true the vote

The true nature of President Donald Trump's unusually close relationship with his young personal aide, Natalie Harp, has been the subject of much rampant speculation, and now, a doctor has shared a new theory about her role in Trump's life, related to his declining health.

Adam James is a licensed physical therapist with years of experience working in the home healthcare sector, giving him extensive up-close knowledge of patients dealing with physical and cognitive decline. He is also a prolific online content creator, better known by the handle "Epistemic Crisis," who has used his professional insights to try to explain the issues that Trump is dealing with and suggest where his condition might be heading next.

On Sunday, he was interviewed in a new video from former Democratic strategist turned progressive political commentator, Keith Edwards. He argued that Harp's role in Trump's inner circle, despite the media frenzy, remains underreported, and pressed James on what he believes might be going on.

Pulling from his own experience, James suggested that Harp is providing a very specific service to Trump: "a dementia home healthcare aide."

"So she is the insulation between him and what is actually happening in the world and his administration," he explained. "She filters every piece of information that gets to him or does not get to him. And they're doing this to prevent his demented paranoia and agitation from derailing the entire day."

He added: "She, for whatever damn reason, let the president see negative reporting on him from MS NOW and the next thing you know, he bans MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the damn White House. I don't know what she was thinking doing that because her job is to keep him calm, keep him from agitation, make it totally fine that the White House staff can't get him to focus on doing his f—— job. He doesn't care about this job; he only cares about the damn ballroom, the helipad, the triumphal arch, or whatever the hell they're calling it now."

James further argued that Harp "administers to [Trump's] hygiene needs," a claim based on his belief in the allegations about him being "horribly incontinent." He gave particular weight to the accusations of Noel Casler, who worked as a talent wrangler behind the scenes of The Apprentice and has made several claims about Trump's behavior and health, including that he is chronically incontinent and needs adult diapers.

"Noel has never been sued because they don't want that smoke in discovery, because Noel's telling the truth," James added. "And so you have to have a particular kind of person, psychologically speaking, to volunteer for this job, to accept this job, because not only are you basically caring for a child, you're wiping their a——...That's what's in that big ass bag she's carrying around. There's hygiene supplies, Depends briefs [and] what we call 'chucks,' which are the disposable, you know, hygienic barriers that you can lay on a bed or a sofa or a chair or something to, you know, attend to somebody's toileting hygiene and keep everything from being ruined on Marine One or Air Force One."

President Donald Trump's Transportation Department, which is led by his fellow former reality TV star Sean Duffy, is making it easier for airlines to rip off their customers.

"Last month, the Transportation Department announced that 10 types of flight disruptions would no longer be attributed to the air carrier," wrote The Hill reporter Addy Bink on Sunday. "Instead, the 10 disruptions, listed below, will be tracked in the new 'Section 511(b) category'”

The new disruptions include cybersecurity attacks, a baggage or cargo delay not caused by the airline's own bag system, aircraft cleaning needed after the death of a passenger, aircraft damage caused by extreme weather or foreign object debris or sabotage, overheated breaks that cause emergency procedures, medical emergencies not caused by the airline, the removal of unruly passengers, government shutdowns, airport closure due to natural events like ash or wind or wind shear and unscheduled maintenance.

The result could very easily be “quite a big blow potentially for customers,” Clint Henderson, the managing editor for The Points Guy, told Nexstar. He added, “The one that is especially outrageous to me as a consumer advocate is that if a plane goes mechanical or has maintenance issues, that is no longer considered a reason the airline would give you compensation," not even food or airline vouchers, if one of the incidents arises.

“the airline wouldn’t necessarily give you food or hotel vouchers.” He predicted there will be more flight disruptions and that passengers will need to “have a backup plan in case things go sideways.”

This is not the first time Trump has pursued policies which seem to harm the working class voters who supported him. Trump's Agriculture Department, following his 2025 executive order against subsidizing wind and solar energy, first restricted and has now effectively ended solar funding through the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), which has existed for decades so that farmers and rural businesses can sell excess power back to the grid to cut energy costs and earn extra income.

“It’s like stacking the deck against family farms, and entrepreneurial businesses in small towns that are trying to bootstrap themselves,” Matt Russell, the executive director of the Iowa Farmers Union, told Grist. “It’s picking winners and losers, and the losers are the very kinds of farms and businesses and communities that I think the vast majority of American taxpayers think that they’re investing in.”

