Social Security Will Hurt the GOP in 2026

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

Lisa Rein, Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson  at WP:

The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.

It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.

Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.

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The table was set in February by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which installed a loyal, mid-level data analyst with no management experience to lead the $15.4 billion agency..

.Regional offices abruptly disappeared in a rushed reorganization. New policies to fight fraud were rolled out only to be canceled or changed, prompting confused customers to jam the phones and the website, which crashed repeatedly. Daily operations in some respects became an endless game of whack-a-mole as employees were pulled from one department to another.

MTG's Epiphany (No Joke)

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

Robert Draper at NYT:

Eleven days after Charlie Kirk was killed in September, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the third-term Georgia congresswoman, was watching his memorial service on TV as the luminaries of the conservative movement and the Trump administration gathered to pay tribute to the young activist.

What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

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This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

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 Greene’s last exchange with the president was by text message on Nov. 16. That day, she received an anonymous email in her personal Gmail account that threatened her college-aged son: “Derek will have his life snuffed out soon. Better watch his back.” The email’s subject heading used the nickname Trump had given her the day before: “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

Greene promptly texted that information to the president. According to a source familiar with the exchange, his long reply made no mention of her son. Instead, Trump insulted her in personal terms. When she replied that children should remain off limits from their disagreements, Trump responded that she had only herself to blame.

Trump's identification with Christianity is nothing but a label. He literally does not understand Christian teachings 

Spit Take: Trump Says Russia Wants Ukraine to Succeed

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

Jennifer Bowers Bahney at Mediaite:

Critics branded President Donald Trump “an embarrassment” for declaring that Vladimir Putin wanted to see Ukraine “succeed,” even as Russian troops continued to unleash on Kiev.

After meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a much-hyped peace summit at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, Trump said no deal had been reached, but they’re “very close.”

Trump also claimed that Russia will help with reconstruction after peace is finally achieved.

“Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed,” Trump told reporters. “It sounds a little strange but I was explaining to the president, President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding. Including supplying energy, electricity, and other things at very low prices.”

Not everyone was buying Trump’s claim, though.

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The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell wrote, “Whenever I truly want my neighbor to succeed, I break into his house, brutalize his family, steal his children, and burn his house to the ground while screaming, ‘bro, I’m just trying to help!’”

Longwell added, “Our president is an international calamity.”

Ukrainian commentator @BohuslavskaKate wrote, “About the press conference: Trump is absolutely detached from reality. He doesn’t understand how to end this war or what he is doing. But he visibly enjoys bragging about his relationship with Putin and their sweet phone calls in front of [Zelensky]. To him, it’s a kind of power flex, but in reality he is simply admiring a war criminal in front of the president of the victim nation. It doesn’t looks powerful, it looks sadistic and dumb.”

Rural Battlegrounds

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

Marcia Brown, Samuel Benson and Rachel Shin at Politico:

Democrats are accustomed to losing in rural America — especially to Donald Trump. Now they’re hoping the president’s own policies might prove to be the leverage they need going into next year’s midterms.

The party faces immense challenges in farm country that have overwhelmingly voted Republican for decades and turned out in droves on the president’s behalf three times. But over the past year, those same communities have borne the brunt of his tariff agenda, health care center closures, lingering inflation and cuts to public lands programs.

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The party is trying to replace wishful thinking with a new shoe-leather strategy in rural communities where it has long lacked a presence and is deploying unhappy farmers in media campaigns. If Democrats mean to retake Congress in the midterms or have a shot at the White House in 2028, their candidates don’t necessarily need to sweep rural counties — they just need to eat into the margins Trump was getting, which were frequently north of 80 percent of the vote.

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Democrats have previously dedicated relatively modest amounts of money, staff and advertising to rural counties and districts outside of swing states. But after a string of off-year victories last month, House Democrats have launched their first-ever rural outreach program, an eight-figure campaign that will fund efforts to hire staffers for candidates, mobilize voters and run ads focusing on the cost of living.

And then there's the One Big Beautiful Bill:

Rural health care centers across the country have already shuttered in response to the law’s Medicaid cuts, which will disproportionately hit communities where hospitals are few and often primary employers. Low-income Americans are quickly learning they may no longer qualify for federal food aid — even as most of the tax breaks the GOP has touted will benefit the wealthy.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who chairs the Democratic Governors Association and represents a ruby red state, recently called the law “a slap in the face to rural America.”

