First, President Trump’s Wednesday night address on Iran. Despite the hype, not much new was announced. Trump said that America’s “core strategic objectives” in the war — “systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or reject power outside of their borders” — are “nearing completion,” though the U.S. is going to “hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks” before the conflict wraps up. He did not lay out any plans to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, which he said would “just open up naturally” when the war ends. “We have all the cards,” Trump said. “They have none.”

Second, Attorney General Pam Bondi has been fired. Trump was reportedly frustrated with Bondi’s handling of the Epstein Files, as well as her failure to prosecute more of his political rivals. Her ouster comes just a few weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was dismissed as well; per Politico, Trump is weighing a broader Cabinet shakeup, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also potentially on the chopping block. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as acting AG after Bondi officially steps down later this month; successors being floated include EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

Third, the Department of Homeland Security shutdown — the longest in American history — is maybe inching closer to a resolution. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced that they have agreed on a plan to fund DHS, minus ICE and CBP, for now and then deal with those two agencies in a party-line reconciliation bill. (Yes, this is the same deal that Johnson rejected a week ago.) Now, many House Republicans are fuming about the plan, which might not be approved until mid-April. In the meantime, the president has said he will sign an order to pay all DHS employees for the duration of the shutdown. As I said on Monday, the days of shutdowns as a meaningful political tool are over.

Fourth, the March jobs numbers came out this morning, and the U.S. economy added 178,000 jobs last month, well above what economists were expecting. The unemployment rate dropped down a tick, from 4.4% to 4.3%. Nothing will be more important for the midterm elections than the economy, so this is an important indicator to be watching.

And now, our top story this morning, my report from inside the room as the Supreme Court considered a landmark case on birthright citizenship on Wednesday, another behind-the-scenes special for paid subscribers:

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first. Yes, President Trump was in attendance as the Supreme Court considered his executive order on birthright citizenship on Wednesday. No, no sitting president has ever attended Supreme Court oral arguments before.

There are many commentators who have cast Trump’s presence as an attempt to bully or intimidate the Supreme Court, or even as a threat to the separation of powers. Inside the room, however, the move came off a little differently.

When Trump walked in, it caused a stir in the press gallery, but seemed to have little impact on the rest of the courtroom. Trump’s entrance wasn’t announced. Nobody stood up; “Hail to the Chief” wasn’t played. (There is also not, despite what some Trump officials claimed, a special chair set aside for the president during Supreme Court oral arguments. This was made abundantly clear since Trump actually changed seats with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, moving closer to the center, a few minutes after sitting down. Did he want the better view? To move away from Pam Bondi, whom he had just fired? It’s impossible to say.)

By contrast, as always, when the justices grandly strode out from behind their velvet curtain, their presence was announced (“Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention…”) Everybody stood, including Trump.

For the next hour and 20 minutes — when Trump left shortly after his lawyer was done speaking, and right as the lawyer challenging his executive order began — all nine of the justices were given a turn to grill the president’s attorney. Trump sat silently and watched.

Whatever Trump’s intent, the impact of his attendance wasn’t to aggrandize the appearance of his power versus the court’s; it was the opposite. While the justices presided from their imposing bench, Trump sat in the front row of the public gallery. He quietly walked in and quietly walked out, without any pomp or circumstance. This was a testament to the separation of powers, not a threat to it. The president was treated like any other litigant; he was welcome to attend, but that didn’t mean he would receive any acknowledgement or special treatment.

It was a powerful reinforcement that the court is its own branch of government — he was walking into their house — and its procedures aren’t altered one iota if the sitting president is a party to the case, or sitting in the room. The court marches on regardless.

Nor did the justices seem particularly intimidated. I was wondering, ahead of time, if Trump was expecting something akin to a congressional hearing: big, partisan fireworks, with two sides fighting over the policy implications of his birthright citizenship order. (He has likely seen many House and Senate hearings on television over the years, including the confirmation hearings for the three justices he nominated. The court has been livestreaming audio of its hearings since 2020 — and they make for scintillating listening! — but I would be surprised if Trump has ever clicked over to supremecourt.gov to listen in.)

Indeed, Trump’s only comment after leaving the court was strictly policy-related. “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship,” Trump wrote on Truth Social just after leaving the court. That isn’t strictly true (there are 32 other countries that offer citizenship automatically to anyone born on their soil), but more to the point, it wasn’t relevant to the proceedings Trump had witnessed.

If Trump wants to have a policy argument, he should go to Congress (and, potentially, depending on how the court rules, state legislatures as well to advocate for a constitutional amendment). The Supreme Court’s is not to decide good policy for the country. It is to interpret what the law says.

This point was actually made by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, while the president who appointed him was still sitting a few rows away.

“You’ve mentioned several times the practices of other countries, and that, obviously, as a policy matter supports what you’re arguing here,” Kavanaugh said to Solicitor General John Sauer, who was representing the Trump administration. “But, obviously, we try to interpret American law with American precedent based on American history. That’s certainly what I try to do and I think you try to do.”

“And so why should we be thinking about, even though as a policy matter I get the point, thinking about, ‘Gee, European countries don’t have this or most other countries, many other countries in the world don’t have this?’” Kavanaugh continued. “Doesn’t that—I guess I’m not seeing the relevance as a legal, constitutional, interpretive matter necessarily, although I understand it’s a very good point as a policy matter.”

Based on his Truth Social post, Trump doesn’t seem to have internalized this distinction, or grasped the sort of legal — not policy — arguments that are most likely to impress the justices.

So let’s turn now to those legal arguments.

On Wednesday, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) posted pictures of himself outside the Supreme Court, with a message about birthright citizenship. Padilla wrote: “The 14th Amendment is CRYSTAL CLEAR: All persons born or naturalized in the United States… are citizens of the United States.”

That is perhaps the hardest-working ellipses in Washington: nearly all of Wednesday’s arguments turned on the six words that Padilla omitted.

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There are two ways this could go. In his most recent public comments, Trump has been signaling that the war may soon be wrapping up: “It’s coming to an end,” he told NBC News in an interview yesterday. The U.S. and Iran have been engaged in peace negotiations, though we don’t have much insight into how they’ve been going. If the war ends, will the Strait of Hormuz reopen? Trump has suggested that he may be fine with ending the military operation even if the strait stays closed. He wrote on Truth Social that, essentially, other countries will have to handle it: “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself,” he said. “The U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.”

Trump being Trump, it is also possible, of course, that he will announce the exact opposite: that the war is expanding. According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has been drawing up plans for a potential weeks-long ground invasion.

In other news, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments this morning on Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. I’ll be there. Trump says he’ll be there, too. I’ll have more for you later this week on that fascinating staredown, and on the president’s address.

I’m going to wait for the speech to make any conclusions about where the war stands militarily. But in the meantime, we can say what it’s meant domestically: the last month of war has been absolutely toxic for Trump’s political fortunes.

This morning, let’s dive into four data points I’m watching, all of which tell a scary story for the GOP:

1. The Iran war is deeply unpopular

As was widely noted when the war in Iran started, however unpopular foreign military interventions often become, they usually start out with majority support. This one didn’t.

As the Iran war continued over the last month, it only became less popular. Below, I’ve charted the percentage of Americans who said they approved of the initial U.S. attacks on Iran when asked by YouGov on March 2 vs. those who said they approved of the war in a YouGov poll conducted from March 27-30.

The military operation started out with 37% support. It has since plunged to 28%. As you can see below, this is due to decreases among every political group. What little support the war initially had among Democrats has basically evaporated, and the roughly one-fourth of Independents who first backed the war has shrunk to roughly one-fifth. And most notably: there has been a 14-point decline in support among Republicans.

There is still mostly no MAGA split on Iran, although MAGA support did drop from 85% to 79%, a small but noticeable change. Instead, most of the GOP movement comes from an absolute collapse in support from non-MAGA Republicans: 63% of this group backed the war at the beginning of March; only 33% backed the war by the month’s end.

(For those wondering, there has been a decline in the percentage of Republicans who identify as “MAGA Republicans” over the last month. In the March 2 poll, 66% of Republicans said they were a MAGA supporter; 21% said they weren’t. In the March 27-30 poll, 54% of Republicans said they were a MAGA supporter; 29% said they weren’t. I will note, though, that the March 2 number was basically the high watermark of Republicans identifying as MAGA Republicans in YouGov’s polling. The current 54% number is much closer to where the number was for most of 2025. Still, it’s notable that the MAGA number went up in January and February before dropping in March, and it’s a trend worth paying attention to.)

But let’s go back to that topline number for a second: Trump is waging a war with only 28% of the American public behind him. By comparison, 70% of Americans backed the war in Iraq one month in. For a president to be fighting a war, this early in, that only about one-quarter of the country supports is basically unprecedented.

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2. Gas prices continue to rise

Historically, Americans don’t pay much attention to foreign policy. One stat I’ve been curious about is whether the ongoing war in Iran would make voters tune in more closely to foreign affairs. So far, it seems like the answer is “a little, but not much.”

According to polling by Strength In Numbers/Verasight, before the war, 2% of Americans said foreign policy was the issue they cared most about. After the war, that number ticked up to 5%: a little bit higher, but still a really small segment of Americans.

From those numbers, we can glean that the simple fact of the war — just by itself — might not have much of a political impact, since American voters continue not to care much about foreign policy. In other words, if the U.S. began attacking Iran but it didn’t lead to many or any reverberations inside the U.S. (sort of like the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela), you wouldn’t expect it to help President Trump politically (because the war is unpopular), but you also wouldn’t expect it to hurt. Americans may not love the idea of foreign military intervention, but that isn’t a philosophical stance that is so closely held or so important to them that you’d brace for a political impact. (Indeed, the Venezuela operation was unpopular, but didn’t really seem to affect Trump’s approval rating.)

However, the war in Iran has had an impact on Americans’ lived experiences in a way the operation in Venezuela didn’t: it has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused the global oil supply to plummet, which has caused global oil prices to rise, which has caused gas prices here in the U.S. to increase accordingly.

Per AAA, average U.S. gas prices crossed the $4/gallon threshold on Tuesday for the first time since August 2022. The below chart of gas prices is from the website GasBuddy; it is not hard to tell when the war in Iran began:

1 + 2 = 3. Trump’s approval rating is cratering

Unlike foreign policy, rising prices is an issue that matters to a lot of voters, so it’s no surprise that an unpopular war that has also had a negative economic impact would create a political crisis for a president. 1 + 2 = 3.

Opinions on the economy — Americans’ No. 1 political issue — were already low. The war in Iran has only made them worse. Below, you can see the results of the University of Michigan’s long-running consumer sentiment survey. Americans currently feel about as badly about the economy as they did during the post-Covid inflation spike, and even worse than they did during the 2008 recession.

Trump’s approval rating has gone down with it. In the last week, several pollsters, including Reuters and YouGov, have recorded lower approval ratings for Trump than they have at any other point in his second term. Some of these polls showed his support dipping into the mid-30s.

Here at Wake Up To Politics, we believe it’s always best to use polling averages, in order to sweep in as many data points from as many different pollsters as possible. This week, Trump’s average approval rating in Nate Silver’s tracker dipped below 40% for the first time in his second term:

March really did a number on Trump’s approval rating: Trump started the month with an average net approval rating of about -12%, which is basically where he had hovered since December. He ended March with an average net approval rating of about -17%, a five-point drop in four weeks. (Trump’s net approval rating = his approval rating minus his disapproval rating.)

Trump is far from the first president to see his approval rating dip under 40%, but it’s not the best club to be in: Harry Truman during the post-World War II inflation spike and again during the Korean War, LBJ during Vietnam, Nixon during Watergate, Ford after the Nixon pardon, Carter during the Iran hostage crisis and stagflation, Bill Clinton during Hillarycare, George H.W. Bush during a recession, George W. Bush during Iraq and the Great Recession, Trump himself during the Mueller probe and after January 6th, and Joe Biden after the Afghanistan pullout, then again as inflation spiked, and again after his disastrous debate. (You’ll notice a fair amount of foreign wars on this list: we often think of military conflicts as causing a “rally around the flag,” but over the long run, wars usually cause the opposite for a president’s approval rating.)

Trump’s average approval rating — 39.7% — is now exactly where it was on the last day of his first term, meaning Trump is as popular now as he was in the wake of January 6th.

Of particular political importance: Trump’s average approval rating among Independents is now down to 28%, per the Cook Political Report. 66% of Independents disapprove of his presidency, a stunning 38-point gap. (Per CNN’s Harry Enten, no president on record has been as unpopular among Independents at this point in their second term, not even a soon-to-resign Richard Nixon.)

Should we be surprised that a spike in gas prices has sent Trump’s to their lowest level this term? Not at all. As this 2022 chart from Sabato’s Crystal Ball shows, presidential approval ratings and gas prices are highly correlated. This is just one more example of that trend.

