<....Representative Derek Kilmer, a Democrat who chaired the now-defunct House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, said the issue of Congress’s shortened schedule was the main thing he would fix if given a choice.

“Part of the reason why when people are watching C-SPAN and no one’s there, it’s because they’re on three other committees at the same time,” he told Reuters. “The dynamic that creates is members ping pong from committee to committee. It’s not a place of learning or understanding. You airdrop in, you give your five minute speech for social media, you peace out.”

“Time is the biggest challenge,” Representative William Timmons, Kilmer’s Republican counterpart on the modernization committee, agreed. “We have to build trust with our colleagues, and we don’t have the time to build the trust with our colleagues.”

The amount of action happening on the floor isn’t a perfect representation of how much Congress is talking to each other – lots of action happens in committee rooms or briefings – but it is a marker of a decrease in action taking place in the main arena where lawmaking was intended to occur.

Fewer pages of proceedings are being recorded by the Congressional Record, which publishes all debates and speeches that take place on the floor in the House and Senate.

It is not clear how these hurdles to productivity will be solved. Part of the problem is that the current Republican Party holds a tiny majority in the House of just five seats, giving disproportionate power to any small group of members who wish to exert their influence, as seen by the far right House Freedom Caucus repeatedly blocking legislation it disagrees with, even though it was put forward by their own party, much to the frustration of their colleagues.

“We’ve had divided government in earlier periods and haven’t seen this level of low legislative productivity,” Craig Volden, director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia, said. “The question is, what is the Republican Party going to sort itself into, in terms of its main priorities, and what is the best strategy they see as advancing those priorities?”

Timmons acknowledged facing this issue himself.

“I have somebody running against me (in the primary election) that agrees with all the votes that I make, he just doesn’t agree that I don’t scream and yell,” he told Reuters. “Next Congress we’re going to have to figure out how to relearn the muscle memory of voting as one… If we have a narrow majority and we can’t do anything, that’s not good.”

Kilmer is part of a wave of lawmakers retiring Congress – 45 at time of publication, not the highest number on record but enough to draw attention. But he remains optimistic about Congress’s ability to change.

“I don't think it's a secret that Congress is a fixer upper,” he said.>

<In its seventh public hearing, the House select committee detailed an explosive meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, in which outside advisers to then-President Donald Trump and White House officials clashed over election fraud conspiracy theories and plots to keep Trump in power.

The committee meticulously reconstructed the meeting, playing clips of sworn testimony from various participants, including White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who met with the committee behind closed doors on Friday.

The chaotic White House meeting took place four days after electors met across the country and made Joe Biden the president-elect, and lasted over six hours, beginning in the Oval Office and ending in Trump's private residence.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who co-led Tuesday's hearing, described how attorney Sidney Powell, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and former national security adviser Michael Flynn accessed the White House with the help of a junior staffer and spoke with Trump alone for 10-15 minutes before White House officials learned of the meeting and made their way to join.

"I bet Pat Cipollone set a new land speed record," Powell said of the White House Counsel.

For his part, Cipollone expressed frustration at the group assembled before the president, telling the committee he "was not happy to see the people in the Oval Office."

"First of all, the Overstock person, I didn't know who this guy was. Actually, the first thing I did, I walked in, I looked at him and I said, 'Who are you?' And he told me," he recounted. "I don't think any of these people were providing the president with good advice and I didn't understand how they had gotten in."

Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann said the outside group suggested that Venezuela had meddled with the election and that Nest brand thermostats hooked up to the internet were changing votes.

Cipollone recalled "pushing back" on the group of Trump's outside advisors by asking them to provide any evidence that the election was fraudulent.

He said the group showed a "general disregard for the importance of actually backing up what you say."

The outside group of Trump's advisors repeatedly accused the White House team of being too weak to further contest the election results.

"I would categorically describe it as: 'You guys aren't tough enough,' " former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in a video clip of testimony.

"What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts," said Herschman, and recalled an exchange with Powell about the integrity of judges who had ruled on the Trump team's legal challenges.

"She says, 'Well, the judges are corrupt,' " he recounted. "I'm like — 'Every one? Every single case in the country you guys lost? Every one of them is corrupt? Even the ones we appointed?' I'm being nice, I was much more harsh to her."

Raskin displayed texts from Cassidy Hutchinson — who has already delivered bombshell testimony before the committee — describing the meeting to Tony Ornato, then-White House deputy chief of staff for operations, saying, "the West Wing is unhinged."

The committee also shared a photograph Hutchinson took of then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows escorting (Giuliani) off-campus "to make sure he didn't wander back into the mansion."

Cipollone also testified that he spoke out against a plan to appoint Powell as a special counsel in charge of investigating seized voting machines and prosecuting election-related crimes.

"I was vehemently opposed," he said. "I didn't think she should be appointed anything."

It was in the hours after this meeting that Trump tweeted that his supporters should come to D.C. on Jan. 6: "Be there, will be wild!">

<An Indiana state senator recently became the target of a swatting incident hours after he was named and criticized by President Donald Trump, according to law enforcement.

Knewz.com has learned that the incident came as the battle over mid-cycle redistricting in the state intensified, drawing threats and growing concern among elected Republicans who say political pressure is now escalating into criminal intimidation.

Recently, President Trump posted a lengthy message on Truth Social blasting GOP state Senator Greg Goode and Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray for refusing to support redrawing congressional maps that could give Republicans additional seats.

Trump wrote he was “very disappointed in Indiana State Senate Republicans, led by RINO Senators Rod Bray and Greg Goode,” accusing them of weakening the party.

He threatened that Republicans who oppose the plan “should be PRIMARIED," adding, “let’s get them out of office, ASAP.”

At the time, Goode had not publicly confirmed a position on the proposal, despite Trump implying otherwise.

Hours after Trump posted on Truth Social, deputies responded to a call about potential harm inside Goode’s home in southeastern Vigo County.

Sheriff Derek Fell said officers initially struggled to make contact but later confirmed the senator and his family were unharmed.

Fell described the false emergency report as a “hoax, also known as ‘swatting.’”

Senator Goode issued a brief statement saying he and his family were “victims” of the incident and thanking responding law enforcement for their “professionalism.”

At least 11 Republican lawmakers have reported threats, swatting attempts and harassment since Trump’s first public criticism in mid-November.

State Senator Mike Bohacek said he received a bomb threat the same day he announced he would oppose redistricting over an ableist comment made by Trump.

“This recent pattern of threatening behavior and intimidation attempts are not only concerning, but also illegal,” he said.

Senator Jean Leising reported a pipe bomb threat and said, “Threats like these to public officials are unacceptable.”

Several others -- including Senators Dan Dernulc, Rick Niemeyer, Spencer Deery, Kyle Walker and Linda Rogers -- confirmed they were targeted in similar incidents.

Some reported receiving unwanted pizza deliveries -- a tactic often used for surveillance or intimidation.

Recently, Indiana Republican lawmakers unveiled a proposed congressional map intended to secure two additional GOP seats in next year’s midterm elections.

The release follows mounting pressure from President Trump, who has publicly demanded that the legislature pursue redistricting to strengthen Republican control.>

<Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked the four-star Navy admiral overseeing the U.S. military’s strikes against boats in the Caribbean to step down after the top officer voiced concerns about the “murky” legality of the attacks.

U.S. Southern Command head Adm. Alvin Holsey will retire two years ahead of schedule on Dec. 12 following “months of discord” between him and Hegseth, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Hegseth announced the surprise retirement on Oct. 16 with Holsey only one year into his tenure and during a major new military operation — an extraordinary move, lawmakers and experts said at the time.

But tensions between the two had simmered since the start of the year, when the newly confirmed Hegseth met with Holsey via a secure video conference, two Pentagon officials and former officials told the outlet.

