<Two weeks ago, I wrote that the Trump presidency is over. Nothing has changed my mind.

President Trump’s approval ratings have fallen to 36 percent. According to various polls, only 25 percent approve of his handling of the cost of living, and 65 percent believe his policies have made the economy worse. Thirty-five percent approve of U.S. strikes on Iran and 74 percent oppose sending U.S. troops there. Since Trump’s reelection, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats. Today, according to one survey, more than one in five Trump voters say they will not cast a vote for a Republican presidential candidate.

Democratic strategist Doug Farrar says these numbers provide a “huge opportunity for Democrats to make major strides.”

But these dismal ratings should offer little comfort to Democrats. Of the 20 percent who are disillusioned Trump voters, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democratic in the next presidential election.

Public disillusionment with the Democrats is widespread. A March poll found 52 percent expressed negative feelings toward the Democratic Party, more than those who felt negatively toward Trump, the Republican Party or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Only Iran aroused more hostile emotions, with 61 percent holding negative views toward that country.

During her successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) described herself as a member of “Team Normal.” Slotkin emphasized the need to, in Harry Truman’s words, “speak plainly,” and not engage in esoteric discussions about gender identity, responding to every tweet on X or listening to the coastal elites.

Longtime Democratic strategist Steve Schale says the message delivered is clear: While Trump has hurt voters economically, Democrats are “woke,” “weak,” out of touch and focused on stuff they don’t care about. Until Democrats join “Team Normal,” Americans are reluctant to give them a hearing.

Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg writes that in 2026 the successful Democrat “must run against his own party.” Several are following his advice. In Texas, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico (D) says he is not “taking instructions or orders from the national Democratic Party.” In Alaska, Mary Peltola is running on a platform of “fish, family, and freedom.” Nebraska Democrats have gone so far as to coalesce around independent candidate Dan Osborn instead of a Democrat, knowing that their party brand is toxic in that state.

Although winning the next election matters, what a party does afterward is even more important. In 2005, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean created a “50-State Strategy” to rebuild withering Democratic state parties. But Dean’s plans ran afoul of Rahm Emmanuel, then-head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who saw a chance for victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Dean’s ambitious project was eventually cast aside.

Today, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has revived Dean’s 50-state strategy. But Martin’s ambitious plans are hampered by money woes. The national committee has just $10.3 million on hand and an outstanding debt of $17.4 million. In sharp contrast, the Republican National Committee has $109 million in the bank.

For decades, Republicans have understood that winning elections is only the beginning. Beginning in the 1970s, Republicans developed plans designed to give legislators and executives an agenda from which to govern....>

<....The American Legislative Exchange Council was formed in 1973 and became a warehouse for Republican state legislators to back Republican-sponsored measures in multiple states. That same year, the Heritage Foundation was established. It spent years advocating proposals that found their way into the more recent Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term.

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 and became the go-to organization that Republican presidents consulted in selecting nominees for the federal bench. Today, five of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are either current or former members of the Federalist Society.

Midterm elections are all about opposing the party in power, but presidential elections are about what a party stands for. In 2027, it will not be enough for Democrats to oppose Trump and check his excesses, as important as that is. A Democratic victory in 2026 is a starting point, not an end point.

To effectively compete nationally, Democrats must begin the hard work of appealing to voters previously unwilling to listen. That work is urgent. After the next census, it’s likely that eight to 12 congressional seats and electoral votes will shift from Democratic-leaning states to Republican-leaning states.

It may take years before Democrats overcome decades of trouble. But the party is running out of time. Until Democrats stop thinking in the short term and start thinking further ahead, an existential crisis awaits. Democrats must learn to be effective, nimble national players.>

<The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is opening the door to a rewrite of its rules for local blackout restrictions on live sports, a move that could be the first step in a potential shake-up of the broadcasting landscape for pro leagues and their media partners.

The FCC announced in February it is seeking public comment on “consumer experience” with live sports viewing, noting the rising cost of subscription services and pointing out what it called a “fragmented” modern media landscape.

The department’s move comes as polls and social media feedback consistently show fans are increasingly annoyed with the cost and hassle of paywalled subscription services required to view games.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are suggesting Congress do more to curb the leverage top leagues have long held over fans when making deals on media rights.

“The thing that’s getting lost in some of this discussion is the broader economics of sports,” one media consultant specializing in streaming told The Hill this week. “The leagues are pretty clearly not interested in doing what’s best for fans. And why would they [be] when people continue to pay to see games on all of these services?”

Today, it is more expensive than ever to watch live sports events, particularly marquee events like the NFL playoffs or the NCAA March Madness tournament.

Major streamers like YouTube TV and Roku have largely replaced traditional cable bundles, while more media companies like Disney, Paramount and Comcast have launched direct-to-consumer streaming services largely with pro and college sports coverage in mind.

No league is more profitable for major media conglomerates than the NFL, which raked in more than $110 billion with its most recent broadcast rights deal.

Consumers who wished to watch every NFL game last season had to pay upwards of $1,000 and subscribe to 10 services to do so, according to estimates by the FCC.

The department bemoaned the current streaming landscape, arguing in its public notice seeking comment that “sports remain inherently local, despite the increasingly national nature and reach” of both professional and college games.

It added, “We believe it is important for us to evaluate the sports media landscape and understand how changes have impacted consumers and broadcasters.”

Some of the NFL’s longtime partners would like to see the FCC’s rules stay the way they are.

Fox Corporation, in a filing with the FCC reviewed by The Hill, warned, “there could be a dramatic impact on both consumers and local journalism if [streaming] became the default means by which Americans watch live sports.”

“In a world where Big Tech acquires more and more broadcast sports rights—often as a loss leader to support other massive, vertically integrated businesses that primarily profit off of the personal consumption data of its customers—fans across the country could be ‘paywalled’ out of the Fall Classic, Thanksgiving football, or Team USA’s victories in the Olympics or the World Cup,” the Lachlan Murdoch-owned company said....>

<....Experts and observers within the sports media business point to the NFL’s dealmaking as key to what the future of all sports broadcasting looks like. The downstream impact of the NFL’s prominence is felt by other leagues competing for a smaller viewership pot, these people say.

“Sports are one of the last things people are watching live. People still care and they want to watch these games,” said Olivia Stomski, director of Syracuse University’s Newhouse Sports Media Center. “I can’t help but think of the older sports fan who is maybe retired and, say, the Mets game is the highlight of their day or their week, and now they can’t find it or pay for another platform they maybe can’t afford.”