Trump’s approval rating on the economy — arguably the issue that got him elected — is even worse than his overall approval: 36.8% approve, 59.3% disapprove, per Nate Silver’s average. Almost 60% of Americans disapproving of the president’s handling of the economy is an obvious political danger zone in an election year.

His approval rating on other matters isn’t much better. In YouGov’s latest poll, I noticed that only 28% of Americans approve of Trump’s White House renovations. On this, there actually is something of a MAGA split: only 69% of self-identified MAGA supporters approve. I don’t think this is an issue costing Trump votes or anything, but it is very rare to see such a low level of support from Trump’s base on anything Trump is doing.

Naturally, then, Trump posted twice about the White House ballroom yesterday, plus three separate posts with photos of the plans. (Construction was blocked by a judge yesterday.) Possibly the least helpful messaging from the president you could imagine if you’re a Republican seeking re-election in a competitive district.

1 + 2 + 3 = 4. Democrats are expanding their generic ballot lead

All of these data points add up to a four-alarm fire for Republicans ahead of the midterms.

One trend that was giving some Republicans hope for much of the last year was that, even as Trump’s approval rating dropped, Democrats weren’t gaining much of an edge in the generic ballot. (“Generic ballot” questions ask poll respondents whether they plan to support a Democrat or Republican the next time they cast a ballot for Congress.)

Back in April 2017, during Trump’s first term, Democrats boasted about a six-point edge on the generic ballot, per RealClearPolitics. By April 2025, Trump was back in office once again, but now Democrats had only about a 1-point edge on the generic ballot. This gap between 2017 and 2025 was a source of concern for many Democrats.

Well, it’s now April 2026, and that gap has disappeared. According to RealClearPolitics, the average generic ballot now shows Democrats with a six-point advantage, much closer to where you would expect based on the president’s poll numbers. Not only is Trump’s approval rating dropping, but it is taking the Republican Party’s midterm prospects with it.

We are also seeing Democratic gains on another question: party identification.

As you can see in the chart below — which uses quarterly party ID data from Gallup — the general trend for the last three decades has been that more people identified as Democrats than Republicans. This underwent a sharp change during the Biden era, when Republicans took their first lead in party identification since the 1990s.

Gallup released its data for the first quarter of 2026 this week, and the Biden-era change has now reversed itself: Democrats are back to claiming an advantage on the party identification question.

Not only that, but the percentage of Americans identifying as Republicans (39%) is lower than Gallup has recorded at any point in the last 35 years. The Democrats’ 10-point advantage on this question is the largest that it’s been since 2006, when the party flipped 31 House seats and five Senate seats.

If you zoom in on the above chart, you can really get an appreciation of Republican Party identification has collapsed during Trump’s second term, going from 47% in the last quarter of 2024 to 39% today.

Another ugly trend for the GOP. If it and the others hold, expect to see more congressional Republicans retiring, more House seats sliding into tossup territory, and Democrats starting to daydream about flipping Senate seats in Alaska and Iowa that could catapult them into the majority.

What happens if the war ends tonight?

It’s possible that Trump’s approval rating could recover somewhat. His numbers saw a similarly sharp drop after the “Liberation Day” tariffs, and then bounced back (though only to their previous, subpar level). We also saw Trump’s approval rating decline during last year’s government shutdown; they partially recovered, but never fully made up that ground.

No matter what happens next, this last month has been a political disaster for the president, and one that was entirely self-made. Even if gas prices get back to normal by Election Day, Trump has handed Democrats the gift of two periods in his first two years where Americans thought he was hurting, not helping, the economy — “Liberation Day” and the Iran war — despite his 2024 promise to lower prices. If either one fades from the national memory, there will surely be plenty of Democratic advertising in the next seven months to remind voters. (Of course, if the war continues, voters won’t need reminding. Of particular danger to the GOP could be the legislative package to fund the war that would then become necessary. Per Axios, Republicans are considering offsetting the cost of the war by cutting health care spending, thereby mixing one unpopular policy with another.)

Trump could have spent the last month shoring up his political position, traveling the country in a bid to tell a feel-good story about the economy. Instead, he launched a war that has helped worsen it, and barely tried to sell it, leaving voters with the exact opposite impression. These sorts of impressions can often be hard for presidents to reverse — Joe Biden’s image never recovered after the pullout from Afghanistan — though outside events can sometimes lend a helping hand (for Biden, it was the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion).

The Republican Party’s political prospects were already shaky enough when the Iran war began. For the GOP, the month of March was nothing but one long setback.

The DHS is the country’s third-largest Cabinet department, with more than 240,000 employees. It’s the agency that protects the border, swears in new citizens, prepares for natural disasters, keeps airports secure, guards the president, and fends off cyberattacks. The Coast Guard, the Secret Service, FEMA, TSA, ICE, and Customs and Border Protection are just some of its component agencies.

It has already been shut down longer than any federal agency in history — and now both chambers of Congress have skipped town, virtually ensuring that the shutdown drags on in their absence for two more weeks, at least. Numerous federal employees are working without a paycheck, but lawmakers aren’t even trying to come to a compromise; instead, they’re giving up and going home. (And yes, senators and representatives will still be paid in the meantime.)

“Reconvene the Senate Now,” Lee wrote on X. “The Senate must reconvene. This is crazy,” he added in another post. Somewhat confusingly, he also posted in Japanese, in a message that translates to, “The House of Councillors must be convened and conduct its business.”

I agree completely with Lee (at least with the English-language messages I’m able to understand). It is crazy that DHS employees are working without pay, while the exact people who could fix the problem are being paid without working. But there’s a difference between Lee complaining about it, and me complaining about it: he actually had the power to stop it.

And I don’t mean in an abstract, “You’re a member of Congress! Just DO SOMETHING!!!!” way. Oftentimes, there is only so much a single member of Congress can do to shape events. But this is not one of those times. At about 2:30 a.m. on Friday morning, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) came before the Senate to ask unanimous consent that the chamber leave town for the next two weeks, meeting only for a handful of pro forma sessions (when no business is conducted) in the meantime.

At that moment, any of the other 99 senators could have stood up, and said “I object,” preventing the chamber from going on recess (or at least forcing a vote on it, which would have meant that senators would have had to go on record on whether they wanted to recess in the middle of a shutdown). However, according to Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News, only five senators were on the floor shortly before Thune made his 2:30 a.m. request. None of them objected. Lee was not one of the senators present.

Video of the moment is below, via Friend of the Newsletter Kacper Surdy:

Lee is complaining about legislative absenteeism, but at the crucial moment when all 100 senators had equal power to block (or at least forestall) the Senate from going on recess, he himself was absent. The DHS shutdown has officially become the perfect metaphor for the modern-day Congress.

To explain why, let’s review what’s going on in greater detail.

The perfect metaphor

The Department of Homeland Security was initially supposed to be funded by September 30, exactly six months ago. It wasn’t, along with the rest of the government, leading to a record-breaking, 43-day shutdown in the fall. Since then, all the other agencies have been funded by bipartisan agreements, but DHS continued to operate off of stopgap funding bills (except for another, four-day shutdown in February). When the most recent stopgap expired on February 14, Democrats said they would not accept another one unless it included reforms to ICE, sparking the new shutdown.

Negotiations have continued off and on since then, with Democrats and the Trump administration trading offers back and forth. Eventually, on Thursday, the two sides basically agreed to disagree. Democratic and Republican senators settled on a compromise to fund all of DHS except for ICE and part of Customs and Border Protection, both of which would be able to continue due to funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill. No new ICE reforms were included, but neither was any new ICE funding. Senators on both sides of the aisle were satisfied.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, Thune asked for unanimous consent to pass the bill. With five senators present and none objecting, the bill passed. (All 100 senators were aware in advance that Thune was going to make this request, and any of them could have gotten to the Hill in time if they wanted to stop it.) Then, Thune asked for unanimous consent to go on recess.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) did not take kindly to this compromise, and refused to put it up for a vote in the House. Instead, he held a vote on a bill to fund DHS — all of it — through May 22, which passed 213-203, with three Democrats joining all the present Republicans. (Eight Democrats and eight Republicans didn’t show up for the vote.) Then, the House left for recess, too.

President Trump promptly signed a memorandum ordering TSA employees to be paid, by moving money around from the One Big Beautiful Bill. Record numbers of TSA employees had been calling in sick, instead of showing up for work without pay, leading to long wait times at airports across the country. At this point, Congress had deserted Washington, closing off any path to a legislative compromise, leading the president to step in and offer a fix by executive action, thereby alleviating the main source of pressure that still existed for lawmakers to come to a deal.

Almost everything wrong with the present-day Congress can be detected in this string of events.

First, the Senate approved a major piece of legislation by unanimous consent, without any semblance of debate, at 2:30 a.m., with five senators present. Rather than risk taking a tough vote, senators opted to just put the bill up by unanimous consent and then not show up to object. Some senators now say they were against the legislation: “I opposed this bill,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) wrote on X after it passed. But this is empty rhetoric; none of them showed up to block it.

Then, the House Speaker refused to put the bipartisan bill up for a vote, even though a majority of his chamber very likely would have supported it. (In fact, per Punchbowl, House GOP leadership aides estimate that more than half of House Republicans would have backed the Senate bill if it were put up for a vote.) But majority party members, even when they support a bill, usually don’t rock the boat and step in to prevent their leadership from deciding what does or doesn’t get a vote. So a bill that is thought to be backed by a majority of House members withered because one person, the Speaker, opposed it.

And in the final act: the legislative branch abandoned its post, and allowed the president to step in to fix the problem, preferring to fork their “power of the purse” to the executive branch and let the president handle things rather than stay in session and do the hard work of legislative negotiation.

Bills passed without any semblance of deliberation. Members posturing on social media rather than actually showing up to take tough votes or exerting their power to stop bills they claim to oppose. Leaders singlehandedly blocking votes on bipartisan bills that otherwise could pass. And lawmakers skipping town so the executive branch can sweep up their messes, allowing the president to expand his power at the expense of their own. All while breaking the record for longest-ever government shutdown, which they set just a few months ago. Welcome to the United States Congress in 2026.

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The end of shutdowns?

We’ll return to our wayward legislative branch soon, but I want to pause for a moment on Trump’s move to pay TSA officers.

Regular readers won’t be surprised by the idea that government shutdowns aggrandize the power of the executive branch. In fact, as I’ve written repeatedly, shutdowns are an executive branch creation: the whole reason they exist is that Jimmy Carter’s attorney general changed the existing interpretation of an 1870 law to say that when a government agency runs out of money, it has to halt non-essential activities instead of continuing to operate at its current funding level. (Read more here and here.)

Anything that was created by the executive branch can be ended by it too. At any time, a new president or attorney general could put the interpretation that reigned from 1870 to 1980 back in place, and shutdowns would be no more. So it’s no surprise to me that a memo from the president could end shutdowns. But this isn’t exactly the type of memo I had in mind:

That’s the header for Trump’s memo ordering that TSA officers be paid, and I don’t think enough attention is being paid to the fact that this move effectively neuters the whole concept of a government shutdown going forward.

Shutdowns happen when members of Congress have some otherwise-hard-to-achieve political priority in mind, and want to use the pain of a shutdown as leverage to make it happen. The success rate of this strategy is basically zero, but it’s proved seductive for both parties at various points anyways.

Whether or not the strategy works, though, the only reason to try it is because you hope that the party in power will be so cowed by the pain a shutdown causes, that they’ll give you what you’re demanding.

With the fall 2025 shutdown and now this one, Trump has basically killed this strategy. In the last shutdown, Trump moved money around to pay the troops and to pay (some) SNAP benefits, when those emerged as the shutdown’s largest pain points. This time, the TSA has proven to be the shutdown’s biggest pain point; now, Trump is paying them, too.

If presidents follow this precedent over time, it will become harder and harder for minority parties to even try to enact legislative change via shutdown, because the executive branch will simply step in and alleviate any shutdown-related pain, knowing that no one will want to challenge them in court and sue to stop, say, troops from being paid.

In no small part, this is also possible because of the expansion of the reconciliation process, which allows majority parties to pass certain pieces of legislation without worrying about the Senate filibuster. The reconciliation process has evolved over time to include parties funding line items that used to have to go through the normal appropriations process, which comes with the 60-vote filibuster threshold.

Democrats did this with the Inflation Reduction Act. Then, Republicans did this with the One Big Beautiful Bill, which is how they had enough money in the defense and DHS budgets to pay the troops and ICE agents and, now, TSA officers. Republicans might now move forward with a new reconciliation bill to fund DHS, cutting the minority party out of the funding process entirely if Democrats don’t drop their demand for ICE reforms.

As time goes on, as reconciliation bills grow larger — and vaguer, giving the president more and more leeway over how to spend the money — shutdown threats might not carry much weight soon. When controversial issues come up in appropriations negotiations, the majority party will simply be able to fund what they want through reconciliation and let the president fill in the rest. If parties do this during a period of united government, they can even be sure that their priorities will be funded for the rest of a president’s term, even if the opposing party eventually wins a foothold in Congress. (Or, of course, the legislative filibuster might just get scrapped entirely, mooting this whole thing.)

