Another day, another discharge petition short-circuiting the power of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Yesterday, the House passed a bill overturning a Trump executive order stripping union protections from some federal workers, a bill that began as a petition circulated by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine). It came as some surprise to everyone that Johnson, thrust unexpectedly into the speaker’s job in 2023 at a moment of maximum intra-conference chaos, managed to keep things ticking along as smoothly as he did for a while. Now, however, he seems to be landing pretty much where many people expected him to be from the jump: a weak speaker whose fractious conference increasingly ignores his playbook to do what they want. Happy Friday.
Republicans Are Bracing for Midterm Disasterby Andrew Egger “It’s not a secret. There’s no sugarcoating it. It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.” “We are facing almost certain defeat.” “The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard.” “You hit the nail on the head. This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms.” These pessimistic assessments of Republicans’ chances in next year’s midterms are the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from disgruntled GOP operatives outside the MAGA camp. This week, however, they’ve been coming from someone way crazier: Joe Gruters, the Trump-diehard chair of the Republican National Committee, who has been barnstorming conservative radio this week.¹ Gruters isn’t throwing Trump under the bus. Quite the opposite: As Democrats overperform in special election after special election and Republican confidence in the midterms craters, he’s trying to set expectations low—way low. After all, he says, the guys in power nearly always lose the midterms. And as once-unimaginable cracks have begun spiderwebbing across the MAGA coalition, he’s making a specific case to his party: “The only person that could bring the nose up and help us win is the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.” Still, it’s remarkably abnormal to see the chair of the institutional Republican party—the head of the party’s campaign apparatus!—openly predict doom for his candidates. It risks further depressing GOP voters and encouraging lawmakers to retire early. And, beyond that, it’s far from clear that the Republicans who actually need to get elected next year share Gruters’s assessment of how to fix their electoral predicament. This week, I spoke to a number of swing-state GOP operatives about Trump and the midterm environment. And they were pretty blunt. To them, the biggest reason Republicans seem bound for disaster isn’t historical midterm trends. It’s the world the president has built for them to run in—particularly when it comes to affordability. (To encourage them to speak openly, including in ways that contradict top-down GOP messaging, we agreed not to disclose their names.) “His message sucks. It’s absolute trash. ‘Affordability is a Democrat hoax’??? Give me a break,” said one strategist, a veteran of presidential and congressional campaigns. “It’s the non-college-educated version of the Biden message, and we saw how well that worked. . . . Nobody believes the economy and particularly affordability is getting better.” Asked about Trump’s affordability message, a Georgia-based Republican wrote simply: “It’s landing like doo doo,” before sending a screenshot of the results of this week’s shock Democratic victory in a special election in a normally red Georgia state House district. According to a third GOP strategist, Republicans are likely to find themselves in particularly bad shape next year precisely because Trump demands that they stay loyal to him. “There have been past White Houses where it was okay to have some distance between yourself and the president,” he said. “A candidate who says, ‘Yeah, maybe tariffs aren’t a great idea because of what they’re doing to prices,’ or whatever the case may be . . . That is clearly not the case with this administration.” Past presidents might have put up with disrespect—or allowed for some strategic distance—from candidates in close races, reasoning that they’d rather have congressional majorities than enforce personal purity tests. Donald Trump is about as far the opposite of that as possible. As you can imagine, all this low-grade midterms panic has Republicans everywhere trying to figure out how to get Trump to change—if not in policy, then at least in messaging. They’re making some baby steps in this department. With everyone from Laura Ingraham to Suzie Wiles all but begging the president to start treating affordability as a real concern, Trump is grudgingly going along for the moment. Earlier this week, he headed to Pennsylvania for a speech billed as focusing on affordability, where he said he’d been advised that “I can’t call it a hoax, because they’ll misconstrue that.” Even when he can be talked into talking about affordability, though, Trump can’t help falling back into meta-narratives about how unfair it is for him to have to talk about it at all. “I inherited the worst inflation in history,” he groused in Pennsylvania. “There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.” And he remains as committed as ever to the policy choices that are creating these headaches in the first place: “Tariff,” he said, is still one of his favorite words. Given that reality, many Republicans feel they can’t do much but grit their teeth, cross their fingers, and hope against hope that the economy will improve before next year. “This isn’t going