Trump

President Donald Trump has been quiet on the nationwide ground stop on Friday evening. Secretaries Sean Duffy and Markwayne Mullin were the administration officials sent out to speak to cameras over the weekend as a ground stop fueled chaos in airports across the nation.

It prompted CNN host and White House reporter Kaitlan Collins to question where the president is.

"You might have noticed that President Trump has been uncharacteristically silent since that rare nationwide ground stop yesterday that left thousands of Americans stranded at airports across the country." she said in a quick video for CNN.

"The president has been posting on Truth Social. He commented on Gavin Newsom, the riverboat crash in New Orleans, and also, what he described as a bipartisan effort to revive the entertainment industry," she continued. "But he has yet to say a single word about this nationwide ground stop and what led the FAA to put all of these planes on the ground while they fixed an issue to repair the nation's aviation system."

She cited Duffy, who claimed he's been on the phone with the president and insisted the president wants to put the full force of the government behind fixing the problem.

“This is what President Trump does,” Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said in the Friday news conference. “He puts leaders in place, and he allows them to lead. They even ask, you know, why is the president not talking? It’s because he’s allowed Secretary Duffy and us to go out there and explain to you what took place.”

Duffy "demanded $50 billion more from Congress to fix it, despite questions that reporters raised to him about how Republicans have been in control of Congress for the last two years, with, of course, a Republican president in the Oval Office," Collins continued.

She noted just how rare it is to not hear from Trump on something that is so significant.

"But the White House just issued a travel photo lid on Saturday, which means we don't expect any public appearances from the president," Collins closed.

The New York Times similarly found it odd that Trump has been out of sight "as crisis circled the skies."

As of publication, Trump has commented on Hannibal Lecter, but he still hasn't said a word about the ground stop.

The Times noted that when asked about where the president is, Duffy replied, “Well, the two of us have talked to him. He’s in. I’ve talked to him on the phone. I’ve talked to him in the Oval. So has Markwayne.”

The report also said that since Trump lost so significantly during the 2026 midterms, he's "been keeping somewhat of a lower profile."

They also cited former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who wrote on X, “While everyone was freaking out thinking we are under some sort of attack, Trump didn’t even bother to address the nation.”

The White House briefing with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on the nationwide air traffic control meltdown offered a troubling preview of President Donald Trump’s final two years, argued Politico's John Harris.

Writing for Politico Magazine on Saturday, Harris warned that the next two years will likely bring problem after problem, with solutions that are nothing more than administration officials praising themselves and the president's leadership. Meanwhile, if Friday evening is any indication, they'll keep struggling to give an anxious public clear answers.

“The dynamics on display Friday night, if they continue, suggest that Trump in his final two years could become even more isolated from political reality," Harris wrote.

He explained that he was lucky enough not to be struggling to get to a wedding or funeral, much less juggling toddlers or elderly relatives while talking on a phone with a booking agent. He said he witnessed a lot of sobbing and a lot of swearing at JFK airport on Friday night.

"These scenes were the context in which I heard Duffy, who dominated the news conference compared to the somewhat less prepossessing Mullin," Harris noted. "His style was crisp, emphatic, even impressive; the substance of his words was murky, self-justifying, unpersuasive."

“The news conference with Mullin and Duffy raised something more fundamental: Do they have elementary self-awareness? What planet are they on?” Harris asked about the men.

Duffy's referenced to radar problems, communications inconsistencies and technical systems. Harris complained that all the excuses and blame-shifting to Democrats did little to explain the breakdown in terms ordinary travelers could understand.

Some Americans don't buy the outage explanation, but Harris isn't one of them. He also agrees that the country should have cutting-edge equipment.

Harris called the performance by the two top appointees a vivid window into the late stages of Trumpism after the massive election losses 11 days ago.

“The familiar signatures — bluster, boasting, blame-casting — were not so much triggering, as in the old days, as the height of irrelevance," Harris wrote. "It is a style that suggests reality can be created, or decisively shaped, by self-confident proclamation."

Former President Joe Biden's transportation bill provided $5 billion over five years to upgrade FAA air traffic control facilities and equipment, part of a broader $25 billion investment in aviation infrastructure. Congress approved another $12.5 billion for the upgrades. Now Duffy is asking for another $50 billion.

Meanwhile, Trump is more focused on his ballroom, golf course and the giant arch.

The deeper warning, Harris said, is not that a major transportation system failed. It is that senior officials responded as if the tough-guy routine and praise for Trump could substitute for accountability.

When Mullin closed his speech by describing Trump as the nation’s greatest president, it captured the real disconnect, Harris said. Travelers want responsible leadership, but the administration seems more intent on celebrating itself. He closed by saying it's a mismatch and a risk that extends well beyond this crisis.

One of President Donald Trump's biggest legal foes, Norm Eisen, sees a link between the giant arch that Trump wants to build and the Senate race in Mississippi — and it points to a week full of losses for the president.

Writing for The Contrarian on Saturday, Eisen said democracy won for a second week in a row. First, Scott Colom won the Mississippi U.S. Senate race, in spite of ongoing efforts to use bad data to purge voter rolls in the state.

Eisen said he was working for a Mississippi voting rights coalition to fight back against officials' efforts to make voting so difficult.

"It remains one of only three states to not offer early in-person voting and is one of 13 that require voters to provide an excuse to cast a ballot by mail. For most voters in the state, Election Day is the only opportunity to vote, and polling places close at 7 p.m. In practice, this means that many Mississippians, particularly those in Black communities, must endure long lines simply to exercise their fundamental right to vote," wrote Eisen.