Fans of teams in leagues like the MLB and NHL have for years relied on regional sports networks via cable providers to watch games, but as more consumers cut cable each year, these networks find themselves under increasing pressure to retain audience.

The FCC has no jurisdiction over major tech platforms like Amazon, Netflix or Apple, all of which have poured billions into live sports streaming in recent years.

The FCC seeking public comment on local blackout restrictions is widely seen as a precursor to potential reform of the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.

The act, passed by Congress after a boom in popularity across the NFL and the advent of color television, granted professional football teams the ability to collectively license the “sponsored telecasts” of their games to national broadcast networks.

Some lawmakers, like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), argue the act is outdated and needs a revamp with streaming in mind.

“The modern distribution environment differs substantially from the conditions that precipitated this exemption,” Lee wrote in a letter to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. “To the extent collectively licensed game packages are placed behind subscription paywalls, these arrangements may no longer align with the statutory concept of sponsored telecasting or the consumer-access rationale underlying the antitrust exemption.”

Others say an effort on Capitol Hill to repeal the Sports Broadcasting Act, as well as changes to the FCC’s current blackout restrictions, could cause more chaos for fans to navigate.

“There are real problems with extending the SBA to streaming services,” said Kellie Lerner, a prominent antitrust attorney. “If Congress is going to go that direction, you can’t just invalidate it with no solution or we’re going to end up worse off than we are now, which is already pretty bad.”>

<When President George W. Bush shocked the conservative legal movement by nominating his friend and White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, Ralph Neas celebrated. Footage from his self-produced documentary shows the liberal troubadour beaming with excitement that morning in 2005 as he accepted congratulatory phone calls.

Neas, then president of People for the American Way, had been the progressive point man for judicial battles going back to Robert Bork’s failed Supreme Court nomination, 18 years earlier. And Neas had just lost a big one, with the confirmation of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. But now, with Bush’s nomination of Miers, Neas instinctively understood that the president had caved: In the great proxy war over abortion, affirmative action and gun control, the center had held.

No one could claim to know exactly what Miers believed, but the fact that she was emphatically not a creature of the conservative legal movement — not a member of the Federalist Society, not a name on the list of acceptable nominees drafted by former Attorney General Ed Meese and his allies — made this nomination a breakthrough for the left. The fact that it came at a moment when Republicans controlled the White House and Senate made victory all the sweeter.

Neas’ enthusiasm was initially matched by that of other Bush critics, such as the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who told people that he had been the first to suggest Miers as Supreme Court material to Bush. While Bush’s top adviser Karl Rove insists Bush was already mulling a Miers nomination when Reid chimed in, Bush clearly felt more confident in making the move with the expectation that Reid would deliver Democratic votes for Miers. This wasn’t a far-fetched notion: Roberts, with far more of a conservative pedigree than Miers, had just won confirmation with the support of half the Democratic caucus.

The seeming liberal triumph of the Miers nomination, of course, would give way to a conservative backlash. Almost immediately, conservative judicial activists rose up against Miers, citing her lack of experience in constitutional law and sparking a rebellion that eventually forced Bush to withdraw her nomination.

The alacrity with which conservatives turned on Bush, a president they had lionized after 9/11 as the great leader of his time, shocked people on both sides of the judicial divide. It was a powerful signal that the fight over the Supreme Court transcended party loyalty. This was a long twilight struggle, and one side — the right — understood the stakes well enough to know they had to gash Bush to preserve their agenda. The other side, it turned out, was slow to grasp the implications until it was too late.

Reid’s initial praise of Miers was quickly muted. Liberal stalwarts including Sen. Ted Kennedy declared that they would wait until Miers’ confirmation hearings to pass judgment. This was a much milder response that the gales of fury that Kennedy usually inflicted on Republican nominees, but it inadvertently fed into the conservative critique of Miers as unknown and unqualified: a non-entity.

As the conservative attacks on Miers mounted, Reid and his fellow Democrats seemed only too happy to stand on the sidelines of the Republican-on-Republican scrum, while letting the last chance to rescue Miers slip away.

Significantly, Bush made it clear that he didn’t give up on Miers simply because of what he called “the firestorm of criticism we received from our supporters.” It was the failure of Democrats to lend their backing to the besieged Miers.

“When the left started criticizing Harriet, too, I knew the nomination was doomed,” Bush wrote in his memoir, Decision Points.

Today, the notion of Miers as a misguided, unfit choice for the Supreme Court has taken root, partly because of her lack of any defenders on the left or right outside of Bush’s inner circle. The nomination seems to have passed as a blip, a footnote to much more consequential judicial battles before and after.

In fact, the Miers debacle was not only a colossal missed opportunity for the Democrats, but a major turning point in the judicial wars. The failure to build consensus around a centrist nominee, based on her character and life experiences rather than ideology, effectively ended any hope of compromise over the Supreme Court. Every nominee confirmed since then has been, for better or worse, a figure with a long, ingrained record of decision-making that reinforced the predilections of the party in power. This was the recipe for bitterness and conflict that followed.

Miers’ replacement was Third Circuit Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., who in 15 years on the bench had built an unwavering conservative record. He was an enthusiastic Federalist Society member and former Meese aide, showered with endorsements on the right....>

<....One measure of the extent of the conservative victory in his nomination became visible in 2022, when he authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ending the constitutional right to an abortion which had lasted for 49 years. This was the great white whale of the conservative legal movement, the event it had organized around and prayed for. It was Alito’s words that made it a reality.

Despite Roberts’ concurrence in the result — upholding a Mississippi law that allowed abortions up until the start of the second trimester — the vote was only 5-4 in favor of overruling Roe v. Wade. Would having Miers on the court instead of Alito have made the difference? No one can say for certain. But the implications are vast, and powerful enough to fuel decades of potential liberal regrets.

The seat to which Miers was nominated belonged to Sandra Day O’Connor. In the years since she became the first woman on the Supreme Court, in 1981, the Ronald Reagan appointee had evolved into the court’s swing vote.

Like most centrists, O’Connor attracted a little friction on both sides. Conservatives often expressed frustration over her preference for elaborate balancing tests to serve competing interests, including on abortion rights; they believed she functioned more as a legislator than a judge. Liberals sometimes had similar frustrations, but respected her desire for a fair outcome. Her background in state politics, having served as majority leader in the Arizona state Senate, seemed to have made her more attentive to results than to process.