to get better unless he either, one, shuts off the tariffs and starts a real economic turnaround, or two—well, I don’t know what two is,” the first strategist said. “I think the GOP is looking at a very rough midterm.” Quick HitsWHY BOTHER WITH A NEW SCRIPT: Two months ago, in a speech to American generals and admirals, Donald Trump talked about sending troops to cities “run by the radical left Democrats.” “We’re going to straighten them out one by one,” the president vowed. “That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.” Trump wasn’t kidding. On Wednesday, he threatened Chicago in the same language he has used to threaten other countries. Speaking to reporters in the Cabinet Room, Trump warned Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, not to follow in the path of Venezuela, where Trump has deployed ships, seized an oil tanker, and threatened to launch an invasion. “Colombia is producing a lot of drugs . . . and they sell it right into the United States,” said Trump. “So he [Petro] better wise up, or he’ll be next. He’ll be next, too. And I hope he’s listening. He’s going to be next.” Three minutes later, Trump aimed the same words at JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. “Every place we go, we knock down drugs,” the president bragged, referring to his National Guard deployments in American cities. “Too bad that we’re not invited more into Chicago, because we could save Chicago very quickly,” he added. “At some point we’ll just go in and do what we have to do, if the governor doesn’t wise up.” Trump doesn’t distinguish between foreign adversaries, domestic political opponents, and local officials who get in his way. If you don’t “wise up,” he’ll apply coercion or force. It’s the same way he has treated Canada, Denmark, Panama, and multiple women. In August, after Pritzker rebuffed Trump’s pressure to deploy the Guard in Chicago—“We won’t let a dictator impose his will,” said the governor—Trump suggested that Americans wanted a strongman. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator,’” the president boasted. But Trump’s segue from Colombia to Chicago is a warning. A strongman won’t just go after countries or people you don’t like. Sooner or later, he’ll come for you. —Will Saletan FEDERALISM! IN 2025!: Republicans in the Indiana Senate did something remarkable this week: They stood up to a mammoth pressure campaign from Donald Trump. This month, the president and his cronies begged, cajoled, and even threatened the Indiana legislature to go through with a mid-district gerrymander of their congressional map, an effort that would likely have netted House Republicans an additional two seats after next year’s midterms. But yesterday, 21 Indiana Senate Republicans—more than half their majority—joined the Democratic minority to kill the effort in a 31–19 vote. The pressure on lawmakers had been intense. Trump threatened on Truth Social this week to back a MAGA primary challenge against any GOP state lawmaker who voted against redistricting, while Trumpy organizations like Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, threatened that failure to pass the map would result in all federal funding being stripped from the state. Meanwhile, opponents of the redistricting plan said that as the president vilified them, they had been targeted in alarming ways, including receiving bomb threats and swatting attacks. Yet in the end, they held firm. “My opposition to mid-cycle gerrymandering is not in contrast to my conservative principles, but because of them,” GOP state Sen. Spencer Deery said ahead of the vote. “As long as I have breath, I will use my voice to resist a federal government that attempts to bully, direct, and control this state or any state. Giving the federal government more power is not conservative.” EUROPE’S DEAD ANYWAYS: Donald Trump hasn’t hidden the fact that he disdains Europe, even to bemoaning that “Paris is no longer Paris.” But his—and, by extension, America’s—role in sowing discord on the continent seems far greater than what is publicly known. The Times of London had this chilling report last night:
Read the full dispatch here. A BOOM FOR ZOOM: DHS Secretary Kirsti Noem went to Capitol Hill yesterday for a hearing on the administration’s assessment of national security threats. But the questioning—when done by the Democrats—often veered into Noem’s handling of the president’s mass deportation campaign. It was the usual stuff: demands that she resign, responded to with indignation and obfuscation. But one moment stood out. Rep. Ira Magaziner (D-R.I.) asked Noem: “How many United States military veterans have you deported?” To which she responded: “Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.” Magaziner then had a staffer come stand next to him. The staffer held an iPad with Zoom open. On it was Sae Joon Park, a U.S. Army combat veteran who had been shot twice in service. Park earlier this year was forced to self deport to South Korea, where he had not lived since he was a child. He looked on as Noem, for one of the only times in the hearing, seemed caught off guard, stumbling to explain that she appreciated anyone who had served but would continue to deport people. Watch the exchange here. AROUND THE BULWARK
Cheap Shots
1 To be specific: He said these things on SiriusXM Patriot with Mike Slater, WBT Charlotte’s Brett Winterble Show, Cats and Cosby on WABC in New York City, and the nationally syndicated Chris Stigall Show, respectively. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
|
Trump’s Hand-Picked RNC Chair Predicts Doom
December 12, 2025
0