“You’re either on the team or you’re not,” Hegseth reportedly told Holsey at the time. “When you get an order, you move out fast and don’t ask questions.”

Later in March, Hegseth ordered Holsey to develop military options to ensure the U.S. had full access to the Panama Canal after President Trump said he wanted to “reclaim” the strategic waterway, but the Pentagon chief felt Holsey didn’t move quickly enough on the plans, according to the Journal.

Hegseth also was suspicious that Holsey may have leaked details about those options when such media reports surfaced, one former official told the outlet.

Then this past summer, when the U.S. military began striking boats off the coast of Venezuela that the administration claimed without evidence were carrying drugs bound for America, Holsey was reportedly concerned about the tenuous legal authority for the campaign.

Holsey objected that parts of the operations fell outside his direct control, as other military units under separate chains of command were also involved in the strikes, according to the Journal.

But even before Holsey’s concerns, Hegseth reportedly had lost confidence in him and was looking for his replacement. Tension came to a head with a “confrontation” between the two at the Pentagon in early October.

Multiple outlets reported at the time that Holsey and Hegseth were at odds over the U.S. mission in the Caribbean, but Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell at the time dismissed the stories as “fake news,” insisting there was “no hesitation or concerns about this mission.”

Asked by The Hill about the nature of Hosley’s departure, a Pentagon official disputed that there was animosity around his leaving.

“Admiral Hosley was not fired, he was asked to retire on good terms,” they said. “Since that time the team has worked in harmony. We are grateful for his service to our nation, and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”

The saga comes as Hegseth has been accused of war crimes over his handling of the U.S. strikes, which began in September and killed more than 80 people in more than 20 attacks.

The Washington Post last week reported that the Pentagon chief gave a spoken directive to “kill everybody” ahead of the U.S. military’s Sept. 2 attack against an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean, an operation in which 11 “narco-terrorists” were killed.

Navy Adm. Frank Bradley, the commander who oversaw the strikes and ordered a follow-up attack to kill two survivors, on Thursday denied that Hegseth ordered his subordinates to “kill everybody” aboard the vessel.

Congress is looking into what the military’s reasoning was for ordering the second strike against the boat and what order Hegseth gave. Democrats also want the Trump administration to release the full video of the attack — which Trump has expressed an openness to — along with written directives and orders from the Pentagon chief.

Holsey, a Navy helicopter pilot, had previously voiced support for stepping up interdiction of drug shipments and a stronger push to “dismantle the drug cartels,” according to testimony he gave during his Senate confirmation hearing in September 2024.

Holsey has not publicly said why he is stepping down.>

Time for this tinpot weekend warrior to vanish for good and all and let those who actually know how to lead carry the day.

<It’s so rare for a federal grand jury to reject an indictment that it happened just five times in the fiscal year 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Five times. Nationwide. Out of more than 165,000 cases.

That’s 1 out of every 33,000 cases. In percentage terms, it’s 0.003%.

Yet President Donald Trump and his Justice Department have now managed to achieve this remarkable feat in both of his signature attempts at exacting legal retribution against his foes.

First came the grand jury rejecting 1 of 3 charges against former FBI Director James Comey in September — apparently the most significant charge — and only narrowly agreeing to bring the other two. Then the indictments against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out because a judge ruled the prosecutor was illegally serving. After the Justice Department managed to find another prosecutor who would try to re-indict James, a grand jury on Thursday said no thanks. It rejected the charges.

The Justice Department is signaling it might press forward and try to indict James again.

But at this point, this whole retribution exercise is going quite poorly for the administration and appears increasingly likely to backfire on Trump.

His campaign has long suffered from a very significant and important deficit — and that’s the actual evidence.

Try as Trump’s allies might to justify this as a lawfare tit-for-tat after his four indictments when he was out of office, the mortgage fraud allegations against James and the perjury allegation against Comey appear rather flimsy — much flimsier than the charges against Trump were, certainly. Even some conservative legal scholars have scoffed at the evidence.

(The classified documents charges against another Trump foe, former national security adviser John Bolton, appear more serious. But the investigation was undertaken by the Biden administration, and Trump didn’t play such a role in orchestrating the charges.)

What’s more, the political nature of this effort is on another level. While Trump and his allies have baselessly claimed then-President Joe Biden was behind Trump’s indictments, Trump’s role in orchestrating these indictments has been rather shameless and very much out in the open, for all to see.

This is just a very different animal — no matter how much certain people try to both-sides it all.

The situation is reinforcing how Trump has truly weaponized the justice system.

It’s well-established that the Trump administration struggled to find prosecutors who would even present these cases to grand juries. CNN has even reported that Trump-loyal top DOJ officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, resisted the cases.

Ultimately, with the statute of limitations expiring on the Comey charges, Trump forced out the US attorney. Apparently the best way to get the charges brought quickly enough was to install Lindsey Halligan — who, as the judge who later disqualified her noted, had “no prior prosecutorial experience.”

What followed was a debacle in which the question seemed less whether the Comey case would get thrown out than for what reason. Among the problems was Halligan’s bizarre handling of securing the indictment. It was a pick-your-poison of potential failure before Halligan’s illegal appointment sunk both it and the James case.

But many of those problems remain and could loom large if the administration manages to secure another indictment in either or both cases.

What’s more, to the extent the administration just keeps bringing these charges, it could reinforce another reason for judges to potentially dismiss them: selective or vindictive prosecution.

Which brings us to the other key element here: public perception. It’s not just judges who might reason that the evidence of legal misconduct is growing; it’s also the American people....>

<....The American people, after all, already seem to regard these cases with quite a bit more skepticism than they ever did Trump’s indictments.

A recent poll from Marquette University Law School showed Americans said by a 55%-45% margin that the indictments against Trump had been warranted, but by a 58%-42% margin that the charges against Trump’s foes were not justified.

This echoed earlier polling that suggested Americans were quite skeptical of the Comey and James cases — in a way they simply never were about Trump’s indictments in real time. Americans were also much more likely to view the Comey and James cases as being political.

These situations aren’t apples-to-apples. And that’s not just in courts of law; it’s true in the court of public opinion too.

So if you’re Trump, what do you do with that?

His inclination right now seems to be to do whatever he can to make a point and to cause the likes of Comey and James legal headaches. If nothing else, maybe that’s enough of a warning to others who might come after Trump, lest they find themselves in similar situations.

But at this point, it’s somewhat doubtful that either James or Comey will have to contend with a trial. And even if they did, how could a jury ever unanimously convict them under the much higher standard of evidence? After the administration has struggled to get grand juries — who don’t need to be unanimous and only need to agree there is probable cause — to indict?

And that’s to say nothing of the apparent problems this is causing internally for the administration. Not only do these failed indictments appear to be dividing the Justice Department, but CNN reported recently that a grand jury in Maryland was probing the handling of another mortgage fraud allegation against a Trump foe — Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California — led by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and the Justice Department official Ed Martin. The probe appears to center on whether someone impersonated a federal agent and illegally shared grand jury materials.

Imagine if the most significant charges to come from this effort are against the investigators themselves.

At some point, one has to wonder whether the Justice Department will fear this leading to a succession of embarrassments for it and the administration. Because that’s the trajectory this is on.

Some DOJ officials appear to have tried to warn Trump that this wouldn’t work out. But he seems undeterred, at least so far.>

<Trump isn’t just destroying the White House to make room for a vanity ballroom — he’s selling it off to the highest bidders, who conveniently need favors from his regime.

The giant ballroom is Trump’s monument to corruption.

Google and Amazon are both chipping in with massive donations. They both just so happen to have massive antitrust lawsuits working their way through the courts. Amazon is also suing to get the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional. But I’m sure their ballroom donations have nothing to do with that, right?