Trump has also weakened labor unions and presided over 400,000 in job cuts, including 75,000 manufacturing jobs as well as many other jobs from working class and union-protected positions. As a labor studies scholar recently wrote for The Conversation, "For America’s unionized workforce, the overall state of the economy is bleak. Threats from AI and robotics abound. Pledges by U.S. and international corporations to invest in new plants remain largely pledges. The roughly 400,000 federal job cuts during President Donald Trump’s second term have disrupted lives. Many of these jobs were previously represented by labor unions."

The president has not spared supporters in states that overwhelmingly voted for him. An August report revealed that Trump's cuts to the federal workforce, which included 377,000 people, and noted that the hardest-hit groups were often those most likely to back Trump. Within 10 states “most of which voted for Trump in 2024 and half with sizable rural populations, the federal workforce was slashed by 25 percent or more,” reported NBC News' Ashley Mowreader on Tuesday.

Mowreader continued, “Across all departments, close to half of federal job cuts from June 2025 to January 2026 impacted more staff in states with a larger-than-average share of rural residents.”

For all the money they have been able to raise and spend over their Democratic opponents, Republicans appear to have been lighting their money on fire for all the good it has done them, with two political experts highlighting the clear evidence in recent data that proves this point.

On Sunday, Pod Save America co-host and polling analyst Dan Pfeiffer interviewed Amy Walter, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, one of the foremost election tracking and predicting firms in the U.S. Walter wrote earlier this month that the political environment for the GOP is as bad as it has been in the last 20 years, suggesting to Pfeiffer that they might both be getting flashbacks to 2006.

"We're all coming back. This feels very 2006 deja vu," Walter said. "Because you have a president with an approval rating under 40 percent, which is where George W. Bush was at this point in 2006, an unpopular war and corruption being sort of the center of the conversation in Washington. Back then it was Jack Abramoff; now, it is all of the things."

Walter also noted that, for all the hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans have raised and spent heading towards the midterms, they remain underwater in terms of approval from voters, and in some cases are worse off, all while Democrats have managed to keep their numbers above water. All of this, she suggested, is a sign that Republicans are not getting any meaningful electoral returns from burning through all of that money.

"How much money has been spent in the last three weeks in these races, right? More than millions of dollars," she said. "And if you're in Alaska or Texas or Ohio or Iowa, your goal isn't to try to win persuadable independents. You're sending signals to your base about why it's important for [them] to turn out. And thus far, I mean, to me, what's the most telling in some of the polling we've seen recently is that opinions of the Democrats remain above water, and opinions of the Republican candidates are below water, which says, boy, you've spent a lot of money, and I don't know that you're getting what you thought you were going to get from all of it."

Elsewhere in the conversation, Walter also noted that the flagging enthusiasm among Republican voters compared to others is another sign that the blue wave wipeout could be even worse than in years like 2006 and 2018, where polls suggested that the GOP base was solidly engaged enough to fend off the worst-case scenario. In 2026, with Trump's leadership having broken the spirit of many Republican voters, it is not clear that many will even bother to turn out to the polls next month.

Former supporters of President Donald Trump "can all remember where we were when we finally admitted" that he is terrible, one ashamed former MAGA follower wrote for The Spectator, who further revealed the exact moment she knew she was done with him.

Writing for the outlet on Sunday, Julie Burchill, the controversial author and columnist who until recently voiced support for conservative politics in the U.K., explained how Trump's recent social media post involving manipulated footage of a tragic tiger attack at a British zoo hit her as an "awful shock."

"After sharing online footage of this almost surreally sad event on his ‘Truth Social’ platform (with the text ‘Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT’), Trump proceeded to go full tonto by following it up with a series of after-midnight posts," she explained. "This included an AI-generated video of himself wrestling with a tiger and coming out on top, ultimately embracing it to the strains of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. Another video finds the big orange baboon comparing himself to a lion – yes, ‘the king of the jungle’ – while characterising Democrat luminaries such as Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi as ‘jackals, hyenas…barking at him, laughing at him…every once in a while the lion has to show the jackals who he is.'"

