Trump v. Conservatism

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It explains how Trump has exploited conservatism without believing in it.

Patrick Svitek at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump lashed out at the conservative legal movement and one of its prominent leaders, Leonard Leo, on Thursday night, blaming them for the federal court ruling that blocked most of his tariffs this week.

In doing so, Trump deepened a schism with an influential community that was crucial to shaping his first term but has increasingly fallen out of favor with the president as he ramps up attacks on the judiciary.

In a lengthy social media post, Trump called Leo a “real ‘sleazebag’ ” and suggested that the Federalist Society led him astray on judicial nominations during his first term.

One of the judges involved in the ruling on tariffs was appointed by Trump. And in recent months, Trump and Leo have been at odds over the wisdom of Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs: A group with ties to Leo is among those that have sued the administration, arguing that the president overstepped his authority in issuing them.

Charlie Savage at NYT:

Hours earlier Thursday, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees. A day before, Mr. Trump picked a loyalist who has no deep ties to the conservative legal movement for a life-tenured appeals court seat, explaining that his pick could be counted on to rule in ways aligned with his agenda.

Together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees. Such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained how he exercised power during his first presidency.

But it could also give pause to judges who may be weighing taking senior status, giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to fill their seats. Conservatives have been eyeing in particular the seats of the Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, who will turn 77 next month, and Samuel A. Alito, 75.

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And Professor Yoo, who wrote memos advancing sweeping theories of presidential power as a Bush administration lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Leo were “outrageous.”

“Calling for the impeachment of judges, attacking Leonard Leo personally and basically calling him as traitor as far as I can tell — Trump is basically turning his back on one of his biggest achievements of his first term,” he added, referring to the reshaping of the federal judiciary.

Joni Ernst Gaffe

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) might have a competitive reelection race next year.  Yesterday's gaffe will not help.  Alexander Bolton at The Hill

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (R) pushed back against constituents who shouted out at her recent town hall meeting that cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would cause people to die, responding, “Well, we’re all going to die.”


The awkward moment came at a town hall meeting on Friday in Butler, Iowa, while Ernst defended the spending reforms in a House-passed budget reconciliation package that are intended to stop people who crossed into the country illegally from receiving federal benefits.

JUNE 1 UPDATE: Then she made it worse with a sarcastic video.

 

Absolutely bonkers — Joni Ernst doubles down on her “we are all gonna die” defense of Medicaid cuts while walking through a cemetery pic.twitter.com/tZrhtvODeK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 31, 2025

Maybe the reference to Jesus was an effort to shore up her evangelical base after this:

#ICYMI: The Air Force revealed earlier this year that a general who oversaw its lobbying before Congress had inappropriate relationships with five women.

Sources say one of the women whose relationship with him was scrutinized was Sen. Joni Ernst.https://t.co/97qos9S9hC

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 1, 2025

Kryptonite for Tariff Man

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.

Ben Berkowitz, Courtenay Brown at Axios:

A three-judge panel of the Court of International Trade — Reagan, Obama and Trump appointees — ruled that Trump does not have the authority to impose sweeping tariffs under 1970s-era emergency legislation.In fact, the judges said an injunction wasn't enough — they issued a summary judgment invalidating and blocking almost all of Trump's trade levies to date.

Those levies were vast, from a 10% global baseline tariff, to fentanyl-related tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, to (paused) reciprocal tariffs on dozens of other countries.

They effectively raised U.S. tariff rates to their highest levels since the 1930s, and threatened to cost American households thousands of dollars in higher goods costs.

The big picture: Tens of thousands of containers full of goods enter the United States every day.Whether or even what levies to assess on their contents today, versus yesterday, is a mess that could snarl commerce across the country for days to come.

Follow the money: The levies, while causing huge economic strain, were also generating significant revenue for the government — almost $23 billion so far this month.They were meant to be a cornerstone of the administration's fiscal plans — trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote in an op-ed Wednesday that tariffs would generate up to $3.3 trillion in revenue over the next decade.

