Big Mad Don

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- including the snatching of Maduro from Venezuela.

Whoa. Trump goes nuclear on the five Republicans who backed the Venezuela war powers resolution, saying they “should never be elected to office again.”

He names them: Collins, Murkowski, Paul, Hawley, Young pic.twitter.com/YvCKdhNzWx

— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) January 8, 2026

Josh Dawsey, Annie Linskey, Lindsay Wise, and  Siobhan Hughes at The Wall Street Journal:

President Trump called Republican senators on Thursday to personally rebuke them for supporting a war-powers resolution that served as a symbolic repudiation of the administration’s moves in Venezuela, according to congressional and White House officials familiar with the calls.

Trump called Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Todd Young of Indiana, the officials said.

In at least some of the calls, he told the senators they were voting against the military, two officials said.

...

A spokeswoman for Collins confirmed he called the senator. Trump expressed frustration at Collins for her vote, according to a person familiar with the matter. The president complained that she never did anything for him and said that supporting his efforts in Venezuela—and voting against the resolution—were important for the country, the person said. Most of the call involved Trump expressing his rage, and at one point he did say that he was so angry he might support Collins’s opponent, the person said.

Collins doesn’t have a Republican opponent. So far, only Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and Democrat Graham Platner, an oyster farmer, have indicated that they plan to run. The deadline for running is March 15, according to the secretary of state’s office, and the paperwork related to those bids became available last week, the office said.

When reporters read Trump’s social-media post to Collins Thursday after the vote, she said dryly that Trump “obviously is unhappy with the vote,” adding, “I guess this means that he would prefer to have Gov. Mills or somebody else.”

YouTube and 2028

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  The 2028 campaign is starting already.

Adam Wren at Politico:

NOW STREAMING: The 2028 presidential primaries are already unfolding on YouTube.

Amid the rapid decline of cable news, potential candidates and other elected officials are locked in a digital arms race to draw subscribers, boost their reach and build what amounts to their own broadcast networks.

• Potential candidates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are closing in on audiences that rival or surpass total cable primetime viewers for individual networks.
• Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is racking up millions of views.
• Vivek Ramaswamy, the former 2024 GOP presidential candidate who is running for Ohio governor, dwarfs any other Republican but President Donald Trump on YouTube with more than 813,000 subscribers.
• Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s channel started the year with just 28,000 subscribers, and now has 177,000, having generated nearly 10 million views and accumulated 500,000 hours of viewing time so far this year, according to a spokesperson.
• Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear saw a 448 percent increase in views from last year to this year, a spokesperson tells POLITICO.

Trump Trashes Republicans

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Hawley soon endorsed Trump.  Cruz did not.  Hence the following:

(The filing deadline for the Texas primary has passed.)

Romney on the GOP

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.

McKay Coppins profiles Mitt Romney at The Atlantic:

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

...

What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

...

But as Romney surveyed the crop of Republicans running for Senate in 2022, it was clear that more Hawleys were on their way. Perhaps most disconcerting was J. D. Vance, the Republican candidate in Ohio. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told me. They’d first met years earlier, after he read Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Romney was so impressed with the book that he hosted the author at his annual Park City summit in 2018. Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and re­invented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.