She added: "As if this unhinged take on The Jungle Book wasn’t jaw-dropping enough, there were a slew of other midnight-oil online musings. This included one wherein a voice-over makes the somewhat immoderate claim that Trump has been appointed by the Almighty as ‘caretaker’ of the world, with another dig at his nay-sayers as ‘wolves’ and ‘vipers’ – just in case we hadn’t got the anthropomorphic memo."

Burchill admitted that the posts were shocking "those of us who have talked him up over the years and – somewhat shamefully – greeted each new breach of decency with an indulgent what-a-wag/take-that-snowflakes chuckle," but stressed that it ultimately was not surprising. She noted that Trump has, over the last decade, embraced social media with "immoderate glee," calling the technology his "drug of choice," considering his lifelong abstention from things like alcohol and smoking.

"If Trump did do drugs and/or drink, he might use them as an excuse. That would be bad enough," Burchill wrote. "But to do these things in one’s right mind suggests that there is something very wrong with that mind; the phrase ‘second childhood’ occurs, when an aged person behaves in a way we might more readily associate with a badly-socialised brat. At the age of 80, Trump does seem like a particularly silly child, perhaps one who has consumed an excessive amount of E-numbers at his own birthday party and is one gummy sweet away from jumping on the table and announcing that he’s the king of the castle and those funny foreign kids are dirty rascals."

She added later: "[Trump derangement syndrome] is no excuse for my foolhardy fawning over this man. I should have drawn the line at the persistent sex-pest allegations, the ludicrous call for a ‘united Ireland’ and, more than anything, his repeated disrespect towards President Zelensky. This has now come to a head after Trump attempted to humiliate this dignified and stoic man by mocking his clothes. The US President’s cuddling up to Vladimir Putin seems to know no limits now. I’m ashamed that it took me so long to see sense; I swallowed that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ cliche to a point where I couldn’t seem to see past it. Like a long relationship you’ve invested a lot in, I’d defended him to my incredulous friends for so long that to back down would make me look like an atrocious judge of character – which I am, and always have been, and so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise."

President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, ex-UN Ambassador John Bolton, blasted his former boss on Sunday for failing to "understand" basic global politics, particularly when it comes to Ukraine.

Referring to the infamous Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, Bolton told Times Radio that "he has called people like this useful idiots. Trump really doesn’t understand what’s at stake in Ukraine. And in the past several weeks, he has been focused not on geopolitics, but on domestic American politics. He’s in deep trouble."

Bolton then pivoted to discussing domestic politics.

"The Republicans are facing a referendum on the Trump administration," Bolton told Boulton. "People are unhappy. There are gonna be substantial Republican losses. Inflation is one of the factors working against Republican candidates. Diesel fuel, gasoline are factors in that. And what Trump is trying to do is take steps to say domestically, “I’m gonna be able to bring down oil prices.” Now, none of what he’s doing with Russia will do that, but for Trump, it’s announcing the deal. It’s not necessarily the results of it."

He added, "But the international effect of what he’s doing is to give Russia an enormous favor to call in at some point, because Putin, by agreeing to this deal and other things, has given Trump a favor when Trump needs it at home. So it’s a very disturbing development all the way around."

The former Trump adviser also noted that Trump is easily manipulated, citing the president's obsequiousness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin as an example.

"If he and Vladimir Putin are good friends, he thinks US-Russia state-to-state relations are good," Bolton told Boulton. "That’s not correct for many reasons. Most importantly, because Vladimir Putin doesn’t see Trump as a friend. He sees him as an easy mark. And every time Trump, in a very needy way, comes to Putin to ask for this diesel deal or something like that, Putin’s more than happy to give it to him and put it in his pocket to call him later."

Bolton is not alone in observing that Trump is easily swayed by flattery. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright observed about Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un that “I do think that what is worrisome to me is, in an effort to be flattered by Kim Jong-un, that he gives away something that might have a longer term effect for the next administration.”

Bolton has been a frequent critic of Trump, and the president has responded by targeting Bolton through his Justice Department. After being investigated on an 18-count indictment by the Trump administration, Bolton pleaded guilty to one count of inappropriately sharing classified information.