I suppose that Apple’s support for the ballroom isn’t related to its own legal problems — or its desire to remain exempt from Trump’s tariffs.

Oh, and Meta. It’s also involved in a major antitrust lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission right now. But I’m sure the company is just donating because Mark Zuckerberg is a patriot.

Surely it’s not because Meta and other Big Tech companies stand to gain handsomely if Trump maintains his corporate-friendly AI policy.

Other generous donors to the ballroom project include cryptocurrency players like Coinbase, Ripple, and even the Winklevoss twins.

I’m sure the Winklevoss twins would be thrilled if Trump kept up his crypto-friendly policies, which he’s also cashing in on.

And Coinbase’s donation probably has nothing to do with the company’s being under an active regulatory investigation, right?

Another donor: The railroad giant Union Pacific, which is eyeing a $72 billion megamerger that needs approval from federal regulators.

Another: Comcast, which needs government approval for the mergers and acquisitions it pursues.

As does billionaire private equity executive Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone.

Companies that survive on government contacts are also chipping in, including Palantir and Lockheed Martin. How kind of them.

The Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of “bribery” to the point where a specific favor has to be demanded in advance of payment. So we can’t say this is bribery … exactly.

But the writing’s on the wall — perhaps literally. These donors are likely to get their names etched into the new White House building itself.

Could there be a more fitting monument to the Trump presidency?

That’s because in Trump’s White House, everything is for sale — even the building itself.

Memo to all of us: One of the first things to be done when sanity and legality are restored to Washington — demolition of Trump’s ballroom memorial to corruption.>

<President Trump keeps blaming former President Biden for everything from the cost of living to the recent shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C.

But there are signs that the effectiveness of the strategy is petering out, now that Trump has been back in power for almost a year.

On Tuesday at the White House, Trump complained that the term “affordability” is “a Democrat scam” and went on at some length about his efforts to bring prices down.

But the most recent rate of inflation given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — 3 percent on an annualized basis, for September, — is exactly the same as it was in January, when Biden left the White House.

In relation to the killing of National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom and the wounding of fellow Guard member Andrew Wolfe, the Afghanistan-born suspect Rahmanullah Lakanwal, did indeed come to the U.S. during the Biden presidency.

But Trump’s efforts to pin culpability on his predecessor are complicated, because Lakanwal was granted asylum in April, three months into the Trump presidency. Many specifics regarding the National Guard shooting also remain unclear.

When it comes to the larger political fight on the cusp of a midterm election year, Democrats insist Trump’s attacks on Biden are reaching their sell-by date.

“I believe there are diminishing returns to the attacks against Biden,” New York-based Democratic strategist Basil Smikle Jr. said.

“There is a portion of Trump’s base that will always support such attacks and statements. But when we look at the polling, it is clear that independent voters are starting to turn away from Trump, which suggests to me that those attacks are starting to wear very thin.”

Trump’s poll ratings, which have never been stellar, took a notable dip last month. He is currently 11 points underwater on job approval, as measured in the average maintained by The Hill’s partner, Decision Desk HQ. Fifty-three percent disapprove of his performance in office, while 42 percent approve.

More worryingly for Trump, his ratings on the economy and particularly on inflation are poor.

A Yahoo/YouGov poll released late last month found just 31 percent of Americans approving of the president’s handling of the cost of living while 63 percent disapproved.

There is a significant, and predictable, partisan split in the degree to which voters blame Trump or Biden for their economic woes, but the current president faces real challenges with voters in the middle ground.

The Yahoo/YouGov poll found that 38 percent of Americans blame Trump for inflation, compared to 31 percent who blame Biden.

A Fox News poll, also released last month, made for even grimmer reading for Trump. It found that voters say Trump is more responsible than Biden for the state of the economy by an almost 2-to-1 ratio, 62 percent to 32 percent.

A separate question found that just 15 percent of voters believe they have been helped by Trump’s economic policies, while 46 percent say they have been hurt and 39 percent say those policies have made no difference.

The question of inflation is a vexing one because of its inherent complications.

Inflation reached its highest point in decades during the Biden administration, peaking at an annualized rate of 9.1 percent in June 2022.

The then-president’s critics complained the soaring prices had been fueled by government spending intended to ameliorate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden’s defenders contended high inflation was a by-product of congested supply chains....>

<....Either way, inflation did fall steadily from this peak until the end of 2023. But it then proved sticky at around 3 percent — higher than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. Public dissatisfaction over elevated prices was a major drag on Democrats’ hopes of holding onto the White House with then-Vice President Kamala Harris last year.

Trump’s economic record, meanwhile, is inextricably bound up with his penchant for tariffs. Inflation has not risen as much as some economists predicted, but nor has it declined over the past year. That leaves the president in a politically vulnerable position — especially since improving affordability was one of his big campaign promises.

“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make American affordable again,” Trump told a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in August 2024.

Trump’s arguments have changed, but the tendency toward hyperbole has not. In his White House remarks Tuesday, he said of the Biden administration, “They had the worst inflation in the history of our country.”

This is untrue. Inflation was worse at the start of the 1980s — and at other points in the more distant past — than it was at any point in Biden’s presidency.

Still, Republicans defend the president’s arguments against Biden in a broader sense, asserting Trump is merely providing context for current conditions.

GOP strategist Brad Blakeman said, “The whole [2024] election turned on the record of the prior administration, so you know it doesn’t stop after Election Day.

“Obviously, the American people were not happy with the prior administration. The president, in the process of trying to pick up the pieces, is justifiably explaining where we’ve been, where we’re headed and why he’s doing what he’s doing.”

Blakeman also argued this dynamic goes beyond the big picture of inflation and includes topics such as enhanced subsidies for people who get their health coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed under former President Obama in 2010.

The Republican strategist contended voters had been sold an illusory promise that the ACA would be sustainable and that this had not proven to be the case.

Still, even he acknowledged that Republicans running in next year’s midterms should make a more “positive” case — even as he was careful not to criticize Trump.

“The president is term-limited — and a different character completely,” he said.>

I think it is good the way you respond to nonsense , stupidities , lies of three idiots of politics forum viz <the integrity> , <gezafan> , <diceman>.

<As the Republican Party flails on the cost-of-living crisis, President Donald Trump kicked off his Saturday morning with an attack on his beloved Fox & Friends for prodding that sensitive subject.

The show on Saturday hosted Peter Schiff, a stockbroker and financial commentator. He’s also a rising critic of Trump—Schiff has taken the president to task for dismissing economic concerns amid mounting inflation, job losses, and affordability issues.

On Truth Social, the president called Schiff a “Trump hating loser” and questioned the integrity of the Fox News program—of which he is, famously, an avid viewer—for having given him a platform. “Either the show made a mistake, or it is heading in a different direction,” Trump wrote, urging its staff to look into “the ‘booker’ who put this jerk on!”

Schiff, Trump wrote, “thinks prices are going up when, in fact, they are coming substantially down.” The claim is a familiar one from the president, who recently referred to “affordability” as a Democratic “hoax,” while recent polls show concerns about his handling of the economy rising to a fever pitch—and even growing among his own voters.

This mounting frustration with the administration, and apparently resultant GOP losses in recent elections, has created anxiety in the party. Some politicians and strategists are calling on Republicans to rethink their approach so as to actually address voters’ material concerns.>

'(A)ddress voters' concerns?

Novel concept, that.

<The New York Times says the Roberts court is giving their favorite president passes he doesn’t deserve.

“The justices … seem friendlier to claims of executive power under [President Donald] Trump than they were under President Joe Biden. They blocked Mr. Biden’s efforts to use his authority to forgive student loans and manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, they are enabling a Republican president as he goes much further while relying on weaker rationales,” argued the Times.