Not all the income will disappear, though; tariffs imposed under a different legal authority called Section 232 — including on imports of autos, steel and aluminum — are unaffected by the ruling.

What they're saying: "This really *is* Liberation Day: The court's decision striking down Trump's mass tariffs as unlawful is a tremendous triumph for the rule of law, human freedom, and prosperity, and a deserved rebuke for arbitrary one-man rule over our livelihoods," Walter Olsen, senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, said of the ruling.

Trump Corruption, Continued

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Its corruption is unprecedented. Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another. Abuse of pardons is third.

Kenneth P. Vogel at NYT:

As Paul Walczak awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated president.

Mr. Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.

Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.

Mr. Walczak’s pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother’s efforts for Mr. Trump than by his admitted use of money earmarked for employees’ taxes to fund an extravagant lifestyle.

Still, weeks went by and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Mr. Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.

Then, Ms. Fago was invited to a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.

An April 11 release from the US Department of Justice:

Owner Of Florida Health Care Companies Sentenced for Employment Tax Crimes

Friday, April 11, 2025
For Immediate Release
Office of Public Affairs
Defendant Did Not Pay Over $10M in Taxes


A Florida man was sentenced today to 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $4,381,265.76 in restitution to the United States for willfully failing to pay over employment taxes and willfully failing to file individual income tax returns.

According to court documents and statements made in court, Paul Walczak controlled a network of interconnected health care companies operating under various names, including Palm Health Partners. Through another of his entities, Palm Health Partners Employment Services (PHPES), Walczak employed over 600 people and paid over $24 million annually in payroll. As such, Walczak was required to withhold Social Security, Medicare, and federal income taxes from his employees’ paychecks and to pay those monies over to the IRS each quarter, and to pay the companies’ portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes.

For more than a decade, Walczak was not compliant with his tax obligations and instead used the withheld taxes to enrich himself. In 2011, Walczak did not pay two quarters of withheld taxes to the IRS. In 2012, the IRS began collection efforts, including by sending him notices about his unpaid taxes, and by meeting with Walczak to help bring him into compliance. When that effort was unsuccessful, the IRS assessed the outstanding taxes against him personally. After that was imposed, Walczak paid the assessments in October 2014. Walczak’s compliance did not last long, however. By the end of the following year, Walczak was again withholding taxes from his employees’ paychecks and keeping the money.

From 2016 through 2019, Walczak withheld $7,432,223.80 of taxes from his employees’ paychecks, but did not pay those taxes over to the IRS. While Walczak was withholding taxes from the pay of his employees under the pretext of paying these funds to the IRS, he used over $1 million from his businesses’ bank accounts to purchase a yacht, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to his personal bank accounts, and used the business accounts for personal purchases at retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier, and Saks. During this same time, he also did not pay $3,480,111 of his business’s portion of his employees’ Social Security and Medicare taxes.

By 2019, the IRS had assessed millions of dollars in civil penalties against Walczak. Beginning with the 2018 tax year, Walczak also stopped filing personal income tax returns despite that he was still receiving income including a $360,000 salary from PHPES and $450,000 in transfers from his business bank accounts.

Moreover, in 2019, Walczak created a new business, NextEra. Walczak used a family member as the 99% nominal owner of NextEra, but Walczak had ultimate control of the finances and operations of NextEra. Through NextEra, Walczak transferred in 2020 just under $200,000 to a bank account titled in a family member’s name, over $250,000 to a bank account in his wife’s name, and over $800,000 in payments directly to third parties for Walczak’s personal expenses, including clothing stores, department stores, and fishing retailers.

In total, Walczak caused a tax loss to the IRS of $10,912,334.80

Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney Karen E. Kelly of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and Special Agent in Charge Emmanuel Gomez of IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Miami Field Office made the announcement.

IRS-CI investigated the case.

Trial Attorneys Brian Flanagan, Andrew Ascencio, and Ashley Stein of the Justice Department’s Tax Division prosecuted the case.
Updated April 11, 2025

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I interviewed a guy who did The Big Short, except using $TRUMP coin.

He got a free dinner with the President out of it. pic.twitter.com/NpLm5QEAop

— Tina Nguyen (@tina_nguyen) May 27, 2025

Trump 2026

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

A Democratic takeover of the House in 2026 would mean investigations and possibly even impeachment. Mike Allen at Axios reports that Trump is taking five steps to protect the thin GOP majority.

1. Trying to prevent retirements. The White House is targeting several Republicans in politically divided swing districts and urging them not to ditch their seats or run for higher office.Incumbent lawmakers with established fundraising and campaigning networks are almost always better positioned to win than any challengers. It has sent a clear message to New York Rep. Mike Lawler that Trump wants him to stay in the House rather than run for governor.

2. Spending big. Trump has built a $500 million-plus political apparatus, and he's already unloading some of it with 2026 in mind.Securing American Greatness, a pro-Trump group that works with the White House, has launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign touting his economic agenda in the districts of eight vulnerable House Republicans. Trump also has a leadership PAC, Never Surrender, planning to give directly to Republican candidates.

 3. Taking primary challengers off the table. Besides Lawler, Trump has endorsed a slate of swing-district GOP incumbents in a series of moves aimed at shutting down would-be primary challengers before they get off the ground, people close to the president tell Axios....

 4. Raising gobs more money. Trump is the GOP's most powerful fundraiser, and he's begun helping the party fill its coffers.He headlined an April dinner benefiting the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) that raked in more than $35 million.

 5. Ramping up recruiting. Trump's political operation and the NRCC are seeking out candidates in swing-district contests with no incumbents.Their goal is to get the party to coalesce around a Trump-and-GOP-backed candidate to avoid a bloody primary, a Trump ally said.

Trump's Corruption

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.    Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another.

Peter Baker at NYT:

When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.

Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.

The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.

Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.

And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.

Damien Cave at NYT:

This $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, are the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam — part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.

To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”

And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.

One Big Beautiful Bill Act and Liberation Day, Continued

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  His reconciliation bill will blow up the debt and his trade policies will blow up the economy.

 The Joint Committee on Taxation looks at "The One Big Beautiful Bill Act."

The Joint Committee staff estimates that enacting these provisions would increase the 
average annual growth rate of real Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) by 0.03 percentage points, from 1.83 percent in the present-law baseline to 1.86 percent, over the 2025-2034 budget window. The Joint Committee staff estimates that the macroeconomic effects due to this proposal would increase Federal revenues by about $103 billion. Relative to the conventional revenue effect of about -$3,819 billion, the Joint Committee staff estimates that the proposal would have a total revenue effect of about -$3,716 billion over the budget window.

The Joint Committee staff also estimates that after the budget window, cumulative  increases in Federal deficits under the proposal will continue to increase Federal debt as a
percentage of GDP relative to the present-law baseline. While the Joint Committee staff
estimates that labor supply will continue to be higher than projected in the baseline, the growth in Federal debt will increasingly crowd out private investment, reducing the capital stock relative to the baseline. The long-run effect on real GDP remains positive at first—primarily over the second decade following enactment—driven by labor supply effects. However, by the third decade, the crowding-out effect dominates, and real GDP falls below baseline projections. As a result, the budgetary feedback from the macroeconomic effects of the proposal diminishes over time.

From CBO:

Tony Romm and Colby Smith at NYT:

One day after House Republicans approved an expensive package of tax cuts that rattled financial markets, President Trump pivoted back to his other signature policy priority, unveiling a battery of tariff threats that further spooked investors and raised the prospects of higher prices on American consumers.

For a president who has fashioned himself as a shrewd steward of the economy, the decision to escalate his global trade war on Friday appeared curious and costly. It capped off a week that saw Mr. Trump ignore repeated warnings that his agenda could worsen the nation’s debt, harm many of his own voters, hurt the finances of low-income families and contribute far less in growth than the White House contends.

The tepid market response to the president’s economic policy approach did little to sway Mr. Trump, who chose on Friday to revive the uncertainty that has kept businesses and consumers on edge. The president threatened 50 percent tariffs on the European Union, and a 25 percent tariff on Apple. Other tech companies, he said, could face the same rate.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has raced to enact his economic vision, aiming to pair generous tax cuts with sweeping deregulation that he says will expand America’s economy. He has fashioned his steep, worldwide tariffs as a political cudgel that will raise money, encourage more domestic manufacturing and improve U.S. trade relationships.


But for many of his signature policies to succeed, Mr. Trump will have to prove investors wrong, particularly those who lend money to the government by buying its debt.

So far, bond markets are not buying his approach. Where Mr. Trump sees a “golden age" of growth, investors see an agenda that comes with more debt, higher borrowing costs, inflation and an economic slowdown. Investors who once viewed government debt as a relatively risk-free investment are now demanding that the United States pay much more to those who lend America money.

That is on top of businesses, including Walmart, that say they may have to raise prices as a result of the president’s global trade war. The onslaught of policy changes has also left the Federal Reserve frozen in place, unsure as to when the economy will call for lower interest rates in the face of persistent uncertainty. As a result, borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans and credit cards remain onerous for Americans.

The Bribery Dinner

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.    Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another.

David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton at NYT:

President Trump gathered Thursday evening at his Virginia golf club with the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, promising that he would promote the crypto industry from the White House as protesters outside condemned the event as a historic corruption of the presidency.

The gala dinner held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington, where Mr. Trump flew from the White House on a military helicopter, turned into an extraordinary spectacle as hundreds of guests arrived, many having flown to the United States from overseas.
...

It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J. Trump. Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.

...

Perhaps the best known crypto investor at the dinner was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who runs the crypto platform Tron. He spent more than $40 million on $TRUMP coins, earning himself the top spot on the leaderboard.

Wearing a black bow tie and accompanied by an assistant who held an umbrella over his head, Mr. Sun was among the first guests to arrive. In a brief interview at the club, he told The Times that the dinner would be his first meeting with Mr. Trump.

“I’m very excited to meet him and discuss about crypto’s future,” Mr. Sun said.

Sangrok Oh, a Korean crypto executive, arrived at the dinner with a collection of red baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Make Crypto Great Again” that he planned to hand out at the event. He said he had flown all the way from Seoul to attend the dinner.

“It’s kind of a fund-raiser” for Mr. Trump, Mr. Oh said in an interview at his hotel in Virginia. “And he’ll always be good to his sponsors.”

Others guests included Vincent Liu, the chief investment officer at Kronos Research, a crypto firm founded in Taiwan. Kronos profits by conducting high-frequency trading on crypto platforms across the world — except in the United States.

But with a nod from Mr. Trump and his regulators, Mr. Liu wants to enter the U.S. market. His firm bought enough of the $TRUMP coins to ensure he had a seat at the dinner — with the hope he might get Mr. Trump’s ear.

“I will definitely not hesitate to share my perspective,” Mr. Liu said. “It’s great to see the current direction that everything’s going.”

Retribution, May 2025

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. “We are all afraid,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said last month. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

Adam Wren at Politico:

DHS targets Harvard: The Trump administration is revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, NYT’s Michael Schmidt and Michael Bender scooped, which would potentially force a quarter of the student body to either transfer to another school or risk losing their legal status. Jason Newton, a spokesperson for the university, said the action was unlawful. Harvard plans to sue.

The pretense: The decision stems from an investigation by DHS, which alleges that the university “created a hostile learning environment for Jewish students,” and comes after weeks of haggling between the agency and the university. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”

Critics blasted the move: Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), a Harvard alum who has been critical of his own alma mater at times, said the administration “is acting just like the most unhinged of the anti-Israel campus protestors last year –– performative, irrational and cruel.”

FTC targets Media Matters: The Federal Trade Commission is demanding documents from liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America “about possible coordination with other media watchdogs accused by Elon Musk of helping orchestrate advertiser boycotts of X,” Reuters’ Jody Godoy and Mike Scarcella scooped.

The pretense: “FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who was appointed by President Donald Trump to run the agency, highlighted the potential for a probe in December. ‘We must prosecute any unlawful collusion between online platforms, and confront advertiser boycotts which threaten competition among those platforms,’ Ferguson said in a statement on an unrelated case.” (Notably, this comes as the FTC drops its case against the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard merger and a Pepsi price discrimination lawsuit, which is a good sign of its enforcement priorities.)

...

That’s not all, of course … The DOJ is investigating ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform. … The White House is punishing law firms that have represented Trump’s political opponents. … The U.S. attorney in New Jersey has charged Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) for allegedly assaulting law enforcement during a protest outside an ICE facility in Newark. … And Trump or his team have in recent days threatened investigations of New York AG Letitia James, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, “treasonous” aides to Joe Biden, the City of Chicago and the Kennedy Center, as the NYT’s Peter Baker noted.

Trump Lies About South Africa

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  His dishonesty is even more intense than in his first term.

Riley Mellen and Aric Toler at NYT:

In a White House meeting on Wednesday, President Trump showed President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa a social media video of a rural road lined with white crosses and hundreds of vehicles.

Mr. Trump told Mr. Ramaphosa that the footage showed “burial sites” of “over 1,000” white farmers in South Africa.

A New York Times analysis found that the footage instead showed a memorial procession on Sept. 5, 2020, near Newcastle, South Africa. The event, according to a local news website, was for a white farming couple in the area who the police said had been murdered in late August of that year.

The crosses were planted in the days ahead of the event and were later removed.

The misrepresentation of the footage took place during a stunning meeting in which Mr. Trump made false claims about a genocide against white farmers. Mr. Trump dimmed the lights to play the footage, presenting it as evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans.

Bill McCarthy at Yahoo:

US President Donald Trump brandished a stack of printed articles at the White House Wednesday that he claimed documented a genocide taking place against white people in South Africa.

Mixed into the deck of papers he unveiled before South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa, however, was a months-old blog post featuring a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Death of people, death, death, death, horrible death, death," Trump said as he flipped through the headlines, which he said were published in "the last few days."

A Special Election in NY

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

Jared Gans at The Hill:

Democrat Sam Sutton has won a special election for a New York state Senate seat, repelling Republican efforts to flip the conservative-leaning district, Decision Desk HQ has projected.

Sutton, a businessman who has led a nonprofit for years, defeated Republican Nachman Caller, an attorney who previously ran for state Assembly a decade ago. His win keeps the seat in Democratic hands after the resignation of former state Sen. Simcha Felder, who resigned from his position last month to take a seat on the New York City Council.

The result seemed uncertain as Felder is a conservative Democrat who previously caucused with the state GOP conference for years. Felder repeatedly ran unopposed on the party line for the Democratic and Republican parties.

State Senate District 22 encompasses a part of Brooklyn that overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in the November presidential election.

But the district includes a heavily Orthodox Jewish area. Sutton has close ties to the Sephardic community as a co-leader of the Sephardic Community Federation.

Elderly, Confused Trump Defers to Putin

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump is giving Putin nearly everything he could want.

Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler at Axios:

Ukrainian President Zelensky and five other European leaders joined a conference call with President Trump immediately after his call with Vladimir Putin on Monday hoping to hear that Putin had agreed to a ceasefire — or the U.S. would impose penalties on him for refusing to do so.

Instead, Trump said Putin had agreed to negotiate, stressed the U.S. wouldn't be involved in those negotiations, and pushed back against the idea of imposing sanctions on Putin at the current time, two sources who were on the call and a third source briefed on the call told Axios.

Why it matters: Trump gave the impression he was getting closer to withdrawing from the issue altogether. Some leaders on the call seemed "surprised" or "shocked," the sources said."I think something's going to happen. And if it doesn't, I just back away and they're going to have to keep going. Again, this was a European situation, and should have remained a European situation," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office several hours after his calls.

...

Trump told the leaders that Putin agreed to start direct negotiations on a ceasefire immediately. A source on the call said there were a few seconds of puzzled silence.Zelensky then pointed out that Putin had previously agreed to negotiate, and the first round of ceasefire talks took place on Friday in Istanbul. Trump didn't directly respond, the sources said.

The sources said Zelensky and several other leaders on the call told Trump it had been his idea to start the peace talks with an immediate 30-day ceasefire.

Friction point: Other European leaders on the call asked about the possibility of U.S. sanctions against Russia, but Trump said he didn't think was a good idea and stressed that he thought Putin wanted a deal. 

Polarized Reactions to Biden's Cancer

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses Biden's late withdrawal from the 2024 race.

At Politico Playbook, Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns quote Trump's pro forma staff-written reaction to Biden's cancer diagnosis.

And in years gone by, that would have been it. A bipartisan show of support for a former president of the United States upon their diagnosis with what would appear to be incurable cancer.

But this is 2025. So, no, it didn’t go like that.

MAGA-adjacent social media is lit this morning with accusations that this announcement is suspicious, on two grounds. And you can hardly ignore just the noise, given all we’ve learned this past week.

First is the extraordinary timing, coming with Biden at the center of a firestorm of accusations that he was losing his mental faculties while in office and that his closest aides covered it up. The book helping shape those allegations, “Original Sin” by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper, is literally out tomorrow. The conversation around those claims will inevitably feel different now.

Just check out this quote from David Axelrod, the former Obama aide and frequent Biden critic, who told CNN any discussion about the former president’s mental acuity “should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this.” You can imagine how that’s going down on the right.

Second, and more significantly, there are accusations spreading like wildfire — including from Trump’s son, Don Jr. — that aspects of this tragic diagnosis stretch back further than last week, and that Biden’s cancer was kept quiet while he was in office. Certainly, plenty of doctors say it would be unusual — though far from impossible — for prostate cancer this serious to suddenly emerge out of the blue. Far-right activist Laura Loomer’s claims from back in July 2024 that Biden had a terminal illness are now being reamplified by his critics. Pro-MAGA X users are also reupping Biden’s statement to camera in 2022, when he bluntly said he had cancer, which aides insisted at the time was a misunderstanding.

None of which proves anything. Publicly available facts are sparse, and plenty of people are outraged this is even being discussed at such a sensitive time. But it does matter.

Given the already intense scrutiny of Biden’s mental and physical state — and that he insisted he was in good health while trying to secure another four-year term as president with his party’s fulsome support — these accusations are not going away quietly.

Ramming Reconciliation: "Close Your Eyes"

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

At The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn notes the lack of deliberation about the budget reconciliation bill:

Consider where this process was just one week ago, with no legislative language and no commitment to specific proposals. The only indications of what GOP leaders had in mind were broad statements they made in speeches and other appearances, along with ambiguous leaks to the press.

When they released an actual bill last Sunday evening, they announced at the same time that the Energy and Commerce Committee would take it up on Tuesday—not even two days later, and so quickly that the Congressional Budget Office wouldn’t have time to produce a full, detailed cost estimate. Then came the hearings themselves: an uninterrupted, 26-hour run through deliberations (the “markup” of the legislation) that ended with a party-line vote to approve the bill and send it to the Budget Committee, where it now sits.

In all, lawmakers had less than 72 hours to digest, debate, and vote on deep Medicaid cuts that—according to CBO’s preliminary, partial estimate—will cause more than 7 million Americans to lose health insurance and millions more to face higher medical costs.1

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But the longer the debate goes on, the more indefensible those claims look. Every passing day gives analysts more time to publish damning information, like these analyses showing coverage losses by state and congressional district. And the more this information gets out, the easier it is for organizations and activists to press their case.

Something along these lines happened in 2017, when Republicans were trying to pass legislation that would repeal the Affordable Care Act. Every time a new projection showed big coverage losses, every time a major organization announced it opposed legislation, every time activists showed up at a congressional town hall, passing repeal became more difficult politically—until, finally, the effort failed.

As it happens, the GOP leaders from that time tried to do what the current GOP leadership is doing now: ram legislation through before the opposition could stop it. And they were doing so even after having, for years, insisted Democrats somehow hadn’t given the original Affordable Care Act enough time for debate

In April, Trump told House Republicans: "Close your eyes and get there."