A growing number of Republicans are declining to take part in debates against their midterm opponents, and as one campaign communications veteran wrote for MS NOW, there is a "cowardly" truth that they are actually hiding from.

Symone Sanders-Townsend is an MS NOW host and contributor who also previously worked as a political strategist and national press secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, as well as a White House spokesperson and senior advisor for former Vice President Kamala Harris. In a new piece published Sunday morning, she detailed the growing trend of Republicans ducking out of planned debates against their Democratic opponents.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, she noted, has taken part in election debates throughout his time in politics. Now, however, as polls show his current opponent, Gina Hinojosa, gaining on him, he suddenly "decided a debate is unnecessary," prompting Hinojosa to hold an event outside the governor's mansion. Elsewhere in Texas, GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton has declined to debate his increasingly popular opponent, James Talarico.

"In Florida, Republican Sen. Ashley Moody has declined to debate Angie Nixon," Sanders-Townsend wrote. "In Mississippi, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said there’s 'no point' in debating Democratic nominee Scott Colom. Why are so many Republicans making the same decision in the same election cycle?... I have some thoughts."

Sanders-Townsend highlighted her own past experience working as "deputy communications director for the Democratic nominee for governor in Nebraska" in the 2014 midterms, which she said were anything but a "pleasant" time to be a Democratic candidate. Republicans had successfully turned President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act into a heated political issue, making it "difficult to keep the conversation focused on the issues we wanted to discuss" when the conversation would invariably get wrenched towards taking Democrats to task for the ACA.

Now, the tables are turned, she argued, and Republicans are running scared at the prospect of having to answer for their capitulation to President Donald Trump and his toxic agenda.

"That is the political environment I recognize today, except Republicans are now being asked to defend the president’s agenda," Sanders-Townsend wrote. "Donald Trump unilaterally imposed tariffs, raising costs for American businesses and consumers. Then came his war of choice in Iran. Gas and diesel prices climbed, raising costs for households and businesses. And Americans are still waiting for a clear explanation of how this war will end. Where were Republicans in Congress?"

She added later: "A debate means explaining those choices — or why you didn’t challenge them — while someone a few feet away questions your answer. I can understand why a campaign might not want that. But refusing to face those questions is cowardly... A politician who treats difficult questions as optional is telling us how they understand the power they hold. Perhaps the most revealing thing about these Republicans isn’t what they might say on a debate stage. It’s what they believe they no longer have to explain."

President Donald Trump's construction plans seem to take chunks out of East Potomac Park — and online commentators are furious.

"Trump’s plan shrinks the course from 36 holes to 18 but impacts more than golfers," wrote The Washington Post's sports writer Rick Maese on X. "It eliminates Ohio Drive, historic mini golf and a grove of Japanese cherry trees — reshaping space used by thousands of cyclists, runners, anglers, bird-watchers and picnickers."

An attorney agreed with him and shared his outrage.

"This is a travesty and unlawful," wrote lawyer and former Commerce Department employee Brian McGrail. "Every Democratic presidential candidate should commit to reestablishing the public perimeter road if Trump somehow succeeds. That won't bring back the cherry blossoms, though."

American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick argued that Trump's design for his East Potomac Golf Course will inevitably impact the public park.

"This design appears to completely eliminate the much-beloved loop road and public park at Hains Point, and cut down the cherry trees which line the road," Reichlin-Melnick said. "The park is a public space used by tens of thousands of Washingtonians and heavily visited by tourists."

Even politicians began chiming in.

"The Trump Administration was clearly lying about the reasons for their mass felling of trees in East Potomac last weekend," Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) wrote on X on Sunday.

He added, "They were lying to conceal from the American people that, at a time when our country is at war, and everyone is worried about the economy and high prices, the President simply doesn’t care—he’s focused on building an upscale golf course within walking distance of the White House. And on his fancy ballroom and his memorial arch to himself."

Beyer continued, "The design he’s pursuing would block off roads and paths used by large numbers of local residents for cycling and walking, no doubt to make the area another exclusive hangout for Trump’s rich and powerful friends. And once again he’s doing all of that at great expense, on your dime."

Trump's golf course renovations have long been a source of controversy. Last week, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes rejected Trump's arguments for having cut down hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links.

