramatic days between the debate and when Biden eventually quit. Matt Yglesias, for instance, wrote an apology post saying that he’d been wrong about Biden.

And yet, there have always been denialists about Biden’s decline, from academics who tried to portray his behavior as heroic to people who formerly worked for the president, like Mike Donilon and Karine Jean-Pierre, who haven’t accepted responsibility for their roles. It doesn’t seem to have mattered that subsequent reporting has confirmed that Biden’s problems were even worse than critics like me had feared.

Pass the cranberry sauce, because we’re going to have a family chat about Olivia Nuzzi

So, yes, we’re going to do one more round of partying like it’s 2024. The debate about Biden’s fitness resurfaced over the Thanksgiving weekend for a reason that will require some explanation unless you’re glued to media gossip.

The CliffsNotes version is this. The journalist Olivia Nuzzi has admitted to a romantic relationship with RFK Jr. It’s not clear whether it was ever consummated physically. However, you don’t need to have gone to Columbia J-School to recognize that even sexting with a candidate you’re covering is a huge journalistic no-no. And that’s not all that Nuzzi has been charged with. In a series of Substack posts, her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza — also a journalist, formerly of The New Yorker and other publications — has accused Nuzzi of also having had an affair with former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Mark Sanford. And also, having basically run interference for RFK Jr. in the course of what was supposed to be objective reporting.

(If you want more detail about all of this, I’d recommend Brian Phillips’s explainer at The Ringer. Although Phillips’s story very much needs an NSFW label because it contains excerpts — I wish I were making this up — of RFK Jr.’s erotic poetry.)

On July 4 last year — so after the debate, but before Biden was forced out² — Nuzzi published a story in New York Magazine claiming that Biden was basically a walking corpse (“his face had a waxy quality”) and that this was well-known to Democratic insiders despite their outward support of Biden. Lizza has alleged that Nuzzi committed at least one clear journalistic foul in this story by including “an anecdote about Biden not remembering the name of a ‘Democratic megadonor’ that I knew had been told to her off the record.”

Some inside-baseball talk. Most journalists respect a distinction between “off the record” and “on background”. “Off the record” means that you can’t report the information you get from a source, although it isn’t as though the source expects it to be deleted from your memory. Instead, you can try to report it out with other evidence or sources willing to go on the record....>

<....By contrast, “on background” means you can use the information, but please don’t put my name on it. There might be some further negotiation with the source on terms: whether the juicy bit of reporting is attributed to, say, a “senior White House official” or instead enters your narrative in an even more ambiguous way.⁴ (These lines are often blurrier than journalists would care to admit, especially when you’re speaking with sources who don’t regularly talk with reporters.⁵)

However, reporting a piece of information that was supposed to be off the record doesn’t mean it was untrue. Journalists care about this distinction because it affects our reputation both globally (undermining our collective ability to negotiate terms and conditions with sources) and locally (if Lizza’s allegations are true, no one ought to speak with Nuzzi in the future unless they expect to see whatever they tell her appear in print). But readers probably shouldn’t care about these inside-baseball mechanics. They should just want us to report the truth.

The Biden debacle should have killed off The Big Cope

And what Nuzzi reported about Biden was almost certainly true, according to both lots of subsequent on-the-record reporting and basic common sense from anyone who had watched that debate.⁶ However, that didn’t stop partisans who had insisted that concern about Biden’s age was just a media fiction from using Lizzanuzzipalooza to take a victory lap:

What the hell, exactly, is Aaron Rupar claiming that he was right about? That coverage of Biden’s age was just a “hysterical feeding frenzy”? That it was just right-wing misinformation? Rather than the inevitable result of the fact that Biden was asking Americans for another term so he could be president until he was 86, and could literally barely string a sentence together during the highest-stakes political moment of his life?

When I first started covering politics in the late 2000s, it was relatively rare to see liberals complain about the mainstream media. There are some good reasons for this. Liberals have higher institutional trust than conservatives, especially toward institutions like journalism. And the mainstream media probably does lean left, although in a more complicated way than conservatives sometimes assert.

However, there’s now a whole cottage industry of progressive/Democratic publications like Rupar’s Public Notice that make media criticism one of their main beats, often targeting center-left institutions like the New York Times more aggressively than the likes of Fox News.