The court will soon hear a challenge to Trump’s power to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission — an action that flies in the face of a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent. It will also hear a challenge to Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, which the 14th Amendment explicitly protects.

But the conservative-dominated court has been a very good ally to Trump of late, letting fly some of the worst of Trump’s power grabs, including his decision to withhold congressionally-appropriated money and destroy congressionally created government offices.

Just as important, in their arguments — both official and quietly delivered without debate or rationale on the courts furtive shadow docket — conservative justices are ignoring evidence that Trump is not acting in good faith.

“In the past, the government has enjoyed what legal scholars call the ‘presumption of regularity.’ Judges assume they can rely on government officials to present facts accurately and give true reasons for their actions — and can defer to those officials at times as a result. The Trump administration does not deserve this presumption,” the Times argues.

Lower court judges appointed by presidents of both parties have described the administration’s actions, arguments and defiance as “egregious,” “capricious,” “nonsensical,” “unconscionable,” “baseless,” “cringe-worthy,” “Kafkaesque,” “blatantly unconstitutional” and “a sham.” Judge Karin Immergut, who Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, even described Trump’s professed reasons for deploying the National Guard in Portland as “untethered to the facts.”

“Yet the Supreme Court remains blithely credulous of the administration,” says the Times. “To take one example, Justice Kavanaugh minimized the burden of wrongful stops on legal immigrants by saying they would be briefly questioned and then could ‘promptly go free.’ That is often not the reality of the Trump administration’s immigration roundups. Instead, immigration agents conduct military-style raids that terrify children and hold even citizens in custody for hours or days or even weeks.”

“Judges on lower courts, including some appointed by Mr. Trump, have upbraided the Trump administration for its falsehoods and bad faith and begun to treat its arguments with the basic skepticism they have earned. The justices should do the same,” the Times writes.

Additionally, the court keeps letting Trump grab power “in dubious ways,” the Times opines, referring to the court’s September decision allowing the Trump to withhold $4 billion of foreign aid that Congress had directed to be spent by the end of that month.

“In a single paragraph of explanation, the majority let the policy stand, citing a president’s authority to conduct foreign policy. That is a far-reaching claim at odds with the country’s long history of respecting Congress’s power of the purse. Mr. Trump’s impoundment of appropriated funds is unconstitutional, full stop,” the Times said.

The conservative majority has also let the president begin to dismantle the Department of Education even though only Congress has the power to abolish an administrative agency and it greenlit Trump’s firing of members of the National Labor Relations Board and other agencies without cause, contravening the vision of independence Congress had when it created those agencies.

“Given the largely supine nature of Congress under Republican control, the stability of American democracy depends more than it should on the Supreme Court. So far, it is failing to live up to its constitutional role,” reports the Times. “But we’re only in the first quarter of this term. There’s a long way to go.”>

<Somalis are garbage! Deport a college student during a trip home for Thanksgiving! Pardon the Honduran ex-president convicted of drug peddling! Kill survivors from an unarmed boat the Navy has bombed in the Caribbean! Turn against Canada, our number one ally! Threaten to take over Greenland! Sell out the Ukrainians to the Russian invaders!

And there’s a good chance, a very good chance, the worst is yet to come.

How did we get a president who says these things, does these things? And what are the Democrats doing about it?

Not much. A record speech in the Senate by Corey Booker. Another in the House by Hakeem Jeffries. And of course there is self-righteous outrage over the Jeffrey Epstein files. The only new substantive issue is “affordability,” and it came from Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist. The Democratic Party’s strategy appears to be to lie low, let Trump wreck the country, and then hope to win enough House seats to stop him during his last two years. Let’s hope that works, but we should be worried, very worried, even though recent elections have shown increasing voter dissatisfaction with the Republicans.

What’s worrisome about the Dems is the mindset of believing that the system, overall, was working just fine until Trump came along. Certainly, that was the case for party elites, but it sure wasn’t for working people.

Why worry? Because the same party, the same mindset, and the same devotion to wealthy donors are what got us here.

Let’s start with Biden. Liberals and much of the left claimed he was the greatest pro-labor president since FDR, and that his Inflation Reduction Act was the greatest public works program since the New Deal. Well, okay. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and maybe if he’d been able to put a few sentences together, those claims would have proved true, but he didn’t execute and he still shouldn’t have been running for a second term. And the American public knew it. In February 2024, a whopping 86 percent thought Biden, age 81, was too old to run again.

How many Democrats had the courage to say out loud that he shouldn’t run. Very few. How many progressives called for him to step down? Very few. It was a pathetic display of cowardice. No one wanted to offend him, to provoke his wrath and that of his team, to be pushed outside, to have their chances to run in 2028 diminished because they called for him to step aside. As far as I’m concerned, all the 2028 Democratic presidential contenders have blood on their hands for staying silent. They showed zero guts when we needed the big boys and girls to tell Biden to step aside.

It wasn’t until he showed clear signs of decline in the June 2024 debate with Trump that voices were raised. That didn’t take courage. It only took watching the disaster unfold slowly and painfully.

And then came the next debacle—the coronation of Kamala Harris. It was as if the entire party forgot that she had dropped out of the presidential race in 2020 when her poll numbers sank to 3 percent. Think about that for a second. You must be very unpopular to attract so little support. Actually, you have to have no support at all. And yet, she was given the nod in 2024 without a primary challenge?

But Harris was very popular with the Democratic establishment. She didn’t utter a sound that offended the donor class. She was the darling of liberals who believed her gender and mixed ethnic origins gave her nomination special significance. She argued for the “opportunity society,” not for progressive economic populism, and her brother, Tony West, a Wall Steet insider, her campaign’s secret weapon, vouched for whose side she was on. There was no way she could win back the working class from Trump....>

<....What infuriates me still is that the Democratic establishment, and many progressives, did not act on the Trump threat and instead went along with the Biden/Harris train wreck. Given that we had already endured four years of Trump, don’t call this 20-20 hindsight. I sent Biden birthday greetings in November 2023, and begged him not to run.

It’s a sad day when referencing myself makes a point about the cowardice of the Democratic Party. But it’s more than just the failure of nerve. What’s worrisome about the Dems is the mindset of believing that the system, overall, was working just fine until Trump came along. Certainly, that was the case for party elites, but it sure wasn’t for working people.

The vast majority of Democratic politicians, consultants, operatives, and funders do not see a conflict between capital and labor, between their wealthy corporate donors and working people, or between their own wealth and growing inequality. In their ideological universe there is no class conflict. We’re all in this together, no matter what our wealth, our education, or our level of job insecurity. Runaway inequality may be a concern, but it is not viewed as an existential problem that is ripping our country apart.

Instead, the Democrats who control the party support policies that avoid progressive economic populism. They’re not interested in government forcing corporations to stop needless mass layoffs, raising the minimum wage, breaking up monopolies, facilitating unionization, and guaranteeing jobs for all. These policies are threats to corporate interests and therefore discouraged, no matter what public opinion data shows. You don’t bite the hands that feed your candidacy and, by the way, may provide highly paid jobs for you, your family, and your staff once you leave office.

But none of this is viewed as corruption or a betrayal of the public’s trust. Party leaders really believe that centrist policies will grow the pie for everyone. They cherish the “opportunity society” that gives everyone a fair chance at the American dream. They believe that the capitalist drive for wealth, free of burdensome government controls, will produce the good jobs of the future, and that effective educational policies will prepare working people for them—or at least give their children a shot at success. It’s kumbaya economics, unhinged from recent history and future progressive goals.

We’ve heard all this for more than a generation. This was the justification for deregulating Wall Street; the justification for free trade deals that wiped out millions of industrial jobs; the justification for permitting corporations to lay off workers to pay for leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks while avoiding taxes; and the justification for public-private partnerships that enriched the private partners at taxpayer expense.