"The Court concludes, on this limited record, that government officials raced to undertake the [tree-management plan] because President Trump demands haste on his redesign, and not because of some newfound zeal to implement a small part of a seven-year-old," Reyes wrote.

The president even has a controversial relationship with the game of golf itself. Sportswriter Rick Reilly has accused Trump of being an inveterate cheat.

Reilly has written that, “Among the many hilarious things about club championship #43 is that he lies so much about them he loses his place. We went from 26 to 36 overnight, then skipped 39, 40 and 41. Actual number: 0.”

President Donald Trump and his administration are abusing and spinning the traditional language of political decency to launder their radical new goals, with two legal scholars explaining for The Hill how this warping of reality is almost literally "Through the Looking Glass."

Writing for the outlet on Sunday, legal scholar David Wippman and historian Glenn C. Altschuler detailed the administration's last-minute spending of federal human rights funds on far-right pet causes "far removed" from anything that has ever been the purview of U.S. foreign policy.

"On Sept. 30, with just hours left to allocate the money in its human rights fund, the State Department directed most of it — more than $175 million — to conservative causes, many of them far removed from the traditional priorities of U.S. foreign policy," Wippman and Altschuler explained. "The recipients are not dissidents, journalists or persecuted minorities. Instead, the Trump administration has chosen to support allegedly persecuted whites in South Africa; combat supposed 'democratic backsliding' by European allies; and challenge judicial institutions in Brazil accused of censoring conservatives. One program seeks to promote Western 'civilizational values' by assisting opponents of the European Union’s 'supranational and bureaucratic overreach' and restrictions on extremist political speech."

The pair explained further that even as Trump has removed the U.S. from many mainstream global human rights initiatives, his administration has continued to co-opt the language of human rights conversations to express its new aims, creating a dangerous spin meant to warp reality and meaning to its whims.

"Nowhere is this more visible than in the State Department’s revamped annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," they explained. "Instead of focusing on torture, extrajudicial killing and political repression in authoritarian states, the reports now emphasize restrictions against 'hate speech' and extremist political parties in democratic countries, including France, Canada and Germany. Attention has been drastically curtailed to violence against women, racial and ethnic violence, gay and transgender rights, government corruption and environmental justice."

They added: "Meanwhile, the administration has largely ignored human rights violations by many pro-Trump authoritarian governments. The report on El Salvador, for example, makes the demonstrably false claim that there are 'no credible reports' there 'of significant human rights abuses.'"

On the domestic front, the approach is much the same, with the administration's much-discussed crusade against "DEI" attempting to invert the perception of programs meant to aid historically marginalized, instead painting them as marginalizing white people and men.

"The day after returning to office in 2025, President Trump issued an executive order denouncing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in government, academia and the private sector — not simply as illegal but 'dangerous, demeaning, and immoral,'" the pair explained further. "His administration dismantled such federal programs and barred them among federal contractors. He challenged race-conscious policies in higher education and private employment and launched investigations of institutions that continue to pursue diversity initiatives. After rescinding affirmative-action guidance dating to 1979 that had encouraged employers to improve opportunities for women and minorities, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission invited white men to file workplace discrimination complaints."

This entire push to force the language of legitimacy to fit their own aims has a distinct literary corollary, Wippman and Alstschuler concluded.

"In 'Through the Looking Glass' [by Lewis Carroll], Humpty Dumpty insisted to Alice that 'when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,'" the pair wrote. "The Trump administration seems determined to claim the same prerogative for its mean-spirited and damaging approach to human rights. That said, here’s hoping all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put human rights together again."

President Donald Trump's foreign policies are literally creating anarchy with his policies toward NATO and the rest of Europe, at least according to a piece in a British political newspaper published on Sunday.

" Trump is sowing the seeds for anarchy by moving America directly into Russia’s orbit, a ploy that would undermine NATO and potentially even collapse the transatlantic alliance," wrote Simon Marks, an Emmy Award-winning US commentator based in Washington DC, for The i Paper. "Two months before Trump is due to host the G20 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, he wants to solidify relations with Putin and restore him to the world’s top table."

Marks continued, "The Kremlin is still mulling Trump’s invitation to Putin. Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his G20 colleagues could be forced to decide how to respond if the Russian leader – wanted for Ukraine-related war crimes by the International Criminal Court – is walking alongside them among the palm trees in the Sunshine State."

