<What happens when a government declares war on a domestic terrorist organization that doesn’t actually exist? It’s a question that completely flummoxed Michael Glasheen, the FBI’s branch and operations director, last week when he was testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., asked him where antifa, the alleged terrorist organization, was headquartered and he could only reply, “we’re building out the infrastructure right now,” an impressive non sequitur that dodged the question.

Glasheen could not give any specifics as to how many people are involved in antifa or where they are, but he said that it was “ongoing for us to understand that…no different than al-Qaida and ISIS.” Thompson pressed him further about just who and what this alleged terrorist threat actually was, and all he could do was shrug and say “it is the most immediate violent threat we’re facing on the domestic side.” It’s not surprising that the FBI cannot give any concrete evidence. Antifa is not an organization, terrorist or otherwise. It’s simply a single concept: anti-fascism.

As the Washington Post reported, Thursday “marked the first deadline for all the federal law enforcement agencies to ‘coordinate delivery’ of their intelligence files” to the FBI, which will be drawing up lists of “leftist networks,” Americans and foreigners to investigate. Attorney General Pam Bondi‘s order defined “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “opposition to law and immigration enforcement,” “radical gender ideology” and “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality” as the kind of ideology requiring investigation by federal authorities. Those are elastic enough terms that it could cover at least half the population.

This followed an executive order issued in September in which the Trump administration designated “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization “that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” Any such manifesto or statement of principles doesn’t exist; this was simply an attempt to justify the targeting of left-leaning groups and critics of Donald Trump through extrajudicial powers granted to the government for use against foreign terrorist threats.

The administration formalized this order with the issuance of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which the Brennan Center described as addressing a mishmash of incidents, some of which are criminal and some of which constitute activity protected by the First Amendment. These include violence directed at public figures such as conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the killing of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson; a purported 1,000 percent increase in attacks on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; a shooting at an ICE facility; and anti-police and criminal justice protests.

Those incidents, according to the Trump administration, are part of an organized left-wing campaign to “silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” Clearly, what they are attempting to do is give themselves the power to define any political dissent as terrorism or provide material support to terrorism which, if you were to apply the same laws that govern foreign terrorism, would lead to prosecution and imprisonment.

In previous cases when the Supreme Court sanctioned the government’s power to prosecute foreign terrorists, the justices were clear that these mechanisms could not be applied to domestic organizations, because they would clearly violate the First Amendment. But that was the Supreme Court of another era. Who knows what they would say today?

The Trump administration’s campaign against the left is not new to American life. The government has gone after left-wing speech and organizing for more than a century, beginning with the first Red Scare in 1919-1920. Spooked by the Russian Revolution, anarchist bombings and labor unrest, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered a crackdown on anything that looked like it might be radical through illegal searches and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detentions. Naturally, a lot of it was focused on immigrants, hundreds of whom were deported under suspicion of being anarchists....>

<....FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got the country all worked up in April 1920 with a warning that communists were plotting a violent May Day rebellion; his agents conducted massive raids across the nation. After no rebellions took place, the judicial system put on the brakes, the public turned against Palmer and the scare went dormant. The unfortunate consequence was continued anti-immigrant feeling that led to the draconian Immigration Act of 1924.

The years after World War II brought a second red scare, with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the McCarthy hearings led by the anti-communist crusader Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., who was of course advised by Trump’s future mentor Roy Cohn. The government once more scoured the country for radicals and traitors, trampling all over the First and Fourth Amendments, ruining lives and threatening livelihoods until the fever finally broke.

During that period, Hoover, still running the FBI, created COINTELPRO, a project to surveil and smear individuals and infiltrate political organizations the FBI considered subversive threats. These included anti-war protesters, the Civil Rights Movement, environmentalists, student groups and various racial and ethnic organizations among others. Unsurprisingly, all of them were left-leaning.

By the late 1960s, the FBI was operating as a secret police force. The organization had abandoned any pretense of fealty to the rule of law, all in the name of protecting America from the alleged threat from within. The program continued until it was exposed in the press, with the Senate Church Committee conducting an investigation in 1975.

