Abuse of Power: Denying Disaster Funds

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 weaponizing the flow of federal funds to the states.

Thomas Frank at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid for four Democratic-led states this month.

Emails between state and federal officials obtained by POLITICO along with more than 150 pages of documents submitted to FEMA by three states — New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — provide new details about Trump’s low rate of approving disaster aid for his political adversaries. He also denied a request by New York after administration officials verified that it had met federal standards for approval, according to state officials.

Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February.

“The Blizzard of 2026 certainly achieved a pinnacle ranking in the memories of those who experienced it and climatologically in the historical rankings of snowstorms,” said a NOAA report confirming Rhode Island met the requirement for disaster aid.

Presidents retain sole authority over granting federal disaster aid to states, but it’s highly unusual to deny a governor’s request after FEMA field offices have verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels, according to a former agency official who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.

“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, said the former FEMA official who was granted anonymity to speak about internal decision making.

The emails and documents, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on Trump’s decisions to reject an overwhelming number of requests for disaster aid from Democratic-led states, even as he has approved nearly 90 percent of requests from states that are governed by members of his own party. The revelations also offer a fuller picture of Trump’s tenure over the most partisan distribution of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979.

DNC Woes

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

Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

The Democratic Party is so short on cash that leaders at its headquarters have undertaken a new gambit to mask the severity of the problems: asking vendors not to send bills until after the midterm elections.

The bookkeeping maneuver, which was described by three people briefed on it, is the latest sign of financial duress for the Democratic National Committee and its embattled leader as money troubles threaten to undercut Democratic momentum with 100 days until the midterms.

So much is going politically right for Democrats these days. President Trump’s approval is down, gas prices are up and an unpopular war with Iran drags on. But dysfunction and debt inside one of the party’s key institutions — which is getting crushed in fund-raising by its Republican counterpart — are creating rising anxiety for top Democrats.

At the center is Ken Martin, the 53-year-old party chairman, who has found himself increasingly isolated, gripped by the fear that he will lose his job and relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts, according to interviews with more than two dozen Democrats, including current and former D.N.C. officials and members. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the party’s troubled state of affairs.

The RNC in 2010 was dysfunctional, underfunded, stepped on rakes in every news cycle, and was hated by other outside groups and Capitol Hill honchos

The environment was far more powerful

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) July 26, 2026

One Big Beautiful Bleh...

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

In 2020, I observed:

Thanks in part to the Reagan and Bush 43 tax laws, about 44 percent of Americans have no income-tax liability, though they do pay other taxes.  By definition, a cut in income taxes brought them no direct benefit at all.  Many others pay relatively little in income tax.  Most of the benefit of the tax cut went to the well-off.  Voters understood, which is why they disapproved of the tax cut by a significant margin.

In 2025, about 40% of households owed no federal income tax. 

The 2025 tax cut has had no measurable impact on how voters view their taxes.  Yet Republican pols continue to overestimate how much that tax cuts appeal to people outside the donor class.

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JORDAIN CARNEY and CALEN RAZOR at POLITICO:

THE GOP’S OBBB PROBLEM — Republicans’ signature legislative achievement of the second Trump era is turning out to be a drag.

A new POLITICO Poll finds that nearly half of Americans say they can’t explain the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — including almost half of Trump voters. And those who can are much more likely to say it’s helped others, including the wealthy, but not them, Bernie Becker reports.

Republicans insist there are aspects of the bill tilted toward the working and middle class, like the tip and overtime tax breaks and Trump Accounts. The problem is that other issues have overshadowed those benefits, most notably the war with Iran.

The poll shows a 57 percent majority of Americans say the conflict has made things more expensive for them, even as they struggle to feel the benefits of the tax cuts.

And outside analysts have found that the new tax law gives a bigger boost to wealthier taxpayers.