Over time, shutdown threats will lose their luster, possibly giving rise to more Zombie Shutdowns that drag on for weeks, since the biggest-ticket items get funded by a combination of reconciliation bills and executive actions, erasing any impetus that lawmakers might have had to act.

Queen of the hill

However this might look down the line, however, the fact remains that right now, there are still federal employees working without pay. The most attention-grabbing examples, like TSA officers, have now been taken care of — but that leaves out all sorts of employees across DHS, including support staff at many agencies, to whom the One Big Beautiful Bill funding doesn’t extend.

None of this is about taking either the Democratic or Republican position in these negotiations. The Democratic Party has valid reasons to be calling for ICE and CBP to be reformed, in the wake of the two American citizens killed by those agencies in Minneapolis. And the Republican Party has valid reasons to resist those reforms, and to resist them being attached to appropriations negotiations: majority parties, including Democrats in the past, have long said that they will not negotiate on policy while government funding is being held hostage.

The outrage here is that America’s legislators aren’t even trying to bridge that gap by legislation. Instead, they’ve all gone home.

The way I see it, there are three proposals on the table:

• The Senate-passed bill to fund all of DHS but ICE (not reforming the agency but also not giving it new funding), which has not received a vote in the House.

• The House-passed bill to fund all of DHS through May, which has not received a vote in the Senate.

• A bipartisan bill proposed by the House Problem Solvers Caucus — funding all of DHS, including some ICE reforms (requiring officers wear body cameras and identification; banning them from wearing masks; requiring warrants for enforcement activities at sensitive locations; mandating independent investigations of ICE agent-involved shootings), as well as a GOP priority (setting enhanced penalties for doxxing law enforcement officers) — which hasn’t received a vote in either chamber.

In the House, there is a procedure that is sometimes used called the “queen of the hill” rule. In a “queen of the hill” process, multiple pieces of legislation on the same topic are put up for consecutive votes; the bill that receives the most votes is the one that is considered to have passed the chamber.

In my perfect world, the House and Senate would vote on all three of the above proposals under this process. I believe that at least one of them would receive majority support in both chambers, and potentially two of them. All three would end the shutdown.

But this can’t be tested — the Senate-passed bill can’t get a vote in the House, the House-passed bill can’t get a vote in the Senate, and the Problem Solvers bill can’t get a vote anywhere — if both chambers of Congress are on recess. And even if they were here in Washington, it couldn’t be tested, because rank-and-file members largely allow their party leaders to control the floor and block bills from being considered even when they might fetch majority support.

In the House, the only way around this is the discharge petition, which can force a vote on legislation if a majority of House members sign on. Incidentally, another bipartisan discharge petition notched the necessary 218 signatures this week, on a bill extending temporary deportation protections for Haitian migrants that the Trump administration has tried to end. It will be the fifth discharge petition to force a vote this Congress, more than in any Congress since 1934.

The Problem Solvers Caucus has indicated that they might try this route for their DHS bill. The record-breaking run of discharge petitions is one small sign that rank-and-file members of Congress are pushing back. But mostly they play dead, content to tweet from the sidelines while allowing their chambers to recess as their leaders shield them from tough votes and the president steps in with a quick fix.

This morning, the Senate quickly gaveled in for a pro forma session, without conducting any business. “No attempt was made to pass DHS funding by unanimous consent,” Mike Lee fumed on X.

Only two senators were present. Mike Lee wasn’t one of them.

The White House was planning to hold a press briefing in two hours, and they wanted to call on me for the first question. Could I make it?

I cleared my schedule.

I threw on a suit, and immediately started thinking about what I wanted to ask Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.

There was the SAVE America Act, which had been the topic of that morning’s newsletter. I could go super-niche and ask about the Senate filibuster, or about whether President Trump would want Senate Republicans to overrule the chamber’s parliamentarian if she says election reform can’t be done through the reconciliation process. No, too specific.

TSA lines were snarling through the airports: I could ask for an update on the Department of Homeland Security shutdown negotiations. But what were the odds she’d have an update to share?1

Hoping I’d be able to ask a follow-up, I ultimately settled on two questions:

First, I wanted to ask about war powers. The war in Iran is now almost a month old, and I felt like the idea of the president seeking congressional authorization had come up a lot in the early days of the conflict, but pretty much been dropped since then. Of course, there are now peace talks, which may lead to the war ending — but there are also signs of potential escalation.

Thousands of U.S. troops are on their way to the Middle East, and President Trump is reportedly considering an operation to seize Iran’s Kharg Island, which would require a ground invasion. I wanted to know if the war stretched on long enough, or if it started to involve ground troops, whether there was a point at which President Trump would commit to seeking congressional authorization.

Second, I wanted to ask about the youth vote. In the 2024 election, President Trump made significant gains among young voters, in no small part because they wanted lower prices and an end to foreign wars. Now, of course, Trump is engaged in a war that is causing prices to go up. Many young Trump supporters have been growing dissatisfied as a result.

I wanted to ask what President Trump’s message was to these young voters who had supported him in 2024, but now feel the administration isn’t going how they expected.

My hope was that these two questions would a) be newsworthy, b) be in keeping with the topics I cover in this newsletter (like separation of powers and shifting political coalitions), and c) take advantage of the fact that not many 24-year-old journalists get to ask the White House press secretary a question. I wanted to try to bring a Gen Z perspective into the briefing room.

You can see my questions and Leavitt’s responses in the video below. On the first question, she told me that congressional authorization for the war in Iran is “not necessary because we’re currently in major combat operations” — a military term, but not a legal one — and that all briefings that Congress had received had been given strictly “as a courtesy.” She didn’t lay out circumstances under which Trump would seek authorization, though she didn’t rule it out either, pledging that the president and the administration “will always abide by the law.”

On the second question, Leavitt said her message to young voters was, “President Trump is doing this for you,” to ensure that U.S. troops in the Middle East, “many of them young people themselves,” are “no longer threatened by a rogue terrorist regime.” She said that the spike in gas prices would be a “temporary short-term fluctuation” and that “they’re going to go right back down when this is over.” Here’s our full exchange…

In today’s newsletter: I want to take you inside the White House briefing room, explain what it’s like and how it works, talk about how the press briefings have evolved, how useful I think they are in the age of Trump, and what led to me being able to ask the first question.

This is the type of behind-the-scenes content I always try to offer paid subscribers, whether it’s at the Supreme Court, a presidential debate, or a nominating convention. One of my goals with Wake Up To Politics is to take you inside the halls of power and give you a sense of how our politics really work.

If you aren’t one already, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to become a paid subscriber. As I’ll explain below, I was in the briefing room’s “New Media” seat, which more often than not — I run the numbers below — has gone to highly opinionated outlets. Someone recently sent me a database they built of top figures in independent media (political podcasters, Substackers, social media influencers, etc). They had Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT organize each of the commentators on a left-right spectrum and averaged out the answers between 0 to 50 in either direction, from Hasan Piker (50D) to Candace Owens (50R).

Out of 97 media figures, I was one of only two to score a perfect 0, right in the center.

I am glad that there is a growing ecosystem of “new media” outlets, and that the White House is giving some of them recognition. But I fear for the future of media if voices are much more clustered towards the 50Rs and 50Ds, with fewer and fewer places to find the 0s: unbiased reporters who are covering politics through a non-partisan lens. I truly believe we’re building something special here at Wake Up To Politics — and apparently three AI models agree with me!

If you also want “new media” spaces to include some non-partisan voices, I hope you’ll upgrade to a paid subscription to ensure WUTP can keep going. (Trust me: going “50R” or “50D” is a much better business model.) It’s only with your support that I’m able to end up in places like the White House briefing room.

Plus, a paid subscription means you can come along with me when I do. Speaking of, let’s take a trip into the White House and learn the secrets of the James S. Brady Briefing Room…

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You have a driver to take you wherever you want to go. A coterie of aides at your beck and call. You make $174,000 a year (well over double the national average), plus a nice pension. How about job security? At most, you only risk termination every six years; more accurately, unless you are one of a handful of senators from a competitive state, the job is pretty much yours until you choose to give it up.

At your workplace, Capitol Hill, the world bends around you. People hurry out of your way in the halls. Lunch is served for each party multiple times a week. (Yesterday, Republicans had roast beef.) A specialized subway system takes you from your office building to the Capitol, then a “Senators Only” elevator take you to the Senate floor. No need to rush: every vote will be held open until you get there. Even outside the Capitol, you move through life with ease: it sure sounds nice to skip airport lines like a member of Congress, doesn’t it?

You also don’t have to do that much.

The Senate is the upper chamber of the legislative branch, and yet it spends less and less time legislating. Once a forum where the nation’s most pressing issues were discussed, it is now rare for the Senate to debate a hot-button bill. And when bills do get considered, the process is highly structured. The Senate was designed to allow every individual senator unlimited opportunities to debate and amend every bill, which can create — in theory — drawn-out sessions, hectic schedules, and votes forced at any hour. It was supposed to be freewheeling, deliberative, and time-intensive.

Instead, senators have largely forked over their rights to control debate and amendments to their party’s leaders. Debates are held in tidy blocs, and votes are scheduled in advance. Unlike in the House, which is controlled by majority fiat, rank-and-file senators have all sorts of ways, according to the rules, to force votes on bills or amendments they want to see considered. But they don’t. Because if they do it, someone else can do it to them, and who wants to vote on an amendment by Rand Paul when you could be happily flying home for a three-or-four-day weekend?

“Senators got very comfortable,” Rachel Bovard, the vice president of the Conservative Partnership Institute and a former Senate Republican staffer, told me in an interview. “And they still are very comfortable with that schedule… They build their whole travel schedule and fundraising and all these things around this predictability of the floor, when it is, by nature, inherently unpredictable.”

Senators spend a lot of time in public calling for action on this issue or that, but almost never force debate themselves, in order to preserve this predictability — and because it’s possible they might get rewarded politically more for talking about an issue than getting something done on it (especially if that “something” ends up being a compromise).

Bovard is part of a band of conservative activists who have been trying to urge the Senate to change its ways, to embrace the unpredictability of deliberation, and try a new strategy to force legislation through — no matter how long it might take.

These activists are trying to upend the Senate’s complacent culture with the hope of passing President Trump’s top legislative priority, the SAVE America Act, which would require individuals to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo ID when casting a ballot. (Trump has also called for the measure to be expanded to limit mail-in voting and to ban transgender participation in women’s sports and gender reassignment surgeries for children.)

It’s possible you’ve already spotted the issue: in the Senate, it takes 60 votes to end debate on most pieces of legislation (or, in Senate parlance, to “invoke cloture.”)

Or, at least, that’s how journalists like me normally put it. The truth is a little bit more complicated.

In the original Senate, there was no way to end debate on legislation. Senators would simply talk and talk; once no one else wanted to speak, the chamber would move on to a vote. This eventually became frustrating for majorities (and presidents), who accused minorities of “filibustering.” Thus, the “cloture rule” was created in 1917, allowing a supermajority of senators to cut off debate at any time. (“Cloture” comes from the French word for “closure,” as in closing off debate.)

But it’s still possible to end debate on legislation naturally, just by exhausting the other side, until nobody wants to (or can) speak anymore. This is a way for the Senate to advance to final consideration of a bill without needing 60 votes. But it does take a lot of time and effort. This is what it means for a majority to force a minority into a “talking filibuster.”

There are a few things we know about how this would go. Under Senate Rule XIX, every senator can only give two speeches per “question” per legislative day. (Each bill or amendment considered by the Senate creates another “question.”) Legislative days aren’t the same as calendar days: theoretically, the Senate majority could simply not adjourn at the end of a calendar day, and stay in the same legislative day, in an attempt to deplete the number of speeches available to the minority.

Beyond that basic structure, though, it’s anyone’s guess how this would go. If all 47 Democrats managed to give two Cory Booker-style 24-hour speeches, the talking filibuster could theoretically last for 2,256 hours, or 94 days. But not all Democrats have a Cory Booker-style talk-a-thon in them. (Remember, 16 Senate Democrats are in their 70s or 80s.) Let’s say the 47 Democrats average out at about five hour per speech per senator. That would bring them to 470 hours, or about 20 days.

Each Democrat would also be able to offer amendments to the SAVE America Act; every new amendment would be a new “question,” which means it would unlock two more speeches from each Democrat. Theoretically, this multiplies the number of days Democrats could drag things on for, although you would have to imagine there’s a cap at which they simply couldn’t talk any more, even if they still have more amendments to propose. It’s just that nobody knows where that cap is, and the modern Senate — as we’ve discussed — likes its predictability.

This would basically create a test of stamina between the two parties. Even among Republicans, there’s a big divide about whether or not the GOP would be able to win this war of attrition. Having spent the last few days talking to conservatives on both sides of that divide, the most striking thing has been that both sides are absolutely certain that they’re right, either that the “talking filibuster” would surely grind Democrats down before long, or that it’s a battle Republicans would never win.

