Gerrymandering Is a Zero-Sum Game

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

Lindsey Holden at Politico:

Two of California’s safest House Democrats say they’re preparing to take one for the team — accepting slightly more competitive districts as part of the state’s quest to find five new blue seats.

Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to counter President Donald Trump’s effort to increase the number of GOP seats in Texas with a midcycle gerrymandering of his own. State lawmakers could vote soon after they return from recess on Aug. 18 to hold a November special election asking Californians for the power to redraw congressional districts ahead of the midterms.

But decreasing the number of Republican seats means some deep-blue California districts will take on a slightly more purple tinge.

San Diego Reps. Scott Peters and Sara Jacobs — both of whom represent overwhelmingly Democratic areas — are among the members who would likely see an increase in Republican voters if lines are redrawn. Both told Playbook they would prefer to avoid the sudden redistricting, but that Trump’s Texas push warrants it.

“This is bigger than me and my seat,” Jacobs said. “This is about the survival of democracy and our country. I don't think any of us want to go forward with this, but it's the only way to respond to what they're doing in Texas.”

Peters said he actually agrees with Northern California Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley’s crusade to outlaw redistricting outside the typical 10-year time span. But, he added, “We’re not the ones who picked this fight.”

Jonathan Martin at Politico:

Which gets to the cold reality for GOP lawmakers in California and New York: The very Republicans who helped deliver their party’s congressional majority by winning in the two mega-states in 2020 and 2022 could be collateral damage to Trump’s gambit.

That includes House veterans such as Reps. Darrell Issa and Ken Calvert, both of California, but also younger, promising Republican lawmakers such as [Kevin] Kiley, 40, and Rep. Mike Lawler (N.Y.), 38.

“This creates a situation where you’re going to lose blue state members, which over the long haul are critical to keeping the majority,” Lawler told me.

It’s all, Lawler said, “mutually assured destruction once people go full throttle.”

The redistricting threat is especially cruel to Lawler, who was already eager to avoid yet another tough race in his Hudson Valley district by running for governor next year. But Trump made clear he preferred Rep. Elise Stefanik, a born-again MAGA disciple, as the standard-bearer even though running a Trump acolyte statewide may only ensure Stefanik ends next year where she started this year: hoping for a Trump cabinet appointment.

For Kiley, the Newsom reprisal to Trump may extinguish a congressional career that just began in 2023.

 

Trump's Cognitive Decline

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Last year, Trump was already showing signs of cognitive decline.

President Donald Trump bragged on Sunday that he had lowered drug prices by up to 1500 percent—an arithmetic absurdity, even by his standards. https://t.co/Sk6dJdzNtd

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) August 4, 2025

Adam Gabbatt at The Guardian:

Donald Trump’s frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say.

For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life.

...

Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: “The other thing I say to Europe: ​we’ve – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States​. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery.”

Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales “loco” and that wind energy “kills the birds” (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the number killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines).

The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump “digressing without thinking – he’ll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative”, said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine.

 

Trump was spotted on the roof of the White House raising concern that if your grandpa was taking a “little walk” on the roof, you’d probably put him in a home. #FallonTonight pic.twitter.com/VDa78l3bnj

— The Tonight Show (@FallonTonight) August 6, 2025

Duel in the Sun: Texas v California

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

Eleanor Klibanoff at Texas Tribune:

The Texas House voted Monday afternoon to track down and arrest more than 50 Democratic lawmakers who were not present when the chamber gaveled in. After the 85-6 vote, House Speaker Dustin Burrows said he would immediately sign civil warrants for each of the legislators, empowering the chamber’s sergeant-at-arms and state troopers to arrest and bring them to the Capitol.

They will not face civil or criminal charges from the arrests. The warrants apply only within state lines, making them largely symbolic as most of the legislators in question decamped to Illinois, New York and Massachusetts to forestall passage of the GOP’s proposed redraw of Texas’ congressional map.