After reviewing Trump's efforts to alleviate the economic isolation imposed on Russia since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Marks described how Russia supports Trump's policies and viewed the exempting of Russia from special sanctions as a "truly historic moment."

"Trump may well view things through the same prism," Marks argued. "His irritation with Zelensky has long been evident, and over the past week he has repeatedly characterised Ukraine as the troublemaker for refusing to solve the conflict, rather than Russia, which continues to terrorise Ukrainian civilians and demand 30 per cent of its neighbour’s territory."

Marks also pointed out that Trump's foreign policy blunders have taken a domestic political toll.

"Having relentlessly insisted that the issue of 'affordability' is a made-up concept concocted by the Democrats, blamed Ukraine for America’s economic woes rather than his fruitless war on Iran and done nothing to provide Republicans with tangible policy support in the final weeks of the midterm campaign, Trump would have been hard pressed to do more to undermine his party’s fortunes," Marks observed.

Trump's fellow conservatives often agree with commentators like Marks.

"To be clear," the conservative National Review wrote in September, "Trump was right about one big thing: that Greenland merited much more attention than it had been getting. The Arctic may not have warmed up by as much and as quickly as Al Gore and others claimed it would, but it has done so by enough to render it much more accessible than before. As a result, it is becoming a zone of geopolitical competition for its resources and, more simply, because of location, location, location. For obvious geographical reasons, that increases the already-considerable importance of Greenland to this country."

“The world’s liberal democracies had grown comfortable and complacent, like the eponymous character at the beginning of Rocky III, while the tyrannical, authoritarian, and malign regimes (the Clubber Langs of the world, if you will) grew stronger and more prepared,” wrote Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project, for the conservative publication The Dispatch in July. He was particularly alarmed that “President Trump has continued to suggest that the United States—the most powerful of NATO’s member nations—might not support its fellow members if they were attacked. Trump has even suggested that the United States might be the country doing the attacking. The Danes took his threats against Greenland so seriously that they deployed their special operations forces to the territory in preparation for an American offensive.”

President Donald Trump's chaotic control over the country is poised to hit a serious roadblock if and when Republicans lose power in the midterms, and according to a new piece from The Hill, there is one particular tool that will prove to be Democrats' secret weapon in Congress for reining him in.

Driven largely by voter disdain for Trump's leadership, Republicans are widely expected to lose much of their power in Washington, D.C., in next month's midterms. The Senate, once viewed as a safe for the GOP to retain, is becoming ever more likely to flip to Democratic control, while the House is such a foregone conclusion that some Republican lawmakers are openly admitting that retaining their majority in the chamber is impossible.

It is in the House, according to The Hill's Sudiksha Kochi, that Democrats are poised to gain control of their "greatest tool" to curb Trump's rampant presidency: the House Appropriations Committee.

"A Democratic takeover would put Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in line to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee, giving Democrats greater sway over the annual spending bills that fund federal agencies and programs," Kochi explained. "They could use the process to try to rein in President Trump’s spending priorities, attach restrictions to agency funding and scrutinize how the administration is using taxpayer dollars."

She added further: "The strategy could put Democrats on a collision course with the White House and congressional Republicans, particularly if they win a razor-thin House majority. Any spending legislation would still need enough Senate support to overcome the filibuster and eventually Trump’s signature, limiting how far Democrats could go without Republican buy-in. Still, the appropriations process would give Democrats an opening to force the administration to the negotiating table."

Kochi outlined several areas in which Appropriations Committee control would allow Democrats to subject Trump's agenda to greater scrutiny and hold his administration to account. First and foremost, she highlighted Trump's pilfering of National Parks funding to pay for his D.C. monument vanity projects, with Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat and ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, telling The Hill that there are plans to begin scrutinizing this practice.

"Another area Democrats will be focused on is defense funding, especially as the war with Iran has cost the U.S. billions of dollars," Kochi added. "Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, argued that Congress needs to 'get back to parity between nondefense and defense spending.'"

She added later: "For Trump, this is all a headache, particularly as he has repeatedly tested the limits of executive authority and sought to exert greater control over federal spending, challenging Congress’s constitutional power of the purse."