When she announced her retirement in 2005, desiring to spend more time with her husband who was struggling with Alzheimer’s Disease, she expressed hope that a woman would replace her on the bench.

Court watchers understood the stakes immediately.

“Justice O’Connor has been the most important figure on the court in recent years,” Neas told The New York Times. “Her replacement will have a monumental impact on the lives and freedoms of Americans for decades to come.”

He called for bipartisan consultation, followed by the selection of a consensus choice in the mold of O’Connor. Conservatives had other ideas, having already given the Bush administration a list of acceptable nominees.

Building a robust pipeline of highly qualified and proven conservatives, from law school to clerkships to the Justice Department to lower-court judgeships, was an explicit aim of the conservative legal movement. In the decade and a half since the last Republican nominee, Clarence Thomas, had joined the Supreme Court, Meese and others associated with the Federalist Society, including Leonard Leo, had honed the list to roughly five acceptable candidates: Roberts, Alito, Michael McConnell, Michael Luttig and Edith Jones, all circuit-court judges.

Bush’s team had been following and vetting the candidates since the start of the administration in 2001. According to oral-history tapes, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asked Bush if he wanted to provoke a fight over abortion rights. Bush did not. That ruled out candidates who had been outspoken in their condemnations of Roe v. Wade, including Jones, the only woman on the list.

Always trusting of his gut, Bush wanted to spend personal time with the leading candidates, including Roberts and Alito. He and a rather stiff Alito did not jibe, but he found himself immediately impressed with the genial and outgoing Roberts.

Roberts’ charm was on full display when Bush announced his selection as O’Connor’s replacement. The nominee quickly began winning over Democrats with his mixture of boyish friendliness and Ivy League gravitas. Neas, however, was not gulled. He believed Roberts to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, destined to move the court dramatically to the right.

Thus began a tense period on the left, as Democrats including the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Pat Leahy, gradually began to be won over by Roberts, to Neas’ frustration.

The situation altered a bit when Chief Justice William Rehnquist succumbed to cancer, and Bush decided to nominate Roberts for the chief’s position. The replacement of one conservative, Rehnquist, with another, Roberts, didn’t shift the balance of the court, but it raised the stakes for the reopened O’Connor seat....>

<....One person who insisted the new nominee should be a woman came from a surprising quarter: Laura Bush. The First Lady’s support for abortion rights was well known, and the fact that she and her husband could comfortably disagree on such an issue actually worked to Bush’s advantage, moderating his image. And the president deeply trusted her instincts.

“This was a rare occasion when Laura’s advice spilled out into the public, but far from the only time I relied on her thoughtful counsel,” Bush later wrote. “Laura had an instinctive feel for the pulse of the country.”

And both Bushes were close friends with Miers, who had loyally served them in Austin and Washington.

At 60, Harriet Ellan Miers was a pioneer. Growing up in Dallas in the pre-feminist days, she defied expectations and worked her way through law school at Southern Methodist University, Laura Bush’s alma mater. She was the first woman partner at a major Dallas law firm; the first woman managing partner of a top Dallas firm; and the first woman to serve as president of the Texas Bar Association.

Along the way she was elected to the Dallas City Council, where she explained to an interviewer that she chose not to join the Federalist Society, believing “it’s better not to be involved in organizations that seem to color your view one way or the other for people who are examining you.”

During Bush’s governorship, Miers was Bush’s choice to clean up the scandal-plagued Texas Lottery Commission. When he became president in 2001, he brought her into the White House in several roles culminating in White House counsel.

After secret discussions within the administration, George and Laura Bush gave Miers the news at a private White House dinner that she would be his choice to replace O’Connor. The logic seemed clear enough to the Bushes: Like O’Connor, she was not a creature of Washington or East Coast legal circles; she had established a foothold in electoral politics; and she could be counted on to take a common-sense approach to important court decisions.

She also had some of the earmarks of what Neas had sought when speaking of a bipartisan, consensus choice. And, of course, she was a woman.

Despite the quick actions of Karl Rove and other Bush aides to smooth the waters with the right, two important conservative voices rang out immediately in opposition.

Randy Barnett, a Boston University law professor and respected Federalist Society figure, took to the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal to cast Miers as a Bush crony elevated above her station. The famed Washington Post columnist George Will was even more withering. If one hundred constitutional experts were asked “to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice,” Will wrote, “Miers’ name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.”

In their memoirs and oral histories, Bush and members of his team decried that line of thought as elitist and unfair.

“How could I name someone who had not run in elite legal circles?” Bush wrote, summarizing the conservative blowback. “Harriet had not gone to an Ivy League law school.”

Rove tried to build support for Miers by stressing her evangelical faith, and having two close friends of hers, including Texas state Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, the man who introduced her to the church, attest to her religious values. Some of the religious leaders seemed mollified, only to have a new kerfuffle arise when Focus on the Family leader James C. Dobson hinted on his radio show that the friends had promised that Miers would vote against Roe.

While Rove and Hecht denied anything of the sort, Democrats including Reid, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) quickly began demanding an investigation, in a reflexive move that had them joining the ranks of Miers’ skeptics.

Even Robert Bork himself, the patron saint of failed nominations, adjudged the Miers choice to be “a disaster.”

The Democrats were caught between their sense of Miers as a palatable alternative to other, more nakedly conservative nominees and their desire to play the role of Bush’s antagonists....>

<....Reid seemed to set the tone at the outset. At first, he appeared open to giving Miers a hand. He had found her competent and approachable in her White House job, and responded to the initial surge of conservative criticism by calling her lack of judicial experience “a plus, not a minus.” But he had his spokesman, Jim Manley, tell the media that Reid’s praise of Miers did not preclude his opposition or even a filibuster against her.

For his part, even Manley found it difficult to decipher his boss’ intentions: “I remember at one point, I had to pull him aside and say, ‘What’s going on here?’” Manley recalled in an interview. But it was characteristic of Reid to set things in motion and then wait for more data points to recalibrate the political equation. “He had a theory of politics to throw some things up in the air and see how they land,” said Manley. “Reid threw it out there and then he took a step back and watched the Republicans publicly and privately attack the woman.”

For a tough combatant like Reid, who built a robust Democratic machine through labor unions in politically divided Nevada, watching the GOP descend into disarray brought satisfaction. But it did nothing to help Miers, let alone to advance the cause of a balanced and moderate Supreme Court.