The House used the same tactic to try to force Democrats back to work in 2021, when a majority of them left for Washington, D.C., to protest GOP voting restrictions. Some of the lawmakers challenged the warrants in court, obtaining an injunction against arrests that was later struck down by the Texas Supreme Court.

While the Texas Constitution “enables ‘quorum-breaking’ by a minority faction of the legislature, it likewise authorizes ‘quorum-forcing’ by the remaining members,” the court ruled.

...

Democrats left the state Sunday afternoon to deny the House a quorum — the number of people necessary for the chamber to advance legislation — and delay passage of a new congressional map.

The current congressional map, drawn by a Republican-dominated Legislature in 2021, has netted 25 GOP seats in the last two elections. But after pressure from President Donald Trump’s team, Abbott directed lawmakers to redraw the map during the special legislative session, which started July 21. Last week, the House proposed new congressional lines dividing up existing districts in Austin, Houston and Dallas with the aim of netting five more Republican seats.

Michael Wilner, Laura J. Nelson, Seema Mehta and Taryn Luna at LAT:

A last-ditch effort by California Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional map for the 2026 election, countering a similar push by Texas Republicans, is now up against the clock.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that Democrats are moving forward with a plan to put a rare mid-decade redistricting plan before voters on Nov. 4. But state lawmakers will craft a “trigger,” he said, meaning California voters would only vote on the measure if Texas moved forward with its own plans to redraw Congressional boundaries to add five more Republican seats.

“It’s cause and effect, triggered on the basis of what occurs or doesn’t occur in Texas,” Newsom said. “I hope they do the right thing, and if they do, then there’ll be no cause for us to have to move forward.”

 

Trump Corruption

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another.

Kenneth P. Vogel and David Yaffe-Bellany at NYT:

[L]obbyists, political consultants and others in the influence industry have capitalized on Mr. Trump’s aggressive fund-raising while in office to deliver for clients and earn chits with a president who keeps close tabs on who is delivering cash and listens to their appeals. It is a cycle that has helped Mr. Trump fill the coffers of his political groups, defying the gravity that sometimes drags down the fund-raising of term-limited presidents.

The degree to which this dynamic has benefited Mr. Trump, his donors and their lobbyists — while shutting out regular people seeking assistance from their government — was laid bare in MAGA Inc.’s financial report. The group, which can accept unlimited donations, raised an astounding $177 million in the first half of the year. That was nearly twice as much as the amount raised during the same period by the Republican National Committee, which is subject to contribution limits.

MAGA Inc.’s report included donations from a mother seeking a pardon for her son, as well as people who had been, or would later be, appointed to posts in his administration and companies in industries seeking more lenient treatment than they had gotten under the administration of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

It is not just MAGA Inc. that benefits.

Since Mr. Trump’s election last fall, fund-raisers and lobbyists have been steering corporations and donors to a buffet of options for unlimited giving, some of which are less overtly political or allow anonymous donations, that can bring access to the president.

The president’s inaugural committee raised a record-shattering $239 million, including about $18 million from crypto interests and $1 million each from tech giants like Meta and Amazon that had drawn his ire in the past and were looking to smooth things over headed into his second term.

A nonprofit group called Securing American Greatness, which is affiliated with MAGA Inc. but is not required to disclose its donors, can accept cash from interests willing to pay for access without the controversy that can come with having that known.

Trump's War on Facts

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Peter Baker at NYT:

An old rule in Washington holds that you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts. President Trump seems determined to prove that wrong.

Don’t like an intelligence report that contradicts your view? Go after the analysts. Don’t like cost estimates for your tax plan? Invent your own. Don’t like a predecessor’s climate policies? Scrub government websites of underlying data. Don’t like a museum exhibit that cites your impeachments? Delete any mention of them.

Mr. Trump’s war on facts reached new heights on Friday when he angrily fired the Labor Department official in charge of compiling statistics on employment in America because he did not like the latest jobs report showing that the economy isn’t doing as well as he claims it is. Mr. Trump declared that her numbers were “phony.” His proof? It was “my opinion.” And the story he told supposedly proving she was politically biased? It had no basis in fact itself.