Now another crackdown is upon us. This time, the government is targeting a phantom organization that is little more than an idea with no central organization or planning. As Reuters reported in October, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is spearheading a program to defund left leaning organizations such as Democratic donor George Soros’ “Open Society Foundations; ActBlue, the funding arm of the Democratic Party; Indivisible and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights” by claiming they are funding domestic violence. When pressed for examples, the White House “highlighted seven political protests in 2023 and 2025 that included acts of violence directed against law enforcement officials, and two incidents of vandalism at Tesla dealerships this year as well as half a dozen social media posts celebrating the damage.”

In the past, when the government embarked on one of these paranoid campaigns, public pressure managed to put an end to it once the agenda became clear. When you combine this latest plan with the administration’s violent crackdown on immigrants, the nation is about to be overwhelmed by scenes of mayhem and cruelty at the hands of federal agents. Will the people step up to stop this next chapter in domestic political repression? If past is prologue, it will happen. Unfortunately, as always, there will be a whole lot of carnage left in its wake.>

<Bari Weiss is long past her supposed free speech era. The Free Press founder and CBS News editor-in-chief recently yanked a 60 Minutes segment from the air detailing horrific conditions in CECOT, the El Salvadoran prison to which Donald Trump has been deporting Venezuelan immigrants. Sharyn Alfonsi, the segment’s correspondent, said in an email to colleagues that she learned Saturday that Weiss had spiked the story after Trump officials declined to be interviewed.

It didn’t matter that the story was factually correct and had undergone a legal review. The timing made it appear that was Weiss was covering for her boss, David Ellison, who along with his father, Larry, controls CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance. The Ellisons, who are among the very richest men in the world, purchased Paramount earlier this year and are now after an even bigger fish: They are hoping Trump wields his antitrust power to scuttle Netflix’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery and allows Paramount, instead, to consume WB, creating a new entertainment-and-media juggernaut. The Ellisons, who also bought The Free Press and installed Weiss as the head of CBS News, are not yet on Trump’s good side, though. He is still fuming about 60 Minutes and how it’s still not sycophantic toward him — not in the way he’d like. It pursues, even under the Ellisons, the watchdog journalism it’s known for.

How long that will last is anyone’s guess. Weiss, who was made extremely wealthy by Paramount’s purchase of The Free Press, has demonstrated, repeatedly, that her professed commitment to free speech and heterodox thought is mostly nonexistent once money, power, or her own political obsessions become part of the equation. An unabashed Israel hawk, she has championed clamping down on the speech rights of the pro-Palestine left; these days, she barely tolerates opposition to Trump. She is not an especially deep thinker. But she is an adept mogul. She knows how to play the Hollywood game. Since departing the New York Times more than a half decade ago, she’s hardly made a wrong move.

CBS could be her Waterloo. Saving broadcast TV in the cord-cutting era would be hard for any executive, and Weiss has yet to prove herself an innovator. There’s no grand digital strategy at CBS, and her early moves, like a town hall for Erika Kirk have been a flop. CBS lacks a clear identity. Making it MAGA-flavored will alienate its core audience while failing to attract conservatives, who will still prefer Fox News. There is no obvious demand for a news network that is not overtly right wing but also seeks to curry favor with Trump. The news organizations that prize their independence, like the New York Times, have fared well in the Trump era. He is an unpopular president, and most news consumers simply aren’t hunting for MAGA propaganda....>

<....There are many valid reasons to bemoan the fractured media landscape and the inability of reliable news organizations to reach Americans like they once did. Yet it’s easy, in the wake of Weiss strangling of 60 Minutes, to see an upside: Since corporate media is less powerful than it once was, it’s far harder for a strongman president like Trump to control the flow of information. The spiked segment spread across the internet anyway. Even if Trump, the Ellisons, and Weiss succeed in transforming CBS News into a network that is overly deferential to the White House, there will be many other competitor outlets, along with social media, to disseminate a counternarrative. And it’s not entirely clear CBS will go this way. Weiss and her boss may come to understand, as with Disney’s decision to temporarily suspend Jimmy Kimmel, that capitulating to the president is a poor public-relations strategy. Disney, under fire, eventually brought Kimmel back, and now he has a new contract. The spiked 60 Minutes segment will probably air in the U.S. eventually. If, however, Weiss and Ellison continue to weaken a famed journalistic institution, they will find themselves with even less credibility and, likely, with less money. Once trust with an audience is broken, it’s very difficult to get it back.

For Weiss, a larger challenge looms: her market, or how she imagines dominating a battle for the attention and dollars of an audience. She was highly successful building out The Free Press, which began as a Substack exploiting a particular market inefficiency. In the early 2020s, social-justice or woke politics was far more dominant, and there were a large number of disaffected centrists and liberals who hungered for a news outlet and commentary site that bent rightward on culture but didn’t seem explicitly MAGA. Now anti-woke has won — it is effectively the law of the land — and those liberals who might have been alienated from woke are far more unsettled by Trump. There are plenty of people who are anti-woke and left-leaning; there are far fewer people who would describe themselves that way and claim any sympathy for Trump.

Weiss is now in a very lonely place: operating a major news outlet that is attempting to placate a president few Americans, beyond hard-core Republicans, now like. Maybe Weiss can chart a path forward; she was counted out when she quit the New York Times, and look at her now. Maybe she knows how to make CBS great again. More likely, though, is that she’s finally found a challenge she can’t really meet. She’s out of ideas.>

<As Senate Majority Leader John Thune rushed to advance a new funding package this month, he faced a familiar roadblock: a trio of conservatives from his conference’s right flank.

Republican Sens. Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mike Lee of Utah banded together as they sought to advance key conservative priorities, including an end to spending earmarks — holding out for weeks as Thune strained to keep the 2026 funding process on track and avoid another costly government shutdown on Jan. 30.

The tensions between the fiscal hawks, who want to drastically slash spending, and more pragmatic corners of the Senate GOP, including members of leadership and the Appropriations Committee, are nothing new. But these hard-liners have now found a larger pool of allies as the conference’s center of gravity slowly shifts right. They also have new perches of authority that give each a powerful megaphone.

Thune ultimately wore the three Republicans down with some outside assistance from President Donald Trump, cutting deals to win their consent to advance the proposed trillion-dollar “minibus” funding package. Ultimately, it was Democratic objections that prevented the Senate from acting in the final legislative days of 2025.

But Lee, Johnson and Scott are unapologetic about using their power amid the growing perception among some of their colleagues that they are frequent thorns in Thune’s side.

“We're actually trying to do important things,” Johnson said in an interview. “No matter what I would have done, Democrats would have held out until the very last minute, too. So, I mean, sorry about your frustrations, colleagues.”

Since January, the trio has chosen to exert their leverage during key moments where GOP leaders have sought party unity. As Thune worked to advance the party’s sprawling domestic policy bill over the summer, the three Republicans haggled repeatedly over the measure’s parameters — including during a procedural vote that was left open for hours as they negotiated. Last month, they briefly withheld support for the bill that ultimately ended the 43-day government shutdown, huddling with Thune before ultimately voting in favor.

Publicly, their colleagues are respectful and note that every senator has a right to use the legislative tools available to advance their own agenda.

Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), an appropriator and Thune ally, noted that Johnson, Scott and Lee “reflect a bigger share of the caucus” that is decidedly conservative, while “folks on the other end of the caucus” also use their leverage from time to time.

“That's just how it works,” Hoeven said.

But behind the scenes, the hardball tactics have rankled Republican senators. As the spending standoff dragged on in recent weeks, some privately urged Thune to call the fiscal hawks’ bluff by putting the spending package on the floor, essentially daring Johnson or others to publicly object.

“He’s going to keep doing it until they call his hand,” one GOP senator said about Johnson, adding that Thune risked being “miserable” unless he asserted himself.

A second GOP senator, who was also granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal conference dynamics, added that the trio has been more “emboldened” this year than under prior GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The senator said that’s due to Thune’s “looser” leadership style and his determination to move funding bills individually rather than simply banking on a single omnibus deal.

“We haven’t done an appropriations process in a long time,” the senator added.

Those tensions have played out quietly behind the scenes in GOP lunches, with the conservative trio at times sparring with Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and other members of the government funding panel who want to revise spending levels enacted under former President Joe Biden.

But the two GOP senators agreed that they did not think Lee, Scott and Johnson would be engaging in their current tactics were McConnell still in charge, or even under Collins’ predecessor as Appropriations chair, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

“Shelby would have taken away every one of their projects,” the first GOP senator said.