This year the state partnered with Experian using outdated information to purge more than 230,000 voters from the rolls. It meant thousands of provisional ballots, which they call "affidavit" ballots, that have to be double-checked before they can be counted as they are cast. That's why it took so long to get the results in Mississippi. Now, the state has an opportunity to change all of its rules to make things significantly less complicated, Eisen said.

His second case involved the East Potomac golf course, which called a team back to court on Friday. The administration decided to close the entire island, which has parks, trails and the golf course, to the public on Nov. 15. The government claimed the problem is a dangerous, crumbling seawall and that no one will be there to manage the course. The administration canceled the contract for the people running the course. The legal group is waiting for the judge to issue an order that would stop the closure.

But the golf course isn't the only one of Trump's projects that remains in limbo. The 25-story Trump arch with the sniper's nest and cafe was paused this week. "We have since filed a motion to join the case to block the arch on behalf of nine members of the Kennedy family," Eisen said.

In it, they argue that the 25-story arch would not only obstruct historically significant sight lines and cast shadows over the gravestones of American soldiers, but there's a separation-of-powers argument. Only Congress can make decisions about the arch, not Trump.

"Yesterday we filed additional proof in the form of declarations from Kennedy family members explaining the devastation that building the arch would cause to them and to the family gravesites. The declarations are factual but also deeply emotional. You can read them here," Eisen said.

Eisen explained these events are emblematic of what happens when Americans refuse to sit idly by and accept whatever the administration decides.

Author and biographer Michael Wolff spoke with Joanna Coles for the Daily Beast podcast on Saturday afternoon about the Microsoft outage and the complete ground stop across the U.S. and he doesn't buy either story.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin started his press conference Friday by promising it wasn't another Sept. 11 and urging the public not to panic.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed the ordeal on poor technology and used the opportunity to ask for more money for the FAA.

"It felt chaotic," Coles said about Friday afternoon and into the evening.

"Well, I think Markwayne Mullin opened the news conference yesterday by saying that the Microsoft fail and the FAA fail were not related," Wolff recalled. "So, I think we can fairly say, they probably are related. If these guys say — we're at the point where logic tells us to assume whatever these guys say it has to be — it's a fair chance the opposite is the truth.”

After showing a clip of Mullin's press conference, Wolff mocked their claim, "We're built to handle crisis."

"We're built to create crises," Wolff shot back. "I mean, these two guys? This is who we're counting on? But even set the context here. And they seem to be essentially dismissing this problem or dismissing the crisis."

Duffy said that Trump asked for an additional $30 billion after they were already given $12.5 billion. At first they asked for an additional $15 billion. That evolved to $19 billion. Trump then said he wanted an additional $30 billion and now Duffy is saying he wants that to be $50 billion.

In August, Politico reported that three FAA officials had serious concerns about the contractor that took over the modernization: Peraton. One of the officials said that the company failed to manage other contractors at a work site and let schedules slip on a project in Alaska.

“The big issues here are threefold,” said the person familiar with discussions, adding that “Peraton has basically not done any work since they got in.”

They also blamed the agency as a whole for stonewalling Peraton’s work with the FAA.

"In one case, a Peraton manager showed up to a radar site that was being worked on, and instead of ensuring that the other contractors were carrying out their duties, brought doughnuts and sat in the corner the entire time," said an industry official who spoke with Politico.

Wolff mocked the idea that the issue was caused by "circuit overload."

"Alright, so what we have here is either they don't know what it is because they are uninformed, that dopey. The structure of air travel has been so disrupted and underfunded and so many people have been fired and jobs not replaced that they are really kind of at a loss here," Wolff suggested as one possibility. "Or they do have a sense of what happens, and they really don't want to fess up to it."

Regardless, he said, there's nothing good going on and no one "should have confidence about their explanation."

Coles referred to them as "a ship of fools."

Sen. John Fetterman, often dubbed "Trump's favorite Democrat," is once again threatening to ditch the party and switch side, this time revealing an ultimatum that could finally make him leave.

Initially elected in 2022 as a progressive candidate, Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, has made a notable shift to the right during his time in the Senate, often breaking with the rest of his party and their on certain issues, and backing President Donald Trump, especially on matters involving U.S. support for Israel.

As a result of this shift, concerns have mounted among Senate Democrats that Fetterman might eventually opt to switch his party allegiance to the Republicans, potentially throwing their majorities into chaos, though these concerns are much less pressing in light of the Democrats winning 56 Senate seats in the midterms. While admitting that he often feels alienated by his Democratic colleagues, Fetterman has also insisted that he would make a poor Republican, citing his continued support for LGBTQ rights and marijuana legalization.

Now, however, Fetterman has made one of the most concrete threats yet about switching parties, telling Fox News on Saturday that he was considering abandoning the Democratic Party if they opt for new leadership in the chamber. In the wake of growing voter outrage about standing up to Trump, Sen. Chuck Schumer is facing a rare challenge as incoming Majority Leader from Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who has won acclaim from voters for his desire to take on the administration and its cruelest policies.

Fetterman is among the incumbent senators who have thrown their support behind Schumer, who is, like the Pennsylvania lawmaker, also a staunch supporter of Israel.

"Yeah, absolutely. It would be troubling if my caucus elects someone like Van Hollen that has really made his name being very … hostile to Israel," Fetterman said during his appearance on Fox News. “Both in the House now and the Senate now, their first instincts are to punish Israel and to withhold these kinds of aid. Why isn’t it your first instinct to say, ‘Let’s hold Iran accountable?’”