Nearly all the members of the Democratic Party establishment, as Bernie Sanders so often points out, are wealthy and really have no clue about what working people are experiencing:

It’s state after state after state. The Democratic Party has abdicated—they’ve given up. They’re not fighting for the working class. What the Democratic Party has been is a billionaire-funded, consultant-driven party—and way out of touch with where the working class of this country is.

I fear that unless this corporatist mindset changes substantially, the Democrats will fail yet again in the new year, although I am praying for the Republicans to lose in the midterms. I’m afraid to even think of the harm a lame duck Trump will do in his final act, especially to the most defenseless among us. And of course, that assumes he doesn’t find a way to continue, heaven forbid.>

<First a Democratic gerrymander pushed California House Republicans to the brink of extinction. Now they’re fighting each other for scraps.

In a state where Republicans had long counted on congressional races to exert some influence in Washington, just four of California’s 52 House seats are now safe for the GOP. And a decades-long slide for the party has reached a new nadir as Republicans surveying the landscape use words like “demoralized,” “massacred” and “obliteration.”

“I’m sure Gavin Newsom and the Democrats are sitting back laughing and enjoying the havoc they’ve wreaked on the Republicans in California,” said Dave Gilliard, a veteran consultant who represents several House Republicans. “It’s going to be crazy next year, no doubt about it.

The infighting began almost immediately. Less than 24 hours after Proposition 50 passed, Rep. Ken Calvert announced he’d run for one of the few remaining red seats, after his own Southern California district was redrawn to favor Democrats. He was followed quickly by Rep. Young Kim, who announced a $3.5 million ad buy that would begin in April of next year — an unusually long runway that looked like an effort to dominate the airwaves and drive up ad rates before Calvert could.

In recent cycles, Kim and Calvert were two bright spots for Republicans: They repeatedly fended off well-funded Democratic challengers, holding swaths of Orange and Riverside counties for Republicans even as other incumbent GOPers succumbed. But now they have been drawn into a conflict that no one in their party wanted.

“I was really hoping there’d be some type of agreement worked out that we wouldn’t have Republicans pitted against Republicans,” said Rep. Doug LaMalfa. “That’s counterproductive and all it does is waste resources.”

LaMalfa has a different problem on his hands. He has long represented the state’s vast rural north, a redoubt of anti-Democratic sentiment where conservative secession dreams thrive. Now he’ll be up against a former Democratic state legislative leader from wine country, Sen. Mike McGuire, who helped oversee the Legislature’s efforts to craft new maps.

It’s possible neither he nor Calvert will survive.

“If Ken Calvert goes away, there goes a very powerful Californian on water issues who’s also an appropriator — that’s a big deal,” said Rob Stutzman, a longtime Republican consultant. “Rural California does lose its voice if they lose LaMalfa.”

Other incumbents are still weighing their fates. Rep. Darrell Issa, who was already driven into one brief retirement by unfavorable maps, contemplated relocating his career to Texas but could see it end in California as a bevy of Democratic challengers seek his blue-tinted district. Rep. Kevin Kiley, his district shattered into six shards, will have to either plunge into a Democratic-favoring district or run against Republican Rep. Tom McClintock.

“People are obviously demoralized at the moment about the results,” Kiley said. “We never would’ve seen something like this coming, but we just have to figure out how to move forward.”

It’s a far cry from the beginning of the year, which Republicans here began on a hopeful note. While out of power in Sacramento, they flipped several state legislative seats in 2024, celebrated a burst of new registrants and took partial credit for voters passing an anti-crime ballot initiative opposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and many Democrats. President Donald Trump improved on his 2020 margins in every county.

Now, Republicans are pointing fingers. Consultant and fundraiser Anne Dunsmore lamented the splintering she observed as Republicans turned on each other even before Prop 50 passed, condemning the “RINO bulls***” of Republicans questioning one another’s bona fides.

“I don’t want people to lose hope, but everyone needs to wake up and deal with this,” Dunsmore said. “Everyone needs to go back to their corners and reassess. We can’t go back to the battlefield in the same way — we’re almost completely gone.”

Consultant Tim Rosales described a similar soul-searching process as the party struggles with a deeper sense of resignation.

“Amongst the consultants and professional class, the mood is pretty somber at this point,” Rosales said. “For the average Republican voter in California, with Prop 50, it really is — we feel like we get kicked in the teeth year after year after year just being Republicans. We don’t expect anything different.”....>

<....The House has been the party’s final bastion of influence. Even as an increasingly Democratic state pushed the governor’s office and electoral votes out of reach, California’s size made it key to control of Congress and a perennial hub of campaign activity. California is still home to nearly 6 million Republican voters.

As the Legislature prepared to draw new House lines in 2001, President George W. Bush’s adviser Karl Rove reached out to Republican Senate leader Jim Brulte to say the GOP could retain the House if California supplied 19 seats, Brulte recalled in an interview. In an era when Republicans had more sway in the Legislature, Brulte cut an incumbent-protection deal that saw California Republicans retain their 20 seats as the GOP held the House — a source of national relevance that persisted even if Republican presidential candidates no longer bothered.

“Bob Dole waited until September (of 1996) to pull the plug on California,” Brulte said. “Now they don’t even plug us in.”

More recently, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy helped keep his home state in the picture by recruiting candidates and bringing in national money. A cluster of contested races in California have helped swing House control over the last decade.

But now McCarthy is out of office and proved unable to thwart Prop 50. His early pledge to raise $100 million in opposition fell flat as a blue electorate rallied behind an anti-Trump campaign. And the future looks bleak.

“We’ve got four seats that are Republican and five that are massacred,” said Cathy Abernathy, a longtime McCarthy political adviser. “We have a governor and a Legislature at war with us.”

Many Republicans were already skeptical of the independent commission that’s drawn lines since 2011, noting their share of the state’s House delegation trails their share of the electorate. Now, despite language in Proposition 50 stipulating that the redistricting will revert to the panel in 2031, it’s an article of faith among Republicans that Democrats will find a pretext to undo that trigger and scupper the commission. Brulte argued that once a party has enacted a partisan gerrymander, it has little incentive to return to the way things were.

“I think this is like losing your virginity,” Brulte said.

Republicans haven’t given up hope. The National Republican Congressional Committee plans to continue defending frontline members like Rep. David Valadao, who has held his seat in recent cycles despite registration deficits, and targeting Democrats like Rep. Adam Gray, with NRCC spokesperson Christian Martinez saying in a statement that “no map can shield” Democrats.

“California is always a challenge for Republicans, but our incumbents have already proved we can win tough seats when our candidates are better, work harder, and talk about the issues that matter most to voters,” California Republican Party Chair Corrin Rankin said in a statement.

Abernathy is circulating a proposal for a ballot initiative that would create a new redistricting commission with rules she believes would be more favorable to the party. Trump’s DOJ has backed a lawsuit from state Republicans challenging the constitutionality of California’s maps, although a Supreme Court ruling upholding Texas’ lines buoyed California Democrats hoping for a similar victory.

“We could have three sets of lines in nine months — wouldn’t it be exciting?” said Republican National Committee member Shawn Steel.

But if the lines hold, Steel acknowledged, 2026 is “going to be an unexciting year.” Rosales noted that Republicans in California — “always one of the most expensive and hardest places to run congressional races” — could see less help than usual if the party decides its money is better invested elsewhere.

Still, it’s hardly the first time the party has had its back against the wall. In a state with serious cost-of-living and homelessness issues and a huge trove of Republican voters, the faithful still believe there’s a way back.