When Sen. Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticized Miers by declaring her answers to the senators’ pre-confirmation questionnaire to be inadequate, and then condescended to give her more time to address follow-up questions, he was seconded by Leahy, the Democrats’ ranking member.

But when Miers, feeling heat on all sides, withdrew, Reid and Leahy sounded different notes.

Reid complained that “the radical right wing of the Republican Party drove this woman’s nomination right out of town.”

Leahy responded to Bush’s decision to replace Miers with Alito by saying, “Instead of uniting the country through his choice, the president has chosen to reward one faction of his party, at the risk of dividing the country.”

Miers, who is still practicing law in her Dallas firm at 80, routinely declines to discuss those painful days of 2005. Democrats aren’t much inclined to do so, either. Outside of Bush’s circle, however, conservatives seem resolute in believing that Miers was flat-out unqualified, and that by curbing Bush’s misguided instincts they helped the country to dodge a bullet.

But by historical standards, there is no reason to believe that Miers was unqualified for the court.

Consider the charge that Bush was showing favoritism to a member of his administration. If so, he was in a proud line of presidents who tapped their top deputies for the court. William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman all elevated their attorneys general to the Supreme Court, along with a fair number of personal friends and allies.

The corresponding notion that a justice must be a great constitutional mind, having developed a theory of interpretation through long judicial experience, would have ruled out most of the justices who ever served on the court. In the late 19th century, choosing nominees whose main experience was in corporate law was closer to the norm than the exception. And nominating justices with experience in politics, far from being corrupting, was common practice throughout most of U.S. history.>

<....In fact, many scholars believe that a successful court requires a mix of perspectives. Experienced jurists like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Benjamin Cardozo earned great respect on the Supreme Court, but so too did politicians like Earl Warren and practitioners like Robert Jackson.

Among the nation’s 17 chief justices were a former president, a former presidential nominee, a former governor of California, a former Ohio senator and a former U.S. representative from Kentucky.

It’s today’s court that’s the historic anomaly. Among the nine current members, all but one member served as circuit-court judges; all but one went to law school at Harvard or Yale; and all seemingly set their sights on the court from their early years, avoiding risky statements or entanglements that might have complicated their confirmations.

The New York Times editorial page captured the arc of history in its editorial after Bush tapped Miers: “Many of the best justices have taken odd routes to the court,” the paper opined in an unsigned editorial. “Ms. Miers could prove to be a pragmatic, common-sense justice who ends up making this court the Miers Court, the way Justice O’Connor made the last one the O’Connor Court.”

It never happened. And when the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision in 2022, Hecht, the Texas Supreme Court justice who was Miers’ friend, couldn’t help but wonder what Harriet would have done. Would she have shifted the decision in the other direction? Hecht couldn’t say for sure, but he thought the moderate path sketched out by Roberts was something Miers might have found appealing, and she would have given serious consideration to the weight of settled precedent.

“Even today, people will argue, oh, well, I thought Roe was wrongly decided at the time, just thought that Justice [Harry] Blackmun got it wrong,” said Hecht. “But would I upset the country by changing it today? I don’t know.”

America will never know.>

<Most of Texas’ school voucher applications came from white families and children who previously attended a private school or home-school.

The Texas comptroller’s office, which manages the program, released final applicant data Thursday evening, saying it will continue verifying information before admitting students in the coming months. The program will allow families to use taxpayer funds for private school or home-schooling costs.

Of the 274,183 Texans who applied for vouchers before Tuesday night’s deadline, 45% are white, 23% are Hispanic and 12% are Black. Low-income families make up 37% of applicants — defined by the program as a family of four earning $66,000 or less per year. Children with disabilities make up 16% of applicants.

For comparison, 24% of Texas 5.5 million public school students are white, 53% are Hispanic and 13% are Black. About 60% of students are considered low-income — defined in public education as a family of four earning $61,050 or less annually. Children with disabilities make up 16% of enrollment.

Meanwhile, about 75% of voucher applicants attended a private school or home-school during the 2024-25 academic year. The comptroller did not provide data on students’ current enrollment.

The state found nearly 25,000 voucher applications ineligible.

The applicant pool, while not fully reflective of the families who will ultimately receive voucher funds, indicates that taxpayer money will mostly flow to families who, before the program, had already committed to having their children educated in a private school or home-school.

During the 2025 legislative session, state lawmakers and advocates touted vouchers as a benefit for low-income families and students with disabilities fed up with inadequate public schools. Of all applications, 63% came from middle- to high-income families — 27% of them making at or above $165,000 per year for a household of four.

“It’s not surprising that a state as big as Texas has more voucher applicants than other smaller states, especially with such a large marketing budget,” Carrie Griffith, executive director of Our Schools Our Democracy, a public education advocacy group, said in a statement.

“It’s also not surprising that so few public school families have applied for a private school voucher,” Griffith added. “Public schools deliver special education services, provide transportation, support extracurriculars, keep kids safe, and prepare them for life. They are one of Texas’s most effective, unifying public institutions. And the data remains undeniable: Most Texans want strong, fully funded public schools — not vouchers.”

Travis Pillow, a spokesperson for the comptroller, said Texas anticipates having only enough funding to offer vouchers to children with disabilities and students from low- and middle-income families. Program participants, Pillow believes, will look different than the pool of applicants.

“We are working on a detailed report that captures all our outreach efforts for year 1, but we know there’s going to be more work to do to get the word out in year 2 and beyond,” Pillow said. “We’ll be looking for opportunities to reach more families we didn’t reach in year 1 and for ways to build trust in this new program.”

In other states with voucher programs structured like Texas’, white families with children previously in private school make up the majority of participants....>

<....Most participating Texans with children in private schools will receive about $10,500 annually. Home-schoolers can receive up to $2,000 per year. Children with disabilities qualify for up to $30,000 — an amount based on what it would cost to educate that child in a public school.

Demand for the program exceeds $1 billion in available funding, which means the state will conduct a lottery to determine who can receive vouchers. The state will consider, in order of priority:

Students with disabilities and their siblings in families with an annual income at or below 500% of the federal poverty level, which includes a four-person household earning less than roughly $165,000 a year (12% of applicants).

Families at or below 200% of the poverty level, which includes a four-person household earning less than roughly $66,000 (32% of applicants).

Families between 200% and 500% of the poverty level (29% of applicants).

Families at or above 500% of the poverty level (22% of applicants); these families can receive up to $200 million of the program’s total budget. Children who attended public school for at least 90% of the prior school year will receive priority within this group (5% of applicants).