He added further: "I'm frustrated by the gas prices. It's terrible Americans have to suffer, but if you want to blame the Trump administration, I continue to blame the Iranians as well too. They could find a way forward for peace. It's a political loser, absolutely, but that's a country over party... I hope we're going to embrace bipartisanship and look for solutions for the last two years. And if you just turn it into a circus of constant hearings about payback, that's a lost opportunity."

Fetterman is widely expected to face major primary challenges when he is up for reelection in 2028, and is also expected to lose his potential reelection bid, given his cratering approval ratings from Democratic voters.

Sarah Longwell, publisher of the anti-Trump conservative outlet, The Bulwark, is a champ at corralling Trump-voting political focus groups for surveys. So far this year, Longwell’s in-depth interviews have painted an accurate picture of the midterm devastation that Republicans should have seen coming.

Her latest surveys out of deep-red Mississippi, however, suggest the king of the party, President Donald Trump, has been demoted by MAGA to the position of court jester.

“I have such a poor opinion now of Trump due to – I mean … ‘He's a clown,’ said one Trump voter who was angry enough to swing toward the state’s Democratic candidate in deep red Mississippi. “And I know Cindy Hyde-Smith just all of her billboards were of her hugging Trump. And so that was the main reason that I went with Colom instead. I don't remember who it was that said it, but she's definitely gotten rich since she's been up there. And she's only out for herself and what matters most to her. And so I'm hoping this guy will be different.”

Another white woman speaking to Longwell said she was a strong Republican who had actually “voted for Cindy Hyde Smith the first time years ago,” but she could not abide voting for her again because Hyde-Smith “is Trump's yes-person.”

Other Trump voters said they were revolting because of the taint of corruption currently suffusing the White House and the impossible wealth the Trump family has amassed in just two years thanks to their ability to exploit the White House.

“I know that he's got, he has family members that are tied to Kalshi and Polymarket (where Donald Trump Jr. served on Polymarket's advisory board). It's very, very self-serving,” said one former Trumper.

“He seems to be, you know, a full-fledged narcissist,” remarked another Trump voter who has since turned on the president — as well as his Republican Party by pointedly voting Democrat. “I think it's also affecting him in that because he knows he can't be president again, he's just doing whatever he wants to do. It seems like he's making a lot of money off of being president.”

“And also look at all of his family members,” she continued. “I mean, the son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And I know one of his sons, Donald Trump Jr., got remarried and there was all this controversy about the [money] that was being spent. And so, yeah, I'm just not happy with him at all.”

“You may not go into office corrupt, but unfortunately, the odds of you do end up corrupt,” said another Trump voter who rebelled against Trump by supporting Colom -- despite still being in “love” with other notable Republican figures. “I love Marco Rubio. I love Harold Ford Jr., out of Memphis. I mean, I love Jim Jordan, but they're probably the only three good guys out of it. I mean, even Congressman Harold Ford says there's so much corruption in Washington, D.C. that you can cut it with a with a dull butter knife.”

But all that corruption has a face on it, and it appears to be the guy in the White House. So much so that many of the Trump voters who turned on the GOP this month did it specifically to check his corruption.

“I do hope that with the Democrats taking over, that means they'll keep him in check better,” said one woman.

“Do I think Trump's a great person? Hell no,” replied another former Trumper. “I know he's a self-righteous, narcissistic, whatever. We all know who he is at this point, and we all supported him for a while. We've seen this show.”

Trump's Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, attempted to hold a new press conference about Friday's nationwide grounding disaster, but was delayed after the address was beset with technical issues, leading CNN pundits to trash the incident as "frankly, embarrassing."

On Friday, the FAA ordered all flights in the U.S. to be grounded, with Duffy later claiming in a press conference that the agency's machinery "got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data." The shutdown ultimately lifted after four hours at around 8:15 p.m., the longest of its kind since 9/11, causing around 10,000 flights to be canceled. Duffy also claimed that such issues would continue due to the FAA's aging infrastructure, and demanded billions of dollars in order to fix it.

On Saturday morning, Duffy attempted to hold another press conference on the matter, this time on his own and not flanked by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. As he tried to begin speaking, however, the audio from the speech appeared to cut in and out, and become overwhelmed by static noises, leaving the secretary once again at the mercy of technical issues.

As this new incident played out in real time, CNN's Wolf Blitzer provided some running commentary, making reference to the issues with the FAA's technology being outdated.

"They're clearly having some technical issues over there at the Department of Transportation," Blitzer said. "So there's been a pause in the statement, but we'll continue to monitor this... You heard some technical problems that were very, very audible earlier. Looks like the microphone could be a problem right there. A little awkward. Major news conference like this with the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, and the FAA administrator, Brian Bedford, about to give us some new information about this investigation into this disaster... Let's make sure that they fix that microphone. I hope it's not antiquated technology that they have there from the 70s or 80s, that it's new technology, that microphone that they can work with."

Blitzer then passed over to White House correspondent Brian Todd, who was even less forgiving of the situation.

"Wolf, it's awkward and frankly embarrassing, and really somewhat symbolic of everything that's happened over the past 24 hours," Todd said. Uh, just waiting for some answers from Sean Duffy, a lot of pointed questions coming his way and coming the way of the FAA administrator, Brian Bedford, who we have not heard from until, you know, we're going to hear from him in a few minutes, presumably. But he had not been heard from at all during this crisis, and neither has President Trump."

GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert's failed reelection bid in the midterms capped off a "grim year for MAGA women," according to a new analysis from MS NOW, exposing how little they are getting from the paradox they are trapped in.

