Another Lost War

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic:

President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker—diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.

The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations.

Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me. Trump, they said, has privately denounced Iran hawks, some of whom are among his closest allies in the Republican Party, for questioning the strength of the agreement. Within the administration, there is a divide on the deal, but Trump sided with those advocating for the war to wind down, no matter the terms, as fears mount about the economic toll on Americans and the political costs for Republicans in the midterms.

Trump’s own anger masks a desperate desire to find an off-ramp from a conflict that did not go the way he had planned, an outcome that has threatened to leave the United States—and Trump—reduced in the eyes of the world. For a decade, Trump has dominated the global stage and wielded extraordinary executive power. But now he is saddled with low poll numbers and unhappy Republicans, and he may soon have to contend with a Democratic Congress. His evolution into a lame duck is accelerating, and the political world is poised to soon look beyond him and focus on the 2028 contenders hoping to succeed him. World leaders, who were once cowed, have begun to defy him. Trump’s defeat in Iran, and the way he lost, may hasten his irrelevance.

Trump DOJ Going After Newsom

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.  Just as an authoritarian regime would, it is abusing the legal process to punish opponents.

Melanie Mason and Dustin Gardiner at POLITICO:

Gavin Newsom is seizing on the political upside of his newly elevated place on Donald Trump’s enemies list.

The California governor mounted an aggressive response to revelations that he is facing multiple investigations by the Trump Justice Department — breaking the news in a video that also bluntly acknowledged his likely presidential ambitions, rallying Democratic allies to his side, and sending out a fundraising appeal within hours.

The defiant posture gave Newsom the chance to disclose the probes on his own terms — and bask in being lifted, once again, to the role of president’s chief antagonist.

“Persecution by Trump — or even prosecution by his weaponized Department of Justice — is a badge of honor to Democrats, kind of like the political version of a Purple Heart,” said Garry South, a veteran Democratic strategist who’s worked with Newsom on past campaigns. “The idiot has already made a martyr, and national figure, out of Newsom by attacking him and calling him childish names. So, of course this revelation will just add to Newsom’s standing as a 2028 presidential candidate.”

The probes echoed those of California Sen. Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey: Democrats whose feuds with Trump escalated from social media spats to DOJ targets. So far, the retribution campaign has resulted in embarrassing setbacks for the administration instead of successful prosecutions — and has lifted those in Trump’s crosshairs to folk hero status among the Democratic base.

Newsom’s team is hoping he will enjoy a similar boost. Already, the governor’s pugnacious posture toward Trump during last year’s immigration crackdown in Los Angeles and his prescient foray into the redistricting wars sent his approval numbers soaring and landed him among the top contenders in early 2028 polls.

Going After Habeas Corpus

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan at NYT:

Last spring, Will Scharf, an arch-conservative lawyer serving as the White House staff secretary, wrote a secret memo to the chief of staff that reflected growing unease in the West Wing about one of the extreme measures being weighed by Stephen Miller, the powerful adviser driving President Trump’s deportation campaign.

Dated April 29, 2025, and stamped “confidential,” the memo was careful and lawyerly but amounted to a warning against end-running the rule of law. The subject line read: “THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS.”

Habeas corpus — the centuries-old right to force the government to justify, before a judge, why it has locked a person up — is enshrined in Article I of the Constitution. Mr. Scharf’s memo, in its unassuming way, was a blinking red warning light. The second Trump White House was deliberating an explosive new claim of presidential power: the suspension of habeas rights for unauthorized immigrants.

The suspension of habeas corpus has occurred just a handful of times in U.S. history, and always under the most dire circumstances of war or invasion. Yet to a greater degree than previously known, administration officials, encouraged by Mr. Trump, actively weighed taking that step in the early months of his second term — this time to accelerate the mass deportation of immigrants in the country illegally.

...

Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.

...
But the documents reflected alarm among a small group of senior aides. They felt that Mr. Miller’s eagerness to test the limits of executive power — and to accuse other branches of encroaching on it, echoing a president who bristled at any constraint — risked steering the administration, and the country, in a dangerous direction.

...

“The Constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Mr. Miller said. “So it’s an option we are actively looking at.”

Mr. Miller was intentional about his choice of words. The president had been trying to recast the immigration surge across the southern border during the Biden years as an invasion by enemy forces — a highly dubious claim intended to unlock extraordinary powers, intended only for wartime, to repel the migrants. Mr. Miller kept using the word “invasion” even after border crossings had fallen to multidecade lows.

“Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” Mr. Miller added to the reporters, a not-so-subtle warning to federal judges to give the president the leeway he was seeking.

After weeks of uproar, and disagreement between government officials on whether it could be done, the proposal eventually faded from view. Asked about it later, Mr. Trump appeared to acknowledge discussing suspending habeas corpus, but downplayed that the discussions were serious, and suggested it was not worth doing so just then.

The Nodfather, Age 80

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  In 2024, Trump was already showing signs of cognitive decline. It's getting worse.

 Annie Linskey at WSJ:

President Trump closed his eyes and appeared to nod off while seated in a suite this week at an NBA Finals game in New York City as cameras caught him snacking on french fries and pizza. He returned to the White House after 2 a.m.

By 10 a.m. the next day, he offered a lengthy critique of a recently published Wall Street Journal editorial to a reporter who called him on his cellphone, and said the downing of a U.S. Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz “wasn’t a big deal.” Hours later, he ordered strikes on Iran in retaliation for the incident.