Families must still find private schools — which are generally not required to accommodate students with disabilities — to accept their children. Whether families identify a private school will ultimately determine who receives voucher funding. Parents must have their children enrolled in a school by July 15.

Later this month, families will begin finding out if they can receive voucher funding. Most families applied to receive funding for pre-K, though the state deemed half of those applications ineligible.>

<Pope Leo XIV chronicler Christopher Hale says he has confirmed that Trump’s Pentagon threatened to declare war on the Vatican.

“In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture,” said Hale.

“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Colby and his associates informed the cardinal. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

As the room temperature grew, Hale said he confirmed that one U.S. official “reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.”

Hale said the report confirms that the Vatican had reason to decline the Trump-Vance White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo XIV for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026 two weeks after the confrontation.

Citing a Free Press report, a writer obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at President Donald Trump. Hale said what “enraged them most” was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

“The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere,” said Hale.

Hale said the cardinal sat through the lecture in silence, but added that “The Holy See has not, since that day, given an inch.”

The Trump administration's contentious relationship with the Catholic Church represents a significant departure from traditional Republican-Church alliances. While Trump secured substantial Catholic voter support in 2016 and 2024 by championing conservative social issues like abortion restrictions, his foreign policy approach and rhetoric have increasingly alienated Church leadership.

Pope Leo XIV has positioned himself as a moral counterweight to Trump's geopolitical aggression, consistently advocating for dialogue-based diplomacy over military intervention. This philosophical clash intensified during Trump's second term, particularly as his administration pursued more hawkish positions on Iran, trade relations, and immigration — issues where Church teaching emphasizes compassion, dialogue, and respect for human dignity.

The Vatican's traditionally neutral stance on secular governance has been tested by Trump's unilateral foreign policy decisions and inflammatory rhetoric. Church leaders have publicly questioned whether American military interventions align with Catholic doctrine on just war theory and the sanctity of human life. Additionally, Trump's administration's hardline immigration policies directly contradict papal messaging that emphasizes welcoming migrants and refugees.

The Pentagon's January confrontation with Cardinal Pierre signals an unprecedented willingness by Trump officials to pressure religious institutions into alignment with administration goals. This represents a potential inflection point: where diplomatic courtesy once governed state-Church relations, coercion may now be replacing negotiation. The Vatican's refusal to participate in the 250th anniversary celebration underscores that even America's most prominent religious institution will not compromise its moral authority for political expediency.>

<If Iran caves or if it doesn’t, if Trump follows through on his threats or if he doesn’t, there will be lots to talk about tomorrow. For today, though, I wanted to turn briefly to another presidential obsession that’s gone under the radar lately: Trump’s ongoing attacks on American elections infrastructure.

So far this year, the president has failed to convince Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which among other things would require voters nationwide to show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote or vote by mail. But last week, he tried to scratch his election-meddling itch in another way: a one-weird-trick-style executive order trying to seize federal control of mail voting by creating new lists of whose ballots the Postal Service can and can’t mail.

“The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,” Trump, who himself cast a mail-in ballot to vote in Florida days before, said at the signing ceremony. “It’s horrible, what’s gone on . . . I think this will help a lot with elections.”

In all likelihood, what the order will actually do, at least as a legal matter, is nothing. Its strategy—which involves ordering the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of “approved” absentee voters, and ordering the USPS not to mail requested ballots to anybody else—is legally hilarious, a slapped-together usurpation of states’ election authorities without the slightest basis in federal law. The order has already drawn a plethora of major lawsuits, which are all but guaranteed swift success.

And yet pro-democracy advocates who are focused on the president’s election predations remain wary. Not because they think the order has a prayer in court, but because they see it as part of a larger, ongoing presidential strategy to sow doubt about future American elections, or even to attempt to meddle with their outcomes after the fact. It remains gospel in MAGA circles that Democrats fiendishly stole the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden. And Trump keeps testing the waters of how much bullying of election officials he can get away with, most notably with the FBI’s January raid on the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.

In this context, even a legal win against the order isn’t a total win. Trump still muddies the waters, still intimidates anyone connected with elections who might need the courage to stand up to him, still confuses voters about what is and isn’t allowed, and still gets another point of “rogue judges” grievance to parade before his followers as the justification for his next move.

“He can’t lose with this,” Alexandra Chandler of Protect Democracy told The Bulwark. “Because basically, if there is the faintest vanishing chance the courts didn’t stop him, then he gets a win there. If he doesn’t, he gets a win in a narrative sense, and it just is the pretext for the next round, for the next action and the next, and then the eventual denial of the [election] results.”

There’s a perverse attention trap at play here. The more insane, ludicrous stuff Trump does around the country and around the world—the war in Iran being the most obvious example—the more he hemorrhages his domestic political support. But at the same time, these controversies threaten to take our attention away from his insidious work to meddle in elections right in plain sight—efforts which, if successful, would make such trivialities as “maintaining domestic political support” pointless. Why bother with holding an electoral coalition together if you think this time around you’ll just be able to steal the whole game?

<The Justice Department (DOJ) is asking a federal judge in Virginia to allow it to conduct its own search of a Washington Post reporter’s seized electronic devices, rather than have the court do the review.

Federal prosecutors urged U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga in a March 31 court filing to overturn a lower court ruling that prohibited the DOJ from using a “filter team” to search reporter Hannah Natanson’s phone and laptop as part of an FBI investigation into a government contractor accused of leaking classified material.

Magistrate Judge William Porter ordered in February that the government could not “open, access, review, or otherwise examine” any of Natanson’s “seized data,” instead authorizing an independent judicial review.

“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product—most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources—is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Porter wrote.

Federal prosecutors have pushed back, arguing that Porter’s order infringes on the separation of powers by shifting an executive branch function into a judicial one.

They also asserted that it could compromise the neutrality courts are meant to maintain in overseeing search warrants and related proceedings.

“That principle is even more important here because the search authorized by this warrant involves the identification and seizure of classified national defense information, a responsibility the law entrusts to the Executive’s expertise,” federal prosecutors wrote.

The case stems from an FBI search of Natanson’s home in January, in which agents took two laptops, a cellphone and a Garmin watch belonging to the journalist, who had been reporting on the Trump administration’s effort to trim government spending and cuts to the federal workforce.

The search was conducted in connection with a government system administrator in Maryland, who is now behind bars, according to the DOJ.