That’s not to say this criticism is never warranted. I myself thought the media often went too far in normalizing Trump, especially during the 2016 campaign and the first year or two of his initial term. There’s probably also more basis for this line of criticism since the 2024 election, as several major media outlets have shifted to the right under changes in corporate ownership and pressure from Trump.

Plus, as a tactical matter, “working the refs” sometimes works. Most journalists and public figures aren’t as willing to push back against criticism as people like me with well-established audiences might be.

However, the result is that any time there’s any story that’s unfavorable to the progressive worldview and/or a Democrat’s election chances, a regiment of Rupars will swoop in to argue that Democrats don’t have an actual problem on their hands — only a perceptual one because the media narrative is biased against them. It doesn’t matter if the issue is something like inflation or Biden’s age, where voters can easily verify the claims against their own lived experience. ⁷

I’ve called this tendency The Big Cope: “the belief that Democrats would win every competitive election if only it weren’t for unfair media coverage”. The Big Cope is hard to kill off because this type of content is easy to produce and is self-evidently popular with a wide audience (Public Notice is very popular, certainly.)

I believe the Big Cope is damaging to Democrats electorally, since it allows them to attribute any cases where public opinion isn’t on their side to media bias — instead of doing the hard work inherent in democratic governance of actually listening to voters.

But because the Big Cope rarely offers testable hypotheses⁸, it’s extremely hard to disprove. That’s why the debate was so critical. It was Big Copers’ chance to demonstrate that coverage of Biden had been unfair. Instead, we got almost certainly the worst performance in the history of general election debates....>

<....So how did Big Copers handle this? Well, they basically just pretend that the debate never happened. For instance, even recently, we’ll still get stories like this one from Margaret Sullivan, which criticize the media for having gone “overboard” in its coverage of Biden’s age, while at the same time critiquing them for not covering Trump’s age more aggressively.

It would be more persuasive for Sullivan to say something along these lines: “I was one of those people who thought the media went overboard in covering Biden’s age. And boy, was I proven wrong. Kudos to all the reporters who did diligent work on this question instead of just speculating. But we all learned just how dangerous it can be to have people this old running the country. And now Trump is showing some of the same signs of deterioration that Biden did.”

Honestly, I find it kind of depressing that people like Sullivan, who I thought did an excellent job as the New York Times’s public editor, have fallen into this partisan epistemic bubble. Again, 86 percent of Americans thought Biden was too old to run for another term before the debate. Maybe it would just be too damaging an admission. Or maybe people like Sullivan and Rupar aren’t worried really about persuasion because they’re preaching almost entirely to the converted.

Biden staffers who insist he was fine are either dishonest or delusional

But what I have even less patience for are people who directly aided and abetted Democrats’ disastrous 2024 because they were working for Biden.

For instance, Neera Tanden, Biden’s chief domestic policy advisor.⁹ Tanden is probably the only person in American history to lose out on a Cabinet nomination because of bad tweets. (Yes, really!¹⁰) Honestly, I kind of respect that.¹¹ Still, Tanden hasn’t given up her Twitter habit and also tweets at me a lot. Seeing my criticism of Rupar, for instance, she engaged in a classic bit of whataboutism by pointing out that President Trump is also extremely old.

I don’t think Tanden is a Silver Bulletin subscriber. If she were, she might remember that I touched on this very theme in the last politics-related newsletter I wrote. Trump’s age is one of the main reasons we might expect his approval ratings to continue to decline.

Personally, in fact, I’m in favor of a constitutional amendment to require that a president can be no older than 75 years old on Inauguration Day. And if you want to say Trump’s age should get more media coverage, I’ll agree with that too — although it has gotten quite a bit lately, including a big New York Times story last week.

Trump, at age 79, is also currently about two years younger than Biden was at the time of the debate. The late 70s/early 80s are often an inflection point for cognitive and overall health, so every year can matter. Subsequent reporting has suggested that Biden was OK-ish up until the 2022 midterms, at which point his condition rapidly deteriorated. So, on the one hand, we might not expect to see as many examples of cognitive decline for Trump right now as we did for late-stage Biden. And some of the examples that people like Tanden and Rupar cite can feel forced. Nodding off during a boring meeting is something that can happen to the best of us, regardless of age.¹²

On the other hand, Trump still has more than three years left in his term, and these problems will likely get worse. Possibly to the point where, as with Biden, the signs become unmistakable, no matter how much party apparatchiks deny them.