The shift in leadership style was by design. The same GOP senators kvetched that McConnell was too centralized, with Scott unsuccessfully challenging him in 2022. In his bid to take over as Republican leader two years later, Thune pledged to shift power back to individual senators and committee chairs — and the three conservative malcontents, once dismissed as outliers, are now more difficult to ignore....>

<....Scott leads the Senate GOP’s Steering Committee, holding weekly meetings with the conservative-oriented group as well as hosting a weekly lunch for the larger conference. Lee chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, one of several one-time rebels who received gavels in January. And Johnson — long been willing to be a squeaky wheel — leads the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel’s investigative subcommittee in addition to having seats on the powerful Finance and Budget committees.

At the same time, the Senate GOP conference has undergone a subtle transformation in recent election cycles, inching toward the right as the most pragmatic Republican dealmakers are replaced by senators more closely aligned with the MAGA movement — giving Scott, Johnson and Lee a growing set of allies.

Thune has been dealing with the hard-liners one step at a time. Gaining their approval for the recent funding package, for instance, required promising several amendment votes as well as a path forward for a pet Johnson priority — a bill that would exempt some federal employees from furloughs during government shutdowns.

“He has more patience than any three of the rest of us do,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) added that Thune wants “to the maximum degree possible to make sure that people in his conference are heard and respected” — even if, she said, he “has a lot of frogs that keep hopping around.”

Asked about his message to the holdouts, Thune pitched the funding package as being in “everybody’s best interest” and better than the alternatives — a new shutdown, another short-term stopgap or a mammoth omnibus loathed by conservatives. Thune also helped facilitate a potential path toward enactment for Johnson’s shutdown bill, connecting him with Speaker Mike Johnson.

“I think you always have to keep the perspective in this job … that the most important vote isn’t the last vote, it’s the next vote,” Thune said about his broader approach to leadership this past year.

The conservative trio is looking ahead to the next fight, as well. Even after Scott cut a deal to advance the funding bill, he rekindled the earmarks fight, accusing Democrats in an X post of “packing the latest appropriations package with taxpayer-funded earmarks” and trying to “undermine Pres. Trump’s agenda.”

Republicans, Scott said, must “stand strong.”>

White relinquishes his dark-squared bishop early on and thenceforth faces a most unpleasant defensive task:

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.07.05"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "7"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Mulyar, Michael"]
[Black "Fishbein, Alexander"]
[ECO "E91"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<I will never get over the attack on my country January 6, 2021, by the anti-American lowlife, Donald J. Trump.

I will never move on until the man who spearheaded that attack is brought to justice.

Trump is the most dangerous man in the world, and if this has somehow escaped you until this point, he made the case yet again Wednesday night when he assaulted a podium, a microphone and our senses on primetime TV, telling approximately four lies every minute.

It was an unhinged performance worthy of one of history’s most notorious dictators.

Just six hours earlier, we had learned that former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith privately testified in front of a closed House Judiciary Committee hearing that his legal team had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the convicted felon, Trump, conspired to overturn the 2020 election.

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Can we stop for a minute and consider what another day in America looked like Wednesday?

First, you have Smith telling a closed hearing that his team had “powerful evidence” on the morally dead Trump, who only hours later would claim he had the goods on America, and we better like the beating he is giving her or else.

A closed hearing …

Of course the damn thing was closed, because Republicans know good and damn well that if Smith were to take his testimony public, we all would have been forced to reckon with the worst attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812.

We would have been reminded that the traitor, Trump, did nothing but root for the attack’s success for hours while he sequestered himself in a room and punished ketchup bottles.

We would have been reminded that when the beatings and the threats, and the fires and the damage to our Capitol and worldwide reputation were finally over that gruesome day, the belligerent Trump stumbled in front of a camera and told his anti-American thugs who had attacked us that “he loved them.”

We would have been reminded how little Republicans did to safeguard this country from the worst possible outcome: The return to office of the man who is hellbent on destroying our Democracy and turning America into an authoritarian cesspool ruled by the very worst among us.

Finally, we would have been reminded in the wake of all THAT, how damn little Joe Biden’s Attorney General, the feckless Merrick Garland, did to bring America’s greatest enemy to justice.