Attorneys for the Post have contended that the warrant and subsequent search were an example of federal overreach and violated First Amendment press protections.

“The government should not receive permission to rummage through a reporter’s professional universe,” Simon Latcovich said during a Thursday hearing, according to The Post.

The newspaper reported that Trenga, appointed by former President George W. Bush, said he would “get a decision shortly” but seemed skeptical that Porter’s ruling would hamper the DOJ’s ability to build its case against the contractor.>

<Democratic leaders are walking a delicate line as liberals clamor for President Trump’s removal over the Iran war.

On one hand, the minority Democrats are well aware that they have virtually no power to boot Trump from office — an effort that’s opposed by even some in their own party — and they don’t want to distract from the issues of rising costs and inflation, where they see Republicans as most vulnerable heading into the midterms.

On the other hand, Trump’s threat to use the military to attack civilian infrastructure and destroy “a whole civilization” has infuriated base progressives, who say the president crossed a line that demands his removal, either through impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Liberals in the Capitol are advancing the cause.

The uproar is posing a dilemma for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who find themselves (once again) scrambling to prove to base voters that they’re fighting their best fight to restrain Trump’s impulses — without antagonizing the centrists whose support will be crucial to the Democrats’ success in November’s elections.

Walking that tightrope, Jeffries this week condemned Trump’s Iran posture in the harshest terms while steering clear of the removal efforts that are gaining traction in his ranks. He then offered the liberals an outlet to blow off their steam: On Friday, the House Democratic Caucus staged an all-hands discussion, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a former professor of constitutional law, on the “different accountability mechanisms, in the words of Jeffries, available to Democrats as they seek to rein in Trump’s actions.

The virtual gathering featured an examination of the merits and drawbacks of their limited options, including the push for impeachment and the effort to entice members of Trump’s Cabinet to eject the president via the 25th Amendment.

Raskin, for one, is a loud proponent of the 25th Amendment strategy. And from the left, a growing number of liberals agree, saying it’s imperative that Democrats pursue Trump’s removal, even if it’s a long shot.

“When somebody threatens a genocide and has the nuclear codes, there is a problem,” Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), a former member of the Democratic leadership team, told NewsNation on Thursday.

“We go to war with governments or terrorists; we do not go to war with civilians,” she added. “And knocking out infrastructure like power plants and water facilities is a war crime.”

If Trump’s Cabinet doesn’t act by invoking the 25th Amendment, Sánchez added, “we need public sentiment to create the pressure to have them remove him from office.”

Senate liberals have joined the chorus, with some calling for impeachment and others pressing for the 25th Amendment.

Neither Jeffries nor Schumer have endorsed any of the removal efforts, which Democratic leaders have framed at various times over the last year as a distraction from their preferred focus: the rise in consumer costs and erosion of health coverage under Trump’s second term.

“In terms of … impeachment and things that matter, we’ve said we’ve ruled nothing out and we’ve ruled nothing in,” Jeffries said Thursday in an interview on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” program.

Instead, Democratic leaders in both chambers have repeatedly compelled votes on war powers resolutions, which are designed to force Trump to terminate all military operations in Iran unless Congress explicitly authorizes them. In each instance, Trump’s Republican allies have rallied to defeat the measures, most recently in the House on Thursday.

The cautious approach is being cheered by more moderate Democrats, some of whom are facing tough midterm reelection contests. They’re quick to note that Trump was impeached twice in his first term, only to win the largest popular vote in U.S. history four years later....>

<....They’re also warning that an aggressive effort to oust the president will drown out the Democrats’ economic message and mobilize Trump’s supporters to vote in November.

“We already tried it; it didn’t work,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Blue Dog Democrat, told NewsNation. “You’re not going to get the votes [to convict] in the Senate. And all it does — it just energizes the Republican voters to come out. And so I’m not going to vote to impeach the president.”

Democrats have been highly critical of Trump’s return to office, hammering the president across a range of policies that include sweeping cuts to federal programs; blanket pardons for the Jan. 6 rioters; global tariffs that have raised costs on domestic goods; and a militant approach to immigration enforcement. But few have clamored for Trump’s removal — until now.

The calculus changed in recent weeks with a series of messages Trump posted regarding the Iran war. In one, he threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure — a war crime under the Geneva Convention — and bomb the country “back to the Stone Ages.”

“Open the F‑‑‑in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account on Easter Sunday.

Then on Tuesday, he warned that he was ready to eradicate Iran’s entire population if the country’s leaders didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by the day’s end.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Trump walked back the threat hours later. But the remarks set off alarms among Democrats, many of whom have dropped their previous reservations about Trump’s removal and are now framing the concept as practically compulsory.

“We cannot excuse what the president said as a negotiating tactic,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) told reporters at the Capitol on Thursday. “Threatening genocide is not a negotiating tactic. It is important that even though we were able to get this ceasefire, which I pray holds, that we hold this president accountable for what he threatened.”

The growing appetite among Democrats to confront Trump more aggressively is sure to reverberate in the Capitol when Congress returns to Washington next week after the long spring holiday. Already, House Democrats were teeing up another war powers vote. Now, that could also be accompanied by other privileged resolutions to impeach the president — even if the strategy is not endorsed by leadership.>

<In this hand, I was in the early stages of a low-stakes online tournament.

I had A♣ 3♠ in the big blind.

Under the gun plus two raised to 2.5 big blinds.

They had 120.5 big blinds back.

It was folded around to the small blind, who called the raise.

They had 131 big blinds back.

I had 116 big blinds back.

What do you think you should do here?

Do you think you should fold, call, or raise?

This is actually a pretty clear fold, and it’s amazing how many people get this wrong.

So first of all, when you call preflop, if you’re playing against anyone who knows what they’re doing, they’re going to know you don’t have aces, kings, queens, jacks, tens, ace-king, or ace-queen.

Secondly, let’s say the board comes with a flush draw and you just check-call.

It is really likely on those boards you’d check-raise a set or two pair for value and also to protect your hand versus draws.

So your opponents will know you have a pair, and it is very likely to be a weak pair because you did not 3-bet preflop.

From that point on, if your opponent knows what they’re doing, with these stack depths, they can overbet constantly and just put you in nightmare situations.

You’ll be left guessing, and if you end up folding too often, they’re going to be able to turn you into their cash machine.

If you end up calling too often, they could just value bet you to hell.

When they’re in position, they’re holding all the cards and all the decisions and all the information.

