Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: DOJ Edition

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Its incompetence sometimes compounds the harm it does, but it sometimes tempers it.

 Alan Feuer at NYT:

In the past several months, prosecutors have repeatedly failed to persuade grand juries that the cases they have brought warrant criminal charges. And if it were not unusual enough, they have also been admonished at least three times since last November by federal judges who have accused them of misconduct.

The latest setback came in Chicago, where a judge cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors in a case that was dismissed against four Democratic activists about to face trial for impeding the police during a protest last fall at a suburban immigration detention facility.

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The government’s missteps were bad enough to necessitate tossing out the case against the critics of the president’s immigration plan just days before it was supposed to go to trial.

But the mistakes also pointed to a more important problem: As Mr. Trump has demanded more and more charges against those he perceives as his opponents, prosecutors have felt pressure to push weak cases through grand juries. And that, in turn, has led to an erosion in faith in the Justice Department by both the grand jurors themselves and the judges considering the cases.

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Part of the problem, legal experts say, is that Mr. Trump has hired inexperienced loyalists to fill senior roles in the Justice Department even as hundreds of career prosecutors have departed — either by their own choice or because they were forced out for having worked on cases that ran afoul of the president.

Junior prosecutors typically attend a weeklong course on the ins and outs of working with grand juries, and often trail more seasoned colleagues before they take the lead in presenting cases. But leaders in politically appointed posts do not get the same kind or amount of training.

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All of these examples of grand jury malfeasance come on top of the many cases in which Justice Department prosecutors have failed to get grand jurors to return indictments. Such failures — known as no true bills — used to be essentially unheard-of, given the amount of sway that prosecutors have in the grand jury room and the department’s adherence to a tradition of seeking charges only in cases with strong evidence.

But over the past year or so, there has been a flurry of no true bills in federal courts across the country. Most have occurred in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, where grand jurors have rejected several cases involving people accused of protesting the administration’s immigration crackdowns and surges in federal law enforcement.

Epstein and the Midterm

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

Holly Otterbein at Axios:

Several top Democratic candidates in the midterms are airing scathing ads linking their Republican foes to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — betting that the Trump administration's reluctance to release the Epstein files still resonates with voters.

Why it matters: Democrats are mostly focusing on high prices, health care and Trump's war against Iran, but some also are trying to tie Republicans to the late sex offender as part of a broader message accusing the GOP of protecting the corrupt elite.

Zoom in: In the hotly contested Ohio Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown has spent nearly $1.5 million on TV ads slamming his GOP rival, freshman Sen. Jon Husted, for previously taking donations from Epstein financial client Leslie Wexner, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
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Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee in the Maine Senate race — a must-win contest for the party's hopes of gaining a majority in the Senate — also is making anti-Epstein messaging part of his strategy to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.In a six-figure TV ad, Platner accuses Collins of selling out voters to "the president and to the Epstein class," as an old video of Epstein and Donald Trump flashes across the screen.

In Georgia's Senate race — one of the GOP's best opportunities to flip a seat this year — Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) likewise has argued in speeches and media interviews that Trump's administration is made up of "the Epstein class."

Perceptions of the Economy May 2026

 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. 

Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Americans have continued to grow more negative about the economy in May, pushing Gallup's Economic Confidence Index to -45, down from -38 in April and the lowest reading since October 2022, when it was identical to now. Still, the current index score is above the recent low of -58 in June 2022 during a period, like now, marked by high inflation and soaring gas prices.

A release from the University of Michigan:

Consumer sentiment fell for the third straight month as supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz continue to lift gasoline prices, according to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.

Sentiment is now just below the previous historical trough seen in June 2022. The cost of living continues to be a first-order concern, with 57% of consumers spontaneously mentioning that high prices were eroding their personal finances, up from 50% last month.

Independents and Republicans saw decreases in sentiment, with both groups reaching their lowest readings of the current presidential administration. Meanwhile, sentiment of Democrats was little changed from last month.

“Earlier this year consumers may have reserved judgment about how long the Iran conflict would last,” said U-M economist Joanne Hsu, director of the surveys. “Three months into the conflict, consumers appear to be worried that supply disruptions are unlikely to be resolved quickly. Moreover, consumers are clearly concerned that increases in gas prices will spread to other prices in the economy and that consequences may persist into the long run.”

 

Democratic Autopsy

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

Lisa Kashinsky and Andrew Howard at Politico:

Democrats’ long-awaited autopsy of the 2024 election backfired almost immediately after it was released on Thursday.

The Democratic National Committee’s biting and gloomy portrait of the party immediately kicked off a fresh round of infighting, with strategists and party officials lambasting chair Ken Martin for releasing a haphazard, typo-ridden report that failed to fully capture why, exactly, the party was crushed by President Donald Trump.

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 The 192-page document — which the DNC only made public after it had been published by CNN — made no mention of Israel or Gaza and included sparse references to former President Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection, two key elements that contributed to Trump’s 2024 win.

“We should take this autopsy with a massive grain of salt. Clearly, the people who put it together ran a highly ineffective, ill-researched process. Therefore it’s difficult to draw constructive conclusions,” said Adrienne Elrod, a senior adviser on the Biden and then Harris campaigns.

 Click here for a downloadable version of the "autopsy."  It is mostly inside baseball, with scant attention to inflation, the border crisis, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden's cognitive decline, and other fundamental reasons for Harris's defeat.

Corrupt Bargains

 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 proliferate.

Andrew Duehren at NYT:

Lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service sought to contest President Trump’s lawsuit against the agency, recommending several potential defenses in a case that the Justice Department nevertheless decided to resolve by creating an extraordinary $1.8 billion fund that could soon be used to pay Mr. Trump’s political allies.