Tanden is, however, literally about the 8,199,999,994th-ranked person out of the 8.2 billion humans currently alive today with the moral highground to complain that the media isn’t covering Trump’s age enough. Because few people did more to try to lead the press off the scent of reporting on Biden’s age.

Tanden not only defended Biden after the debate — “He’s inquisitive. Focused. He remembers. He’s sharp,” she told the New York Times. She also literally testified under oath earlier this year (!) that she hasn’t noticed any (!!) signs of cognitive decline from her former boss.

In June, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee held hearings on Biden, and Tanden was among those subpoenaed to testify. The transcript of her appearance before Congress was published in October. In her opening statement, Tanden tried to walk a fine, legalistic line, saying she had “no experience in the White House that would provide any reason to question his command as President”....>

<....Perhaps deliberately, this is an ambiguous statement. Someone can be “in command” in the sense of still having reporting lines flowing up to him, but not in full command of his mental faculties. The Republican probe focused, in part, on whether Biden’s staffers had unconstitutionally used an autopen to execute orders that Biden himself hadn’t endorsed. By saying that Biden was “in command”, Tanden is hoping to deflect accusations that White House staff was freelancing as a sort of shadow government without Biden’s awareness or permission.

Tanden, however, was also asked directly in the hearing for her personal opinion about “Biden’s cognitive abilities”. She responded that she had no concerns, and that no one else in the White House had expressed any concerns to her either:

I find this claim implausible. Biden’s cognitive abilities were the biggest story in the political world following the debate, if not before then. And political staffers engage in more than their fair share of office gossip. I’m sure that Tanden is saying what her counsel told her to say, avoiding provable lies. But it’s hard to believe that she spent almost four years in the White House and not only never had any worries of her own, but also never had a conversation with another staffer who expressed concerns.

It may be that Tanden wilfully blinded herself to contradictory evidence. Tanden said in the hearing that even though she’d gotten bad vibes about the debate (my phraseology, not hers) from her friend Ron Klain (Biden’s former chief of staff) she was “on a car ride to New York City” on the night of the debate. So she “listened to the debate on the radio off and on” — apparently unaware that, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, we’ve developed technology that enables you to livestream video from your phone.

Not to mention that, as someone obsessed with travel logistics, I find this an inexplicable choice for a high-ranking staffer. DC to NYC is an easy commute by plane, train or automobile. If you have an early meeting in Manhattan, you can easily travel there late at night (after the debate) or in the early AM (especially with a taxpayer-funded limo at your disposal). The debates are the biggest nights of the campaign outside of the election itself: this is the equivalent of missing your best friend’s wedding because you didn’t want to reschedule your haircut.

Unless, of course, Tanden was worried that things might go badly and wanted an excuse (even if only subconsciously) to flee the scene or preserve plausible deniability. Tanden testified that she found the debate “heartbreaking” but never watched it in full. And this is part of a pattern. Tanden also said that she never watched “the entirety” of Biden’s NATO summit in which he introduced Ukrainian President Zelensky as “President Putin” and that she didn’t listen to the audio transcript of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, who had described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory”.

It’s easier to avoid having doubts about your boss if you systematically avoid moments that might force you to confront them. So at best, Tanden seems to have been in profound denial.

Democrats should hold themselves to a higher standard than MAGA

This probably won’t be the very last time I write about Biden’s age. But I think I’ve hit my saturation point. So I’d like to remind you about a couple of things on the way out....>

<....First, this isn’t just an election story. The bigger impact may have been on how the country was governed. Biden’s first two years in office were pretty successful, at least in terms of passing legislation. But almost everything after the midterms was a giant mess, and the trajectory aligns with the reported evidence of his declining capabilities. And that’s just considering domestic policy. Biden’s limited uptime may have undermined his role as leader of the free world when it came to negotiating peaceful outcomes in Ukraine or Gaza, for example.

And second, denialism about the mistakes they made in 2024 helps to prop up longtime Democratic establishment figures like Tanden who have consistently had terrible political instincts and who the party needs to move on from.

Because there is, in fact, an asymmetry between Democrats and Trump. Democrats are the party of those “In This House, We Believe…” yard signs. They claim to have the moral highground on democracy, integrity, the rule of law, and so forth, along with being the party of reason, science, and expertise.

