Heritage, Groypers, and the Polluted Staff Pipeline

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration was full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.

Kathy Gilsinan at POLITICO:

Conversations with four senior Republican congressional staffers, as well as think tank scholars, Heritage expats, academics who study think tanks and up-and-coming young Republicans reflected a widening generational split and mutual distrust over the issue.

“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

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“I think there is certainly a pipeline problem on the Republican side,” said E.J. Fagan, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics. Even beyond foreign policy, Fagan said that “normie expertise” has been sidelined in favor of producing “chum for the conservative media machine,” at Heritage in particular. “You’re hiring a lot of people who don’t have the chops that they used to,” he said.

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The Heritage Foundation offers a case study in how conservative talent cultivation has traditionally worked, and how it’s changed in the Trump era — including through the accommodation of viewpoints once considered fringe on the right. The institution was a major feeder organization for GOP staff jobs in D.C. for decades. A 2024 Legistorm analysis found that nearly a third of GOP congressional offices employed a Heritage alum, and the institution’s own marketing materials claim the Trump administration has adopted 64 percent of its policy ideas. The Heritage spokesperson said there are 290 Heritage alumni serving in the current Trump administration, as well as 235 “staff/intern/program” alumni working on the Hill.

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Luke Coffey, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, another conservative think tank, experienced the shift firsthand. “The Heritage I joined in 2012 was Reaganite,” he said. “The Heritage I left was more MAGA than Trump.” He said the emphasis on ideology had costs when it came to experience, citing an intern questionnaire that screened applicants for anti-abortion views. For an intern in the Middle East program, he said, “I wanted the guy or girl who studied abroad in Jordan and spoke intermediate Arabic and backpacked across Israel and believed in American leadership on the global stage. I didn’t really care where they stood on the pro-life or pro-choice debate.”

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The anxiety over groyperism in the GOP talent pool corresponds to a rise in antisemitism across the political spectrum, including among young conservatives. A Yale Youth survey found “extremely conservative” young people the most likely to agree with antisemitic sentiments such as “Jews in the United States have too much power.” A Manhattan Institute poll found that a full 25 percent of Republicans under 50 self-identified as having antisemitic views, and 31 percent as holding racist ones. Pew has asked different questions about young voters’ opinions of “the Israeli people,” which have declined across the board since 2022, though a majority of Republicans still view them favorably, compared to a minority of Democrats. (On the separate question of attitudes toward the Israeli government, it’s certainly clear that elected Republicans are far more supportive than their Democratic counterparts.)

 

Trump's Massive Shakedown

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to enlarge his political empire.

Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and  Emily Glazer at WSJ:

Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.

Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.

“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments.

SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.

Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.

Trump has been demanding large checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects—telling executives and lobbyists that their companies should give $25 million or $50 million. He has sometimes offered donors special access.

No laws prohibit presidents from raising unlimited sums of money for nonprofits, like the ones used for the ballroom and his presidential library, his super PAC or political issue committees. For most of these types of transactions, public disclosure of donors isn’t required and reporting on spending is infrequent.

All told, the second-term president has raised more than $800 million since returning to office, according to an updated Wall Street Journal analysis.

Tolerating Scandal

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Oppo is part of the story.But scandal does not cut the way it used to.

Erin Doherty at POLITICO:

Americans are largely tolerant of scandals among politicians. But nobody is more willing to stick by an embattled candidate than a MAGA voter.

The POLITICO Poll finds President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.

Two-thirds of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say they would continue supporting a GOP candidate accused of sexual assault — 13 percentage points higher than the share of Trump 2024 voters writ large, which include those who do not identify as MAGA. By comparison, 40 percent of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would continue backing a Democratic candidate accused of sexual assault.

This article is part of an ongoing project from POLITICO and Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, to measure public opinion across a broad range of policy areas.


Seventy-two percent of MAGA Trump voters say they would stick with a GOP candidate accused of domestic violence, more than 10 percentage points higher than the overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back a GOP candidate (61 percent). Thirty-nine percent of Harris voters say they’d stick with a Democrat accused of domestic violence.

Abuse of Power: Denying Disaster Funds

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. Trump is weaponizing the flow of federal funds to the states.

Thomas Frank at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid for four Democratic-led states this month.

Emails between state and federal officials obtained by POLITICO along with more than 150 pages of documents submitted to FEMA by three states — New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — provide new details about Trump’s low rate of approving disaster aid for his political adversaries. He also denied a request by New York after administration officials verified that it had met federal standards for approval, according to state officials.

Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February.