 

The 2026 Departure Lounge

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

Annie Grayer, Molly English, and Alex Leeds Matthews at CNN:

Congressional Republicans have yet to break the record for most retirements in a single year, but some say it’s only a matter of time before widespread frustration with the current state of Washington leads to a tipping point as many in the party head for the exits.

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Eleven House lawmakers – 10 Republicans and one Democrat – are currently running for governor, surpassing the previous record of nine lawmakers in 2018

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York also announced plans to run for governor this year, but her run was short-lived: she suspended her campaign in late December and said she would not run for reelection to the House.

This year, three senators have announced they are running for governor – with two taking the unusual step of potentially leaving their Senate terms early for a chance at winning the governor’s mansion in their home states.

More are expected to put their hats in the ring. The field is so crowded that in two states – South Carolina and Arizona – two GOP lawmakers are running against each other for governor.

Many say their decisions to leave Congress are unique or the result of opportunities arising in their states. But frequent partisan stalemate in Washington this term has contributed to the allure of becoming a state executive, particularly in states that are considered Republican strongholds.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville has decided that he could be more effective implementing Trump’s agenda by returning to his home state of Alabama

 

DOGE as Partisan Weapon

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.   The real purpose of the "Department of Government Efficiency" was not to reduce deficits -- which it failed to do--  but to punish and disable perceived political enemies.

Luca Bellodi and Kyuwon Lee have a paper titled "The Executive Unbound: Politicized Bureaucracy and Partisan Procurement under DOGE."

The establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during Trump’s second term marks an expansion of presidential authority over federal agencies. This institutional development provides a rare opportunity to examine whether presidents can leverage politicized agencies for political and electoral goals. Drawing on detailed procurement data and DOGE’s cancellation records, we find that Republican donor firms were less likely to face cancellations, whereas firms donating to Democrats were more likely to lose contracts. Cancellations were less frequent in Republican-held districts, conservative agencies, and states favorable to the Republican Party. Leveraging the timing of the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, we use a difference-in-differences design to show that Wisconsin-based firms experienced a sharp increase in cancellations following the election, underscoring the strategic timing of DOGE’s operations. Our findings shed new light on the consequences of agency politicization and align with the Trump administration’s effort to consolidate its support base.

Pardon Lobbying

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.

Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey and C. Ryan Barber at WSJ:

In the first year of his first term, Trump granted a single pardon and commuted one sentence. He waited until his final day in office to issue around 140 additional acts of clemency. This term, he pardoned more than 1,500 people on his first day alone, and has since granted clemency to a further 87 people and companies.

The new approach—driven in part by Trump’s own experience as a criminal defendant, people close to him say—has spawned a pardon-shopping industry where lobbyists say their going rate is $1 million. Pardon-seekers have offered some lobbyists close to the president success fees of as much as $6 million if they can close the deal, according to people familiar with the offers.

A lobbying firm run by former Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller and former Trump Organization executive George Sorial was paid $1 million in the first quarter to lobby for a developer convicted of bribing former Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars. He hasn’t been pardoned. The firm declined to comment, and a spokesman for the developer said he terminated his relationship with the lobbying shop this spring.

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Administration officials and lobbyists describe two playbooks that have emerged. There is the official track, which involves pardon czar Alice Johnson, Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin and the White House Counsel’s Office. Applicants usually go through one of the three, and ultimately White House counsel Dave Warrington reviews the application and makes a recommendation to Trump. The two men meet every few weeks to discuss pardons, administration officials said.

The second track is riskier but can be much faster. If an applicant can find Trump at Mar-a-Lago or a White House event and ask for a pardon directly, Trump is often inclined to be helpful, administration officials said—particularly if someone says the magic words: “unjust persecution.”

Trump has often claimed that those he pardons were the victims of “witch hunts.”

Many of Trump’s most controversial pardons—including for Zhao and the Honduran ex-president—have gone through the latter track, which some senior administration officials said worried them. Another senior White House official said the “vast majority” of pardons have gone through the proper channels.

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