I.R.S. officials prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining what they saw as flaws in Mr. Trump’s suit and advising the Justice Department to move to dismiss it, according to two people familiar with the memo. That memo was provided to Treasury officials in April, and it is unclear if they passed it along to its intended recipients at the Justice Department, according to the people, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal government deliberations.

No lawyers from the Justice Department ever appeared in court to respond to the suit or disputed any of Mr. Trump’s claims, which demanded at least $10 billion from the I.R.S. for not doing enough to prevent the leak of his tax information. The Justice Department instead made a highly unusual deal in the case. In exchange for Mr. Trump’s dropping the suit, the Trump administration created the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for people who say they were wrongly targeted by the federal government.

The existence of the internal memo, which has not been previously reported, shows that the Trump administration disregarded readily available defenses to a lawsuit filed by the president against an agency he controls. While the Justice Department has said that Mr. Trump will not receive money from the new fund, critics have slammed the arrangement as a corrupt attempt at paying Mr. Trump’s political supporters, including, potentially, those who were convicted and later pardoned for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

On Monday, Popular Information broke the news that President Trump publicly praised two companies, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Apple, the same day he bought their stock. Trump took a tour of a Thermo Fisher facility and called on large pharmaceutical firms to partner with the company on the same day he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock.

In a third example from Popular Information’s report, Trump bought between $50,000 and $100,000 in Micron stock and, the next day, touted Micron as “one of the hottest companies” in an interview on Fox News. Trump also encouraged people to “go out and buy a Dell computer” nine days after buying between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

Popular Information’s investigation was based on Trump’s 113-page financial disclosure that was belatedly disclosed on May 14. The filing revealed that Trump had engaged in thousands of stock trades in the first three months of 2026. The hyperactive trading was an egregious violation of the presidential norm to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest. In June 2016, in recognition that a president could not ethically trade individual stocks, Trump liquidated his stock portfolio.

It's His Party. It's Not His Senate

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

Trump endorsed Ken Paxton for the Senate in Texas and secured the defeat of Rep. Thomas Massie in a KY primary.  Adam Wren and Samuel Benson at POLITICO:

“Those so-called victories over the last couple weeks are just a mirage. They are self-owns,” said one senior Senate Republican operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly about frustration with the White House. “We’re not actually beating Democrats, and we’re not actually advancing legislation. Instead, gas is up 45% due to our actions and the President’s decision to go to war with Iran. He’s focused on the ballroom. He’s announced a $1.8 billion restitution fund with zero details or congressional authority to do so. It just is crazy.”

In just one day, a conquered — and, consequently, unbridled — Sen. Bill Cassidy joined Democrats to become the 50th yes vote on a war powers resolution, opposed Trump’s ballroom funding in reconciliation and called Trump’s freshly picked Paxton a “felon.” And that was just day three of Cassidy unchained.

Cassidy is not alone. Trump’s ballroom funding is stalled, the SAVE America Act is mired in the Senate and Majority Leader John Thune is pushing back on his desire to fire the parliamentarian. That’s not to mention the pushback even from the likes of the friendlier senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, who expressed doubt about the Justice Department’s $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund.

“There are still many, many months to go before the election, and this president is going to have to continue to deal and work with, and partner with, or battle with this group of lawmakers,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters Tuesday. “Even though Bill Cassidy lost his primary, he is still a voting member of the Senate until January. … So the president may have just opened some opportunities for people.”

Now Cornyn could join their ranks. After Trump endorsed Paxton, the senior Texas senator faces increasingly slim chances of surviving next week’s runoff election. Should he lose, Cornyn will be liberated to vote his conscience — unmoved by threats of further political vengeance from Trump — for the final months of his term.

Paxon could still win, but only if Republicans divert millions of dollars from North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and other competitive races.

Gerrymanders and Waves

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

Bill Scher at The Washington Monthly:

While it’s likely that Democrats will maintain a healthy generic congressional ballot lead heading into Election Day, the math linking the national House popular vote to House seats is murkier than ever. In 2006, a Democratic 7.9-point popular vote advantage translated to 233 House seats, a net gain of 30. In 2010, the Republicans leveraged a 6.8-point vote edge into 257 seats, a net gain of 63. Eight years later, an 8.4-point margin gave Democrats 40 more seats, bringing their total to 241.

Today, thanks to increased political polarization, geographic sorting, and aerobic gerrymandering, political handicappers envision fewer competitive House districts, which means big popular vote swings may not translate into big numbers of seat flips. That’s why political handicappers such as The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter classify relatively few House districts, just 18, as toss-ups with another 17 as leaning towards one party (12 Democrat, five Republican). The other 400 are considered likely or solidly with a party.

Still, a strong political wind typically blows most toss-up districts towards the popular vote winner. In 2018, Democrats won 21 of the 30 toss-ups, or 70 percent, according to Cook. Moreover, Cook’s race ratings shifted in the Democrats’ favor over the course of the year, as often happens when political analysts receive more district-level poll data. Twelve districts considered toss-ups on May 18 were moved to the “Lean Democratic” or “Likely Democratic” columns by November, and Democrats swept those races. Plus, they picked up three seats from the “Lean Republican” and “Likely Republican” columns.

This November, based on today’s Cook ratings, if Democrats sweep their Lean and Likely races and pick up 70 percent of the toss-ups, they will win 219 seats, just one more seat sufficient for a majority. And that would only mean a net gain of four seats, well below the post-war 25-seat average. A big reason is the explosion of Republican gerrymandering greenlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s rollback of the Voting Rights Act, coupled with the Democrats’ loss at the Virginia Supreme Court, scotching their voter-approved gerrymander. As Amy Walter explained to the New York Times, before the judicial rulings, Cook classified 217 House seats as at least leaning Democratic; now that number is down to 207.