Your best move here is to fold unless this is a very basic opponent who can never follow through with a bluff.

What do you think?>

<....Do you like calling here?>

Not on your life.

<....Have you ever looked up in your database how well it’s working?>

No need.

<....Do you think this is too tight of a fold?>

<In one of Europe’s most consequential elections of the year, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has conceded to the party led by Péter Magyar, ending his run as Hungary’s leader after more than 16 years.

With 60 percent of the votes counted, Magyar’s Tisza Party had more than 52 percent of the vote compared with Orbán’s 38 percent for his governing Fidesz party, according to The Associated Press, despite a last-minute push from Vice President Vance during a rally for Orbán last week.

The vote distribution will change as more votes are counted.

“Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has just called to congratulate us on our victory,” Magyar said in a post on the social platform X.

Orbán, a far-right politician and ally of President Trump, sought to hold on to power in the face of a challenge from center-right Tisza Party leader Magyar, once himself a member of Orbán’s governing Fidesz party.

Vice President Vance held a rally in Budapest last week, praising Orbán as a defender of “Western civilization” and his strong stances against immigration, as well as his adversarial approach to European Union membership, in an effort to bolster his reelection bid.

Especially following Vance’s rally, the result comes as a blow to Trump, who has long defended Orbán’s populist politics and conservative policies.

“My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership!”

Earlier Sunday, the count showed the Tisza Party ahead in 95 of Hungary’s 106 constituencies, The Associated Press reported.

Magyar said earlier in the day that he and the party were “cautiously confident,” according to reporting from The Associated Press. And around 6:30 p.m. local time, turnout had crested to 77 percent, according to the National Election Office and AP reporting, a number higher than any postcommunist election Hungary has held.

“I’m asking our supporters and all Hungarians: Let’s stay peaceful, cheerful, and if the results confirm our expectations, let’s throw a big, Hungarian carnival,” Magyar said before final results came in.

Magyar broke with Orbán in 2024.

The election was seen by some as a referendum on what Magyar called “a choice between East or West.”

Orbán has repeatedly frustrated European Union efforts to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, while cultivating close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and refusing to end Hungary’s dependence on Russian fossil fuel imports. Orbán has repeatedly frustrated these efforts, most recently blocking a $104 billion loan to Ukraine, which prompted other member countries to accuse him of hijacking the critical aid.

“We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition as well,” Orbán said following his concession to Magyar, according to The Associated Press.>

Orgán can choke on it; even the visit by <couch baby> was unable to save his worthless ass.

<Bipartisan furor over sexual misconduct allegations against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) is cascading into calls to expel not only him, but three other members — two Republicans and a Democrat — accused of wrongdoing.

The dynamic could upend the House in the coming weeks with forced votes, intense debate, and at least one public House Ethics Committee hearing on the books.

Swalwell ended his gubernatorial bid on Sunday after being accused of sexually assaulting a former aide and other instances of misconduct.

Lawmakers calling for his ouster from Congress immediately also pointed to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who admitted he had an affair with a former congressional staffer who later died after setting herself on fire, and is accused of sending sexually explicit messages to a former campaign aide.

Gonzales’s affair was reported earlier this year, leading to an Ethics Committee referral and the Texas congressman ending his bid for reelection in March. It is against House rules for a member to have a sexual relationship with a member of their staff.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said over the weekend she will file a motion to expel Swalwell and is inquiring to see if she can pair that with a motion to expel Gonzales. It takes support from two-thirds of the House to expel a member from Congress.

A growing number of Democrats — including Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) — have said they would be in favor of expelling both Swalwell and Gonzales. On the Republican side, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said he would vote to expel both.

But the demands for punishing lawmakers accused of wrongdoing aren’t stopping there. Members are also pointing to Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) and Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.).

Mills — whose former girlfriend obtained a restraining order against him last year for harassment, and whose other simultaneous girlfriend accused him of assault before quickly recanting — is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for allegations of dating violence, campaign finance violations and more.

Meanwhile, an Ethics subcommittee last month found Cherfilus-McCormick had committed 25 Ethics violations related to allegedly using millions in improperly paid federal disaster funds to finance her campaign. She is also being criminally prosecuted in a federal case over the matter.

Mills and Cherfilus-McCormick have both denied wrongdoing.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) called for votes to expel Swalwell, Gonzales, and Cherfilus-McCormick upon the House’s return this week if they do not resign. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) added in Mills, whom she has targeted in the past.

“Time to clean House. These members have proven through their own actions they are unfit to serve,” Mace said on the social platform X on Sunday.

The uproar could upend Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) control of the House floor — just as he is trying to lasso GOP members in support of reauthorizing foreign spy powers ahead of a quickly approaching deadline and a plan to end the record-long Department of Homeland Security shutdown, and against a Democratic push to prohibit President Trump from unilaterally taking further military action in Iran.

House members are able to act individually to bypass leadership and force action on privileged resolutions to reprimand each other, such as censure and expulsion. Once a member gives notice of such a resolution, the House must act on it within two legislative days.

And while the political realities of a razor-thin House GOP majority have made members hesitate about expelling a single member in the past, expelling all four members or just Swalwell and Gonzales would not change the partisan breakdown, adding to the pro-expulsion momentum....>

<....But there are serious questions about due process that could halt or delay the expulsion pushes. The Ethics Committee is already investigating or taking action against three of the four members: Gonzales, Mills, and Cherfilus-McCormick.

Johnson has long argued in favor of letting the Ethics panel complete its investigations before the chamber takes action to punish members. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has similarly called for the process to play out when asked about Cherfilus-McCormick.

A resolution brought by Mace to censure Mills and remove him from committees was scuttled in November when the House voted to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee.

That is keeping with recent precedent. The House twice batted down attempts to expel fabulist fraudster former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), doing so only after the Ethics panel released an investigation into Santos.

Cherfilus-McCormick, though, is just days away from the Ethics panel completing its process. The committee will hold a public hearing to determine what kind of sanctions would be appropriate to take against Cherfilus-McCormick on April 21 — which could be quickly followed by an expulsion vote.

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), who has been itching to call up his resolution to expel his Florida colleague since her federal indictment was announced in December, recently told The Hill he is waiting until the Ethics panel completes its full process before calling up his resolution.

There is also the possibility that the House will not have to resort to expulsion because the embattled members opt to resign.

Santos, who noted he is “the only living former member of Congress that was expelled from the institution,” advised the members caught in the controversy to resign from Congress on their own rather than being forced out.

