Trump Will Use the Murder to Punish His Opponents

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments. This week, a gunman murdered Charlie Kirk.

Emily Davies and Michael Birnbaum at WP:

“There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote Thursday on X. “It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.”

Other senior administration officials spoke of a broad plan to focus on public speech and rhetoric, declaring that those who speak in violent terms about Trump and his allies will face consequences. Some suggested a more expansive campaign, calling out schoolteachers and college instructors who have made public statements criticizing Kirk since his death, and promising to deport noncitizens who do the same.

The statements from Trump and his top advisers provided early insight into how the president will respond to both the personal loss and political juncture he faces in the wake of Kirk’s fatal shooting Wednesday on a Utah college campus. Trump appeared to be positioning himself to launch a campaign against some of Kirk’s — and his — opponents who have spoken out since the conservative activist’s death.

...

Miller called out “people in positions of institutional authority,” noting the social media posts of “educators, health care workers, therapists, government employees” who he said had cheered Kirk’s death. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said he had directed consular officials “to undertake appropriate action” against foreign visa applicants and holders who praised or rationalized the shooting.

EARHARDT: We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?

TRUMP: I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left… pic.twitter.com/snOESz3x5a

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2025

Trump Exploits Kirk Murder to Demonize His Opponents

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments. Yesterday, a gunman murdered Charlie Kirk.

Maggie Haberman at NYT:

Mr. Trump had a close relationship with Mr. Kirk, whose ability to galvanize young conservatives with his criticisms of the left had been crucial to rallying support among a new generation of voters. Mr. Kirk was also close friends with several people in the president’s orbit, including his eldest son, Donald Jr.

But by Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump’s shock had turned to fury. In a video address from the Oval Office, Mr. Trump declared it a “dark moment for America” and faulted the media and the “radical left” for language used to describe people like Mr. Kirk.

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” said Mr. Trump, who one day earlier had been face-to-face with protesters in Washington who called him Hitler. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”

Trump routinely refers to his opponents as communists.

 

CA GOP: AWOL in World War G

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

The California Legislature has approved a special election to redraw congressional district lines. Democrats stand to pick up five seats.

DUSTIN GARDINER and BLAKE JONES at POLITICO:

The California Republican Party finds itself on the periphery of a national effort by conservatives to beat back Democrats’ gerrymandering campaign.

It’s partially the result of an internal rift within the state GOP that some party strategists fear could hamper its efforts to fight redistricting — a self-inflicted wound that could put the party in a weaker position as it competes with Democrats’ fundraising machine.

A chorus of Republicans are now openly questioning the state GOP’s ability to lead the opposition to a redistricting map that could cripple their party’s influence here. …. They complain about sluggish fundraising and a lack of organization and cohesive messaging.

Instead, political committees outside of the purview of the state party apparatus and Chair Corrin Rankin are leading the effort to defeat Proposition 50, the Nov. 4 redistricting measure.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who’s running for governor, told Playbook the party has struggled to craft an anti-redistricting message that will resonate with independent voters and others beyond the Republican base.

“It’s not a cohesive, ‘All for one and one for all’” strategy, Bianco said. “We’re not coming together to say, ‘We’ve got to get the best message for everyone.’ We should be talking to California — we shouldn’t be talking to Republicans.”

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a Republican from San Diego and frequent critic of the state GOP, vented about what he called a lack of party leadership to fight Prop 50 during an interview at the state party convention in Orange County this past weekend — a concern echoed by several prominent attendees.

“Open communication would be helpful,” DeMaio said. “The party hasn’t done a good job of that. It’s certainly hurting us.”

The Smoking Birthday Drawing

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

Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo at WSJ:

Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s estate have given Congress a copy of the birthday book put together for the financier’s 50th birthday, which includes a letter with President Trump’s signature that he has said doesn’t exist.

On Monday, House Oversight Committee members confirmed that they received a copy of the birthday book including the letter bearing Trump’s signature and a second letter that references Trump with a crude joke about a woman from another Epstein associate.

The Wall Street Journal in July reported on the book and the letter bearing Trump’s name, which contained typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman. The letter concluded: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” The signature was a squiggly “Donald” below the waist, mimicking pubic hair.