“The obituary for Republicans in California has been written many times,” Rosales said, “and it’s never come to fruition.”>

<When the framers of what became the U.S. Constitution set out to draft the rules of our government on a hot, humid day in the summer of 1787, debates over details raged on.

But one thing the men agreed on was the power of a new, representative legislative branch. Article I – the first one, after all – details the awesome responsibilities of the House of Representatives and the Senate: power to levy taxes, fund the government, declare war, impeach justices and presidents, and approve treaties, among many, many others.

In comparison, Article II, detailing the responsibilities of the president, and Article III, detailing the Supreme Court, are rather brief – further deferring to the preferred branch, Congress, for actual policymaking.

At the helm of this new legislative centerpiece, there was only one leadership requirement: The House of Representatives must select a speaker of the House.

The position, modeled after parliamentary leaders in the British House of Commons, was meant to act as a nonpartisan moderator and referee. The framers famously disliked political parties, and they knew the importance of building coalitions to solve the young nation’s vast policy problems.

But this idealistic vision for leadership quickly dissolved.

The current speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, holds a position that has strayed dramatically from this nonpartisan vision. Today, the leadership role is far more than legislative manager – it is a powerful, party-centric position that controls nearly every aspect of House activity.

And while most speakers have used their tenure to strengthen the position and the power of Congress as a whole, Johnson’s choice to lead by following President Donald Trump drifts the position even further from the framers’ vision of congressional primacy.

Centralizing power

By the early 1800s, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, first elected speaker in 1810 as a member of the Whig Party, used the position to pursue personal policy goals, most notably entry into the War of 1812 against Great Britain.

Speaker Thomas Reed continued this trend by enacting powerful procedures in 1890 that allowed his Republican majority party to steamroll opposition in the legislative process.

In 1899, Speaker David Henderson created a Republican “cabinet” of new chamber positions that directly answered to – and owed their newly elevated positions to – him.

In the 20th century, in an attempt to further control the legislation Congress considered, reformers solidified the speaker’s power over procedure and party. Speaker Joseph Cannon, a Republican who ascended to the position in 1903, commandeered the powerful Rules Committee, which allowed speakers to control not only which legislation received a vote but even the amending and voting process.

At the other end of the 20th century was an effort to retool the position into a fully partisan role. After being elected speaker in 1995, Republican Newt Gingrich expanded the responsibilities of the office beyond handling legislation by centralizing resources in the office of the speaker. Gingrich grew the size of leadership staff – and prevented policy caucuses from hiring their own. He controlled the flow of information from committee chairs to rank-and-file members, and even directed access to congressional activity by C-SPAN, the public service broadcaster that provides coverage of Congress.

As a result, the modern speaker of the House now plays a powerful role in the development and passage of legislation – a dynamic that scholars refer to as the “centralization” of Congress.

Part of this is out of necessity: The House in particular, with 435 members, requires someone to, well, lead. And as America has grown in population, economic power and the size of government, the policy problems Congress tackles have become more complex, making this job all the more important....>

<....But the position that began as coalition-building has evolved into controlling the floor schedule and flow of information and coordinating and commandeering committee work. My work on Congress has also documented how leaders invoke their power to dictate constituent communication for members of their party and use campaign finance donations to bolster party loyalty.

This centralization has cemented the responsibilities of the speaker within the chamber. More importantly, it has elevated the speaker to a national party figure.

Major legislation passed

Some successful leaders have been able to translate these advantages to pass major party priorities: Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from Texas, began his tenure in 1940 and was the longest-serving speaker of the House, ultimately working with eight different presidents.

Under Rayburn’s leadership, Congress passed incredible projects, including the Marshall Plan to fund recovery and reconstruction in postwar Western Europe, and legislation to develop and construct the Interstate Highway System.

In the modern era, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and the first and only female speaker, began her tenure in 2007 and held together a diverse Democratic coalition to pass the Affordable Care Act into law.

But as the role of speaker has become one of proactive party leader, rather than passive chamber manager, not all speakers have been able to keep their party happy.

Protecting Congress’ power

John Boehner, a Republican who became speaker in 2011, was known for his procedural expertise and diplomatic skills. But he ultimately resigned after he relied on a bipartisan coalition to end a government shutdown in 2014 and avert financial crises, causing his support among his party to plummet.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted in 2023 from the position by his own Republican Party after working with Democratic members to fund the government and maintain Congress’ power of the purse.

Although these decisions angered the party, they symbolized the enduring nature of the position’s intention: the protector of Article I powers. Speakers have used their growing array of policy acumen, procedural advantages and congressional resources to navigate the chamber through immense policy challenges, reinforcing Article I responsibilities – from levying taxes to reforming major programs that affect every American – that other branches simply could not ignore.

In short, a strengthened party leader has often strengthened Congress as a whole.

Although Johnson, the current speaker, inherited one of the most well-resourced speaker offices in U.S. history, he faces a dilemma in his position: solving enormous national policy challenges while managing an unruly party bound by loyalty to a leader outside of the chamber.

Johnson’s recent decision to keep Congress out of session for eight weeks during the entirety of the government shutdown indicates a balance of deference tilted toward party over the responsibilities of a powerful Congress.

This eight-week absence severely weakened the chamber. Not being in session meant no committee meetings, and thus, no oversight; no appropriations bills passed, and thus, more deference to executive-branch funding decisions; and no policy debates or formal declarations of war, and thus, domestic and foreign policy alike being determined by unelected bureaucrats and appointed judges.

Unfortunately for frustrated House members and their constituents, beyond new leadership, there is little recourse.

While the gradual, powerful concentration of authority has made the speaker’s office more responsive to party and national demands alike, it has also left the chamber dependent on the speaker to safeguard the power of the People’s House.>

<One of Donald Trump’s most successful political tactics has been labeling his opponents as too physically enervated to handle the job of the presidency. In 2016, Trump immortally smeared Jeb Bush as “low energy” (a charge that doomed Bush’s campaign) and framed Hillary Clinton as lacking in “stamina” (a jibe supercharged with sexism). In 2019, Trump coined the nickname “Sleepy Joe” for Joe Biden. Initially, this insult failed to resonate with the electorate, who handed Biden a resounding victory over Trump in 2020. Unfortunately, Biden himself lent credence to the “Sleepy Joe” taunt as he became visibly more timeworn during his presidency—a decline that culminated in the stammering, incoherent performance that destroyed his reelection chances for good in 2024.

Biden’s embarrassing decrepitude couldn’t have been luckier for Trump. Not only did it lead to the end of his reelection bid—it also helped Trump look vigorous and healthy by comparison. But now, a year into his second term, there is no Biden to distract the public from the obvious truth—that Trump is at least as low-energy and sleepy as any of his rivals.

In his speeches and press conferences, Trump frequently digresses into chaotic verbal nonsense. But talking disjointedly at least keeps Trump, who has a narcissistic love of being at the center of attention, alert. Yet, as a string of recent videos has shown, when Trump has to listen to other people speak, his brain tends to lapse into a default mode of somnolence.

Even the mainstream media, which has been negligently reluctant to raise questions about Trump’s physical and mental well-being, has started to take note. On Friday, The Washington Post reported,

President Donald Trump closed his eyes for extended periods as Cabinet officials went around the room Tuesday providing updates on their work, at times seeming to nod off.

It was the second time in less than a month that Trump has appeared to struggle to stay awake as his advisers speak about the administration’s initiatives. A Washington Post analysis of multiple video feeds of the meeting Tuesday showed that during nine separate instances, Trump’s eyes were closed for extended periods or he appeared to struggle to keep them open, amounting cumulatively to nearly six minutes. The episode was similar to an Oval Office event on Nov. 6 when the president spent nearly 20 minutes battling to keep his eyes open.

