The Very Unhappy House Republicans

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 -- and not just because of his low approval ratings.  He is effectively pushing Republicans out the door.

MTG explaining her decision to resign:

Loyalty should be a two way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district's interest because our job title is literally, "Representative."

America First should mean America First and only Americans First, with no other foreign country ever being attached to America First in our halls of government.

 Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for.

Jake Sherman at X:

A few other GOP members messaged us over the weekend saying that they, too, are considering retiring in the middle of the term.

Here’s one particularly exercised senior House Republican:

“This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all — appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened. They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms. “More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”

It Sounds Better in the Original Russian

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

Associated Press:

Lawmakers critical of President Donald Trump’s approach to ending the Russia-Ukraine war said Saturday they spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio who told them that the peace plan Trump is pushing Kyiv to accept is a “wish list” of the Russians and not the actual proposal offering Washington’s positions.

A State Department spokesperson denied their account, calling it “blatantly false.”

Rubio himself then took the extraordinary step of suggesting online that the senators were mistaken, even though they said he was their source for the information. The secretary of state doubled down on the assertion that Washington was responsible for a proposal that had surprised many from the beginning for being so favorable to Moscow.

It all added up to a confusing — and potentially embarrassing — turn of events for a Trump administration-blessed peace plan that already faced a potentially rocky future.

The widely leaked 28-point U.S-backed peace plan was, according to the White House, the result of a month of work between Rubio and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff along with input from what it said was both Ukrainians and Russians. The plan acquiesces to many Russian demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has categorically rejected on dozens of occasions, including giving up large pieces of territory. Trump says he wants Ukraine to accept the plan by late next week.

“This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form,” said Republican Mike Rounds from South Dakota, speaking at a security conference in Canada. “They want to utilize it as a starting point.”

Rounds said “it looked more like it was written in Russian to begin with.”

Rounds was not kidding.  Hafiz Rashid at TNR:

The U.S. peace plan presented to Ukraine appears to have been translated from Russian.

The syntax of certain phrases are more common in the Russian language, such as the third point of the 28-point plan: “It is expected that Russia will not invade neighbouring countries and Nato will not expand further.”

“It is expected” is not commonly used in English, but it is common in Russian and appears to come from the phrase ожидается or ozhidayetsya, according to The Guardian’s Luke Harding. Other words that appear to be translated from Russian include “ambiguities” (неоднозначности) and “to enshrine” (закрепить).

It’s no accident, either: The plan was hammered out by President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, after the two met last month in Miami. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also involved, no Ukrainian or European officials were, which is pretty evident by its contents.

For example, under the proposal, Ukraine would cede Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk to Russia and would be banned from joining NATO. Russia would get readmitted to the G8. Ukraine would also reduce the size of its military by hundreds of thousands, and no NATO troops could be stationed in the country. Sanctions against Russia would also be lifted but would snap back if Russia invades Ukraine again.

Grok’s Conclusion:
“This document is almost certainly translated from Russian into English by a native Russian speaker or a non-professional translator. It is not originally written in English. pic.twitter.com/uNF7yup85n

— Meaghan Mobbs (@mobbs_mentality) November 22, 2025

ChatGPT confirms.: "This is almost certainly a translation, not originally written in English. The underlying source language was almost certainly Russian, with a possibility of Ukrainian, but the linguistic signals point more strongly to Russian → English translation."

Trump Calls Critics "Traitors"

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.

Todd Spangler at The Detroit Free Press:

U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin's office said Michigan State Police responded to a bomb threat at her Oakland County home on Friday, Nov. 21, a day after President Donald Trump called her and other Democrats traitors for putting out a video message to members of the military telling them it's their right and duty to disobey illegal orders.

A message posted on social media platform X by a spokesperson for Slotkin, D-Michigan, said Slotkin wasn't at her home in Holly at the time of the threat. Michigan State Police searched the premises "and confirmed no one was in danger," the message said.

Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

President Donald Trump began posting earlier than usual to rant about the shock resignation of former ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whom he disparaged with a derisive moniker.

MTG shocked the political world when she announced on Friday that she will resign from Congress effective Jan. 5, 2026. The congresswoman released a lengthy statement via video on X/Twitter in which she said, in part, “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

...

Trump first reacted to the news by phone on Friday night, telling ABC News White House correspondent Rachel Scott that “I think it’s great news for the country. It’s great.”

The president expanded on the thought early Saturday morning with a Truth Social message posted at 6:45 AM that featured characteristic insults:

 

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.

...... 

• 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.