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:

 

Diploma Divide on the Hill

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

Volden C, Wai J, Wiseman AE. On the Decline of Elite-Educated Republicans in Congress. Perspectives on Politics. Published online 2025:1-13. doi:10.1017/S1537592725102260

We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These changes across the parties have mapped into observable differences in behavior and approaches toward lawmaking. We find that elite-educated legislators are much more liberal in their voting patterns, suggesting a link between the decline in elite-educated Republicans and ideological polarization in Congress. We also demonstrate that, in the House, elite-educated Democrats are especially effective lawmakers, but not so for elite-educated Republicans. In the Senate, we establish a link between the decline of elite-educated Republicans and the rise of partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators.” Overall, these patterns offer initial glimpses into how political elites are being drawn from different educational cohorts, representing an important transition in American governance.

 

Malevolence Compounded by Incompetence: Witkoff ed.

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

Felicia Schwartz at Politico:

President Donald Trump’s surprise Anchorage summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin could have been a signature achievement for Steve Witkoff, the developer-turned-diplomat who facilitated the meet up.

But promised follow-up meetings between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have not materialized, ceasefire demands were dropped, threats of tough action have disappeared and Trump’s team has offered no clear road ahead.

Some frustrated U.S., Ukrainian and European officials say part of the problem is the go-it-alone style of Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for peace missions and go-to negotiator on Ukraine. He has refused to consult with experts and allies, leaving him uninformed at times and unprepared at others, according to seven people familiar with internal discussions. Two said he misses the mark by viewing the conflict through a real estate lens, like a land dispute.

Trump’s unconventional fixer has met Putin five times over six months, but he has yet to translate his access to the Russian leader into any breakthroughs on Ukraine....“His inexperience shines through, he has the president’s ear, which is evident, but there has been some confusion about what has been said and agreed,” said a person familiar with the diplomatic effort.

...

“He’s kind of a rogue actor,” said a U.S. official familiar with Witkoff’s diplomatic style. “He talks to all these people, but no one knows what he says in any of these meetings. He will say things publicly but then he changes his mind. It’s hard to operationalize that.”

Witkoff’s Washington office is sparsely staffed, and short on people with Russia expertise or experienced in complex diplomatic negotiations. And he has refused to do typical consultations with Russia and Ukraine experts in and outside of government, according to the five people familiar with internal discussions.

 

Like Ellis in Die Hard, he thinks he’s a clever negotiator but he has no clue that he’s dealing with a stone killer. https://t.co/UkmpjDcqJI

— Jack Pitney (@jpitney) August 18, 2025