News & Politics

On Tuesday night, April 7, Republicans suffered a major humiliation when Judge Chris Taylor (a former Democratic state legislator) defeated Judge Maria S. Lazar by roughly 20 percent in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election. The race was technically nonpartisan, but it became largely a referendum on Donald Trump's second presidency. And while Taylor was backed by Democrats, Lazar was supported by Republicans.

With Taylor's victory, liberals will have a 5-2 majority on the seven-seat Wisconsin Supreme Court.

In an article published on April 8, Mother Jones' Ari Berman offers a major takeaway on the race's outcome: MAGA Republicans, Berman argues, will have a hard time trying to "hijack elections" in a key swing state.

"It's a stunning turnaround from a decade ago, when a conservative majority dominated the (Wisconsin Supreme) Court and upheld much of then-Gov. Scott Walker's (R) right-wing agenda, such as his efforts to crush unions, make it harder to vote, and gerrymander in the GOP's favor," Berman explains. "In 2020, when conservatives on the Wisconsin Court held a 4-3 majority, Donald Trump and his allies attempted to convince the justices to overturn the state's presidential election results. They nearly succeeded. Just one of the conservatives, Justice Brian Hagedorn, sided with the liberals in narrowly upholding Joe Biden's win."

Berman continues, "Taylor's victory on Tuesday means progressives are set to control the Court's majority through at least 2030. That will make it nearly impossible for Republicans to use the state courts to hijack elections. Taylor said, during a debate last week with her opponent, Maria Lazar — a fellow appellate judge who previously served in Walker's administration — that she was 'very concerned that we might have efforts to suppress the vote' and that 'this is why we need a strong Supreme Court that's going to hold the federal government accountable.'"

Taylor's 20 percent victory, according to Berman, was more than a "landslide" — it was a "tsunami."

"Taylor won at least 24 counties that Trump carried in 2024," Berman observes. "Democrats also prevailed in the mayor's race in Waukesha, the county seat of a longtime GOP stronghold in suburban Milwaukee. The results are another indicator that a blue wave is forming in November."

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is in a fact-check war as the media is desperately trying to get to the truth of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran.

While the White House announced a two-week ceasefire dependent on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, after a bombing in Lebanon on Wednesday, Iranian state media announced the Strait was closed again. They said that the attacks violated the ceasefire, which included no more attacks on Iran and Lebanon.

During the daily press briefing, Leavitt was asked which was true: is the Strait open or not? Is Lebanon part of the ceasefire or not?

"Well, with respect to the first reporting out of Iranian state media, the president was made aware of those reports before I came to the podium. That is completely unacceptable," said Leavitt. "And again, this is a case of what they're saying publicly is different. Privately, we have seen an uptick of traffic in the Strait today. And I will reiterate the president's expectation and demand that the Strait of Hormuz is reopened immediately, quickly, and safely. That is his expectation. It has been relayed to him privately that that is what's taking place in these reports publicly are false."

Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council aide under President Barack Obama, pointed to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, who facilitated the talks between the U.S. and Iran.

In a post on Tuesday, Sharif wrote, "With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY."

Yet, Leavitt claimed the opposite.

She was also confronted by an Iranian reporter who asked, "I have been speaking with people there during the blackout. One of my family members said goodbye to me yesterday. What message should we be sending to Iranians?"

"The president’s and my main priority is to make sure that clear messages are sent to the American people. We hope that Iran will be a country of prosperity," is how Leavitt answered it.

When the Tuesday, April 7 elections rolled around, GOP strategists were hoping to see some positive signs. Instead, Democrats enjoyed what Politico's Andrew Howard described as "one of their best election nights since President Donald Trump returned to the White House."

That included Democrat-supported Judge Chris Taylor's 20 percent victory over GOP-backed Judge María Lazar in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Meanwhile, in a race for ex-Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene's seat in Georgia, Republican Clay Fuller won by 12 percent — which fell way below Greene's 37 percent victory in 2024. That district is so Republican that a 12 percent loss is good for a Democrat.

In an April 8 column, MS NOW's Steve Benen stresses that the April 7 elections show the GOP's fortunes growing worse — not better — as the 2026 midterms draw closer.