This version of Trump—let’s call it Sleepy Donald—is not new. In April of 2024, while Trump sat in a Manhattan courtroom facing criminal charges in a hush-money trial, he frequently had difficulty staying alert. As The New York Times reported, “Trump appeared to nod off a few times, his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest.”

Trump’s increasing lethargy has also significantly affected his daily schedule, as the Times documented last month:

Trump’s first official event starts later in the day. In 2017, the first year of his first term, Mr. Trump’s scheduled events started at 10:31 a.m. on average. By contrast, Mr. Trump in his second term has started scheduled events in the afternoon on average, at 12:08 p.m. His events end on average at around the same time as they did during the first year of his first term, shortly after 5 p.m.

The number of Mr. Trump’s total official appearances has decreased by 39 percent. In 2017, Mr. Trump held 1,688 official events between Jan. 20 and Nov. 25 of that year. For that same time period this year, Mr. Trump has appeared in 1,029 official events.

It would be concerning enough if Trump merely needed a lot more naptime. But it’s worse than that. He is sometimes up very late at night, posting relentlessly on social media, only to taper off during the day. This is the kind of sleep pattern you might find in your average teenager or cocaine addict—in other words, not the sort of behavior you want in a president. Certainly, it’s worrying that the man who has his finger on a nuclear arsenal that can destroy all life on earth is keeping such irregular hours....>

<....To be sure, when Trump is genuinely engaged with an event, he can liven up. Trump seemed uncharacteristically peppy in a recent meeting with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a political foe who nevertheless strangely energized the president. Similarly, Trump found a new spring in his step when receiving the transparently fraudulent FIFA Peace Prize, a bauble created by a corrupt soccer league and designed to please the president’s childish love of shiny trinkets. But these events are the exception; most of the time, Trump has become ever more lumbering, slow, irritable, and drowsy.

Trump and his supporters have responded to investigations into his health and alertness with surly denials and attempts at distraction. Trump has gone back to drawing a contrast between himself and his rivals. In November, Trump said Biden “broke every record. He sleeps all the time, during the day, during the night, on the beach.” Ted Cruz, descending into a sycophancy that is ridiculous even for him, defended the president by saying, “I don’t think [Trump] sleeps at all.” Other presidential cronies have also made patently absurd claims about Trump’s energy.

Trump is far from the first president to fight a losing battle to keep awake. His predecessors William Howard Taft (president from 1909 to 1913) and Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) were also impressively prone toward fatigue. Ronald Reagan (1981–89)—who would drift off to slumberland during cabinet meetings—also deserves a spot in the Mount Rushmore of napping presidents. Interestingly, all three men were, like Trump, big-business conservatives.

As The Washington Post noted in 2003, Taft “once fell asleep while talking face to face with Joseph Cannon, the speaker of the House. He did the same with the French ambassador’s wife. He nodded off while signing papers, attending the opera and standing in review of troops. He was the most obviously sleepy person to ever inhabit the White House.” Historians have speculated that Taft suffered from sleep apnea, a by-product of his notorious portliness.

We have no exact measure of presidential sleepiness, but Calvin Coolidge, who stayed in bed for nine hours a night and napped for at least two in the afternoon, was a contender for the title of most dormant commander in chief. In an obituary, H.L. Mencken, the premier journalistic wit of his age, argued that Coolidge “slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.” Mencken speculated that if Coolidge had governed during the Great Depression, he “would have responded to bad times precisely as he responded to good ones—that is, by pulling down the blinds, stretching his legs upon his desk, and snoozing away the lazy afternoons.”

Mencken was an ardent advocate of laissez-faire government, so for him the sleepiness of Coolidge was a virtue. Mencken likely felt the same way about Taft’s heavy-lidded presidency.

But Trump gives the lie to the idea that a president who tunes out is good for the country. In Trump’s case, there is little relief in the fact that he himself is checked out and prefers to spend his dotage garishly remaking the White House and accepting gifts that are transparently bribes. That’s because, while Trump may be inactive, his minions certainly aren’t. He’s surrounded himself with a crew of extremists, notably Stephen Miller, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio. These underlings have been empowered by Trump’s lack of interest in government. It’s allowed them to pursue harsh policies of immigration restriction, deregulation, and militarism. With his fading mind and lack of interest in governance, Trump has been able to ignore criticism of these policies. Far from being a benign personal foible, Trump’s tiredness is a major reason his second term is shaping up to be an even bigger disaster than his first.>

<On the evening before Thanksgiving, the president of the United States took to his social media platform to claim in a lengthy screed that immigration was destroying the country. In one spurious example Donald Trump offered in his Truth Social post, he warned, falsely, that "hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia" were "completely taking over the state" of Minnesota, with dangerous migrant gangs roving the streets as citizens cowered in fear at home.

Trump laid the blame squarely on Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic Party's 2024 nominee for vice president. "The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both," Trump fumed.

In the not-too-recent past, it would have been unthinkable for a president to attack his political opponent using a derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities. Even a Republican, Indiana State Sen. Mike Bohacek, rebuked Trump for his language in a Facebook post, saying it was reason enough to oppose a GOP-favored redistricting measure in his state. "I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter," who has Down syndrome, he wrote, noting that Trump's "choices of words have consequences." (Trump, naturally, doubled down on his statement days later.)

The president's epithet didn't come out of thin air. Across the internet, during the 2024 election and in the first year of his second term, MAGA influencers have increasingly used the R-word to insult and scandalize conscientious "woke" liberals, normalizing a slur that had been largely purged from the national vocabulary. The trend reflects not only a coarsening of public discourse under Trump but new depths of callousness and cruelty in America, with disability advocates warning of the term's dehumanizing effect. Elon Musk alone has dropped the word more than 30 times on his X account since early 2024, while Joe Rogan has said that its return represents an important win for right-wingers. "The word ‘retarded' is back, and it's one of the great culture victories," the podcaster crowed in an April episode of his show.

Luvell Anderson, head of the philosophy department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has written extensively on the lexical category of slurs. He describes the Trumpworld's pushback against the elimination of the R-word as part of the larger project of asserting ideology. "The attempted reintroduction of ‘retarded' into the public language by people on the far right has less to do with changing meaning and more to do with an attempted shift in values," he explains. "From the far right's perspective, reintroducing a word we are taught not to say is a rebellious act meant to take back power. Open defiance is a clear sign that the old gatekeepers are no longer in charge."

So, how exactly did we get here? To understand that, we have to chart the history and evolution of this troublesome term over hundreds of years.

Neutral and Clinical Origins

"Retard" is a verb derived from the Latin verb "retardere," meaning "to make slow," or "to delay." To hinder something or someone's progress is to "retard" it. "Retarded" is a corresponding adjective referring to whomever or whatever has been slowed down, and "retardant" describes that which is capable of inhibiting in this way: a "flame retardant" substance, for example, helps to reduce or halt the spread of fire. English and other languages included versions of these words as far back as the 15th century.

By the 19th century, clinical psychologists were applying old words such as "idiot" and "imbecile" to categorize people with intellectual disabilities, and sometimes inventing new ones. (In 1910, the American eugenicist Henry H. Goddard coined the term "moron," suggesting it as a replacement for the description "feeble-minded," which he found too vague for his liking.) To receive one of these designations from a doctor in this era was to be marked as unfit for society and a candidate for potential institution and sterilization.