The message, however, was unmistakable: Government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs. Career scientists, longtime intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.

Mr. Trump has never been especially wedded to facts, routinely making up his own numbers, repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories even after they are debunked and denigrating the very concept of independent fact-checking. But his efforts since reclaiming the White House to make the rest of government adopt his versions of the truth have gone further than in his first term and increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries have sought to control information.

Russiagate Redux

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Trump is using wild conspiracy theories to distract from the mounting Epstein scandal.

Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman at NYT:

The Trump-era special counsel who scoured the Russia investigation for wrongdoing gathered evidence that undermines a theory pushed by some Republicans that Hillary Clinton’s campaign conspired to frame Donald J. Trump for colluding with Moscow in the 2016 election, information declassified on Thursday shows.

The information, a 29-page annex to the special counsel’s 2023 report, reveals that a foundational document for that theory was most likely stitched together by Russian spies. The document is a purported email from July 27, 2016, that said Mrs. Clinton had approved a campaign proposal to tie Mr. Trump to Russia to distract from the scandal over her use of a private email server.

The release of the annex adds new details to the public’s understanding of a complex trove of 2016 Russian intelligence reports analyzing purported emails that Russian hackers stole from Americans. It also shows how the special counsel, John H. Durham, went to great lengths to try to prove that several of the emails were real, only to ultimately conclude otherwise.

The declassification is the latest disclosure in recent weeks concerning the Russia investigation. The wave has come as the administration is seeking to change the subject from its broken promise to release files related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Even as the releases shed more light on a seismic political period nearly a decade ago, Mr. Trump and his allies have wildly overstated what the documents show, accusing former President Barack Obama of “treason.”

The release of the annex was no exception. John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, said in a statement that the materials proved that suspicions of Russian collusion stemmed from “a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.”

And Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, who has a long history of pushing false claims about the Russia investigation, declared on social media that the annex revealed “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”


In reality, the annex shows the opposite, indicating that a key piece of supposed evidence for the claim that Mrs. Clinton approved a plan to tie Mr. Trump to Russia is not credible: Mr. Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.

Re those Hillary conspiracy emails: if a native English speaker wrote this, I'll eat Kash Patel's MAGA hat
("pour oil into the fire" is literal translation from Russian idiom, dumbasses: "podlit' masla v ogon'") pic.twitter.com/Ym0bJ2jK8v

— Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱🇬🇪 (@CathyYoung63) August 1, 2025

Freakier Friday

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. His tariffs are hurting the economy.  Predictable and predicted.  Scandals and erratic behavior also continue.

Brian Evans and Pia Singh at CNBC:

The July jobs report showed nonfarm payrolls expanded by 73,000 last month, well beneath the consensus estimate from economists polled by Dow Jones that called for a 100,000 increase to payrolls. Prior months were significantly revised down. June job growth totaled just 14,000, down from 147,000. The May count came down to 19,000 from 125,000, signaling the labor market has been weakening for a while now.
...

Not helping sentiment overnight were Trump’s updated duties ranging from 10% to 41% overnight at the Aug. 1 deadline. Goods that have been transshipped in a bid to avoid the tariffs will face another 40% levy, according to the White House.

Probably most shocking to markets was that for Canada, one of the U.S.′ biggest trading partners, goods imported into the country will now have a 35% levy, up from 25%.

Trump spent every day for 4 years saying that Biden was about to start World War 3 and if he got elected he would end the war in Ukraine and we would have peace with Russia because he has a great relationship with Putin. Here is today’s update on all that. pic.twitter.com/YDCUCgWPpK

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 1, 2025

Ghislaine Maxwell quietly moved to cushy new Texas prison as she pushes for deal to tell-all on Epstein, his associates https://t.co/ldvrFhSVTM pic.twitter.com/W4xceQKtPA

— New York Post (@nypost) August 1, 2025

The Community Note. pic.twitter.com/11B3zQOPLz

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 1, 2025