"In the mayoral race in Waukesha, Wis., Alicia Halvensleben, the Democratic president of the city's Common Council, defeated Republican State Rep. Scott Allen," Benen explains. "This was notable in large part because of Waukesha's role as a bellwether. Waukesha is a suburb, just west of Milwaukee, that's traditionally been a GOP stronghold…. These results come on the heels of a series of Democratic special election victories, including a streak in which the party has flipped 30 seats from red to blue since Trump’s return to the White House. Republicans, meanwhile, have not yet flipped any seats."

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) described the series of recent Democratic victories as "anomalies," but the April 7 results, Benen argues, show that he's in denial.

"In the wake of the latest Democratic victories," Benen comments, "the months-long pattern constitutes quite an alarming 'anomaly' for the Republican Party."

President Donald Trump told a Wall Street Journal reporter that he never has to worry about China doing something crazy like what Iran has done. As Trump explained, President Xi Jinping "respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy." One columnist is concerned that the president thinks this is a legitimate negotiation tactic.

Writing for the Washington Monthly on Wednesday, political commentator Bill Scher noted the forthcoming book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, which comments that Trump knew he had a reputation of being "unhinged" during his first administration. In fact, at one point, he told his ambassador to the United Nations, "Make them think I'm crazy." He also told his attorney general, "Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet? Just the right amount of crazy."

Trump's post on Tuesday claimed that he was likely to wipe out an entire civilization. Loyalists will likely claim that the "dose of crazy once again did the trick," wrote Scher.

"Art of the deal, right? Wrong," he said, citing a comment from Rep. Jim McGovern, who noted that Trump's ceasefire basically achieved what he had before the bombing campaign, only now Iran is making more money.

"For the last six weeks, Trump didn’t just act crazy, he went crazy," Scher explained. "And he doesn’t have much to show for it beyond higher energy prices and a body count."

Having "just the right amount of crazy" isn't a rational negotiating tactic, but it was one deployed by former President Richard Nixon, said Scher, citing a conversation between him and aide H.R. "Bob" Haldeman during his campaign.

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace," said Nixon.

It didn't work for Nixon either. Scher recalled National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger playing "the crazy card" to end the U.S.'s war in Vietnam on favorable terms.

“Henry found the North Vietnamese absolutely intractable. They wouldn’t even negotiate” because they knew “the American people had turned against the war.” In turn, Nixon “would either have to proceed with his threat of force or take the opposite route completely, walk out.” As Trump would put it, they held all the cards.

Looking at Nixon and Trump is arguably a small "data pool," Scher conceded, "but the available evidence suggests that presidential adherents of Madman Theory are more mad than great theorists."

The columnist noted that he doesn't have the knowledge or training to know whether Trump is suffering from dementia, sociopathy, or a narcissistic personality disorder, but no one needs a specific diagnosis to see that something is wrong.

We can "recognize with our eyes and ears than he is not in a sound state of mind and should not be trusted with command of the United States military," said Scher.

He closed by encouraging those in Trump's Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, a process that would officially declare the president "unable to discharge" his duties and hand over power to Vice President JD Vance. As Scher said, however, "sycophants" aren't likely to turn on him. It's a sentiment former prosecutor Andrew Weismann explained that he agreed would never happen.

"But that should not stop the rest of us from sounding the alarm that Trump is manifestly unfit, that he’s a danger to the world, and that a Constitutional mechanism exists to end this nightmare," Scher closed.

Should the ceasefire in President Donald Trump’s war in Iran hold, America “will have suffered a significant strategic defeat and Iran will have won a significant strategic victory,” says The Bulwark‘s Jonathan V. Last, who predicts what Trump’s Republican supporters will be saying in the coming days.

“You have to be clear-eyed enough to recognize that Trump’s surrender may be a s—— sandwich we can afford to eat — but that Trump is the one who marched the country into the diner in the first place,” he writes.

Last notes that before Trump’s war, Iran was facing significant sanctions, the Strait of Hormuz was a free thoroughfare governed by international law, and Iran had “a fourth-rate navy and a fifth-rate air force.”