Well, I am not moving on from this, dammit.

Ever.

We all watched in horror as America was being murdered in cold blood, hour after hour that day, and nothing was being done to stop it.

WE KNOW HE DID IT.

HIS FAMILY KNOWS HE DID IT.

HE KNOWS HE DID IT.

It was one of the most appalling days in American history, and everything should have been done to make sure it never, ever happened again.

Instead, nothing was done.

NOTHING.

I say again: I am NOT done with this, and I NEVER will be.

As a U.S. Navy veteran who served this country, and a man who cares deeply for her, I am demanding we get to the bottom of just what-in-the-hell happened January 6, 2021.

I will not be shutting up about it until I am dead and gone, because if there really are going to be no consequences for an assault on our country, the idea of America is as hollow as the tiny heart of the lowlife who attacked us.

Jack Smith testified in so many words Wednesday that the man who is currently taking a bulldozer to our White House and our human rights is a traitor.

Just what-in-the-hell is anybody who REALLY cares for his or her country supposed to do with this kind of information?

Let it go?

And what about Garland, this deplorable and gutless loser, who catastrophically failed in his greatest responsibility: PROTECTING AMERICA.

Where is this so-called man? Why wasn’t he on Capitol Hill with Smith on Wednesday?

I remind you: We are paying for his quiet retirement.

So I ask again: Just what in the hell is going on here?>

<....For close to the past five years, I have lived in a constant state of trying to make sense of it all.

Why isn’t Trump rotting in jail right now?

Here is a part of one of the many pieces I wrote about all this following Trump’s attack. I spun this one in March 2023, in the weeks after the man who attacked us announced he was running for president so that he could finish us off.

Re-reading it again this morning, I began to shake with anger:

Just 10 weeks ago, the traitor, Donald J. Trump, announced he was once again running for the most powerful office in the world, the President of the United States of America.

This immediately made the disgusting man the Republicans’ frontrunner in the 2024 presidential election, and elevated the stakes in this contest to a sky-high level. If Trump wins, there’s every reason to believe it will be the last presidential election in American history.

The only person in America who seemed genuinely surprised by Trump’s terrifying and completely predictable announcement was our unflappable Attorney General Merrick Garland, who after nearly two years of doing nothing to punish Trump for his attack on our country, was finally forced out of his malaise and into making a move.

After careful consideration, the three-dimensional grandmaster judicial chess player studied the board, and outdid himself by actually putting himself in check when he pawned off his responsibility to somebody else to take care of this monumental threat to America.

Watching Garland glide to the podium, raise his voice to a thundering whisper, and haul out some unwritten rule to the game that actually tied both his hands behind his back was pretty galling, and plenty pathetic.

Essentially, he took out an empty gun, held himself up, and surrendered.

Grandmaster Crash told us that because Trump was now shockingly a candidate for president, he had been forced to appoint a special counsel to look into the former president’s violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election that he lost by more than seven millions votes.

Brilliant, eh?

Before moving onto Garland’s willing accomplices in our race toward fascism, let’s once and for all dispense with the stupid argument that even had he done his damn job and charged the treasonous Trump with some semblance of alacrity, it wouldn’t have prevented the rotten bastard from running for office while he was on trial.

Technically that’s true. Realistically, it’s laughable.

Had Garland charged Trump in a reasonable timeframe, say, ‘only’ one year after his coup attempt, there’s every reason to believe his gutless party, now provided the necessary political cover by the AG, would have long since abandoned Trump, and moved onto nominating far more qualified and cunning fascists like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for president.

As bad as that would be, at least Trump would have been finished as a candidate, law and order would have prevailed, and the rotten, orange bastard would be staring at prison where he most certainly belongs.

Most important, there would actually be consequences for disgusting actions like the traitor, Trump’s, which would serve to prevent further attacks like this on our country.

There would be justice.

Except we never did get that justice, and because of that America has never been in this kind of danger.

Trump is every bit as guilty this morning as he was January 6, 2021, and far more dangerous. Predictably, he is failing catastrophically at his job, and lashing out at anybody who dares blame him for it.

He will own none of this, and warm his stubby, bandaged hands on the fires he has kindled.