As Trump approaches his 80th birthday on Sunday, he and his advisers have made a strategic decision to turn the president into an omnipresent figure in American life, drawing a contrast with his octogenarian predecessor, Joe Biden. Trump makes regular marathon appearances in the Oval Office, he answers reporters’ cold calls and he tees off on social media at all hours of the day and night.

fThe result is that Americans are seeing more of both the good and the bad of an aging president.

In question-and-answer sessions that sometimes last more than 30 minutes, the president spars with reporters, delivering one-liners that ripple across cable news and the internet.

But cameras often zoom in on his bruised hands, stooped posture and closed eyes. And he sometimes trips over his words and confuses details. He has referred to Greenland as Iceland. He has called the Strait of Hormuz the Strait of Iran. And he has mixed up recent conflicts in South America and the Middle East.

Schumer Redux

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Jordain Carney at POLITICO:

Chuck Schumer has served as a punching bag for angry Democrats for more than a year — taking flak on everything from his 2026 recruiting to his handling of government funding talks.

But with about five months until the midterm elections, the Senate minority leader is gently starting to punch back — pointing out how some of his bets are paying off as his party
moves within striking distance of taking back the majority in November.

“There’s no victory lap to take in June,” he said in an interview in his Capitol office suite.


But he ticked through moves he oversaw in the past year — from leading opposition to GOP safety-net cuts to picking shutdown fights over health care and immigration enforcement funding and orchestrating national intervention in several Senate primaries — that he argued have strengthened Democrats’ hand for the midterms and beyond.

“We made a lot of strategic decisions that got us to this place — it didn’t happen by accident,” Schumer said. “I knew from the beginning that if we recruited strong candidates, found paths to victory, focused on the issues the American people cared about, and forced … the Republicans, to carry Trump’s water, we’d be in much better shape, and that has happened.”

Trump Loves Inflation, and There's a Lot to Love

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Raquel Coronell Uribe at NBC:

President Donald Trump embraced an unlikely foe Wednesday: inflation.

Asked by reporters whether he was concerned about new economic data that showed inflation last month surged to the highest rate since early 2023, Trump praised the government figures.

“The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over ... when the war is over, it’s coming down, it’s going to come down like a rock,” he said, referring to U.S. efforts to secretly get oil ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

Democrats pounced on Trump’s remarks, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., accusing him of not caring about the rising cost of living for Americans.

Trump later argued that his words were taken out of context, telling the New York Post what he loved was how inflation wasn’t higher. Trump said that “the numbers are much lower than anticipated” and predicted prices would plunge once the war is over.

He also predicted that the current inflation rate would be the peak in the Iran war, which began Feb. 28.

One day later... Aimee Picchi at CBS News:

Inflation facing U.S. businesses surged in May to its highest level since November 2022 amid higher energy prices stemming from the Iran war.

The Producer Price Index, which registers inflation before it reaches consumers, soared 6.5% in May from a year ago, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. On a monthly basis, the PPI rose 1.1% from April, a faster pace than the 0.6% increase forecast by economists polled by financial data firm FactSet.

The hotter-than-expected reading comes a day after the Consumer Price Index surged in May to an annual rate of 4.2%, its fastest pace in more than three years. Although the PPI doesn't directly signal changes in consumer prices, it can feed into broader inflation if businesses pass those costs on to customers.

Inflation and Iran Mid-2026

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Madison Hoff at Business Insider:

US annual inflation accelerated to 4.2% last month, new consumer price index data showed, as expected. That adds to the recent trend of inflation speeding up, reaching the highest rate since April 2023.

Inflation outpaced wage growth for the second straight time. Average hourly earnings increased 3.4% in May from a year ago. Real earnings fell 0.7% over the year and 0.1% over the month.

Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, expects inflation to remain elevated in the near term because of supply chain disruptions in the Middle East, which could mean the trend of inflation surpassing wage growth persists.

"The dividing line between the haves and the have nots is dictating whether consumers are able to keep with rising price levels," Hamrick said in an email to Business Insider. He pointed to the Fed's May Beige Book, which said consumer spending is "increasingly bifurcated across income groups amid affordability pressures," with higher-income households less affected.

Nicole Bachaud, an economist at ZipRecruiter, said wage growth falling short of inflation is putting financial strain on middle-income households. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City echoed that sentiment in the May Beige Book, noting one firm said that "middle-income households are squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it."

Amy Sherman at PolitiFact:

March 1: Trump said in a speech that "combat operations continue at this time in full force, and they will continue until all of our objectives are achieved." When The New York Times asked him how long the United States and Israel would continue the attacks, Trump said: "Well, we intended four to five weeks."

March 2: Trump said at a White House ceremony: "We're already substantially ahead of our time projections. But whatever the time is, it's OK." He repeated that the initial projection was "four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that."

In a press conference, Hegseth said, "This is not Iraq. This is not endless. ... This is the opposite. This operation (has) a clear, devastating, decisive mission: destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes."

Hegseth added: "Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take. Four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up, it could move back.

March 5: Trump said at an event to celebrate soccer champions Inter Miami CF: "The United States military, together with the wonderful Israeli partners, continues to totally demolish the enemy far ahead of schedule and at levels that people have never seen before."

Hegseth said, "Our munitions are full up, and our will is ironclad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control as long as it takes to ensure the United States of America achieves these objectives."

March 7: Trump told reporters on Air Force One, "We're winning the war by a lot. We've decimated their whole evil empire. It'll continue, I'm sure, for a little while."

He called it "a short excursion."

When asked how long he expected the attacks to continue, Trump didn’t directly answer the question. "Well, I think we've accomplished more in one week than anyone thought possible."

On Truth Social he said victory already occurred. "We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!"

The list goes on, but you get the idea.