After the war, should the terms hold, Iran will face diminished sanctions or a removal of them, Iran will have “permission to enrich uranium” and the ability to control and monetize the Strait of Hormuz, although its navy and air force will “have been (temporarily) neutralized.”

He says that Iran’s power and influence will grow, and America’s influence will wane. “We should expect ties between Iran and China to strengthen as the Iranians become a more consequential partner for the Chinese.”

“Iran will probably get a nuclear weapon eventually,” Last warns.

And he predicts what MAGA will be saying by Saturday:

“Can you believe all the pearl-clutching over ‘war crimes’ and ‘genocide’? Trump didn’t do it, so there’s nothing wrong with threatening it. In fact, that threat probably got the peace deal done. So threatening genocide is good, actually.”

“Look at gas prices — they’re already falling! Oil is down to $93/barrel. Have you even said ‘Thank you?'”

“The economy may not be great, but it’s already recovering! All those people who said the war would wreck the American economy were wrong!”

Last calls this a “pattern.”

“If the absolute, worst-case scenario doesn’t happen, then his supporters argue that the current very-bad scenario is actually pretty great,” he writes.

After Trump rescinded what some critics have called his threat of genocide, social media influencer Matt Van Swol, who has over 490,000 followers on X, wrote on Tuesday evening:

“The most predictable script in American politics: >Trump does something strong >Democrats and the media freak out >Everything Trump did works >Everyone moves on >No one gives him credit.”

“Every. Single. Time.”

President Donald Trump may be attempting to claim total victory in Iran, but according to a new analysis from a political strategist, the conflict has seen his presidency go "from bad to worse" as voters become increasingly convinced that he is full of it.

Brad Bannon is a national-level strategist for the Democrats and operates the Bannon Communications firm. On Wednesday, he wrote an analysis of Trump's current standing with voters for The Hill, as his war with Iran continues to drag on, with conflicting claims about the endgame for the conflict and where things stand at any given moment. Trump's approval, Bannon argued, was already "in intensive care for months" prior to the start of this unpopular war, but now, it is "on life support."

"His overall performance score comes in at net negative 23 percent, which puts him as deep underwater as the Great Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean," Bannon wrote, later adding, "Iran is a big problem for the president. You don’t need a meteorologist to know which way the wind is blowing. Americans oppose the war by a 2-to-1 margin. While Republicans still support the conflict, opposition to his misguided military misadventure is high in every demographic public subgroup."

Bannon further stressed that Trump is suffering from an ever-widening credibility gap with voters, as more and more of them come to suspect that "he hasn’t provided accurate information about the progress of the war," and does not know what he is talking about in any given speech.

This deepening discontent among voters will only spiral further for Trump if he goes ahead with the heavily rumored plan to deploy military forces on the ground in Iran. The prospect of boots on the ground in the Middle East, Bannon explained, is supported by "only one out of every six" voters, per recent surveys.

"There are two reasons why the situation has gone from bad to worse for Trump," Bannon continued. "He failed to demonstrate at the onset that Iran was a serious threat to U.S. national security and the assault weaponized existing public concerns about his failure to reduce inflationary prices."

Elaborating further, Bannon wrote: "First, Trump’s attack against Iran is a war of choice not a conflict of necessity... Without a dramatic [occasion for war], he needed to make a compelling case about the need for war. The Donald failed and now he’s paying for his decision to go to war without galvanizing the public... Second, the attack against Iran has driven increases in oil prices which in turn have accelerated public concerns about inflation. Americans were struggling to make ends meet even before Trump started the war. Now the struggle for hard-working families to feed their children is even more acute. The conflict led to a big increase in gas prices by a dollar nationally since Feb. 28, according to AAA."

After U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to wipe out a "whole civilization" in Iran in a Tuesday, April 7 post on his Truth Social platform, at least 50 Democrats in Congress called for him to be removed from office via the U.S. Constitution's 25th Amendment. But criticism of Trump in response to the war against Iran isn't limited to Democrats. Many people on the right are speaking out as well, including Never Trump conservatives like MS NOW hosts Nicolle Wallace and Joe Scarborough, journalist Charlie Sykes and The Bulwark's Tim Miller. And Trump is also drawing criticism from far-right MAGA figures like Infowars' Alex Jones, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and ex-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).