One can debate how true this claim is¹³, along with how effective it is politically. At least sometimes, it actually carries political benefits for the blue team. Voters were relatively patient with Democrats on the shutdown, for instance, because Republicans are seen as the more obstructionist party.¹⁴

Trump’s argument, conversely, is basically that everyone is a hypocrite playing dirty pool — so you may as well look after your own interests. So the fact that Democrats were so obviously full of s*** about Biden and were hoping to get away with a Weekend at Bernie’s plays into Trump’s hands and any voter’s most deeply cynical instincts about politics.

These pox-on-both-houses voters are an underratedly important part of the Trump coalition. For some evidence of this, we can look toward the AP VoteCast exit poll. Eight percent of voters last year had an unfavorable view of both Trump and Harris.¹⁵ And Trump won those double-hater voters by 15 points. The same was true in 2016 when Trump won the 18 percent of voters who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton by 17 points, more than enough to account for his margins that year in the key Electoral College states.

<The United States government is now investigating members of Congress for the crime of accurately stating military law. This isn’t hyperbole or partisan exaggeration. The Pentagon has announced it may court-martial Senator Mark Kelly, while the FBI is seeking to interview the lawmakers, all for appearing in a video that reminded service members they can and should refuse illegal orders. When a president threatens elected officials with death for reciting legal statutes, and then deploys federal law enforcement to pursue them, impeachment isn’t just warranted—it’s constitutionally required.

The message released by Democratic lawmakers was simple, that service members can and must refuse illegal orders.

President Donald Trump’s response to this was immediate and extreme. He posted that the lawmakers engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” and called for them to be “ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” He reshared a post stating “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!” The administration has since activated federal law enforcement machinery against these elected officials.

What makes this not just alarming but legally absurd is the fact that the lawmakers stated basic military law with precision. Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly requires service members to obey only “lawful” orders. The Manual for Courts-Martial confirms that the requirement to obey orders “does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.” Service members can face prosecution for following unlawful orders—Lieutenant William Calley’s conviction for the My Lai massacre established this principle definitively.

The administration’s position creates a logical impossibility. It claims that publicly stating what the UCMJ requires constitutes seditious conspiracy. By this reasoning, every military oath ceremony becomes an act of sedition. The UCMJ itself becomes criminal literature.

The constitutional violation of Trump’s position runs even deeper. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress explicit power to “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” When Congress enacted the UCMJ, including Article 92’s requirement to follow only lawful orders, they exercised a core constitutional authority.

Congress designed the military justice system. They mandated that service members refuse illegal orders. Now the executive branch claims that reminding service members of this congressional mandate constitutes criminal conspiracy. It’s governmental gaslighting of the highest order.

The Pentagon’s targeting of Senator Kelly in particular reveals the pretextual nature of these proceedings. Hegseth announced via social media that Kelly could face court-martial proceedings—a public threat before any formal investigation. Defense secretaries don’t typically announce investigations on Twitter. They follow proper procedures designed to ensure due process and prevent political interference. Hegseth’s tweet served one purpose: intimidation.

The FBI’s parallel investigation of all six lawmakers compounds the constitutional violation. These aren’t military personnel subject to the UCMJ—they’re sitting members of Congress exercising their First Amendment rights and core constitutional duties. The Justice Department investigating them for accurately stating the military law their branch of government enacted represents the weaponization of federal law enforcement against protected political speech and the separation of powers.

This demands impeachment for both Trump and Hegseth.

The impeachment standard asks whether officials committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Using military and federal law enforcement to prosecute protected congressional speech unambiguously qualifies. The founders feared precisely this scenario: executives wielding investigative and prosecutorial power to silence legislative critics. They designed impeachment as the remedy for such abuses.

The Trump administration has created a situation where stating factual information about military law triggers federal criminal investigations. This is government by intimidation, not government by law. It represents exactly the kind of executive overreach the impeachment power was designed to stop.

The precedent we set now will define whether Congress can function as a co-equal branch of government or whether it operates at the executive’s pleasure, perpetually one investigation away from silence. That’s not a republic worth saving—it’s not a republic at all.>

<House Republicans have an exodus problem.

More than two dozen GOP lawmakers have already announced their decision to leave their seats at the end of the term, and the number is expected to grow in the coming weeks as lawmakers visit their families for the holidays, complicating Republican efforts to fend off a blue wave and keep their slim majority.