Trump has denied writing the letter or drawing the picture, calling it “a fake thing.” He also filed a lawsuit against the Journal’s reporters, Journal publisher Dow Jones, parent company News Corp and executives, alleging defamation and saying the letter was “nonexistent.” A Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting.” 

THE DOCUMENTS ARE HERE.

Michael Gold at NYT:

The book is a collection of letters, photographs and drawings from dozens of Mr. Epstein’s associates bound into three volumes spanning more than 200 pages. While some of the messages contain mundane birthday wishes, others offer a window into a misogynistic circle of wealthy men fixated on women and sex. Many of them included suggestive stories or crude references to Mr. Epstein’s sexual appetites, and some indicated that his friends had at least some sense that he was engaged in inappropriate behavior.

Mr. Trump is mentioned in a letter in the book that appears to have been written by Joel Pashcow, the former chairman of a real estate company in New York. A photo above the letter includes a large mock check, made to look as if it is being paid from Mr. Trump to Mr. Epstein for $22,500. Beneath it, a handwritten caption referring to Mr. Epstein’s “early talents with money and women” claims that the photo shows Mr. Epstein selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump.

The woman’s name and photo are redacted in the caption and the image. Lawyers for Mr. Epstein’s estate told the committee that they removed the names and photos of women and minors who appeared in the book in order to ensure that any potential victims of Mr. Epstein could not be identified, according to a copy of a letter to the committee that was viewed by The Times.

Epstein Keeps Festering

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

Joshua Partlow and Mariana Alfaro at WP:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) on Sunday backed off his claim that President Donald Trump was an FBI informant in the case of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

While Trump has said that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, his members-only club in Florida, he has also recently called the latest demands for the release of more information on the Epstein case a “Democrat hoax that never ends.”

Last week, Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill that Trump cares deeply about the crimes Epstein committed and said that Trump “was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”

On Sunday, his office released a statement modifying that claim.

“The Speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump — who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago — was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator,” the statement from Johnson’s office read.

 Emily Brooks and Mike Lillis  at The Hill:

The debate will resume immediately this week, since an Oversight panel subpoena gave the Epstein estate a Monday deadline to deliver a host of documents that could shed light on the elite associations maintained by the disgraced financier, who died by suicide in 2019 in a jail cell where he was awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking.

The list of records sought by the committee includes Epstein’s will, the travel logs for his private plane, anything resembling a client list, and a notorious “birthday book” assembled by Maxwell when Epstein turned 50 in 2003. That leather-bound volume reportedly contains a lewd note written by Trump when he was still a private citizen in New York, which the president has denied.

 

Ungoverning

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

Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum at Foreign Affairs:

He is pursuing “ungoverning”: the comprehensive and intentional destruction of state capacity. As we described in Foreign Affairs in late January, ungoverning is rare in the history of politics. Authoritarians generally want to take over a state so they can use it, not so they can destroy it. They need loyalty and select for it, but they also need competence. Trump, by contrast, shreds regular procedures, shrugs off the expertise needed to bring policies to life, and promotes administrative incompetence in order to eliminate any authority other than himself. None of his decisions are about slashing bureaucratic red tape or privatizing parts of the state. Instead, he issues capricious commands and negotiates deals that serve his whims. From his first days back in the White House, Trump made it clear that he will reward anyone who breaks the law in support of him. It is why he pardoned all the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists, declaring later that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

...

Prizing incompetence over expertise also explains the sweeping powers Trump gave to the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was not about cutting $2 trillion from the deficit, as Musk originally promised, or $1 trillion, as he later pledged, or even $150 billion, the amount he finally settled on. Instead, DOGE was the sharp end of a battering ram directed at the so-called deep state, which includes both essential operations, such as tax collection, and apolitical employees, such as the National Weather Service scientists who gather weather data. Its purpose was to hollow out the administration.

NatCons Repudiate Lincoln, Embrace Buchanan

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  Forty years ago, conservatism reflected Reagan's sunny optimism about America.  Trump is taking conservatives to a dark place.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln said that this nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  At the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Eric Schmitt repudiated Lincoln:

If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.