As those words were adopted for epithets of abuse outside clinical settings, some in the medical community sought to move toward less loaded language. The first known use of "retarded" to characterize the intellectually disabled dates to 1895, with "mental retardation" slowly but surely replacing the previous terminology in medical literature over the course of the 20th century. This was reflected in the names of advocacy groups, including the National Association for Retarded Children and the American Association on Mental Retardation, which have since been renamed (as Arc of the United States and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, respectively) in recognition of the rise in the harmful use of "retard" as a slur. But "retarded" did remain accepted scientific language into the 1980s and 1990s....>

<....John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University who examined profanity and slurs in his 2021 book Nine Nasty Words, says that the R-word was partially meant to be a neutralizing solution to words like "imbecile" becoming offensive slang. "My sense is that ‘moron' and ‘idiot' were the ones shelved for the more euphemistic ‘retarded,' which originally would have felt like just ‘slowed down by factors beyond their control,'" he tells Rolling Stone. "But once ‘retarded' felt like ‘moron,' we started using terms like ‘special needs' - and note what that term is starting to feel like in public discourse."

A Stigmatizing Pejorative

The issue with simply switching from something like "idiot" to the R-word, McWhorter explains, is that the replacement term enters a "euphemism treadmill" and will eventually acquire the stigma of the last word.

"A word takes on unpleasant associations," he says. "Those who wish to use a word with fewer associations, such as to protect a group of people, suggest a new term. Problem is, that term after a while takes on the same associations. ‘Bum' is changed to ‘homeless,' but when ‘homeless' feels as mean as ‘bum,' we change it to ‘unhoused' - but that term will soon feel the same way." There has been a similar progression, McWhorter notes, from "crippled" to "handicapped" to "disabled."

As such, the R-word gained traction as a slang put-down through the middle of the 20th century, almost as soon as it was default medical terminology, and by the 1970s, disability activists were campaigning to retire the word. (It is probably no coincidence that Musk and Rogan, two outspoken fans of the epithet, are Gen Xers who were born right around a time when popular culture had fully embraced it for bullying purposes.)

Anderson says that what happened with the R-word is hardly unique. "The process of words moving from neutral to pejorative is called pejoration," he explains. "This happens all the time. For example, it also happened with ‘idiot' and ‘feeble-minded,' both terms that were used in a neutral way but then shifted to something more negative. ‘Negro' is another term that comes to mind that has gone through this process."

"The status and meaning of expressions has much to do with shifting language ideologies," Anderson adds, reflecting the values, morals, and politics of a social world. "Often, we come to feel positively or negatively about an expression, or expect words to be used in specific contexts and ways because of language ideologies." That the R-word came to serve as a common disparagement for people who are not intellectually disabled revealed a societal lack of empathy and care for those who are.

Activist Campaign Leads to Change in Laws

In 2009, the U.S. saw a renewed call to force the R-word out of circulation: youth activists working with the Special Olympics launched a campaign called Spread the Word to End the Word to mark that year's winter games. Students across the country were encouraged to sign a pledge to stop their derogatory use of the term. (Eventually, the campaign expanded into a general movement for inclusion and celebration of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.)

The following year, Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff under President Obama, was embroiled in a scandal when it emerged that he had used the term in a private meeting the previous summer. He apologized to a number of disability rights activists, including Special Olympics Chief Executive Tim Shriver, and said he would not only take the Spread the Word to End the Word pledge but ensure that the Obama administration would work with the organization on efforts to remove the R-word from the text of federal laws.

In October 2010, Obama signed legislation to that effect. The measure, known as Rosa's Law, was named for Rosa Marcellino, a nine-year-old with Down syndrome who along with her parents successfully fought to remove the term "mental retardation" from health and education records in her home state of Maryland. The federal law likewise amended government documentation, removing "mental retardation" and "mentally retarded" in favor of "intellectual disability" and "individual with an intellectual disability." Several states had already begun making this revision, as had bureaucratic agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....>

<....All told, it seemed as if the world was moving on from a term that had fully transformed into a harmful slur. There were signs, however, that some would not be giving it up. After a 2012 presidential debate, right-wing commentator Ann Coulter called Obama a "retard" on Twitter, sparking outrage and demands for a public apology from disability activists. Coulter doubled down on her remarks in a CNN interview. "I was not referring to someone with Down syndrome. I was referring to the president of the United States," she said, explaining that she viewed the word as a synonym for "loser."

"Do you call people with mental disabilities retards?" she asked. "Because I don't. I think that's a nasty thing to do."

Culture War Comeback

Trump's 2016 presidential run brought moments of shocking incivility from the insurgent candidate. Almost a year after he took a moment at a South Carolina rally to perform a mocking impression of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has the congenital joint condition arthrogryposis, a poll found that voters still judged it his most offensive moment on the campaign trail. While in office, Trump regularly lobbed profanities, apparently regarding them as a natural element of his populist appeal.

It was not until 2024, however - during an election that saw Trump relentlessly attack Joe Biden as a president in steep cognitive decline - that MAGA culture warriors made a concerted effort to revive the term as a standard verbal jab. They were aided in this by Musk's 2022 acquisition of Twitter, which he rebranded as X and stripped of various moderation policies, reinstating extremists, conspiracy theorists, and peddlers of misinformation who had been banned under those guidelines. He began using the R-word himself on the platform and engaging with like-minded users, including an anonymous far-right "Retard Finder" profile based in Australia that appends the slur to pictures of U.S. liberals and Democrats. (The account was opened in December 2024 and now has more than 800,000 followers.)

In January, researchers at Montclair State University tracked the use of the R-word in the days after Musk responded "F u retard" to a Finnish researcher who posted on X that month that he was "rapidly becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history." They demonstrated a more than 200 percent spike in posts containing the word over the following two days - 312,642 examples in all.

But it wasn't just Musk driving these trends, according to the study's authors. "While it might be tempting to view an event such as this as an isolated one-off, indications are that the widespread dissemination of hateful and marginalizing content may be an increasingly prominent feature on social media," they wrote, observing that Facebook parent Meta had recently dismantled some of its safeguards against dehumanizing language, apparently in concession to the political climate about to be ushered in with a second Trump term....>

<....This week, the paper's co-authors - Bond Benton, a communications professor, and justice studies professor Daniela Peterka-Benton - released new findings that showed a sharp rise in use of the R-word on X in the days after Trump applied it to Walz. The effect was quite similar to the trend they identified in the wake of Musk's January R-word post: a 225.7 percent increase in usage, or 1.12 million R-word posts in the week following Trump's Truth Social diatribe.

"A lot of people face similar stressors in society right now, from cultural challenges to economic challenges to perceptions that they're being marginalized in some way," Benton tells Rolling Stone. "When you can say a word that you know is going to be hurtful to a lot of people, there could be a sort of power in that: you go from being vulnerable to being perceived as dangerous." Benton believes right-wingers may be seeking "validation" by making others angry in this way. He also points out that this slur is surging in popularity at the same time that MAGA figures "are saying that the cost of compassion has hurt our country." It may be no coincidence that they're specifically marginizaling a group that relies on the social safety nets they want to do away with.

"Not using the R-word has sort of become synonymous with ‘wokeness,'" observes Peterka-Benton. Using it today, she says, is about "regaining the power to decide" what can be said publicly while "completely disregarding the harm that has been done to the disability community." Peterka-Benton adds that heated discourse around such slurs can also act as "a diversion from bigger problems, from economic inequality to lingering questions about Trump's ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And, she says, as with the demonization of undocumented migrants, to keep repeating the R-word means "being the bullies in the room against against populations that are inherently not as strong as the mainstream."

Whatever its ideological value to the far right, though, the R-world may also simply be a way of compensating for the Trump administration's failure to deliver on key promises. Grocery prices are up, limited disclosures about Epstein haven't led to prosecutions of Democrats, the county is inching toward a mad war with Venezuela, and millions are set to lose Medicaid coverage - but you are free to throw the word "retarded" around online. As one X user summarized recent polling data that shows Trump's disapproval rating has topped 60 percent: "You wanted a return to 2019 America but all you got is the r-word pass." And it's already looking as if that wasn't quite the deal of a lifetime.>