The reasons are numerous, and the trend is hardly new: Retirements have historically spiked for the party of the president in the midterm cycle. But the numbers are on track to reach 2018 levels — when Republicans got clobbered — and the dynamic is creating huge headaches for GOP leaders scrambling to protect President Trump from a Democratic House in his final years in office.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) sent shock waves throughout Capitol Hill when she announced she would resign as of Jan. 5, fed up with her party’s handling of health care, foreign policy and other issues. Her departure echoes a broader trend: 23 House Republicans so far are retiring or seeking another office, while four Republicans have chosen to resign. In comparison, 17 Democrats are retiring or seeking another office.

The roster spans the GOP spectrum — from high-profile conservatives such as Texas Reps. Chip Roy, Jodey Arrington, and Michael McCaul, to battle-tested moderates such as Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.), who has repeatedly run for reelection and won in a competitive district.

By this point in the 2018 midterm cycle during Trump’s first term, 20 House Republicans had announced they wouldn’t seek reelection, according to data from Ballotpedia. Six House Republicans had left office early or announced resignations. Those figures are close to the current numbers.

Overall, 34 House Republicans chose not to seek reelection and 14 had resigned during their term in the 2018 cycle. Democrats ended up winning control of the House that year.

“Ultimately, the number of Republican retirements that we see compared to 2018 — I would imagine it would be close to the same number when all is said and done,” said Erin Covey, House editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

A number of House Republicans said they weren’t surprised by the turnover.

“I’ve been here five terms now, and every, you know, basically midterm cycle, you continue to see that play out where, you know, there’s people that step aside. Some just — they’ve been here long enough, and they’ve decided they had enough,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) said.

“Some are tired of having to fight the swing districts that they’ve had. There’s a myriad of reasons. And some are just trying to move on to, you know, something that they might consider more fulfilling,” he added....>

<....Bacon told The Hill last month that “if you’re not fired up about winning, that’s time to move on. And that’s how I felt.”

Frustrations with leadership and congressional inaction have also dominated the lower chamber in recent months, driving some lawmakers to leave their posts.

Greene echoed those sentiments in her resignation statement, arguing nothing gets better for the American people “no matter which way the political pendulum swings.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told The Hill that “everybody in the Republican Party, with the exception of just a few, are consigned to be automatons.”

“They just have to do whatever Trump wants them to do. What fun is that, if you’re an adult? Most of my colleagues are successful people who worked really hard to get here, and then they find out you’re just a rubber stamp for the Speaker who’s a rubber stamp for the president. I don’t blame them for running for another office or going back home,” he said.

Massie has frequently sparred with Trump, most recently outmaneuvering him on legislation requiring the Justice Department to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said that there’s been a “lot of dysfunction” in Congress, including a government shutdown that lasted 43 days and the “silliness of censure resolutions going back and forth.”

“Even the fact that the House has been, you know, divesting itself of some of its own powers when it comes to things like, you know, its authority on tariffs and that sort of thing. Of course, the redistricting war that’s bad for people on both sides, and that House leadership has refused to do anything about. So, yeah, I think those are all sources of frustration,” he said.

“I do think that there’s maybe some people who say, like, you know, at some point … if they feel like they can’t accomplish the things that they came here to do, then maybe that weighs into their decision. And I think the fact that you have the House of Representative gone for two months, for example, yeah, that makes it harder for people to do the things that they came here to do,” he added.

Republicans acknowledge the job can often feel isolating. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) noted many of his fellow colleagues he knows are stepping away to spend more time with their families.

But whether the turnover will tip the scales of the 2026 midterm election remains to be seen.

Most House Republicans who are leaving represent districts that are red. But Bacon’s seat is rated as leaning Democrat, while Rep. David Schweikert’s (R-Ariz.) seat is listed as a Republican toss-up, according to Cook Political Report.

Rep. John James’s (R-Mich.) district is leaning Republican, while Rep. Ashley Hinson’s (R-Iowa) seat is likely Republican.

And then there’s the redistricting war going on as a backdrop, with both sides pressing to save seats.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) suggested the turnover could be beneficial by opening the door for new voices and enthusiastic people to enter Congress.

“Fresh blood is good. … I don’t think people serving for 50 years is a great thing, so I think turnover is a good thing,” Fine said.>

<The Lone Star State is used to having a Texas-sized impact on the House Republican Conference. And, by the numbers, its influence should be larger than ever.