On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose.

In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.

For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”

That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.

 Ben Jacobs at Politico:

At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington this week, perhaps the second biggest applause line came when Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) discussed his effort to award Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the stage. The only bigger reaction came when Trump border czar Tom Homan espoused the hardline immigration rhetoric that once made Buchanan an outlier within the GOP.

For Moore, Buchanan deserved the highest civilian honor in the United States because “he was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it.” In contrast, he told POLITICO Nightly, George H.W. Bush was “wrong about almost everything.”

The conference wasn’t exactly a welcoming venue for those who adhere to the brand of Republican politics that had dominated at the end of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st century. Even the speaker delegated to defend Trump’s airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University, took pains to insist he was not “a neo-con” — an even more deadly pejorative than “liberal” at the venue.

“Buchanan has been revered by the under-30 crowd basically the entire time that I’ve been working in professional politics,” explained Nick Solheim, the head of American Moment, an influential right wing nonprofit. “[P]eople have been posting vaporwave edits of Pat Buchanan since 2016.”

...

David Tell, a former aide to Bush on his 1992 campaign, agrees that Buchanan’s platform is eerily similar to the policies of Trump’s GOP. However, he added, there’s now a “Huey Long element not previously present in American conservatism.”

Bread and Butter, War and Peace

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

 For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem.

 CNN:

• The US economy added just 22,000 jobs last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3% from 4.2%.

• Friday’s report is the first data under a new leader at the BLS, after President Donald Trump fired the previous one for producing data that Trump baselessly claimed must be “a scam.” Just 73,000 positions were added in July and previous monthly totals were substantially revised down.

• Friday’s data was far worse than expected, with economists having forecast around 76,500 jobs added in August.

• It’s the latest snapshot of the US economy under Trump’s aggressive trade agenda, as inflation continues to tick up and there are now more unemployed people than jobs for them.

Dubious military action can also pose a problem.

 Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage and Edward Wong at NYT:

The Trump administration declared the start of a new and potentially violent campaign against Venezuelan cartels on Wednesday, defending a deadly U.S. military strike on a boat that officials said was carrying drugs even as specialists in the law of war questioned the legality of the attack.

The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically with a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. Tuesday’s direct attack in the Caribbean was a marked departure from that decades-long approach.

The administration has said 11 people were aboard the vessel. It was unclear whether they were given a chance to surrender before the United States attacked.

The Trump administration has not offered any legal rationale. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that administration officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing,” although he did not offer evidence.

...

Congress has not authorized any armed conflict against Tren de Aragua or Venezuela, and several legal experts said they were unaware of any precedent for claiming that a country could invoke self-defense as a basis to target drug trafficking suspects with lethal force.

Trump Calls Epstein Survivors a Hoax

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

Lauren Peller, Jay O'Brien, and John Parkinson at ABC News:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday cast the Jeffrey Epstein controversy as "irrelevant" amid an effort on Capitol Hill to force a vote to release all files related to the deceased sex offender.

"This is a Democrat hoax that never ends," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about the push for more transparency in the Epstein matter.

"From what I understand, I could check, but from what I understand, thousands of pages of documents have been given," the president said. "But it's really a Democrat hoax because they're trying to get people to talk about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've had as a nation since I've been president."

The comments came as a group of survivors joined House members in a push to compel the Justice Department to release records so far withheld from Congress.

ABC News Capitol Hill Correspondent Jay O'Brien asked the victims for their reaction to Trump's characterization that it is a "hoax."

One survivor, Haley Robson, said it felt like "being gutted from the inside out."

"Mr. President Donald J. Trump, I am a registered Republican -- not that that matters because this is not political -- however, I cordially invite you to meet me in the Capitol in person so you can understand this is not a hoax. We are real human beings. This is real trauma," she responded.

 

 

HFC in Decline?

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

Kate Santaliz at Axios:

The House Freedom Caucus is on the cusp of an identity crisis.

Why it matters: The rabble-rousing group of hardline Republicans who once ousted a speaker and have held GOP leadership hostage over the past decade is shrinking in size and clout as several prominent members head for the exits.