Republicans who don’t think it’s possible to pass the SAVE America Act this way argue that talking filibusters are actually harder on the majority than the minority. At any time, Democrats could suggest the absence of a quorum, which is 51 senators. If no quorum is present, the legislative day can end, and everyone would be allowed to go home and get some rest (and the two-speech count would reset). So Republicans would always need to have a majority of senators nearby the Senate floor, sleeping in cots in the Capitol for 20 or 30 or 90 straight days. Democrats would only need the one senator speaking, and maybe a few others, while the rest of their party would be comfortably sleeping at home until it’s their turn every few days.

“You need 50 Republicans more or less at hand at all times to prevent Democratic shenanigans,” Michael Fragoso, the former chief counsel to then-Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, told me. “And they don’t need that, they only need maybe a third of that. They can cycle through people. Republicans can’t.”

Supporters of the talking filibuster strategy believe that, even if it means some nights sleeping in cots, it is still easier to linger nearby (the Republicans’ task) than to talk (what Democrats have to do). “Do you think it’s gonna be harder to stand up and talk for 20 hours, or hang out near the Capitol and wait for that person to finish talking?” James Waller, another former Senate Republican staffer, said. “Like, put yourself in that position. Which one would you rather do?”

Proponents also believe the Senate rules offer answers to every concern. The chamber’s presiding officer could unilaterally block Democrats from triggering all those tiresome quorum calls, Wallner told me. And recorded votes can only be forced if 20 senators ask for one, Wallner pointed out: so Democrats would need a solid contingent of members on the floor, too, if they want to force amendment votes.

Back and forth like this it goes, with each side bringing up procedural tricks that they say fortify their position. “In this age of AI, you could have ChatGPT write a 10,000-page amendment, and it takes unanimous consent to waive the reading of the amendment, and so [Democrats] could tie things up indefinitely that way,” Fragoso raised. The hypotheticals go on and on.

Trump has made the SAVE America Act priority No. 1 for congressional Republicans, which has put pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to at least consider the talking filibuster strategy. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — who both Bovard and Wallner used to work for — has been the ringleader of this effort.

Thune doesn’t believe a talking filibuster can work (for all the reasons laid out above), but he also can’t afford for Trump to think that he’s not trying to pass the SAVE America Act. So the Senate has technically been considering the bill for the past week, which is highly unusual by modern standards, in which the Senate basically never just moves on to a piece of legislation and stays there, allowing for open-ended deliberation without a plan for what will happen next. (Normally, the Senate Majority Leader will try to invoke cloture on a bill almost immediately after bringing it up, moving to end debate on the legislation before debate can even happen.)

In ultimate Senate fashion, this has created a very structured sort of middle ground. In theory, the chamber is experimenting with actual, free-flowing deliberation — but they’ve also been barely been discussing the SAVE America Act, and Republicans keep adjourning each day, and also making speeches themselves, which means they aren’t forcing Democrats to try to hold the floor at all hours (or forcing themselves to remain nearby).

Republicans aren’t moving off of the SAVE America Act (at least not yet), but they also aren’t forcing a talking filibuster of it. They’ve just created an unusual days-long period where everybody gets to look like they’re fighting about SAVE America, while still getting their normal sleep each night. A true talking filibuster scenario would also allow Democrats to force amendment votes on the legislation, an obvious political risk for Republicans. But Thune has blocked off Democrats’ ability to offer amendments, preventing truly open deliberation.

“I would say that, currently, the Senate floor is more open than it’s been in a decade,” Bovard told me. “And it’s not even that open, right?

I spent all day yesterday at the Capitol, dipping in and out of the Senate press gallery to watch the majesty of deliberation in process. I saw senators speak about AI, and wildfires, and the fact that March is Deep Vein Thrombosis and Pulmonary Embolism Awareness Month. Only a few mentioned the theoretically pending business of the SAVE America Act.

Republicans moved away from consideration of the bill to confirm a new Trump nominee, and then to hold a procedural vote on DHS funding. Democrats also managed to get the Senate off track by forcing a vote on the Iran war. I watched from inside the chamber as the new senator from Oklahoma, Alan Armstrong, was sworn in (and got to see him learn that he had inherited the chamber’s “Candy Desk”). Throughout most of this, the chamber was basically empty. Senators would lazily amble in for pre-scheduled votes, walk up to the two desks set up at the front of the chamber for Democrats and Republicans, glance down at a piece of paper telling them how to vote, vote accordingly, and leave.

A talking filibuster is hard, for the majority and the minority. On Tuesday, I didn’t see any willingness on either side for senators to disrupt their usual routines, or to give the SAVE America Act the singular focus or urgency that Trump is demanding from it.

Later this week, the Senate is poised to hold an up-or-down vote on photo ID as part of a Republican amendment to the bill. Then, at some point, Thune is expected to call off the “debate” and hold a cloture vote, knowing it will fail.

The senators I spoke to Tuesday didn’t seem especially familiar, or interested, in their own chamber’s rules, or how they could be used to force votes on legislation. I asked Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) if he would be open to Democrats attempting a talking filibuster to push through any bills if they recapture the Senate majority.

“You mean changing the rules?” Blumenthal asked.

Not necessarily, I replied. Just throwing the floor open to extended debate under the current rules, in an effort to force a vote on something.

“Well, I’m all in favor of debate and deliberation, but I would oppose changing the rules to enable passing the SAVE America Act,” he said.

What about without a rules change? Just having unstructured debate, even for a Democratic bill?

“Debate for its own sake? Reading the phone book on the floor?” Blumenthal asked. Maybe, if that’s what senators choose to do, I said. “I don’t know,” Blumenthal said.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) similarly declined to discuss the idea. “The consequences of passing [the SAVE America Act] are too important for me to be focused on a procedural matter,” Warnock told me.

Republicans also didn’t want to get into the weeds of procedure, even to discuss the obvious implications of actions they were calling for. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) has been calling for the SAVE America Act to be included in a reconciliation bill, which can be advanced with 51 votes — but which have to be related to the budget. It now appears that Republicans will try this strategy, although it may require overruling the Senate parliamentarian, who is tasked with interpreting the chamber’s reconciliation rules.

When I asked Kennedy yesterday if he would be willing to overrule the parliamentarian, he told me it was a “ridiculous hypothetical question,” even though it’s a very real decision that Republicans will likely have to face soon.

At the end of the day, the talking filibuster is a strategy to force through a bill when 60 senators aren’t on board, but 51 senators are highly committed to it. President Trump is highly committed to the SAVE America Act, but it doesn’t seem like there are enough Republican senators committed enough to the bill to disrupt their routines for it, leading to the extended, yet strangely passive, debate now taking place on the Senate floor.

It’s possible that before anyone can ever try a talking filibuster, that the legislative filibuster will merely be eliminated. Bovard views a talking filibuster as the best way to prevent that: she believes that once senators start talking, they will get tired — but that this will create the incentives for compromise that are currently missing, precisely because senators will want to go home badly enough that they will start looking for consensus, through the iterative process of debating and amending and debating and amending.

“People need a catharsis,” Bovard told me. “They need to be able to look at the Senate and see that senators are trying to work through their differences, that they’re using the chamber as it was designed, as a consensus-building institution that sometimes is playing hardball with things like a talking filibuster, or sometimes it’s just allowing people to vote and to work through their issues and to persuade each other and to come to some kind of agreement.”

“That, I think, is the only thing that is going to save the legislative filibuster, if people see their concerns really reflected, and they see their senators actually trying to work together through through hard issues,” she said.

“So a lot of us are just saying, ‘Let the Senate be the Senate again.’”

Let’s see where we are on both:

#1: Iran. The war in Iran has entered its fourth week, nearing the point that Trump originally said the conflict would come to a close. (He told the Daily Mail at the outset of the war that it would be “about a four-week process,” though he later clarified to the New York Times that it could last “four to five weeks,” while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt then stretched the timeline to “four to six weeks.”)

In recent days, Trump has continued to zig-zag. He wrote on Truth Social on Friday that the U.S. is “getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East”; the next day, however, he signaled plans to potentially ramp up attacks.

“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Trump threatened at 7:46 p.m. ET on Saturday.

Then, this morning — about 12 hours before the deadline — Trump made a surprising announcement: the U.S. and Iran have been having “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST,” he said.

As a result, Trump said that he had instructed the military to postpone any strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for at least five days, while negotiations continue.

There is a lot that this announcement leaves unclear. Will the U.S. be changing its strategy for other attacks during the five-day period, or simply staying the course while holding off on attacking energy infrastructure? What will be the state of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s key bargaining chip, during this period? Will Israel also hold off on attacking Iran’s power plants in conjunction with the U.S.? What does a “complete and total resolution” look like?

In regards to that last question, Trump laid out his five key war objectives in his post on Friday:

(1) Completely degrading Iranian Missile Capability, Launchers, and everything else pertaining to them.

(2) Destroying Iran’s Defense Industrial Base.

(3) Eliminating their Navy and Air Force, including Anti Aircraft Weaponry.

(4) Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability, and always being in a position where the U.S.A. can quickly and powerfully react to such a situation, should it take place.

(5) Protecting, at the highest level, our Middle Eastern Allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others.

Notably, the list did not mention anything about Iranian regime change, despite Trump’s comments at the beginning of the war calling for new leadership. (No popular uprising has broken out on the ground in Iran thus far, despite optimism by U.S. and Israeli officials at the beginning of the war that the military campaign would spark internal rebellion.)

Adding further uncertainty, Iran is denying Trump’s claim that ceasefire talks are taking place. “There have been no negotiations and there are none underway,” an Iranian official told the Iranian news agency Tasnim.

Both sides appear to be broadcasting for domestic audiences: Iran is promoting Trump’s backing away from his 48-hour ultimatum as a victory, with state TV brandishing the headline, “US President Retreats After Iran’s Decisive Threats.” (Iran had said it would respond to any attacks on its energy infrastructure with attacks on energy infrastructure used by the U.S., Israel, and other American allies in the region.)

Meanwhile, Trump’s announcement of the five-day extension came before markets were set to open this morning — and investors reacted with the relief he may have been hoping for. The Dow Jones Industrial Average futures jumped 1,000 points in pre-market trading after Trump’s announcement, while the price of Brent crude — the global benchmark for oil prices — dropped immediately, from $108 a barrel to $93 a barrel.

In all likelihood, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of Trump’s rosy outlook and Iran’s insistence that no negotiations are taking place. According to Axios, there has not been direct contact between Washington and Tehran, but Egypt, Qatar, and the United Kingdom have all passed messages between the two.

If one accepts the premise that indirect talks are happening, but are likely closer to being in a preliminary phase than a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION,” the question then becomes: What happens if Trump’s five-day window comes and goes without any substantial progress?

It’s possible that this could lead to an even more volatile stage of war.

About 4,500 U.S. sailors and Marines are currently headed for the Middle East, and Pentagon officials are reportedly making “detailed preparations for deploying U.S. ground forces into Iran,” according to CBS News. A potential operation to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub, is said to be under consideration.

Then again, anyone who has paid attention to Trump’s tariff negotiations over the last year knowsf that a five-day pause can easily become a 10-day pause, which can become a one-month pause, all depending on whether Trump is satisfied with the state of negotiations and views the prospect of a ceasefire (whether military or economic) as less risky than continued aggression.

In this case, it’s not surprising to see that Trump is starting to look for off-ramps, as the war in Iran increasingly starts to look like a political headache Trump can’t afford heading into the November midterms. A CBS News poll released yesterday found that 57% of Americans believe the war is going badly for the U.S., compared to 43% who believe it’s going well. Asked in the poll whether Americans should be willing to pay higher gas prices during the conflict, a whopping 67% said “no.”

As long as Iran can keep the Strait of Hormuz closed — recall that U.S. allies rebuffed Trump’s belated plea for help securing the vital channel — it can continue to exact economic costs that may make Trump more interested in dealmaking than warmaking. Executives are already preparing for the impact of the war on oil and gas prices to potentially last for months, and even longer if peace talks stall and the U.S. and Iran end up following through on their threats to target energy infrastructure.

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#2: DHS. At the same time as Trump continues to lead a war abroad, he is also facing a growing headache here at home: airport lines.

The Department of Homeland Security has now been shut down for 38 days, making it the second-longest government shutdown in U.S. history (although most previous shutdowns have impacted more than just one agency).

Democrats have said they will not agree to fund DHS without a deal to reform ICE; interestingly, compared to the record-setting 2025 shutdown, when Trump refused to negotiate on Obamacare subsidies while the government was closed, the White House has shown more willingness to negotiate this time — although the talks have so far failed to reach an agreement.

In their most recent counter-offer, the White House said it was willing to expand the use of body cameras by DHS law enforcement agents, limit immigration enforcement at hospitals and schools (with exceptions for national security), increase oversight of DHS detention facilities, require DHS officers to clearly display identification, and “codify current practice of not knowingly detaining a U.S. citizen, except when the person violates a state or federal law that makes the citizen subject to arrest.”