If a bold redistricting plan pushed by President Donald Trump goes forward, Texas could have a massive 30-member GOP delegation come 2027. And yet by the measures of clout and seniority — the real markers of power inside the House — the state is clearly on the wane.

Six members are retiring — some to pursue other political ambitions, others quitting cold turkey. Assuming the redistricting plan is approved — a Supreme Court ruling on the matter could come as soon as Thursday — another five Republicans would be freshman back-benchers from a state that once racked up committee gavels.

The turnover has left many in the already huge delegation unsettled and wondering how the state’s clout declined so precipitously. Rep. Pete Sessions, Texas’ longest-serving Republican, said in an interview that it’s “the biggest change of any redistricting period” he has been through in a nearly 30-year career.

“The timing of this across the board has been difficult to get your hands around,” Sessions said. He noted the redistricting and other retirements will “add youth and opportunity to the Texas delegation but a lot of the inexperience and a lot of things that come at a time when my party needs a lot of teamwork and collegiality.”

A younger colleague, Rep. Jake Ellzey, also said the delegation is facing a “drastic change” over the coming years: “There's going to be a lot of introductory lunches, that's for sure.”

Already there has been a remarkable shift since the beginning of Trump’s first term, when Texans held sway over seven House committees — including the powerful Armed Services, Financial Services and Ways and Means panels — as well as three coveted Appropriations subcommittee chairs.

The GOP delegation was known for zealously guarding its influence, holding weekly lunches to strategize, amassing seats on the influential steering committee that doles out committee assignments and often voting as a bloc on key matters.

Today Texans hold only three committee gavels, all on relatively backwater panels, and just one Appropriations subcommittee chair. One of those chairs, Budget’s Jodey Arrington, is retiring. No Texans serve in the House GOP’s elected leadership.

“We were powerful,” said Rep. Roger Williams, who chairs the House Small Business Committee, recounting what the delegation was like when he first arrived in 2013. “But that all cycles.”

No single member approaches the influence of the most formidable Texan in recent House Republican history — former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who was often said to be more powerful than the speaker he served with, Dennis Hastert.

Rep. Michael McCaul, who announced his retirement plans in September, was the top Republican on two key committees for 12 years. In an interview, he remembered DeLay brokering power when he was first elected. “And there was a time when I was one of seven committee chairs from Texas, and we had the majority of the chairmanships,” McCaul added.

There are still some pockets of ambition in the delegation’s ranks, including Rep. August Pfluger, who heads the 180-plus-member Republican Study Committee. Many Republicans expect Pfluger to vie for an elected leadership role in the next Congress.

But the fact that the redistricting push proceeded at all reflects the state’s relative impotence in Trump’s Washington. The president used Texas as the tip of the spear in his aggressive campaign to rewrite congressional districts midway through the usual Census-driven cycle, and wary Republicans folded in the face of an unrelenting pressure campaign from Trump’s top political advisers.

One Texas Republican relayed his surprise and frustration to a group of fellow House Republicans on the floor as the push unfolded.

“What the hell did we do to deserve this?” he said, according to one of the Republicans present....>

<....Since then, a fifth of the delegation has announced plans to leave. McCaul announced his plans to retire in September, as did Rep. Morgan Luttrell, a highly recruited former Navy SEAL. Arrington followed, and Rep. Chip Roy launched a campaign for state attorney general, while Rep. Wesley Hunt decided to take on incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn.

Last week, Rep. Troy Nehls made a surprise announcement that he would be retiring, and some Texas Republicans believe there could be at least one more in their ranks who could call it quits before the state’s Dec. 8 ballot qualifying deadline.

Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former White House doctor, has spoken privately to other Republicans in the past about leaving for a possible administration job, but he has filed for reelection. A spokesperson said Jackson is "committed to strengthening the House Republican majority and supporting President Trump’s agenda in Congress."

Even the Texas Republicans who are sticking around are showing signs of frustration in the House rank-and-file. Some conservatives in the ranks are privately expressing unease about the millions of Texans set to get hammered with higher health care costs before next year’s midterms and are concerned about Republicans’ lack of a counterattack as they get hammered by Democrats.

Rep. Nathaniel Moran, who represents a deep-red east Texas district, stood up during a recent closed-door GOP conference meeting to confront party leaders on why they haven’t been working on a plan to address expiring Obamacare tax credits until just weeks before the year-end deadline.