Why This President Owns This Economy

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Economist Justin Wolfers:

For nine out of the last 10 presidencies, if you’d said, “How much should we blame the president for what’s going on with the economy right now?” I would have said that the president is just one factor among many.

That’s what I would have said nine out of 10 times. This is the 10th time.

There’s literally no question about the cause of the current oil price spike. It is that we decided to go to war in Iran on an open-ended, ill-defined mission, and we’re not quite sure what to do. The Iranians took over the Strait of Hormuz, and now the global economy is substantially fractured and global energy markets are in disarray. There’s no question about what caused that. We know that because we actually saw things get a little bit better in June during the ceasefire, but those happy days are behind us.

There’s also no question that tariffs are a complete own goal. They’ve led to higher prices paid by Americans. And that, I think, explains why, if you look at the United States compared to our peers in the G7—think of these as other economies that are kind of like, if the U.S. economy had mates, this is who they’d be—comparable large industrialized economies, the United States right now has higher inflation than any of them. We’re number one, but it’s not one of those good number ones.

And let me just add: it really does hurt my heart because we know how not to screw things up. Any economics textbook, anyone who’s taken introductory economics, would know that there are large economic costs to going to war. They would know that starting a global trade war in a chaotic and incoherent fashion is all downside and no upside.

Openly Weaponizing Federal Grants

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

Tony Romm and Brad Plumer at NYT:

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

The saga illustrates the stakes as the Trump administration is completing a set of rules that would provide the president even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants. To critics, the new regulation would only make it easier for Mr. Trump to strike wider tranches of congressionally approved funding over political differences.

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“With one exception,” a lawyer for the Energy Department conceded in a court filing this month, “the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

The lawyer acknowledged that none of the grants were included in the October terminations “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

In contrast, the administration left untouched hundreds of additional energy grants in states that were represented by Republicans and had backed Mr. Trump in the last election, even though the Energy Department had recommended canceling them, the government confirmed in the July court filing.

GOP Gas Pains

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

 Jessie Blaeser at POLITICO:

Voters’ anxieties about fuel prices could give Democrats a boost ahead of the midterms, further strengthening the Democratic voting base and putting strains on the MAGA coalition as the increasingly unpopular war in Iran drags on. A plurality of Americans — 46 percent — say the change in gas prices will impact how they plan to vote come November.

Most voters overestimated the change in gas prices in their area, according to the analysis of polling and granular pricing data provided by OPIS, a Dow Jones company that tracks gas prices. That includes majorities of voters who supported President Donald Trump and also those who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Roughly one in four Americans say gas in their local area has risen by $3.00 or more. But no zip code has actually seen that degree of change on average in the year and a half since Trump took office, as of early July.

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What’s more, American’s perceptions do not quickly change even when prices do. The POLITICO Poll asked about gas prices in both May, when they were near their peak, and July, when they had dipped.

The results were the same in both.

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Roughly 63 percent of Americans selected “the war with Iran” as the primary reason why gas prices have increased since Trump took office, including 59 percent of Trump voters and 70 percent of Harris voters.

Trump Making Things Worse for Republicans

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

An Ipsos/WP poll shows Democrats with only a slight lead in the congressional generic ballot. But other polls and the fundamentals of the election suggest a blowout.

 Sarah Jones & Jason Easley at The Daily:

The Republicans were hoping that the Iran war would end, inflation and prices would drop, and voters would put the pitchforks and torches down and go back to being just angry.

Those hopes have been shattered as the Iran peace process fell apart. The war is back on. Oil is at $100 a barrel. Trump has resumed his tariff obsession, and things went back to being the darkest timeline for Republicans.

The new Emerson College Poll was the stuff of Democratic dreams and Republican nightmares.

According to the Emerson Poll:

A new Emerson College Polling survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.

“Driving the Democrats’ significant lead on the ballot are women voters, who break for the Democratic candidate by a 27-point margin, 56% to 39%, while men are more split: 49% support the Democrat and 44%