The HFC is struggling to reconcile loyalty to President Trump with its own budget-cutting priorities — and the former often takes precedence. That's raising doubts about whether the group can remain an independent force on the party's right flank, rather than increasingly, after some grumbling, caving to Trump.

Driving the news: At least six of the HFC's most high-profile members are eyeing departures, sparking questions about who, if anyone, will fill the void.Rep. Chip Roy, one of the group's biggest agitators, is running for state attorney general in Texas. Three other especially vocal members — Reps. Byron Donalds (Florida), Ralph Norman (South Carolina) and Andy Biggs (Arizona) — are mounting gubernatorial bids. Rep. Barry Moore is running for Alabama's open Senate seat, while there have been reports that Rep. Andy Ogles is jockeying for a Senate appointment if Marsha Blackburn's bid to be Tennessee's governor is successful.

Several other HFC members, including Rep. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania) and caucus chair Andy Harris (Maryland), could face tough reelection battles in 2026.Internal strife has further thinned the group's ranks: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Florida) decided to leave the HFC in March, while the group voted last summer to kick out Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) for breaking with its leadership, prompting Rep. Troy Nehls (Texas) to resign in protest.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was kicked out in 2023 after publicly feuding with fellow HFC members over her support for then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Bad News, Good News for GOP

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

 For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem:

Alex Isenstadt:

Republican operatives and lawmakers are increasingly anxious about how inflation could affect the GOP in the 2026 midterms, and want President Trump to take more aggressive steps to address rising prices.

Why it matters: GOP insiders and lawmakers believe the cost of drugs and consumer items — and how the White House deals with Trump's tariffs potentially turbocharging prices and creating shortages — will be key to whether the GOP keeps control of Congress next year.

Zoom in: Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond praise Trump's recent focus on crime, but many are alarmed by internal polls and focus groups showing persistent — and increasing — concerns about prices.

Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider:

For the American middle class, it has been a summer of cooling confidence.

Consumer sentiment dropped nearly 6% in August, after trending up in June and July, according to a closely watched index from the University of Michigan. Pessimism about the job market increased, with more people surveyed saying they expect their income to decline, according to polling done by think tank the Conference Board.

The middle class—generally considered to include households making roughly $53,000 to $161,000 a year—is playing an outsize role in that waning optimism. After months of tracking high-income earners’ increasing confidence about the economy, households making between $50,000 and $100,000 made an abrupt about-face in June. They now more closely resemble low-income earners’ gloomier views, according to surveys done by Morning Consult, a data-intelligence firm.

“There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world,” said John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult. “Then things fell off a cliff.”

But....

At Politico, Lisa Kashinsky, Elena Schneider and Nicholas Wu write that Democrats are "hamstrung by constitutional restrictions or independent commissions in some states, while Republicans are generally free of those legal barriers and have leadership trifectas in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, promising state lawmakers fewer restrictions to draw Democratic rivals out of their seats. Florida’s constitution has language restricting partisan gerrymandering, though its conservative-majority state Supreme Court recently upheld a GOP redraw."

Nate Cohn at NYT: "[If] the new maps are enacted in all of these states, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by two or three percentage points to be favored to retake the House, according to projections based on recent congressional and presidential election results."

Trump v. Labor

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is on an ominous course.  Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like a jobs report.

Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian:

Despite his vow to help coal miners, Trump halted enforcement of a regulation that protects miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), leaving the US’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics. Angering labor leaders, Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.

...

Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage the construction of factories that make renewable-energy products. In moves that will harm some of the nation’s most vulnerable workers, the Trump administration has proposed ending minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers. It has also killed a Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.

...

Trump has taken numerous steps that will weaken safety protections for workers. He is cutting staffing by 12% at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha). His administration has proposed eliminating a requirement for adequate lighting on construction sites. It is reducing the fines that small businesses pay for violating safety rules. It has proposed blocking the government’s mine-safety district managers from ordering upgrades in mine ventilation and safety. It has slowed action on Biden’s effort to protect workers from high temperatures.

He even trashed paid holidays: