Dictator Stuff

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 calling for the six Democratic lawmakers who urged the military not to follow any illegal orders to be arrested, and he’s reposting replies saying they should be hanged and calling them terrorists. pic.twitter.com/j4m7ZBcm50

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) November 20, 2025

Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:

Senior White House officials have discussed internally their preference for Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros Discovery in recent weeks, and one official has discussed potential programming changes at CNN with Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder of Paramount.

The discussions, according to people familiar with the matter, come as Paramount portrays itself as the best bid for Warner Bros Discovery, after the company announced last month it was open to offers, because it would have an easier time getting through regulatory review.


Ellison often speaks to connections at the White House but, in at least one of the calls, engaged in a dialogue about possibly axing some of the CNN hosts whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar, the people said

Releasing the Files?

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. Scandals persist. 

Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck and Theodoric Meyer at WP:

On Tuesday, the House and Senate agreed to pass a bill calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to release all unclassified information and files related to the sprawling sex trafficking investigation into the onetime powerful financier.

The Justice Department so far has continued to say nothing about how it would respond to that demand. There are many reasons to doubt that a bulk release of the files is imminent.

If President Donald Trump wanted Bondi to release all of the Epstein files, he could have ordered her to do so at any point in the past six months. He didn’t.

On Sunday, when Trump did an about-face and said House Republicans should vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files, he notably did not say he favored releasing them. Instead, he said in a social media post that the House “can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!”

What Congress is “legally entitled to” is a more complicated question than the rhetoric from Capitol Hill might imply.

The legislation that Congress agreed to pass Tuesday gives the Justice Department a few exceptions under which it can refuse to release material. Among them: If release “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution.”

On Friday, Trump ordered Bondi to launch a new federal investigation related to Epstein — this one aimed at his ties to several prominent Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, megadonor Reid Hoffman and former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers. Bondi said the top federal prosecutor in New York City would take on the task.

That investigation could become a reason for the Justice Department to block release of many files. Bondi and her deputies have previously said they cannot release information about active investigations.

 

Epstein Stonewalling: Perverse Effects

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. Scandals persist. 

At Politico, Jack Blanchard and Dash Burns report:

The House of Representatives will vote today to release the Epstein files, and the outcome is already a dead cert. After Donald Trump’s dramatic U-turn on Sunday, Republicans are expected to support the effort from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) en masse. And as Dasha revealed last night, the White House now expects this bill to become law. What a world.

But because there are still ways for the administration to withhold or redact files, suspicions will not go away.

How different the summer and autumn could have been for Trump if he’d picked a different approach. On the podcast this morning, Dasha characterizes this as the “double-edged sword” of the president’s “attack, attack, attack” mentality: It is, after all, this same aggressive resilience that propelled him back into the White House for a second term. But it doesn’t always serve him well in the day to day.

After months of high-profile political rows, the Epstein files are now a mainstream cause — witness the survivors’ ad that aired during Monday Night Football last night; paid for by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. These things don’t come cheap.

And what we’ve seen so far has already been damaging for Trump. There’s been no smoking gun, but that image in Epstein’s birthday book — the one Trump still insists he had nothing to do with — will not fade from public memory. And people now believe Trump knew about Epstein’s crimes. A new Morning Consult poll shared with Playbook shows 60 percent of Americans think Trump knew what Epstein was up to, compared to just 15 percent who believe he did not. It’s not a great look.

Gift Grift

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. Scandals persist. 

Julianna Bragg at Axios:

A Swiss delegation presented President Trump with lavish gifts — including a 1-kilogram personalized gold bar worth $130,000 and a Rolex desktop clock — during a Nov. 4 visit aimed at persuading him to ease the tariffs he imposed on their country.

The big picture: The Swiss visit is one of many this year in which foreign leaders and organizations have presented Trump with luxurious gifts as they try to maintain relations with his administration.

The Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act bars the president and federal officials from accepting gifts worth more than $480 — the current minimum value — unless they're accepted on behalf of the United States or purchased by the official.

Yes, but: Trump and his family failed to report at least 117 foreign gifts worth roughly $291,000 during his first term in office, according to a 2023 report by the then Democrat-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Here's a look at some of the most grand gifts Trump has been given this year:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin presented Trump with a portrait of himself raising his fist — a depiction of him after the assassination attempt at Trump's 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
• The Qatari Royal Family sparked major ethics concerns after gifting Trump a $400 million jet to be used as the new Air Force One —the plane is worth 100 times more than every other presidential gift from a foreign nation since 2001 combined.

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• South Korean President Lee Jae Myung presented Trump with a ceremonial gold crown. He was also the first U.S. president to be gifted a gold medal representing the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, the country's highest honor.

Nationalization of Elections

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  Trump was a liability for Republicans in the 2025 off-year elections.  He could be a bigger liability in the 2026 midterm.

At CNN, Ron Brownstein points to the increasingly important role of presidential approval/disapproval in deciding downballot elections:

From the 1970s through the 1990s, House candidates still won competitive shares (around 25% to 40%) of voters who approved of a president from the other party. But that number plummeted after 2000: Under George W. Bush and Obama, only 12 to 15% of voters who approved of the president supported House candidates of the other party.
...
As with many things, Trump intensified these trends. Widespread disapproval of his performance during his first two years powered the blue wave that swept Democrats to control of the House in 2018: 90% of voters who disapproved of Trump supported Democratic House candidates that year, the exit polls found.

Though Senate candidates have much more of an independent identity for voters than House members, the relationship was just as powerful in races for the upper chamber under Trump. Across the 2018 and 2020 elections combined, every Republican Senate candidate lost at least 89% of voters who disapproved of Trump, with only one exception — Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican Senate candidate to hold their Democratic opponent to less than 89% support among voters who disapproved of Trump, or to carry more than 8% of those disapprovers, according to the exit polls in states and races where such polls were conducted. (Collins won fully 23% of voters who said they disapproved of Trump, en route to her surprisingly easy 2020 reelection on the same day he lost her state decisively.)

Even in governors’ races — which were long thought to be more insulated from national currents than Congressional contests — Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, in his 2018 defeat, was the only GOP candidate during Trump’s term who carried even 10% of voters who disapproved of the president, according to exit polls.

Trump is uniquely polarizing.

Whatever the causes, the results of this month’s elections suggested that Trump’s impact on other contests remains uniquely intense. Significant majorities of voters in each of the major contests said they disapproved of his performance as president and overwhelming majorities of those disapprovers backed the Democrats: 93% of voters who disapproved of Trump voted for Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and 92% of them supported Democrat Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, according to the Voter Poll conducted by SRSS for a consortium of media organizations including CNN.

Maybe most telling, 89% of voters — there’s that number again — who disapproved of Trump supported Jay Jones, the Democratic Attorney General candidate in Virginia who had been battered by a scandal over text messages in which he had mused about shooting political rivals. The Republican candidates drew a comparable level of support among the much smaller share of voters who approved of Trump.

People Support ACA Subsidies

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  In shutdown negotiations, Republicans refused to extend ACA subsidies, though Thune promised a Senate vote.  The issue is very likely to help Democrats.

KFF:

[P]ublic support remains high for extending the enhanced ACA tax credits set to expire at the end of the year, with three quarters (74%) of the public in favor of extending them, a new KFF Health Tracking Poll finds.

The expiring tax credits are a central issue in the ongoing Congressional budget standoff, as Democrats want the tax credits extended as part of a budget deal while Republicans want to reopen the government before negotiating over an extension. Without the enhanced tax credits, ACA Marketplace enrollees who benefit from them would on average have to pay more than twice as much out of pocket in premiums next year.

...

Other findings include:

• Among those who want the tax credits extended, most say that either Congressional Republicans (38%) or President Trump (37%) would deserve most of the blame if they weren’t extended. Fewer say Congressional Democrats (23%) would deserve most of the blame.
• About half (47%) of the public correctly says that undocumented immigrants are not eligible to buy ACA marketplace coverage. About one in seven (14%) incorrectly say that they are eligible to buy marketplace coverage, while the rest are not certain. Similar shares of Republicans and Democrats know the correct answer.

Epstein, Epstein, Epstein

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. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

Erica L. Green, Glenn Thrush, and Alan Feuer at NYT:

When a trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails were made public this week, Donald J. Trump’s name was all over them. But on Friday, when Mr. Trump demanded that the Justice Department investigate a list of powerful men mentioned in the emails, his own name was nowhere to be seen — he had singled out only Democrats.

Equally remarkable was how quickly Attorney General Pam Bondi acquiesced to his demand, even though four months ago the Justice Department formally declared that nothing in the Epstein files warranted further investigation.

That about-face, as much as any action Ms. Bondi has taken this year, demonstrated the near-complete breakdown of the Justice Department’s traditional independence to prosecute cases based on facts and the law, as opposed to presidential fiat. And, crucially, it could foreclose any further disclosures of the Epstein files.

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Ms. Bondi’s decision to press forward with the investigation is a complete turnaround from a memo issued by the Justice Department and the F.B.I. in July, which said that officials had thoroughly scrutinized the Epstein files and had found nothing in them that could sustain opening further inquiries into anyone else.

Still, if an investigation into any one of the targets suggested by Mr. Trump were to ultimately start, it could allow the Justice Department to refuse to release any further files related to Mr. Epstein by claiming that the disclosures could harm continuing inquiries.

In his social media post connecting Democrats with Mr. Epstein, Mr. Trump named Mr. Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman

 

President Trump just attacked me and lied about me. I haven’t called him at all, but I did send these text messages today. Apparently this is what sent him over the edge.

The Epstein files.

And of course he’s coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other… pic.twitter.com/EcUzaohZZs

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) November 15, 2025

Trump calls Marjorie Taylor Greene “Marjorie Traitor Green” on Truth Social. Is Speaker Johnson ok with this? pic.twitter.com/2S2PNz8F20

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) November 15, 2025