Writing for the outlet on Saturday morning, prolific commentator and journalist Amanda Marcotte broke down how Boebert attempted to sell herself as a "contradictory" vision of femininity to male conservatives.

"She titillated the right and annoyed the left with her over-the-top performance of a MAGA man’s contradictory fantasy of a woman who is both sexually liberated and a demure wife and mother," Marcotte explained. "Boebert was the forerunner to a type that has become ubiquitous in the Trump era: Republican women who gain fame and power by submitting to extreme beauty standards, while still insisting that they are good and pious ladies. Observers dubbed their combination of heavy makeup and rumored plastic surgery 'Mar-a-Lago face.'"

Marcotte argued further that Boebert's reelection loss to Democrat and retired Naval officer Eileen Laubacher in a supposedly safe red district showed why her particular "version of MAGA womanhood was always doomed to fail: The facade did not last long."

"It quickly became evident that hers was a turbulent marriage, and she ended it in 2023," she wrote. "Later that year, she was ejected from a showing of the musical 'Beetlejuice,' and camera footage showed her and her date apparently groping each other in front of other theatergoers. Facing a possible loss in her more swingy Colorado district, she relocated to a district nearby, winning a safe Republican seat in 2024. In the 2026 blue wave, though, even that wasn’t enough to save her seat."

She continued: "Boebert’s defeat capped off a year of such women being pushed out of power, either by voters or by male GOP leaders who needed handy scapegoats. Noem proclaimed the health of her 34-year marriage to Bryon Noem, until rumors of an affair with her aide Corey Lewandowski helped lead Trump to fire her. (Both Noem and Lewandowski denied having an affair.) Mace will be leaving Congress in January after a failed bid to be her state’s governor. Leavitt gave up her podium in August... Katie Zacharia lasted only a few days this year as White House press secretary, despite being showily Christian and sporting a standard Mar-a-Lago face."

Marcotte also suggested that, in trying to create a new paradigm for conservative women, people like Boebert instead "created an impossible and oppressive standard for" them, in which they are "expected to fulfill male fantasies without having even basic reproductive rights, much less freedom of their own."

The nationwide sentiment that powered President Donald Trump’s cult-like MAGA movement is still there because Americans are still looking out for their own incomes and comfort, but the movement is a dry well for the GOP, say New York Times columnists Robert Siegel, E.J. Dionne Jr. and conservative Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney.

As indicated by their colossal midterm wallop, Republicans assumed Trump’s MAGA followers were also their followers. Apparently, they’re not, said Carney, and they never were.

“The Trump vote, the working-class white vote that Trump brought into the party, never became reliably conservative and Republican. These people weren’t made into Paul Ryan acolytes who love the idea of reforming Social Security. And frankly, they’re not the Ted Cruz vote from 2016,” Carney told Siegel and Dionne during the New York Times’ Saturday morning podcast.

Carney said analysts can reliably chart by county where people were more likely to go to church every week in the 2016 primaries — and these were the places voting for Sen. Ted Cruz, who could be the closest GOP alternative to the decaying Trump.

“[But] the places where you had the white evangelicals who don’t attend church, they were more likely to be the Trump voter. So, the less religiously observant, the less fiscally conservative — that was the Trump vote,” said Carney, “and the Republicans cannot rely on them now that Trump is leaving the stage.”

But, sadly for the GOP, Carney said the party has been selecting for loyalty to Trump, and tossing the less cultlike rejects. This means the party has not been selecting for more durable things like “conservatism or quality of candidate — and that also hurt the party.”

“So going forward, the Republicans, there’s no juice left to squeeze from MAGA. And if anybody tries to be a mini-MAGA — if JD Vance says, ‘I’m going to be the next Donald Trump’ — you can’t be the next Donald Trump,” Carney added.

Carney thanked God that Trump was one of a kind, and there was no other like him. However, this one-of-a-kind leader broke the GOP by blowing “up what existed before the consensus — the Reagan consensus that lasted for a while — but nothing has filled that space.”

And what’s tried to fill it is the bottom of the barrel, said Siegel, primarily because the party has been selecting for loyalty over intelligence or talent.

“I just want to underscore what you said about candidates. I was thinking, ‘boy, a lot of Senate Democrats who won Senate elections were lucky to have a terrible opponent,’” said Siegel. “And then it occurred to me: it’s not luck that you get Herschel Walker running for the Senate, only because loyalty and fame have been elevated to values that dwarf every other talent that a candidate might have.”

Carney said he has spoken to conservative Republican circles who want to, “get the old [genuine conservative] band back together,” but he warned that the idea of re-nominating somebody like Romney and riding him all the way to victory is “a perfidious pipe dream for conservatives” now in a populist political atmosphere.

“I think that MAGA is dead as such, because it was always rooted in a contradiction,” said Dionne, explaining that Trump paraded “his ties to very, very wealthy people,” as well as his “obsessions with things like the ballroom,” and the voters responded by “just walk[ing] away.”

“Now, does it mean that a strongly conservative wing of the Republican Party is gone? No,” added Dionne. “There’s always been that. The Tea Party, in many ways, gave birth to the MAGA movement. So, there will be a right wing of the Republican Party, but MAGA specifically defined by Donald Trump — and this odd contradiction of policies that often help the wealthiest people, but rhetoric that was directed to working people, usually using tariffs as his way in — I think that just will not work anymore.”

President Donald Trump could have taken the easy way out after his resounding rejection from voters, but according to the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America, he has instead opted to double down on his most "haphazard, ill-conceived, [and] incompetent" ways.