“There is NO dignity in being expelled if I could go back in time I’d do it differently, I’d do it in my own term,” Santos said on X on Sunday.>

<Hey, Every Conservative Dumbass in America,

Alex Pretti wasn't brandishing the gun.

He was legally carrying a weapon, as you always claim is a Constitutional right. He was recording ICE with his phone (also a Constitutional right), as they beat another innocent human being.

Officers removed his firearm, beat him severely, and executed him.

This is easy to see if you watch the video.

But 99.9% of you are so far up Donald Trump's rear end that you're willing to ignore reality, embrace fascism, and assassinate the character of a stranger just to keep your asinine tribal, cultic fixation on a traitorous rapist who is disregarding the Law and the Constitution.

If you're sharing MAGA propaganda, trying to twist the facts, or slandering Alex Pretti, a citizen of the United States—you're a lousy patriot, a [crappy] Christian, and a failed human being.

<In a sign of how disorganized the White House is, they can’t even settle on a single lie to deny Donald Trump‘s god complex. On Sunday, the president posted artificial intelligence-generated fan art depicting himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man while being worshiped by white Americans in modern clothing. When this drew criticism, even from some of his biggest sycophants in the punditry, Trump deleted the post. Then the conflicting excuses began.

“I think the president was posting a joke,” JD Vance argued on Fox News. The vice president, who is promoting a new book titled “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, added that Trump “likes to mix it up on social media.”

But the president long ago stopped pretending he has a sense of humor, so he offered an even dumber cop-out. “I thought it was me as a doctor,” he claimed, insisting that only “fake news” would see the image as Christ rather than, uh, something “to do with the Red Cross.”

Readers can study the image and decide for themselves, of course. Trump is portrayed wearing a white tunic and a red mantle, as often shown in renderings of Jesus, while rays of light emanate from his hands. No one other than saints or the Great Physician himself are depicted this way, a fact the president — who enjoys the best medical care while depriving millions of their health coverage — surely knows.

These laughable excuses were only rolled out because the post drew a rare rebuke of Trump from conservative Christian pundits and leaders. In some cases, the criticism was blistering, with words like “blasphemous” and “demonic” coming from people who usually defend the president’s most depraved behavior as godly. This, along with Trump’s subsequent deletion of the post, led to a wave of coverage suggesting that, to paraphrase a headline from Gizmodo, their faith in Trump might finally have broken.

At the (extremely low) risk of being proved wrong, I’ll predict it hasn’t. A couple of spicy words on social media mean nothing, especially from people who spend their days online, trolling for attention. The responses from prominent right-wing voices were mostly muted. Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles gently asked Trump to “delete the picture, no matter the intent.” Popular Christian influencer Brilyn Hollyhand, while calling the image a “gross blasphemy,” reminded the president “You don’t need to portray yourself as a savior when your record should speak for itself.”

One gets the sense that most evangelical influencers weren’t really angry so much as they were embarrassed that Trump said the quiet part out loud: He has supplanted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.

One gets the sense that most evangelical influencers weren’t really angry so much as they were embarrassed that Trump said the quiet part out loud: He has supplanted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.

MAGA leaders love to praise Trump’s bluntness when he’s attacking their presumed enemies, but they expect him to be a little more circumspect when assessing the character of the people who follow him. That is a huge miscalculation. Trump eventually betrays everyone who shows him loyalty, so it should have come as no surprise that he couldn’t help but strip away the pretense that their faith is about following the teachings of Christ. In the corny AI language so loved by MAGA, Trump told the truth: What the Christian right worships is power.

After all, in the days leading up to Easter, evangelical minister and White House spiritual adviser Paula White gave a speech comparing Trump to Jesus while he nodded along. Progressive Christian podcaster Tim Whitaker outlined how the president has enjoyed a decade of this treatment from evangelical leaders, who continuously compare him to biblical figures like King David and regard him as a savior sent by God to redeem the nation and usher in the end times.

Catholics warn of serious juncture as Trump targets Pope Leo XIV

“Christian nationalists built the throne,” Whitaker said, “and now they’re acting shocked that he sat on it.”...>

<....Trump’s post came immediately after another of his diatribes on Truth Social, this time aimed at Pope Leo XIV, the American-born pontiff who has implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — criticized Trump for his violent deportation campaign against immigrants and for starting an unnecessary war with Iran.

“If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” he complained, attacking the pontiff for being “WEAK on Crime,” and advising Leo to “get his act together as Pope.”

Trump’s post likening himself to Jesus came nearly a year after he posted a similar AI picture of himself as, who else, the pope. This, too, was excused as a joke. But his critique of the pontiff suggests that it was not — that he does indeed think he would be better at the job of than Leo.

As for the world’s second-most famous Catholic, he has defended Trump’s attack on the pope. JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, during a time when he was being heavily bankrolled by esoteric Catholic billionaire Peter Thiel. In a Monday interview with Fox News, the vice president scolded Leo, saying he should “stick to matters of morality” and “let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

Plenty of people have objected to Trump’s policies and conduct. Innocent civilians being bombed in an Iranian school and shot on the streets of Minneapolis are indeed grave matters of moral concern, they have argued. But anyone fluent in the language of the Christian right knows that, in their worldview, “morality” is limited to a certain range of issues, such as controlling the sexual behavior of women and LGBTQ people. The same belief, though, isn’t applied to straight men, as seen by evangelicals’ lack of concern over not just Trump’s adulteries, but also the many credible accusations of sexual violence against him. Under this model, the killing of Renee Good for protesting the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers doesn’t fall under the pope’s purview, but her widow’s lesbian identity does.

Here is what will almost certainly happen next: Since the Trump-as-Jesus picture was deleted from his Truth Social feed, MAGA influencers will promptly return to offering him over-the-top worship. They are already praising the president for taking the post down, declaring how “impressed” they are with him and characterizing his swift action as “amazing.” (Meanwhile, his Trump-as-pope picture is still up.) While this little public relations hiccup might damper their rhetoric for a few weeks, evangelical leaders will soon return to comparing him to biblical figures and claiming he has been chosen by God.

I don’t claim to be a prophet. This is predictable because the Christian right is really not about worshipping God — it’s about worshipping power. In the Christian tradition, Jesus is the conduit to God for the faithful. In the MAGA movement, Trump serves a similar role, his followers not to the Almighty but to what they really want: control over American government and society. And there is nothing the president could do that would cause the Christian right to lose their faith in him.>