That unhinged, unfit primetime performance on Wednesday night won’t be the last time he commandeers our TV networks (which one by one are falling at his fat feet and swollen ankles), and relentlessly lies to America, and threatens patriots who stand in his way.

We are in a battle for our survival.

If Jack Smith has “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that ties Trump to the attack on America then everything must be done to make sure that everybody sees this evidence just as soon as possible.

Because if we are OK with the man who violently attacked our country now leading it, Democracy is dead.>

<Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.>

<Rep. Elise Stefanik shocked the political world over the weekend when she announced she was ending her bid for New York governor, choosing not to run in the Republican primary after failing to secure U.S. President Donald Trump's endorsement.

The decision marks the culmination of the Republican lawmaker's fall from grace and favor, after she became the face of the party's attempt to frame pro-Palestinian campus protests – viewed by many American Jews to have amplified anti-Jewish sentiment – as the epicenter of America's antisemitism crisis, while ignoring antisemitism on the right.

Stefanik will undoubtedly be remembered for her forceful questioning of Ivy League university presidents at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.

But perhaps she will be most remembered as a case study of what can happen when a politician brazenly utilizes the fears and insecurities of others for political expediency, and when they hitch their wagon too closely to a notoriously transactional president.

The New York lawmaker's ascent began when she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in 2014, with the 30-year-old positioning herself as a moderate Republican in a district that had largely voted Republican for 100 years. With Trump's ascendance, however, the young lawmaker proved herself a quick study in the ability to adapt her own political orientation and style to better match the president's.

For a while, this manifested in her tendency to promote outlandish conspiracy theories about Democrats, such as the claim that they collaborated with pedophiles to provide baby formula to immigrants. For some American Jews, however, it was her promotion of The Great Replacement conspiracy theory – a claim that a shadowy cabal of elitists was working to replace white people with non-white immigrants – that caused concern.

The theory had been cited as motivation by perpetrators of a number of mass shootings in recent years, including in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history - the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

But after Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack, Stefanik's conservative Jewish supporters were able to maintain the dissonance necessary to ignore her support for such conspiracies, thanks to the attention she devoted to targeting antisemitism on college campuses.

It also turned her into a bona fide celebrity, even being parodied on a cold-open segment of "Saturday Night Live" days after the hearing. Stefanik made the most of her new national profile, painting herself as the face of "Jewish allyship" and "standing with Israel" as a means to attack the left.

After Trump's 2024 election victory, Stefanik's allies sought to position her as a potential cabinet pick, pointing to her high-profile role on antisemitism and her close ties to major GOP donors, including Miriam Adelson, who had grown close to her in the process. During her confirmation hearing in the initial weeks of the Trump administration, Stefanik made abundantly clear that she would crack down on alleged anti-Israel bias at the UN, while agencies supporting Palestinians, such as UNRWA, would be viewed with hostility.

Trump ultimately withdrew her nomination after Republican leaders warned that the party's slim House majority could not withstand losing Stefanik's seat. Stefanik, ever the good soldier, accepted Trump's decision while being given an honorary leadership role.

She appeared confident she could still secure the Republican nomination next year for the New York governor's race, setting up a November 2026 contest against Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul. After months of soft-launching her campaign focused on combating antisemitism, her rhetoric only grew more acute once Zohran Mamdani surged to victory in the New York City mayoral race, deeming the democratic socialist mayor-elect a "jihadist."

While Stefanik had expected a clear path to the Republican nomination ahead of a tight race against Hochul, she soon faced an unexpected challenge from Bruce Blakeman – Nassau County's first Jewish county executive and a prominent Trump ally in his own right.

When reporters asked Trump if he agreed with Stefanik's assessment that the new mayor was a jihadist, or whether he intended to endorse a candidate in the governor's race, he once again left her in the lurch, declining to back her and explicitly rejecting her characterization of Mamdani.

For Stefanik, the realization that she now faced a protracted Republican primary and could not rely on Trump's crucial endorsement proved to be the final straw.

<The midterm elections for Congress won’t take place until November, but already a record number of members have declared their intention not to run – a total of 43 in the House, plus 10 senators. Perhaps the most high-profile person to depart, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, announced her intention in November not just to retire but to resign from Congress entirely on Jan. 5 – a full year before her term was set to expire.