Democrats dismissed the proposal, insisting on additional concessions like a ban on ICE agents wearing masks and a requirement that agents obtain a judicial warrant before entering private property.

Negotiations are still ongoing, as White House border czar Tom Homan repeatedly met with a bipartisan group of senators last week. There also appears to be a side-channel between Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) — who is poised to be confirmed today as DHS Secretary — and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ). According to the Times, the two have discussed a deal that would require agents to obtain judicial warrants “for forced home entry, unless in hot pursuit”; bar immigration enforcement actions at hospitals, churches, schools and polling places except with the approval of a judge; and revert to the “training, use-of-force and detention facility standards that were in place under the Biden administration.” It is unclear whether their proposal has broader buy-in among either of their parties.

After weeks of the shutdown mostly taking place out of public view, the lack of funding for the TSA (which is part of DHS) has led to 400+ TSA officers quitting since the start of the shutdown, while others are refusing to show up without a paycheck. The ensuing staffing shortages have created chaos at airports across the country, with lines stretching for hours over the weekend.

Starting today, ICE agents will be deployed to 13 airports to assist the TSA with security services, following a Saturday directive from the president that reportedly caught ICE officials off-guard and left them scrambling to come up with a plan. (Trump wrote this morning that he is a “BIG proponent of ICE wearing masks as they search for, and are forced to deal with, hardened criminals,” but said that he would “greatly appreciate” ICE agents not wear masks while working at airports.)

On Capitol Hill, the long airport lines appear to have raised pressure for lawmakers to come to an agreement — although Trump doesn’t seem to feel the same. According to Punchbowl News, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) approached Trump with a proposal yesterday to fund all of DHS except for ICE, which would allow the department to be funded without giving in to any of Democrats’ reform demands. (ICE already has enough funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill to continue operating.) Democrats have signaled they would agree to such a compromise.

But Trump kiboshed the idea, saying that there should be no DHS deal until the SAVE America Act — Trump’s bill to require proof of citizenship for registering to vote — is passed. He then went public with this stance, writing on social media: “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.’”

It is unclear whether congressional Republicans, who are growing antsy to strike a DHS deal, will heed Trump’s directive to halt talks in deference to the SAVE America Act.

Last year, I wrote that the party with the more unpopular stance during a shutdown is normally the one that ends up being blamed: when Republicans forced a shutdown to repeal Obamacare, Republicans were blamed because that was an unpopular policy demand, for example; when Democrats forced a shutdown to extend Obamacare subsidies, Democrats weren’t blamed because that was a popular policy demand.

According to YouGov polling, all of the key Democratic demands here have majority support in the polls, including requiring immigration agents to wear body cameras (84% support) and to have judicial warrants to enter homes (69% support), and banning them from entering schools or churches (66% support) or from wearing masks (55% support).

As a result, most Democrats have said they are in no rush to agree to a DHS deal, confident that Trump will be blamed for the airport chaos — especially once Americans start seeing ICE agents, who are associated with the president, at security lines.

That makes two adversaries who — at least publicly — claim to be content waiting Trump out, in no rush to negotiate with him. Trump seems frustrated with them both: “Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!” Trump wrote on Truth Social this weekend, actively comparing his domestic political rivals to a country he is at war with.

• Why has the Senate remained so much more competitive than you might expect on paper?

• How will redistricting shape the future of the House?

• Is the Supreme Court’s decades-long conservative majority going to last forever?

Let’s dive in…

Senate

There is a pervasive sense in the political sphere that the design of the Senate inherently favors Republicans, although this isn’t quite right.

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In the last 72 hours, Donald Trump has said or posted about 34,000 words.

He has talked about the Kennedy Center, fraud in blue states, St. Patrick’s Day, and Mark Levin. He has leaked a Republican congressman’s terminal diagnosis and claimed to have predicted 9/11. He has called for journalists to be charged with treason and accused Mickey Mouse of “being woke” All while offering updates on an ongoing war and a partial government shutdown. It’s a lot to sort through.

But there’s one comment among the many that I don’t think has received the notice it deserves.

It came in a Truth Social post on Sunday night, attacking the Supreme Court. The post itself has been covered widely in the media (though perhaps not as much as a presidential attack on the Supreme Court would have been in an earlier era. Then again, there is a lot of news competing with it.) Towards the end of the missive, after two paragraphs raging against the court’s decision on tariffs, Trump added:

They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so. All I can do, as President, is call them out for their bad behavior!

Too true, Mr. President.

This is a stark turnaround from early 2025, when Trump was posting things like “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” and raising questions about whether he would defy the courts. A year later, Trump has grown no fonder of the federal judiciary, but his rhetoric has turned from bold threats to meek compliance. When judges rule against him, all he can do “is call them out for their bad behavior!” Trump now says. He can complain about a ruling on social media to his heart’s content, just like any commentator. But he is imbued with no extra powers as president to subvert court orders. That he is conceding this fact is highly notable.

The central story of Trump’s presidency has been his quest for control: he has spent the last 14 months roaming across the policy landscape, trying to seize unilateral power over almost every function of the U.S. government.

He has not always been successful, although Trump’s Sunday night admission on Truth Social was a rare case of him acknowledging it. While trying to expand executive power in novel ways, he’s often run into the same checks as other presidents: namely, the other two branches of government (the courts and Congress), and public opinion (the voters).

This morning, I want to check in on that search for control, by looking at some of the more recent roadblocks Trump has faced on the domestic front, before turning to ask whether, in taking a renewed interest in foreign affairs, Trump has finally found what he is seeking: an area where his power is truly absolute.

Throwing people in jail isn’t easy

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump repeatedly said that he would jail various political rivals upon entering office, hoping to exact revenge for the criminal indictments that had been leveled against him. He has succeeded in solidifying control over the Justice Department, such that something that frustrated him during his first term (he did not have an AG in place willing to prosecute people at his direction) no longer appears to be an obstacle. But solidifying control over the Justice Department is a very different thing than solidifying control over the legal system writ large, and there are many hurdles the executive branch has to go through before someone ends up in prison.

Trump has been stopped at several of these stages, from a grand jury rejecting charges against six Democratic lawmakers to a judge dismissing charges against James Comey and Letitia James. This week, Trump was rebuffed at an even earlier stage in the criminal process, when U.S. District Judge James Boasberg quashed the Justice Department’s attempt to subpoena the Federal Reserve as part of an investigation into whether its chairman, Jerome Powell, had misled Congress about a renovation project.

Boasberg opened his ruling by quoting Trump’s repeated demands that Powell lower interest rates. The judge also detailed other facts from the last year, noting that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro (who brought the case) previously tried to bring charges against the six Democratic lawmakers, soon after Trump called on social media to “lock them up,” and a different U.S. attorney had been fired for refusing to prosecute one of Trump’s political rivals.

Judges “are not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,” Boasberg wrote, quoting the renowned appeals court judge Henry Friendly. “It is a natural inference that the President’s appointee was responding to his desires (whether real or perceived) here,” Boasberg added.

Boasberg cited a 1991 Supreme Court case holding that “grand juries are not licensed to engage in arbitrary fishing expeditions, nor may they select targets of investigation out of malice or an intent to harass.” He decided that the Powell subpoenas did not pass that test:

A mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning. On the other side of the scale, the Government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual. The Court therefore finds that the subpoenas were issued for an improper purpose and will quash them.

Almost every one of Trump’s revenge prosecutions has now been stalled.

MAHA goes to court

The Trump administration ran into another legal check this week, when U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy blocked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. from dramatically overhauling the federal childhood vaccine schedule.

Murphy ruled that Kennedy’s actions — taken in response to a Trump memo ordering HHS to review its childhood vaccine recommendations — did not live up to the mandate of 42 U.S. Code § 243, which requires the HHS Secretary to assist with the “prevention and suppression of communicable diseases” and the “preservation and improvement of the public health.”

The Trump administration argued that Congress intended for HHS to carry out that mandate however it saw fit, without judicial intervention. At a hearing earlier this month, Murphy asked a Justice Department lawyer whether that would extend to a hypothetical HHS that said “we think measles is good for you” and encouraged people to “go have lunch with someone with measles” or to “get a shot that gives you measles.”

The DOJ attorney replied that a court would not be able to review whether or not such a declaration by HHS comported with its legal mandate.

“This argument can only be countenanced if one completely abandons the idea of objective fact, a nihilist endeavor this Court does not find appropriately read into Congress’s public health statutes,” Murphy wrote in his ruling this week. Murphy said that a judge was empowered to review whether HHS actions fit within the public health mandate Congress gave it, and that he did not believe that Kennedy’s changes did so. (In other words: Murphy ruled that this wasn’t a Humpty Dumpty Law.)

Murphy further ruled that the vaccination schedule revamp — which was unveiled without consulting HHS’ Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — violated the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, the so-called “constitution of the regulatory state,” which prohibits executive branch agencies from taking actions that are “arbitrary and capricious.”

Similarly, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration had violated the APA in its moves to dismantle the state-funded broadcaster Voice of America. He ordered the agency to bring more than 1,000 employees back to work and to resume international broadcasting. (I flagged all the way back in February 2025 that the APA would prove troublesome for the Trump administration.)

Of course, any of these legal losses could be appealed. Judge Murphy, in particular, has repeatedly seen his rulings against the Trump administration (mostly on immigration) overturned by appeals courts and the Supreme Court. His latest ruling goes so far as to block Kennedy’s appointees to a key HHS advisory panel, deeming them “unqualified.” It is very possible that higher courts will ultimately say that the executive branch does deserve deference to control this area.

Even if Trump wins out on the law, the MAHA agenda also appears to be faltering in the court of public opinion. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the White House is putting the HHS on a “tighter leash” and trying to control its messaging on vaccines in response to polls showing that RFK Jr.’s vaccine moves are unpopular.

A similar dynamic has played out on immigration, where the Trump administration has “scaled back its deportation strategy” after the backlash in Minneapolis, according to the New York Times, leading to a nationwide dip in immigration arrests.

In general, with the administration’s rhetoric on vaccines, compliance with judicial rulings, and now immigration, we see a White House that is sanding down its harder edges after finding that its aggressive rhetoric has failed to win public support. Per Axios, White House deputy chief of staff James Blair told House Republicans last week to stop using the phrase “mass deportations” — a stark messaging reversal and bow to political reality, considering that was a slogan of Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Meanwhile, Congress is about to deliver a blow to Trump as well. The Senate voted Tuesday to begin consideration of the SAVE America Act, the bill that Trump has prioritized above any other. The chamber is expected to take several days (maybe even weeks) to debate the measure, which would require individuals to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot. But almost everyone involved agrees that the debate will be for show. Senate Republicans have spurned Trump’s calls to eliminate the filibuster, which means the bill will likely need 60 votes to eventually advance. It does not have them, which means Trump’s top legislative priority is poised to fail.

Hamilton 1, Madison 0

Faced with all these constraints in the domestic sphere, it is little surprise that President Trump has spent most of 2026 focused on foreign policy, widely seen as the area where he wields the most unquestioned level of control.

If it seems strange to you that Trump has an easier time removing the Supreme Leader of Iran than he does a junior employee at Voice of America, well, it wasn’t always obvious that presidential power would shake out this way.

The first full draft of the Constitution that delegates considered at the 1787 convention would have given Congress the broader power to “make war,” not just to “declare war.” James Madison was the one who proposed switching to the latter phrase; in his notes, he said this was intended to give “the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks.” (One delegate, supporting the change, expressed confidence that the president “will not make war but when the Nation will support it.”)

But even the Founders themselves were not sure what to do with a system that let Congress start wars but made the president commander-in-chief. An early conflict came in April 1793, one month into George Washington’s second term, when the president issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, declaring that the U.S. wouldn’t take a side in the brewing war between Great Britain and France.

Democratic-Republicans viewed this as a major affront to Congress’ power to decide whether or not the U.S. was at war (and, in this case, whether the terms of a treaty with France required the U.S. to intervene, which Washington said was not the case). Madison — no longer such a fan of presidential power now that he and his onetime ally Washington belonged to opposing parties — wrote a series of pamphlets under the name “Helvidius,” arguing that “the powers of making war and treaty” are “substantially of a legislative, not an executive nature.”

“Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded,” Madison wrote.

Madison was writing to rebut Alexander Hamilton, who had penned his own pamphlets defending Washington under the name “Pacificus.”

“While therefore the Legislature can alone declare war, can alone actually transfer the nation from a state of Peace to a state of War—it belongs to the ‘Executive Power,’ to do whatever else the laws of Nations cooperating with the Treaties of the Country enjoin, in the intercourse of the [United States] with foreign Powers,” Hamilton had said.