In the latest episode of the popular liberal podcast, co-hosts and former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer opened the show with a montage of Trump's new reactions to the "blue wave" that wiped out the GOP in the midterms. In it, Trump claimed once again that his absence from the ballot was the reason Republicans lost so badly, and also claimed that, despite all the evidence of his own toxic approval ratings, his "level of popularity maybe is higher now than it was."

Favreau also shared Trump's recent Truth Social post calling Democrats "corrupt and evil," despite his previous indications that he might be willing to work with them. All of this, he argued, was yet more evidence that Trump has ultimately refused to learn anything at all from the midterms.

"So, now that we know for certain that this 80-year-old dog will not be learning any new tricks, how do you see Trump's last two years playing out?" Favreau, the former director of speechwriting for Barack Obama, asked. "What can we expect from our lame adult duck of a president?"

"I think there was a world in which Trump would sunset, and I mean that in every sense of the word, quietly on his presidency and just kind of — not that he could ever fade in the background, but he just really focused on his true passions of home renovation and self-enrichment and just kind of did that and spent less time trying to remake the federal government, prosecute his enemies, implement some sort of agenda, deport everyone you could possibly deport," Pfeiffer, a former seniors comms advisor to Obama, responded.

He continued: "And it seems like he's chosen the latter path where he's going to, in his own haphazard, ill-conceived, incompetent way, continue to just double and triple down on all the things that got him into this mess. Like, obviously, he was never going to be self-reflective in any way possible. He's not had any moment of introspection his entire adult or, frankly, child life. But the extent to which he is just totally blowing past what happened — that he has apparently convinced himself, I guess, that it's not his fault he lost... And so I think we're just going to end up with a lot of what we've had before just done more erratically and more incompetently than even than before."

No fan of defeat, President Donald Trump appears to be taking his recent political beat-down very badly, reports the Guardian.

“Political obituary writers have been swift to describe him as a lame duck, defanged lion or cornered animal in the wake of the midterms. Democrats’ 13 percentage point victory was the second biggest of any midterm election since 1942, and the party conquered the Republican bastions of Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas,” reports the Guardian.

And the root of the Trump Party rout was obvious as the president’s eight-month war in Iran sent fuel prices soaring and tariffs blasted the cost of living into the stratosphere.

“The 80-year-old president’s response has swung wildly between conciliation, aggression and farce,” according to the Guardian, citing Trump presenting (possibly by accident) “violent fighter and warrior” Dana White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship with the job of White House press secretary, before bizarrely calling the invite a joke.

But the farce and insanity also apparently involves a fair bit of duck and cover, according to people familiar with Trump.

Miles Taylor, a whistleblower and Homeland Security analyst from the first Trump administration, told the Guardian that the finale of the Trump show “will certainly be weirder because Donald Trump was always going to end the administration with the bottom of the barrel appointees,” as suggested by Hillary Clinton.

“Like any wannabe autocrat, you end up in the figurative bunker at the end of the regime with the most hardcore loyalists, which tend to be the people who are willing to contort themselves into whatever shape the leader wants,” said Taylor. “These are the people who have no scruples and are willing to carry out the president’s most extreme edicts and, in some cases, are the ones who have been goading him for almost a decade to do the most extreme things.”

Trump’s new Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is a prime example, said Taylor, speaking of his experience with Miller in Trump’s first term. “[H]e was a guy that was all too willing to walk up to the line of the law and then leap over it and dare the courts to rein us in. That was literally the type of thing he said to me on multiple occasions.”

“One of my biggest fears about this next two years is: will Donald Trump cause the ultimate constitutional crisis by defying judicial orders, including from the supreme court, if he doesn’t get his way? I see it as very possible because he’s got a team around him that might be willing to make the case of why that would be justified,” said Taylor.

And Taylor said the chaos of Trump’s next two years could pale in comparison with what he does in his latter two years, when it comes to foreign policy — and that’s after he launched a disastrous and unprovoked war on Iran.

“Here are things to look for. Does Nato survive this period? Does the United States actually try to go seize more territory?” asked Taylor. “Both of those are things that Donald Trump has talked about doing and been walked back by advisors on over the course of two terms. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.”

And despite their historic losses, the Guardian reports Republicans show little sign of revolt against Trump, or even a willingness to openly blame him for their misfortune.

“On Capitol Hill this week the party effectively killed the attempt to impeach Hegseth while also electing Jim Jordan, a pugnacious ally of the president, as its minority leader for the next Congress,” reports the Guardian.

New Republic Editor-in-Chief Win McCormack says President Donald Trump’s power was bound to collapse. He came into the business world and political office with a set of “misguided and inflexible beliefs and habits, instilled in him first by a stern and un-loving father.” But his unwillingness to learn new things shot him down the path of failure.

McCormack cites the words of Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, who said Trump was raised by a “cold, ruthless, mercenary father and a largely absent and sickly mother.” And that absence of love in the household is the defining characteristic Trump’s upbringing. This, in turn, was fortified by the “ruthless and unprincipled” Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

“The essence of Cohn’s tutelage of Donald: No matter what, no matter how wrong you might be or turn out to be about a given matter or issue, you must never bend, never give up your adherence to a position, no matter how misguided it might turn out to be,” said McCormack.

And Trump stuck with it. The resulting self-absorption created a man who does “not brook advice from other people as to what he should or should not do in a given circumstance,” said McCormack.

Trump allegedly hated when smarter people than him, like retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, would offer advice contrary to his own inclination. So, in his second term, McCormack said “he stacked his Cabinet with pliant, mediocre individuals who would never dare challenge his inclinations, no matter how wayward or bizarre they might be.”