During an appearance on The New Republic's podcast posted on April 8, The Contrarian's Jennifer Rubin — a Never Trumper and former Washington Post columnist — stressed that even "very fringe characters" like Jones are finding Trump's comments on Iran scary.

Rubin told host Greg Sargent — another former Washington Post columnist — "I think this is what happens when you fall out of the cult. Suddenly, everything becomes very clear. You're willing to abandon your idolatry. You're willing to assess his words as they are spoken or written. And that's what’s happened with these, frankly, very fringe characters. So, I don't want to attribute a great intellectual breakthrough in terms of democracy or tolerance or rule of law, but at least they see Trump for what he is. They can at least now be truth tellers about who he is, how deranged he is, and how dangerous he is."

Trump's "whole civilization" comment, according to Rubin, was so beyond the pale that even some MAGA extremists are calling him out.

Rubin told Sargent, "He wants their civilization to die. That is genocide. There's no excuse, there's no rationalization that they can come up with now for carrying out orders to decimate civilian neighborhoods, power plants, infrastructure. They clearly know what Trump's intent is, and they know what the results of that action would be. And there will come a time —maybe it will be a new set of Nuremberg trials, maybe it will be military discipline down the road — but there will be a time of reckoning where these people have to be held responsible for what they did and what they said. And they never should have crossed the line the first time when Trump ordered extrajudicial killings on the high seas. Had they said no then, we likely would not be where we are now."

The 2026 midterms are kicking into gear and Republicans are eager for President Donald Trump's super PAC to start spending its $300 million war chest to help save the GOP from an anticipated defeat.

Axios reported on Wednesday that the PAC intends to start spending while his popularity continues to fall off of the political cliff. "His operation has one of the biggest political bank accounts in history," the report explained. Democrats, however, have momentum and rage on their side.

Trump celebrated his "win" in Georgia on Tuesday, where a Republican candidate won Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-Ga.) seat by 12 points. The problem for the GOP, however, is that Trump won the seat in 2024 by 37 points. It shows a significant over-performance by Democrats in the reddest of red districts around the country.

Trump's personal account takes the $300 million in the PAC to half a billion dollars. So, Republicans are hoping that they can buy their way to victory.

Unlike previous elections, Trump doesn't need to spend the money on his own campaign. So, Republicans are hoping that Trump's desperation to "prevent a Democratic takeover of the House," will inspire him to spend all of the cash. Trump has said publicly that if Democrats take over, it will be nothing but impeachments. Trump is already the only president in history to have been impeached twice.

Democrats don't seem to be able to raise the money and are being out-raised by a 7 to 1 margin.

While Trump's political advisers Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio say that they have been designing a data program to find hard-to-reach voters, there is a fear that the president's moods can flip on a dime. He is "notoriously protective of his money, and takes great interest in how it's spent."

It's entirely possible that Trump will decide to shift all of his money to his presidential library, his non-profi, or other projects, like his giant arch or the ballroom project. Trump could slow the spending and wait until the last minute to use it.

Axios reported that in the 2022 midterms, "Trump amassed piles of cash but ended up using little of it — and withheld much of his spending until late in the campaign." Republicans think that if he had spent more, they could have held off Democrats.

Other Republicans think that all the money in the world can't save the GOP now. "What really matters now is whether candidates can connect with voters in a visceral way," the party thinks, according to Axios.

A good example is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who destroyed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.). The ousted governor outspent Mamdani by a 3 to 1 margin.

Far-right activist and host Steve Bannon commented, "Money has lost its edge." He said that the real difference is made with "authenticity, urgency, energy [and] grassroots commitment."

Trump adviser Taylor Budowich announced that he'd be spending $100 million to support Trump's AI agenda and the candidates that stand with him. But the AI issue isn't a popular one either. A Republican suburb outside of Milwaukee became the first in the country to block a data center project backed by Trump in Tuesday's election.

A March poll by NBC News showed that only 26 percent reported a positive feeling about AI, while 27 percent were neutral. All others are against it.