There are political dynamics that explain this rush to the exits, including frustrations with gridlock and President Donald Trump’s lackluster approval ratings, which could hurt Republicans at the ballot box.

Rather than get swept away by a prospective “blue wave” favoring Democrats – or possibly daunted by the monumental effort it would take to survive – many Republicans have decided to fold up the beach chair and head home before the wave crashes.

As of now, two dozen Republican House members have either resigned from the House or announced their intent to not run for reelection in 2026. With only two exceptions – Republicans in 2018 and 2020 – this is more departures from either party at this point in the election calendar than any other cycle over the past 20 years.

There is also growing concern within the House Republican caucus that Greene’s announcement is a canary in the coal mine and that multiple resignations will follow.

As a political scientist who studies Congress and politicians’ reelection strategies, I’m not surprised to see many House members leaving ahead of what’s shaping up to be a difficult midterm for the GOP. Still, the sheer numbers of people not running tells us something about broader dissatisfaction with Washington.

Why do members leave Congress?

Many planned departures are true retirements involving older and more experienced members.

For example, 78-year-old Democratic congressman Jerry Nadler is retiring after 34 years, following mounting pressure from upstart challengers and a growing consensus among Democrats that it’s time for older politicians to step aside. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker who will turn 86 in March, is also retiring.

Sometimes, members of Congress depart for the same reasons other workers might leave any job. Like many Americans, members of Congress might find something more attractive elsewhere. Retiring members are attractive hires for lobbying firms and corporations, thanks to their insider knowledge and connections within the institution. These firms usually offer much higher salaries than members are used to in Congress, which may explain why more than half of all living former members are lobbyists of some kind.

Other members remain ambitious for elective office and decide to use their position in Congress as a springboard for another position. Members of the House regularly retire to run for a Senate seat, such as, in this cycle, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan. Others run for executive offices, including governor, such as Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

But some are leaving Congress due to growing frustration with the job and an inability to get things done. Specifically, many retiring members cite growing dysfunction within their own party, or in Congress as a whole, as the reason they’re moving on.

In a statement announcing his departure in June, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., mused that “between spending another six years navigating the political theater and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with my family,” it was “not a hard choice” to leave the Senate.

In addition, there are a few other factors that can help explain why so many Republicans in particular are heading for the exits leading up to 2026.

The shifting of boundaries that has come with the mid-decade redistricting process in several states this year has scrambled members’ priorities. Unfamiliar districts can drive incumbents to early retirement by severing their connection with well-established constituencies.

In Texas, six Republicans and three Democrats – nearly a quarter of the state’s entire House delegation – are either retiring or running for other offices, due in part to that state’s new gerrymander for 2026....>

<....All decisions about retirement and reelection are sifted through the filter of electoral and partisan considerations. A phenomenon called “thermostatic politics” predicts that parties currently in power, particularly in the White House, tend to face a backlash from voters in the following election. In other words, the president’s party nearly always loses seats in midterms.

In 2006 and 2018, for example, Republican members of Congress were weighed down by the reputations of unpopular Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Republicans had arguably even greater success in midterm elections during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Currently, 2026 looks like it will present a poor national environment for Republicans. Trump remains highly unpopular, according to polls, and Democrats are opening up a consistent lead in the “generic ballot” question, which asks respondents which party they intend to support in the 2026 midterms without reference to individual candidates.

Democrats have already been overperforming in special elections, as well as the general election in November in states such as New Jersey and Virginia, which held elections for governor. Democrats are on average running 13 points ahead of Kamala Harris’ performance in the 2024 election.

As a result, even Republicans in districts thought to be safe for their party may see themselves in enough potential danger to abandon the fight in advance.

Retirement vs. resignation

One final, unique aspect of this election cycle with major consequences is not an electoral but an institutional one.

House conservatives are quietly revolting against Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership style. That members may be frustrated enough not just to retire but resign in advance, leaving their seats temporarily vacant, is a notable sign of dysfunction in the U.S. House.

This also could have a major impact on policy, given how slim the Republicans’ majority in the lower chamber is already. Whatever the outcome of the midterms in November, these departures clearly matter in Washington and offer important signals about the chaos in Congress.>

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