If Trump believes tariffs are paid by businesses exporting goods rather than by the U.S. consumers who buy them, he’s going to stick to that delusion no matter how many smart people try to correct him.

Similarly, after successfully kidnapping the president of Venezuela, Trump fantasized that he could subdue the “vastly larger nation of Iran, with its estimated population of 93.4 million and approximately 610,000 military personnel, including its notoriously brutal Revolutionary Guard,” said McCormack.

But instead, Trump’s attack killed the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as many of the country’s more moderate leaders who U.S. analysts believed would have been willing to strike a deal with the U.S. over Trump’s purported issue of nuclear weapons.

Marching forth, heedless of the advice of more intelligent people leads most idiot to calamity — and McCormack suggests the midterm election results speak for themselves.

So how does a mediocre and self-absorbed president crawl from that kind of wreckage?

“It appears that he may content himself with pursuing his various construction projects during the rest of his second term. Which is not to say that he won’t get up to some forms of mischief,” McCormack said. “His top priority, clearly — and one doomed to failure — is and has been trying to turn the United States back into an overwhelmingly white country; hence his attacks on all programs involving affirmative action and his relentless efforts to deport as many noncitizen residents of color in the country as possible as rapidly as possible (which may well amp up with Stephen Miller now elevated to chief of staff).”

“Beyond that, I think he aspires to reduce every aspect of excellence in the country to a level of mediocrity, which is to say, down to his very own level,” McCormack added. “And at this, I confidently predict, he will woefully fail, as he has failed so often at his major endeavors throughout his miserable life.”

Thrilling as it was to watch Donald Trump, the congressional Republicans and the MAGA movement defeated in historic style, the even better news that has emerged in the election's wake is that they suffered a sweeping cultural rejection too.

As the midterm results reveal the dimensions of the Democratic victory, it has become clear that its meaning extended beyond blue over red. What the voters declared with their choices in one contest after another was the end of the MAGA project -- again, not just as an electoral phenomenon but as war on American culture. Voters repudiated Trump's attempted restoration of white supremacy, his routine misogyny, his appeals to phony piety and to nativist bigotry, his worship of money and all the ugliness he has manifested since that trip down the escalator in 2015.

Confronted by millions of dollars in openly hateful propaganda designed to scare voters, these rainbow candidates triumphed over prejudice and fear. The nastiest Republican messages were far less effective than anyone anticipated, even with the categories of (white and male) voters usually most vulnerable to those angry emotions.

But the exceptional cases that made the faces of MAGA fanatics as red as their hats went well beyond that handful. Literally dozens of surprisingly successful candidates, whose races haven't quite risen to headline status, showed how thoroughly Americans repudiated Trump's ideology in all its forms.

As women and minorities expanded their political and cultural power, so did other categories inimical to Trumpian idiocy, including scientists, doctors, union workers, veterans, gays and lesbians, and even beleaguered trans people.

In Alabama of all places, a Democratic software engineer will be the first transgender woman elected to the state legislature, flipping a seat in the House of Representatives despite a noxious gender-baiting campaign against her. Arizona chose the first Native American woman for statewide office. Nevada chose its first Black governor, and so did Wisconsin. Georgia voters didn't just choose their first Black and woman governor (while reelecting their first Jewish senator), but they also elected the first Black woman with a science Ph.D. to Congress, Emory University microbiologist Jasmine Clark.

Trump political adviser Roger Stone told us long ago that in politics, "hate is a stronger motivator than love." His depressing maxim appears to have maxed out, at least for now.

No election victory is ever final, and a Republican presidential campaign led by the likes of JD Vance could certainly revive the resentments exploited in Trump's rise. But the 2026 midterms reminded us of something we had almost forgotten -- that Americans can still transcend the poisonous and petty politics of this president.

President Donald Trump spent the last six months predicting voters would bolster his Republican rubber stamp in Congress and allow him to march through the remaining two years of his second term, unhindered by Democratic snooping. But the voters did not deliver, and Trump is not taking reality well, reports Slate.

Slate senior editor Jim Newell said voters can expect the newly shaken president to pour even more of the chaos he has been slinging for the last two years.

“We’re keeping our eyes peeled for a surprise of some sort,” reports Newell on Saturday. “Which Cabinet official might either decide or have decided for them that they should be replaced before Democrats take over the Senate confirmation process? (We’ve flagged one possibility later in the newsletter. Hint: He and his family once dropped by Jeffrey Epstein’s island for lunch.) Which other weird demands no one has previously thought of will Trump drop in a 2 a.m. ‘Truth,’ and from which TV show will he get the idea? Will Susan Collins, who has never missed a vote in 30 years, say ‘f—— it’ and miss a vote? Maybe we should make a bingo card.”

Meanwhile, what’s preparing to rule in Republicans’ new minority is more GOP extremism, not sanity, according to Slate.

“House Republicans’ selection of Rep. Jim Jordan, the combative, far-right jabbermouth, as their incoming party leader is a perfect summation of how small and insular the GOP conference will be in the next Congress,” said Newell. “All House Republican candidates who had to spend even one joule of energy trying to appeal to swing voters lost their elections in the tsunami; the ~175 or so who survived basically all believe in Pizzagate. Jordan’s promotion isn’t a story of how a one-time factional bomb thrower remade himself into a leader with broad appeal. It’s that his faction is now the only one left.”