Moran said in an interview this week that Democrats were making headway against the GOP with what he called a “sound bite policy” on health care. “So I would like to see … Republicans come to the forefront” with more substantial plans, he said.

Other senior Republicans note that the cohesion of the big delegations including Texas’ has withered under speakers Kevin McCarthy and now Mike Johnson, who have continued a trend of centralizing decisionmaking in the leadership suites. Younger members are not given enough senior mentorship, according to another senior Republican, and White House officials “run wild” across the Capitol forcing members to march in lockstep with Trump.

For more than four decades, the Texas delegation has scheduled regular Thursday lunches in the Capitol during session weeks to build camaraderie and discuss strategy. But because Johnson often aims to wrap up House business by 10:30 a.m. Thursdays, Republicans note, members are often scattered to catch flights by lunchtime — including younger members who are most eager to get home.

“Certainly that change of schedule has thrown into play the integrity of the ability of a delegation to meet and speak and gather their balance and equilibrium,” Sessions said.

Members are generally shrugging off the retirements. Moran said “it's a natural cycle” to life in Congress while Arrington said in an interview that “Texans are more inclined to see it as a temporary calling to serve temporarily and go home.”

“For some people, that's six years. For some, it's eight years, and for others, it's 10,” said Arrington, who is leaving after eight years even though he has the chance to continue at least one additional term as Budget chair if Republicans keep the majority.

Those who choose to leave have different perspectives on the experience. Nehls and Luttrell have identical twins. Nehls is behind his brother Trever’s bid to replace him in the House, but Luttrell said he didn’t expect his twin brother Marcus, also a retired SEAL, to do the same.

Asked if he would encourage him to consider it, Luttrell laughed: “No, I would never do that.”>

<The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.

When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.

The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.

Experts point to several reasons for this. One key factor is an increase in polarization — Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically than they’ve been in the last 50 years, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. That’s led to a decrease in bipartisanship, a necessary ingredient for bills to pass in a governing body full of checks and balances.

Fewer bills getting through to the president’s desk means the small number of mandatory ones that Congress must pass — such as government funding or annual legislation authorizing defense policies — are getting longer, said Molly Reynolds, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, as lawmakers try to jam the bills with policies that wouldn’t otherwise get a vote.

“Those large packages have come to bear more of Congress’s legislating,” she said. A longer bill takes more time to read, debate and get voted on, slowing down the process further.

With more policies being shoved into bills increasing in length, the use of policies known as “poison pills” is another hurdle — partisan policies that will be completely unacceptable to the other party. Case in point: Republicans attempting to ban mail delivery of abortion pills via a crucial agriculture funding bill that must be reauthorized every five years.

The length of bills “represents an increasing dysfunction in the institution,” Michael Thorning, director of structural democracy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said. “Congress has difficulty taking action on a lot of individual pieces because of the politics or because of time constraints, and it’s easier to package some of these things up into ‘must pass’ bills… And then it’s a question of, ‘What can we add to this before it becomes so top heavy that it topples over?’”

The spikes in the number of bills passed correlate with periods when one party controlled all levers of government — House, Senate and the White House. But even when one party controls the majority, “unified party control is not doing as much work as it used to,” Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University, said. “The minority party has become especially increasingly aggressive in using the rules of the game, particularly in the Senate, in blocking measures from even going to the floor.” That can be seen in the number of measures passed by each chamber of Congress, which is falling too.

Another more elusive factor in Congress’s decreasing productivity is that members are spending less time talking to each other. A typical senator’s schedule includes flying back to Washington, D.C., on Monday for votes in the evening, then flying back to their home state on Thursday evening. The “Senate Friday” effect is commonly cited among reporters and staffers on the Hill – a sudden surge in activity on Thursday afternoons, as senators rush to finish any votes so they can go home for the weekend.

The House more often has votes Friday morning, but there is still an expectation of going back to the district for a longer weekend, plus recesses when lawmakers are home for weeks at a time. That Monday to Thursday schedule leaves just two full days for a laundry list of work.

“Congress is not spending enough time in Washington to get the basics done,” Thorning said. The shortened in-person schedule “really interferes with members’ one opportunity to interact with each other, to learn collectively, to ask questions of witnesses collectively.”....>