In this case, the debate was about whether presidential power extended to declaring peace, but Hamilton made clear elsewhere that this executive authority to “do whatever else” (short of war) required by U.S. “intercourse…with foreign Powers” included protecting the U.S. with the short-term use of force if necessary. In 1801, he argued that “when a foreign nation declares, or openly and avowedly makes war upon the United States, they are then by the very fact, already at war, and any declaration on the part of Congress is nugatory: it is at least unnecessary.”

In this situation, a president was able to “exercise every act of hostility, which the general laws of war authorise,” even without congressional approval.

As you can see, we have been fighting these battles since the very beginning of the republic, and (as is often the case) there are plenty of dueling quotes from the Founders for each side to cling to.

On Capitol Hill this week, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said that Thomas Jefferson “went after the Somali pirates and he didn’t bother to ask for congressional approval.” The pirates in question were not from Somalia (they were from modern-day Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco), but it’s true that Jefferson initially deployed naval forces to defend U.S. ships when the pirates attacked American sailors.

However, he was very clear that he was “unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense.” He told Congress that he would not take “measures of offense” without their authorization, which they soon gave.

Just as early presidents were more deferential to Congress’ warmaking powers, so the Supreme Court was also once more likely to get involved in war disputes. One notable example is Fleming v. Page from 1850 (of potential interest to our friends in Greenland), when the court ruled that a president lacked the power, without congressional approval, to take over territory by force:

The United States, it is true, may extend its boundaries by conquest or treaty, and may demand the cession of territory as the condition of peace, in order to indemnify its citizens for the injuries they have suffered, or to reimburse the government for the expenses of the war.

But this can be done only by the treatymaking power or the legislative authority, and is not a part of the power conferred upon the President by the declaration of war. His duty and his power are purely military. As commander-in-chief, he is authorized to direct the movements of the naval and military forces placed by law at his command, and to employ them in the manner he may deem most effectual to harass and conquer and subdue the enemy. He may invade the hostile country, and subject it to the sovereignty and authority of the United States. But his conquests do not enlarge the boundaries of this Union, nor extend the operation of our institutions and laws beyond the limits before assigned to them by the legislative power.

In the fullness of time, however, Hamilton has pretty much won his debate with Madison. Congress now regularly opts to take a back seat in war-powers disputes, and the Supreme Court generally declines to get involved, even when members of Congress try to make them.

Checks, foreign and domestic

The upshot of all of this is that many of the checks that frustrate Trump in the domestic-policy arena all take a backseat in the foreign-policy sphere. Congress has given him implicit consent to prosecute war in Iran (although they will still be needed to fund the war if it goes on long enough. It’s hard to imagine the courts taking up a case tied to the conflict. Of course, public opinion doesn’t disappear (and a majority of Americans oppose the war), but voters do tend to pay less attention to foreign policy than domestic policy, giving presidents somewhat freer rein to take action, even unpopular action, without risking political consequences.

Trump’s average net approval rating is down only about one percentage point since the beginning of the war, despite launching an unpopular military action. In addition, foreign policy has barely edged up in polls of Americans’ most important issue, suggesting that most voters do not have Iran top-of-mind when answering questions about politics.

But even as the usual checks recede, other ones emerge, which means Trump still isn’t always as firmly in control of events as he would like. He has proved remarkably successful in controlling the internal affairs of Venezuela, thanks to the acquiescence of Delcy Rodríguez. Exerting the same control over Iran has been more difficult. U.S. intelligence agencies continue to assess that the existing regime’s grip on power is strong, even if the country they are gripping onto has grown weaker. (The agencies also assess that the government has only grown more hardline, a dynamic that may be exacerbated by Israel’s killing on Monday of top Iranian security official Ali Larijani, a relative pragmatist whose death is expected to strengthen the country’s more radical military elite.)

Trump has not yet been able to force Iran to surrender or to allow him to designate its new leader, as he had wanted. Another open question is whether Trump will succeed in flexing power over the internal affairs of Cuba. According to the New York Times, Trump is seeking to push Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, out of power as part of economic negotiations with the island nation. “I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba,” Trump said on Monday, adding: “Whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it.”

In addition to having to deal with the internal politics of his adversaries — and of his own coalition — there are also allies to contend with. Trump chose not to coordinate with U.S. allies in the run-up to the war, and he is now seeing the consequences. On Sunday, Trump appealed to U.S. allies to help protect the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively shut down. He quickly ran into a wall of no’s.

“We are not party to the conflict and therefore France ​will never take part in operations to open or liberate the Strait of Hormuz in the current context,” said French President Emmanuel Macron. “Canada was not consulted, did not participate in the military action, and has no intention of participating in the offensive military operation,” echoed Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand.

By Tuesday, Trump had given up. “The United States has been informed by most of our NATO ‘Allies’ that they don’t want to get involved with our Military Operation against the Terrorist Regime of Iran,” Trump wrote. He added: “We no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID.”

Like his post about the Supreme Court, this was a concession masked in defiance. Even in the foreign-policy realm, Trump’s control isn’t as absolute as he desires.

The war in Iran is now in its third week, with no signs that either side has plans to stop fighting.

In the last 16 days, U.S.-Israeli strikes have succeeded in killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and more than 40 other Iranian leaders. American attack planes have carried out more than 6,000 combat missions, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command. A large-scale strike on Friday against Iran’s critical Kharg Island destroyed more than 90 targets, including bunkers for naval mines and missiles. “Iran’s entire ballistic missile production capacity — every company that builds every component of those missiles — has been functionally defeated, destroyed,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week.

More than 1,400 Iranians have been killed, and another 18,000 have been wounded, according to the country’s health ministry. 13 American service members have been killed and approximately 200 have been injured. Iran — now led by Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei — has fired more than 300 missiles or drones at more than a dozen Middle Eastern countries, Cooper said this morning, including a drone attack today at Dubai International Airport. Israel is also moving forward with a massive ground invasion of Lebanon, expanding the conflict further.

To hear President Trump tell it, the war has basically been won. “We’ve essentially decimated Iran,” he told the Financial Times in an interview on Sunday. “They have no navy, no anti-aircraft, no air force, everything is gone.”

With one exception. “The only thing they can do is make a little trouble by putting a mine in the water,” Trump added. “A nuisance, but the nuisance can cause problems.”

Trump was referring to Iran’s estimated arsenal of more than 5,000 naval mines, which the country has begun laying in the Strait of Hormuz in order to blow up oil tankers passing through the channel, which carries about 20% of the world’s oil. Iran has also launched missile attacks against commercial vessels in the strait, which has seen traffic effectively screech to a halt. (Zero commercial vessels passed through the strait on Saturday, the first day since the war began where not a single ship crossed in either direction.)

Iran’s ability to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz is the country’s most powerful source of leverage; even if Trump soon decides he wants to end the war, continued Iranian attacks on the strait could ensure that the conflict is prolonged. This is an economic threat to the U.S., which makes it a political threat to Trump as well. World oil prices have been pushed above $100 a barrel, while average U.S. gas prices have hit $3.72 a gallon, their highest level in more than two years.

The degree to which Trump planned for the strait’s closure — one of the most highly anticipated forms of Iranian counter-attack — before launching the war remains an open question. CNN reported on Thursday that Trump officials had “acknowledged to lawmakers during recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes,” although the network later amended its report on Friday to exclude that detail, clarifying that officials did brief lawmakers on long-standing military plans to address a disruption to the strait, although sources familiar with the briefing said there were no “near-term solutions” offered.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump was briefed before the war that Iran could close the strait in response to any American attack. “Trump acknowledged the risk,” according to the Journal, but decided to move forward with war anyway, reasoning that “Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.”

Finally, the New York Times has reported that “Iran’s willingness and ability to disrupt the global economy by choking off the Strait of Hormuz was greater than [Trump administration] officials had anticipated, as was Tehran’s capacity to widen the war across the region.” According to the Times, a frustrated Trump pressed Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a meeting last week about why the U.S. could not immediately reopen the strait, and was told that it was because “even one Iranian soldier or militia member zipping across the narrow neck of the strait in a speedboat could fire a mobile missile right into a slow-moving supertanker, or plant a limpet mine on its hull.”

However much Trump prepared for a potential threat to the Strait of Hormuz, he is focused on it now, so much so that he is doing something that he opted against doing in the run-up to the war: asking allies for help. In addition to largely opting not to sell the war to Congress or the American public, Trump also barely consulted allies (outside of Israel) before attacking Iran or attempted to put together a broader offensive coalition.

In the third week of the conflict, however, he is now belatedly beseeching U.S. allies — and even one major adversary — to join the war effort. “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.

With Trump having done little before now to include them in deliberations, most of the countries Trump name-checked have reacted hesitantly. Japan’s prime minister said today that the country has no plans to dispatch naval vessels to escort ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz; the UK and South Korea issued statements that did not give a clear “yes” or “no” answer. France has not yet responded.

Trump appeared to threaten the NATO alliance if other countries don’t help to protect the strait. “If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO,” he told the Financial Times.

If few allies are rushing to assist the U.S., you can imagine the response from America’s adversaries. A Chinese spokesperson said this morning that its energy supply is “relatively strong,” suggesting that the country has no plans to help the U.S. secure the Strait of Hormuz. A much larger share of China’s oil imports (about 40%) pass through the strait than the U.S.’ share (about 2%), but China also has a friendly relationship with Iran, which has said they only plan to strike tankers flagged to the U.S. and its allies.

The Strait of Hormuz is “only closed to our enemies, to those who carried out unjust aggression against our country and to their allies,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at a press conference this morning.

As Trump searches for a solution to his oil problem, his newfound role as a wartime president has hardly blunted his stream-of-consciousness approach to political communication; whether his frenzied posts and comments are an attempt to ensure that a war-skeptical American public don’t focus too deeply on the war, or simply a continuation of the communication style he naturally prefers, is anybody’s guess.

On Truth Social yesterday, Trump returned to a familiar hobbyhorse, uncorking an almost 1,000-word screed against judges thwarting his agenda. In one post, Trump complained that the Supreme Court “knew where I stood, how badly I wanted this Victory for our Country,” but still ruled against his sweeping global tariffs. In another, he said that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg “suffers from the highest level of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” after Boasberg quashed the Justice Department’s attempt to subpoena Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Trump has also repeatedly paused from discussing the war to demand that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would require individuals to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID when casting a ballot. The Senate is set to take up the House-passed bill this week, although there does not seem to be enough Republican support for ending the legislative filibuster to pass the measure at a 51-vote, instead of 60-vote, threshold, as the president has called for.

With the SAVE America Act at the top of Trump’s agenda, neither chamber of Congress has shown much momentum towards funding the Department of Homeland Security (which has now been shut down for 30 days) — or much interest in having a say in the conduct of the war.

Trump told Fox News Radio on Friday that he will end the war when he feels “in his bones” that it’s the time to do so. So far, he has said he is not ready to agree to a ceasefire. Instead, he is potentially on the verge of expanding the conflict even further: according to Axios, Trump is considering an operation to seize Iran’s oil depot on Kharg Island, which would require boots on the ground.

When announcing on Friday that he had struck Kharg Island by air, Trump said that he had chosen to spare Iran’s oil infrastructure on the island, which handles about 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports, making it critical to the country’s economy. “However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision,” he added.

About 2,500 Marines are now deploying to the Middle East, potentially for use in a ground invasion on Kharg Island. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a close Trump adviser, seemed to be pushing for such an operation in an X post on Saturday.

“If Iran loses control or the ability to operate its oil infrastructure from Kharg Island, its economy is annihilated. He who controls Kharg Island, controls the destiny of this war,” Graham wrote.

“Semper Fi,” he added, conspicuously invoking the motto of the Marine Corps.

At the beginning of this week, I sent out a survey asking you how you felt about our recent three-newsletters-a-week experiment. And the results are in: 70% of you said you preferred three days a week. 15% preferred five days a week. And another 15% had no preference. Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your thoughts: your feedback was incredibly helpful.

I’ll continue to experiment — including extra newsletters outside of the normal cycle when breaking news might warrant it — but, for now, this means we’re going to keep up with the Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule from the last month. I hope you’ve found the newsletters over that period to be informative and of increased quality and depth. I also hear the feedback from many of you that, even at a three-day-a-week cadence, brevity is always important, and I will do my best to honor that and continue to try to be as respectful of your time as possible.

As always, if you have feedback for me, you can drop me a line at gabe@wakeuptopolitics.com and let me know how I can best serve your political journalism needs.

And, with that: time for today’s newsletter.

I’ll be starting with a question I received from a reader about the present state and future potential of the Democratic Party. I’ve received similar questions in the past about the GOP, so I’m going to be expanding the scope of the question a bit, and looking at where both parties sit and where they’re going.

To honor my brevity commitment, this is going to be split into a two-part series, trying to answer the question of whether either party has a long-term edge in controlling the various arms of the federal government (the White House, Senate, House, and Supreme Court).