Regardless, Newell said “come January, Republicans in Washington will cede metric tons of political power to the Democrats,” and how Republicans plan to spend their remaining time in power is still largely a question — because their puppet master in the White House had been setting their agenda before he wandered off.

“It’s gone overlooked among postelection analysis, but Republicans have a sizable lame-duck agenda planned between now and the end of the year,” said Newell.

Their biggest priority, so far, is filling every vacancy on the federal judiciary that they can, which amounts to about two dozen seats, because Democrats will likely stonewall any additional far-right Trump’s nominees flooding courts after December.

“Most Senate floor time will be devoted to this,” said Newell, adding that this will inevitably require some fast work in the Judiciary Committee.

Trump is ordering congressional Republicans to slip the Pentagon an extra $350 billion (on top of its regular annual funding of more than $1 trillion), but that kind of generosity would require a problematic party-line reconciliation bill — and neither the GOP or Trump should get their hopes up for that, said Newell.

“Senate Republicans’ majority is going to slim to 52 votes when Sherrod Brown replaces Ohio Sen. Jon Husted in December (thanks to a special election), said Newell. Plus, a last-ditch reconciliation bill would deep-six a bigger government funding deal that the GOP has already hashed out with Democrats.

“Buckle up,” said Newell.

President Donald Trump's "apparent neurological decline" is not showing any signs of improvement, according to one psychologist, and it may be causing him to retreat from his usual press gaggle appearances, to avoid things like his recent "incoherent mess" of a speech.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in body language, who also makes a series of YouTube videos in which he uses his professional insights to examine the behavior of public figures. Many of his recent videos have concerned Trump, with Garrison suggesting that the president is suffering a severe decline, possibly accelerated by a stroke.

In his latest video from Friday evening, Garrison examined a speech Trump delivered for Veterans Day, explaining how it exposed "more signs of President Trump's apparent neurological decline," as he was "struggling tremendously" while attempting to deliver his words. Garrison also noted that, as far as he could tell, the president has been making fewer public press appearances in the wake of the midterms, with a preference for "more pre-recorded interviews," with the Wednesday speech giving a possible reason as to why this might be.

"Anytime he deviates from the teleprompter, he struggles tremendously," Garrison explained. "This is within the first few seconds of him speaking. He is already struggling. He can't articulate himself well. He doesn't even seem to comprehend what he's reading very well."

Trump continued to struggle throughout the clips Garrison examined, while also making strange, nonsensical remarks, including one reference to the "jungles" of Afghanistan while discussing a particular soldier's service.

"What you're seeing is that he's just saying whatever random fragments of words come to his mind," Garrison said. "Jungles being stepped on, all of this, he seems to have no comprehension of what he's talking about. And we see this over and over again. As soon as he goes off script, he no longer makes any sense."

He continued later: "So, he very awkwardly and clumsily just says 'evil group' when talking about the Taliban. It's the strangest speech he's given in a while... Once again, the way that he is saying this is very peculiar. 'Terrorists all.' It's just odd... And now, you notice when he tried to say 'eardrums,' he could not get the words out. And it wasn't just that he was tripping up on his words. It seemed to be there was some sort of event that was preventing his ability to speak clearly."

Another odd thing Garrison noted about the Veterans Day speech was the lack of Trump's typical "glowing orange makeup," a change he called "highly unusual."

The New York Times reports the “America First” president is becoming a “dodging imprisonment” president as Democrats prepare to take Congress and fulfill the legislative body’s role of scrutinizing the White House.

“In his first term, President Trump approached congressional investigations with a strategy of resisting and stonewalling, hoping to stall the inquiries until Democrats ran out of time,” reports the Times. “But in anticipation of Democrats’ return to control of Congress in his second term, Mr. Trump has embarked on an even more aggressive maneuver: threatening to treat some legislative oversight as a potential crime.”

This tactic, said the Times, is expected to be “part of an all-out effort by the White House to block Democratic congressional oversight over the next two years.”

The top lieutenant protecting Trump’s backside will be Trump’s new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said the Times, “a political brawler with extensive experience on Capitol Hill.” His effort “will be bolstered by a Justice Department and a White House Counsel’s Office that have been quietly laying the groundwork” for a protracted war. Rather than being the leader of a nation, the Times said Trump and his allies will adopt the nearly full-time role of preventing Democrats “from getting access to its decision-making and scrutinizing the actions of top officials and powerful people, in and out of government.”

Trump, according to reports, is hotly concerned that some of his biggest financial supporters who helped enrich his family in the last two years or helped finance his prized construction projects “will be targeted, according to aides and his public statements.”

“The White House is bracing for a spate of investigations, and officials say they are ready to punch back,” according to the Times. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel quietly published an opinion a few months ago telling staff that even communications by those outside government could be covered by executive privilege if they concerned Trump and his top aides.

And The Times reports staff for GOP lawmakers who survived the midterm bloodbath will likely be acting as deputies of the Trump DOJ to help the department respond to Democrats’ subpoenas, records requests and accusations. Rachel Jag, a former staff member to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) “is overseeing a large staff, but the department is seeking experienced lawyers to fill out what are expected to be high-workload jobs,” reports the Times.

But good luck with that, said the Times, because the DOJ has been hit by a wave of departures in the aftermath of Trump’s politicization of the department.

White House spokesman Lauren Bis, meanwhile, has already hit a scathing tone before Democrats even assume their majority in January, telling the Times: “If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people.”

But top Democrats are hungry to take on the policing role that the Republican Congress abdicated, said the Times, and they have “shown no indications they are intimidated or plan to slow down.”