“The Blizzard of 2026 certainly achieved a pinnacle ranking in the memories of those who experienced it and climatologically in the historical rankings of snowstorms,” said a NOAA report confirming Rhode Island met the requirement for disaster aid.

Presidents retain sole authority over granting federal disaster aid to states, but it’s highly unusual to deny a governor’s request after FEMA field offices have verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels, according to a former agency official who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.

“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, said the former FEMA official who was granted anonymity to speak about internal decision making.

The emails and documents, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on Trump’s decisions to reject an overwhelming number of requests for disaster aid from Democratic-led states, even as he has approved nearly 90 percent of requests from states that are governed by members of his own party. The revelations also offer a fuller picture of Trump’s tenure over the most partisan distribution of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979.

DNC Woes

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

Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

The Democratic Party is so short on cash that leaders at its headquarters have undertaken a new gambit to mask the severity of the problems: asking vendors not to send bills until after the midterm elections.

The bookkeeping maneuver, which was described by three people briefed on it, is the latest sign of financial duress for the Democratic National Committee and its embattled leader as money troubles threaten to undercut Democratic momentum with 100 days until the midterms.

So much is going politically right for Democrats these days. President Trump’s approval is down, gas prices are up and an unpopular war with Iran drags on. But dysfunction and debt inside one of the party’s key institutions — which is getting crushed in fund-raising by its Republican counterpart — are creating rising anxiety for top Democrats.

At the center is Ken Martin, the 53-year-old party chairman, who has found himself increasingly isolated, gripped by the fear that he will lose his job and relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts, according to interviews with more than two dozen Democrats, including current and former D.N.C. officials and members. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the party’s troubled state of affairs.

The RNC in 2010 was dysfunctional, underfunded, stepped on rakes in every news cycle, and was hated by other outside groups and Capitol Hill honchos

The environment was far more powerful

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) July 26, 2026

One Big Beautiful Bleh...

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

In 2020, I observed:

Thanks in part to the Reagan and Bush 43 tax laws, about 44 percent of Americans have no income-tax liability, though they do pay other taxes.  By definition, a cut in income taxes brought them no direct benefit at all.  Many others pay relatively little in income tax.  Most of the benefit of the tax cut went to the well-off.  Voters understood, which is why they disapproved of the tax cut by a significant margin.

In 2025, about 40% of households owed no federal income tax. 

The 2025 tax cut has had no measurable impact on how voters view their taxes.  Yet Republican pols continue to overestimate how much that tax cuts appeal to people outside the donor class.

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JORDAIN CARNEY and CALEN RAZOR at POLITICO:

THE GOP’S OBBB PROBLEM — Republicans’ signature legislative achievement of the second Trump era is turning out to be a drag.

A new POLITICO Poll finds that nearly half of Americans say they can’t explain the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — including almost half of Trump voters. And those who can are much more likely to say it’s helped others, including the wealthy, but not them, Bernie Becker reports.

Republicans insist there are aspects of the bill tilted toward the working and middle class, like the tip and overtime tax breaks and Trump Accounts. The problem is that other issues have overshadowed those benefits, most notably the war with Iran.

The poll shows a 57 percent majority of Americans say the conflict has made things more expensive for them, even as they struggle to feel the benefits of the tax cuts.

And outside analysts have found that the new tax law gives a bigger boost to wealthier taxpayers.

Why This President Owns This Economy

Our most recent 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.

Economist Justin Wolfers:

For nine out of the last 10 presidencies, if you’d said, “How much should we blame the president for what’s going on with the economy right now?” I would have said that the president is just one factor among many.

That’s what I would have said nine out of 10 times. This is the 10th time.

There’s literally no question about the cause of the current oil price spike. It is that we decided to go to war in Iran on an open-ended, ill-defined mission, and we’re not quite sure what to do. The Iranians took over the Strait of Hormuz, and now the global economy is substantially fractured and global energy markets are in disarray. There’s no question about what caused that. We know that because we actually saw things get a little bit better in June during the ceasefire, but those happy days are behind us.

There’s also no question that tariffs are a complete own goal. They’ve led to higher prices paid by Americans. And that, I think, explains why, if you look at the United States compared to our peers in the G7—think of these as other economies that are kind of like, if the U.S. economy had mates, this is who they’d be—comparable large industrialized economies, the United States right now has higher inflation than any of them. We’re number one, but it’s not one of those good number ones.

And let me just add: it really does hurt my heart because we know how not to screw things up. Any economics textbook, anyone who’s taken introductory economics, would know that there are large economic costs to going to war. They would know that starting a global trade war in a chaotic and incoherent fashion is all downside and no upside.