Along the way, we’ll look at things like:

• How the next census could jolt the Electoral College map away from Democrats

• How many Senate seats Republicans have gambled away with extreme nominees

• Where gerrymandering might be going next

• And whether liberals will ever regain a majority on the Supreme Court

But we’ll start with the reader question, and by trying to level-set and see the position each party is starting out from…

Q: Why is the Democratic Party’s reputation so low? How could it be fixed?

There was an NBC poll that got some attention this week, testing the popularity of various newsworthy groups and individuals. Their finding: The only thing less popular than the Democratic Party, with its -22 net approval rating, is … Iran (net approval: -53). Not exactly a promising result for a party hoping to win back a foothold of power in this fall’s midterms.

If you look under the hood of results like this, though, the picture generally gets a bit more complicated. NBC doesn’t release the crosstabs (i.e., detailed demographic information) for its polls, but other surveys that ask the same question do, which allows us to see which groups are so down on the Democratic Party that it has such a dismal approval rating.

In general, the group that’s most down on Democrats seems to be Democrats themselves.

Here, for example, is a table based on YouGov data from January on the net favorability ratings of the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress, organized by the party affiliation of respondents:

We can see that Democrats and Republicans both feel very negatively about the other party (if anything, Democrats feel slightly more negatively towards Republicans than vice versa). And Independents hate both parties too (again, if anything, the Republican score is slightly worse).

The real difference is that the Democratic rating of Democrats is “only” +30, while the Republican rating of Republicans is a much more favorable +64. That gap (Democrats feeling much more negatively towards their own party than Republicans do about theirs) pretty much singlehandedly explains why the Democratic Party’s favorability rating tends to be so much worse than the GOP’s.

This would still be electorally distressing for Democrats if it meant that Democratic voters were so disillusioned by their party that they planned to stay home in November. But the evidence we have so far, from special elections, state legislative elections, and off-year elections, suggests that Democratic voters are actually more energized to vote right now, their negative feelings towards party leadership notwithstanding.

Polls back this up, too: a recent Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 79% of registered Democrats said they are certain to vote in the fall, compared to 65% of registered Republicans. Many Democrats hate their party, but they hate Donald Trump more.

We have seen this play out before. As Lakshya Jain has pointed out, Democratic approval of Democrats is roughly where Republican approval of Republicans was in Barack Obama’s second term. There was no sign this disapproval hurt the GOP in the 2014 midterms, when the party won a 247-seat majority in the House and flipped a very impressive nine Senate seats. Partisans hate losing elections, and often sour on their own party after they do, but it never really has much of an electoral impact.

This isn’t really a “good news!” report for Democrats, though. The takeaway here isn’t that they’re popular, just that they’re really no more unpopular than Republicans (and it only seems otherwise because their own voters are upset with them, but this isn’t an electorally relevant fact since Democrats keep voting for Democrats regardless). Indeed, polling from Pew shows that our system is basically composed of two political parties that are widely hated at roughly equal levels:

This got me thinking of another question, related to our original reader query above but a little bit more expansive. We can all agree that both American political parties are, um, not doing great right now: widely unpopular and apparently unable to win anything more than 51/49 victories or to hold on to power for longer than two years. (In the nine presidential elections since 1992, the only time a candidate has won more than 51.3% of the vote was Barack Obama’s 52.9% in 2008. In the last 20 years, no party has held control of both the presidency and Congress for longer than a two-year period.)

So if both parties are in bad shape right now … which one is in less bad shape?

In this two-part series, we’re going to walk through the major arms of the federal government — the presidency, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court — and ask ourselves which party is in a better position for the coming years. We’ll also look at each party’s most glaring vulnerabilities and how they might try to fix them.

The presidency

Presidential elections have become marked, in different ways, by high degrees of alternation and rigidity in recent years. What do I mean by that?

First, alternation: From 1993 to 2017, America went through a back-to-back-to-back run of two-term presidents, where the power of incumbency was enough to give three consecutive president eight-year tenures in the White House.

We have then replaced that, from 2017 to present, by embarking on a back-to-back-to-back run of one-term presidents, where there seems to be enough of an incumbency disadvantage that our three consecutive two-term presidents were succeeded by three consecutive one-term presidents. (This point is not undercut by the fact that two out of the three one-term presidents have been the same person. If anything, it underlines the point: The power of dissatisfaction towards the incumbent, and the rapidity with which Americans now swing from one party to the next, were both so strong that they fueled enough voters to vote differently in consecutive elections even when presented with the exact same candidate.)

And yet, also rigidity: In the last four presidential elections (2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024), all but nine states have voted exactly the same way each time. By comparison, in the four elections before that (1996, 2000, 2004, 2008), there were 17 states that flipped between red and blue.

At the highest level, this all tells us that the presidency is something of a jump-ball: highly liable to flip from one party to the next over the course of four years, largely dependent on the mood of a shrinking set of competitive states.

But let’s dig a little deeper. With these analyses, we’re hoping to look not just at the next election cycle, but to look around corners to see what’s coming for cycles down the line as well. Based on our recent string of ~50/50 presidential elections, we can assume neither party is much better positioned than the other in the 2028 election (unless you give a slight advantage to Democrats, as betting markets do, based on the boost that seems to be given now to non-incumbent parties).

But the 2032 election might look different, because in 2030, the decennial U.S. census will be conducted and each state’s allotment of Electoral College votes will be adjusted based on population ahead of the subsequent cycle. And early estimates of the population changes afoot show that Democrats may no longer be able to count on what is currently their most direct path to the White House.

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It’s been a few weeks since we did a mailbag column, so I think it’s about time to fix that, don’t you?

There is no shortage of things to talk about: the war in Iran, the ongoing DHS shutdown, the 2026 midterms shaping up. I want to know what’s on your mind, and what you’re wondering about, on these topics and anything else in politics and media.

I’m also happy to take any questions you might have from this week’s newsletters, which touched on the SAVE Act and the bipartisan housing package (which just passed the Senate, 89-10, earlier today) and the lack of a MAGA split on the war in Iran.

You can ask a question by: posting one in the comments, clicking “reply” to this email, or by submitting one anonymously to my Q&A form.

Ask a question!

Let me know how I can help you understand our increasingly frazzled political environment.

Talk to you tomorrow,

Gabe

According to the Associated Press, “cracks” have appeared in “Trump’s MAGA base” over the war in Iran. “Some MAGA voices warn Iran backlash will only grow the longer the war lasts,” ABC News adds.

These articles — and others like them across the mainstream media — all take the same basic shape. They all mention Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, two former Fox News hosts who have now remade themselves as anti-war crusaders in independent media. Several name-drop Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene as well. As a counterweight, Laura Loomer, a MAGA activist who supports the war, is frequently invoked.

One thing none of these articles include: Any actual data showing whether MAGA Republicans are as divided as the authors claim.

The Bloomberg piece quotes Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a libertarian Trump critic, giving a guess of how MAGA Republicans break down on the war question: “MAGA is split right now,” Massie says. “I think I have half of MAGA, and I think the president has the other half.” But there is no hard data included. Bloomberg simply takes the anti-war MAGA ideologues at their word that they are aligned with a large faction (maybe even half) of the movement.

This would be an understandable choice if there wasn’t any hard data available to test their claims. But there is. And Massie and Carlson and Kelly — and, by extension, Bloomberg and ABC News and the AP, who wrote headlines premised on their claims — are wrong. There is no meaningful MAGA split on Iran.

Since the war started 11 days ago, pollsters at NBC, CNN, and YouGov have tested this question, and they all found the same thing. The war in Iran is unpopular, but that is the case because of opposition from a supermajority of Democrats, a majority of Independents, and a sliver of Republicans — and the Republicans who are opposed overwhelmingly come from the ranks of those who don’t identify with the MAGA movement, not those who do.

Here’s a look at GOP support and opposition for the Iran strikes in each of the three surveys:

Among all Republicans: 77% support, 15% oppose (NBC); 77% support, 23% oppose (CNN); 76% support, 15% oppose (YouGov)

Among Republicans who don’t identify as “MAGA Republicans”: 54% support, 36% oppose (NBC); 61% support, 39% oppose (CNN); 63% support, 21% oppose (YouGov)

Among only Republicans who identify as “MAGA Republicans”: 90% support, 5% oppose (NBC); 88% support, 13% oppose (CNN); 85% support, 5% oppose (YouGov)

A group that is “split” approximately 85%-5% isn’t really split at all. To the degree there is actual Republican opposition to the war among voters — and, let’s be clear, there is very little — it comes from the exact opposite sort of Republicans you’d expect from reading all the stories about Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

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What does it mean to be MAGA?

So, what’s going on here? I think these results tell us something about our political environment and something about the media environment. Let’s do the political point first.

There have been attempts by some intellectual thought leaders on the right to backfill a coherent ideological philosophy into “MAGA” (which always seem to align perfectly with the philosophy these activists already had. Weird how that works out, isn’t it?) But it is pretty clear that, for most voters who identify with MAGA on the ground, MAGA = Trump.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! This wouldn’t be the first time that a group of voters have aligned themselves in allegiance to a particular political leader, just as there were “Reagan Republicans” or “Obama Democrats.” But it’s clear from the polling data that “MAGA Republicans” should be seen much more in line with these personality-driven labels than as an ideological one.

I think a lot of the failings in the media coverage come from this disconnect: treating MAGA as a distinct ideological identity (on the order of “democratic socialist” or “neoconservative”) rather than as a personality label (effectively, when someone says they are MAGA, they are just saying they are a “Trump Republican” who largely aligns themselves in accordance with Trump the person, not a clear set of ideals).

This is clear from polling on a range of topics, not just Iran. Here is a chart from YouGov that shows approval of various Trump policies among MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans. The only real difference is that MAGA Republicans basically approve of everything Trump is doing (with approval of his individual policies ranging from 86% to 94%, and giving him an overall approval rating of 97%), while non-MAGA Republicans are much more mixed (with their approval rating of Trump policies ranging from 57% to 87%, giving him an overall approval rating of 72%).

A Politico poll in November found that these differences also extend to how voters understand their own economic situation: 52% of MAGA Republicans felt their personal financial situation has improved over the past five years, compared to 37% of non-MAGA Republicans. 73% of MAGA Republicans expect their personal financial situation to improve in the next five years, compared to 57% of non-MAGA Republicans. 49% of MAGA Republicans feel better off than the average American, compared to 30% of non-MAGA Republicans.

It is unlikely that there is truly such a delta between MAGA Republicans’ and non-MAGA Republicans’ economic situations. Rather, this should be seen as an extension of what we know: Democratic and Republican partisans judge the economy more based on who is in the White House than based on their actual economic situation. When a president they support is in charge, they assume the economy is doing well and trust that the president will keep making it better. When the opposing party is in charge, they feel the opposite. See this chart from Gallup showing that Democrats immediately felt better about the economy as soon as the clock struck 2021, and then immediately felt worse in 2025, and the exact opposite for Republicans.

Friends, entire national economies don’t shift in a day. This is about partisanship controlling.

But not 100% of Democrats and Republicans change their minds like this on a dime, of course. Rather, it’s the strong partisans who do so — and there are plenty of examples of strongly partisan Democrats and strongly partisan Republicans changing their policy beliefs to match their party leaders. MAGA Republicans, then, should be understood as the current iteration of strong Republican partisans, at least for as long as Donald Trump and the Republican Party are synonymous.

There is no indication that affiliating with MAGA means that one agrees with a specific philosophy on foreign policy, or economics, or anything else, as some ideological entrepreneurs would have you believe. It just means that someone really, really trusts Donald Trump, just like strong Democratic partisans trusted Joe Biden.

So while it’s clear that there is a subset of Republicans who oppose the Iran war, if you’re looking for them in the MAGA movement, you’re looking in the wrong place. The Steve Bannon types — voters who self-identify as MAGA and oppose the war — exist, but they are a really small group once you venture outside the world of influencers and podcast hosts. Bannon speaks for ~5% of the MAGA movement.

Instead, the ~15% of Republicans who oppose the war (still not a very large number) hail from the non-MAGA strain of the party.

To engage in some speculation of my own, I would guess that these GOP war opponents are much more Joe Rogan listeners than Steve Bannon listeners. Rogan has also called the war “insane,” but he would hardly identify himself as a MAGA acolyte — nor would he identify as a Republican, but when we use him as a representation for the Republicans who oppose the war, we’re thinking of his listeners who identify as Republicans.

These would mostly be younger men. Like Rogan, they wouldn’t be MAGA Bannonites: they’d be newcomers to the Trump fold from the last election, Johnny-come-latelys to the Republican Party who experimented with Trumpism in 2024 and are now mixed on its results.

Indeed, opposition to the war skews younger, while membership in the MAGA movement skews older (about half of the movement is over 65, according to one study). When you think of MAGA, it’s probably more accurate to think of a Fox News viewer 65 or older who is strongly committed to the Republican Party; the younger, more heterodox Tucker Carlson viewers clearly make up a small segment of the movement.