Rather, they have “already sent letters to scores of potential targets of investigations, on everything from cuts to scientific research to donors for Mr. Trump’s White House ballroom,” the Times said. And the White House anticipates “an unrelenting pace of oversight.”

President Donald Trump could not get enough of touting his roaring economy, even as midterm voters just didn’t feel it.

But over on the other side of the Atlantic, analysts and economists are wincing in anticipation of a large economic fireball that apparently will be big enough to be visible at the Thames.

“When you run money in fiscal policy this hot in this stage in the economic cycle, I can tell you it will end in tears,” said Andrew Neil, presenter of The Andrew Neil Report on The Times Radio Friday podcast.

While campaigning in 2024, President Donald Trump pledged to eliminate the entire national debt in just one term. And he insisted he’d do it without cutting “one penny” from Social Security or Medicare — with nothing more than manic economic growth, crypto, and tariffs. But critics are calling Trump’s “absurd” plans “fantasies,” while Neil says the bill is coming due with disastrous consequences.

“In the late stages of this economic cycle monetary policy and fiscal policy are both running hot hot, hot,” complained Neil to Gerard Baker, columnist at The Times and editor at large at The Wall Street Journal. “You don't run hot on both [of these] at the end of an economic cycle. You’re supposed to run both after we've hit an economic recession, then you run things hot.”

Broad money is the sum of all liquid financial instruments held by money-holding sectors, and it makes a good unit of measurement for an economy's money supply. But Neil said America’s broad money definition is “now rising by 7 percent, which he calls “a hell of a lot.”

“Plus, the deficit is at least 6.5 percent, probably headed for 7 percent of GDP,” said Neil.

But the recent election is not necessarily the economy’s salvation because Neil said a divided government will only make spending worse worse because of all the horse trading necessary to pass a budget.

“The Trumpies will say ‘give us more for defense and you can have more for health.’ Or ‘give us more for the border wall and you can have more for welfare.’ And then both get more as a result and the deficit will get even worse,” said Neil. “Either all the economics that I've been taught all my life since university has been wrong and a waste of time or something big is coming, regardless of AI. When you run money in fiscal policy this hot in this stage in the economic cycle, I can tell you it will end in tears.”

Worse, Neil said a “nightmare scenario” is brewing with AI if the boom goes bust—which seems more and more likely.

“The FED will only have limited room to maneuver [to save the economy], not only because its interest rates are already running high but because inflation is still running high and we have the terrible, terrible specter of stagflation [because] the fiscal situation is already completely out of control,” said Neil.

“If you thought last week's election was a steady transition to the post-Trump world and that it would convey Trump peacefully to his retirement, you're going to be in for a bit of a shock,” said Baker. “Fasten your seatbelts on the political front and on the economic front. It's going to be wild.”

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Conservative writer Nick Catoggio says the Republican Party is in a pickle. They desperately need someone to blame for the party’s historic collapse last week, but the party is filled with “dead-end Trump apologist[s]” and can’t bring itself to put the blame where it belongs.

“You can’t blame the man responsible. Your political identity, if not your entire personality, rests on the belief that saving the country somehow required handing over the Republican Party to a corrupt authoritarian game-show host,” said Catoggio. “To fault Donald Trump for embarrassing the American electorate into painting the map blue would be tantamount to admitting you’re an imbecile.”

They also can’t blame J.D. Vance because nobody pays attention to vice presidents. And in any case, Republicans are almost as invested in Vance as they are in Trump. They also can’t blame House Speaker Mike Johnson, said Catoggio, because “Johnson is less an actual human being than a sock puppet with the president’s arm up his backside. Blaming him for GOP failures is like having a beef with Jim Henson and blaming Kermit the Frog.”

“To find a useful scapegoat for the GOP’s drubbing, you need to find a figure within the party who’s in a position of power yet isn’t ideologically aligned with the Trumpist project. There aren’t many of those left. In fact, there’s only one,” said Catoggio, and the knives are already out for him.

The big argument is that Senat Leader John Thune failed to pass the SAVE America Act, the Trump bill that would have required millions of Americans to produce proof of citizenship to register or reregister to vote. It doesn’t matter that Trump’s “own voters could have been hit disproportionately hard by the procedural burden” of it, Catoggio said.

Thune doesn’t take the blame, having run to Fox News and demanded: “what could we have done differently?”

That’s a shocking position for a leader after sustaining “the worst electoral beating since Watergate,” said Catoggio. “There’s nothing Thune could have done over the past two years to better serve his party or his country except stand around looking constipated while the president cannibalized legislative power, reducing Congress from a co-equal branch of government to a squalid Russian Duma?”

Thune gave Trump almost everything he wanted, Catoggio argues.

“On John Thune’s watch, Trump launched a major war without congressional authorization, nominated laughably unfit cretins to lead the government’s essential agencies, monetized the presidency for himself and every crony attached to him, and turned federal law enforcement into a vindictive joke. The Senate majority leader and his members did nothing about any of it and in some cases actively enabled him, like when it confirmed Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Cabinet positions,” he said. “… By doing next to nothing to stop the president from governing America like a lower-IQ Viktor Orbán, Thune ensured that blame for an electoral drubbing would fall squarely on Trump himself …”

But doing next to nothing also guaranteed that voters saw no difference between Trump and his party’s candidates for the House and Senate, he added.

“When I say that Republicans lost this election because of Thune, that’s what I mean. He and his members offered no vision of right-wing government distinct from Trump’s, so Americans quite reasonably punished them for the president’s sins,” he said “… That’s the way John Thune and his members wanted it. Blame them for the result.”