Non-MAGA Republicans, meanwhile, are probably a mix of “never Trump” Republicans and Republican newcomers who supported Trump in 2024 and now call themselves Republicans, but aren’t as strongly tied to the party. (My guess is that the anti-war faction of the GOP more comes from the latter group of non-MAGA Republicans than the former group, based on the fact that you might expect some of the “never Trump” neocons to back the war out of previous ideological commitments — think John Bolton. But there are likely some of these pre-Trump conservatives mixed in as well.)

But MAGA = Trump, and anyone telling you that the little Republican opposition that does exist to the war comes from MAGA voters is misleading you. As CNN put it, reporting on the results of their poll:

Within the Republican Party, there is a sharp divide between those who say they consider themselves part of the “Make America Great Again” movement and those who do not, a division that appears largely linked to trust in the president. MAGA Republicans are 30 points more likely than non-MAGA Republicans to say they strongly approve of the decision to take military action, 34 points likelier to say it will reduce the threat Iran poses to the US and nearly 50 points more likely to say they have a great deal of trust in Trump to make the right decisions about US use of force in Iran.

Politically, as I’ve written, this is an important reality to be aware of. If MAGA voters are mostly marked by their trust in Donald Trump, it means you should be skeptical of any actors claiming that there is a “MAGA split” or that “MAGA voters are drifting away from Trump.” It also means that guesses at “the future of the MAGA movement” are probably fruitless, since there are no clear ideological attachments that come with being a MAGA Republican. That makes it more likely that the movement will fall apart once Trump exits the White House, since it is so tied to him personally and not a set of ideas that a successor could run with.

As Trump said back in January: “MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Instead, to the degree there are drifters in Trump’s coalition, the ones to watch are probably not MAGA diehards who are Trumpier than Trump. They are likely young men who experimented with Trumpism in 2024 but now, unlike most MAGA Republicans, actually are concerned with the state of economy and have misgivings about Trump’s handling of the war and other issues. (Most of these voters are probably Independents, but it stands to reason that some would now identify as Republicans in polls.)

This is a good-news, bad-news thing for Trump. Good news: Polls show that he is right when he says, “I think that MAGA is Trump — MAGA’s not the other two,” referring to Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Bad news, to the degree he cares about these things: It seems as though Trump has failed to build an ideological movement that will be able to outlast him (because his movement is much more personalist than philosophical) or a political coalition that the GOP will be able to count on going forward (because he has alienated some of the young male voters who drifted into the party in 2024 by breaking his promises on foreign policy and inflation). Yes, it’s true these anti-war Republicans drifters are small in number (only about 15% of the party, and fewer if you subtract the “never Trump” types). But that was a crucial 15% to the GOP’s victory in 2024 that the party won’t be happy to see go — and potentially could have kept in their fold in a no-tariff, no-war alternative reality.

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The real media bias

Now, the media point.

How did so many media outlets allow themselves to get snookered by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon?

The same way that various youth activists managed to persuade media outlets that climate change, Israel/Palestine, and student loans are important issues to young voters, despite the fact that young voters ranked those, on average, as 11th, 14th, and 15th, respectively, when asked to rank 15 issues by their importance, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. (Inflation took 1st place, just like it does for the population at large.)

And the same way that some Hispanic activists convinced the Democratic Party during the Biden era that Hispanic voters wanted looser border security, even though 76% of Hispanic voters viewed the “large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. at the border with Mexico” as a “crisis” or “major problem” in a Pew poll at the time. (This is basically indistinguishable from the 78% of non-Hispanic voters who said the same.)

And the same way that some Black activists gave the impression that a large percentage of Black voters around the same time supported defunding the police, something that only 28% of Black voters supported in a March 2021 poll. (That number was 18% for voters overall.)

Activists routinely try to give the impression that they speak for identity groups that they belong to, and media outlets routinely fall for it, giving outsized coverage to youth activists concerned about climate change, and Hispanic activists wanting a looser border — and, yes, MAGA Republicans opposed to the war — even though these activists often represent only tiny segments of the groups they claim to represent.

This is because, more than being biased to the left or right, the media is biased towards conflict: Young voters upset with Biden about climate, or MAGA voters upset with Trump about Iran make for juicy, conflict-driven stories. Never mind whether or not they’re true. The media is also biased towards high engagement voters: journalists ourselves are highly engaged with politics, and often so are our peer groups, and our audiences, and our sources.

This means we try to capture the perspective of youth voters by covering a youth-led protest, or MAGA voters by talking to a MAGA media figure, even if this gives us nothing approaching a representative sample of the group in question. Polls are not perfect, but they are the best thing we have to capture what large groups of Americans are thinking in a rigorous, empirical way. If journalists spent more time immersing themselves in the data, and less time taking the word of highly engaged activists with ideological agendas, you would have fewer stories falsely claiming that there is a MAGA split on Iran, when the data tells us there very much is not.

Frankly, you would probably have fewer articles suggesting in either direction that the act of striking Iran itself will have much political impact one way or the other. Journalists, the sources we talk to, and our highly engaged audiences are interested in foreign policy, but the American public largely isn’t. (Even after the war broke out, national security and foreign policy only combined to be listed as the most important issue by 10% of voters in a recent poll, compared to 49% of voters who said either inflation, jobs, or health care.) Journalists should still report on foreign policy, of course — but we should be honest about the ways it will or won’t impact politics.

In this case, Trump is unlikely to be helped by a success about Iran and unlikely to be hurt by any Tucker Carlson-esque opposition to striking Iran on its own terms, although of course the economic fallout of the war can still be highly damaging to him. This is a less alluring story than the idea of an ideological split within Trump’s base, but it is the truth.

I’ll leave you with this. Of the polls I cited above, YouGov gives the most detailed crosstab information, so we’ll use their data for a moment.

According to the YouGov poll, MAGA Republicans were “split” 85%-5% on whether they supported the Iran strike; non-MAGA Republicans were split 63%-21%. In the same poll, 66% of Republicans said they were MAGA Republicans. 21% of Republicans said they were not. This allows us to create a breakdown of the party at large:

The majority of Republicans are either MAGA supporters (think: Trump) or non-MAGA supporters (think: John Thune or John Bolton) of the Iran strikes.

4% of Republicans are non-MAGA critics of the strikes (think Joe Rogan-listening Republicans, or neocons who are suspicious of Trump like New York Times columnist David French pictured in this category above). 3% of Republicans are MAGA critics of the strike, like Carlson or Bannon.

It’s perfectly fine to have an opinion that’s shared by only 3% or 4% of your party (which, of course, is an even smaller percentage of the country); in fact, there can be great honor in that. There’s also nothing wrong with journalists telling people about the opinions of the three- or four-percenters.

But think about media coverage of the Republican response to the Iran strikes. Has it been proportional to the numbers above? Every time you see a news article quoting Tucker Carlson, or read a column by David French, you should remember that you are hearing from people who speak for roughly 3 or 4% of the Republican Party. They may represent more than that in terms of People Journalists Know or Talk To or Find Interesting, but they don’t represent many real voters according to the data.

Of course, there are many Independents who don’t support the war as well, including some who likely fall in the Rogan-listener, young-male category. But it’s important to get our terms straight. This does not represent the long-awaited (in some circles) Republican abandonment of Trump, and certainly not a fracture of his MAGA base. Those are different voters entirely who are unhappy, who do have an important electoral role to play but are not longtime adherents of the Trump movement, as the media coverage makes them seem to be.

That does suggest Trump has a problem with a critical group of Independents. But the rumors of a MAGA split with Trump have been greatly, greatly exaggerated — by ideological actors who have an interest in making it seem that way, and members of the media who went along with it in search of a good story.

President Trump is threatening to boycott the legislative process.

In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump insisted that the Senate take up the SAVE America Act as its next order of business. “It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE,” he said.

The measure, at least in Trump’s mind, keeps getting bigger. The version of the SAVE America Act that passed the House in February would require everyone in the country to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo ID when casting a ballot. In his Truth Social post, Trump said that the legislation should expand to include another change to election rules: “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY - ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL.” And he also called for two other additions that have nothing to do with voting: provisions banning transgender participation in women’s sports and gender reassignment surgeries for children.

And here comes the threat: “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed,” Trump said, “AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION - GO FOR THE GOLD.”

As a practical matter, this ultimatum doesn’t matter much. According to Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, unless both chambers of Congress are adjourned, if the president neither signs nor vetoes a piece of legislation, it automatically becomes a law after 10 days (excluding Sunday). Notably, Trump did not threaten to veto all other bills until the SAVE America Act is passed, which would suggest that bills in the meantime will simply become law by presidential inaction.

The SAVE America Act (even without Trump’s proposed additions) is not backed by any Senate Democrats, placing it a long ways away from receiving 60 votes in the upper chamber. Unless the Senate heeds Trump’s demand to abolish the filibuster (which Republicans have so far resisted), that makes the bill highly unlikely to pass in the foreseeable future, which means Trump could go the entire rest of his presidency without a legislative signing ceremony, letting bills become law without taking the chance to receive public credit for them. (Or he will simply violate his Truth Social vow.)

There are currently six bills that have been passed by both the House and Senate, which are poised — if Trump does keep his word — to become law without a presidential signature. Three would award Medals of Honor, to Vietnam War veterans John Ripley and James Capers and Afghanistan War veteran Nicholas Dockery. The others concern tribal land, an Alaska Native village corporation, and a National Conservation Area in Nevada.

More are coming down the pike. Lawmakers are ignoring Trump’s demand that the entire legislative process be held up for one controversial bill, and continuing to churn out much less polarizing — but consequential — pieces of legislation behind the scenes. Some of them will make it very hard for Trump to keep his pledge, forcing him to choose between his push for the SAVE America Act and the natural inclination of any president to visually tie himself to popular legislation with a high-profile signing ceremony, especially before the midterms.

The clearest example here is a bipartisan housing package that is gaining traction on both sides of the Capitol.

I first covered these talks back in July, when the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee unanimously approved the ROAD to Housing Act, the first major housing package advanced by the panel in years.

The bill has now been renamed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. In its latest form, the measure is 303 pages, containing a variety of policy ideas to combat the housing crisis and increase the supply of housing. The measure advanced in the Senate in a sweeping 90-8 vote last week; it is expected to receive final approval from the chamber in the days ahead.

Meanwhile, the House passed its own, 202-page housing bill, the Housing for the 21st Century Act, in a similarly lopsided 390-9 vote last month. Even as the cost of housing has skyrocketed, it has been more than a decade since either chamber of Congress has comprehensively addressed the issue — and now, all of a sudden, both of them are, in a strikingly bipartisan fashion.

There are still some kinks to iron out. The Bipartisan Policy Center has a great comparison of the two bills, but in short: both measures include provisions to streamline environmental reviews of new housing projects, increase federal multifamily housing loan limits, expand access to small-dollar mortgages, reform affordable housing grants, help veterans access housing, and increase the use of pre-approved home designs so that builders can be permitted to build homes faster.

Provisions in the Senate version, but not the House version, include the creation of a federal grant program to help fund home repairs and a $1 billion innovation fund to support communities modifying their land-use rules to build more housing. Provisions in the House version, but not the Senate version, include a new eviction helpline and the modernization of banking regulations to expand local lending. Once the Senate passes its bill, the two versions will have to be reconciled before a unified package can be sent to the president’s desk.

Notably, the latest version of the Senate bill includes a provision — championed by Trump in his State of the Union address — that would ban large institutional investors from owning more than 350 single-family homes and require them to sell their newly constructed rental properties to individuals within seven years of building them.

The Senate bill also includes a provision that has generated some controversy, banning the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital version of the U.S. dollar, known as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), though only through 2030. Many House conservatives are fiercely opposed to a CBDC, and threatening to oppose an eventual bicameral housing bill if it doesn’t include a permanent CBDC ban.

Regardless, if more than 90% of both the House and Senate will have approved separate housing packages by the end of this week, it will raise pressure on both chambers to negotiate a compromise. With 87% of Americans in agreement that finding affordable housing in the U.S. is “very” or “somewhat difficult,” a new law aimed at combatting this problem will doubtlessly be very popular — the exact sort of thing that would be great for Trump to tie himself to ahead of the midterms, to show that he is addressing voters’ urgent economic concerns.

The process of negotiating a final housing law will probably take months, though it’s highly unlikely that the SAVE America Act will be passed even by then — meaning Trump will have to choose between taking the political win of embracing the housing law and hosting a signing ceremony, or continuing his ill-fated legislative boycott.

One interesting thing about Trump’s Truth Social post is how it shows that he really only thinks about legislating through the logic of the reconciliation process.

The reconciliation process, you’ll recall, allows majority parties to skirt around the Senate filibuster and advance bills with only party-line support. It’s how the Inflation Reduction Act got passed under Biden, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act got passed under Trump.

Reconciliation bills encourage partisan legislating. They also encourage parties to stuff all sorts of unrelated policies into one big bill, since opportunities for reconciliation bills are limited. Trump apparently wants to do this with the SAVE America Act, transforming it to become not just a voting bill, but also a host for other, unrelated Republican Party policy priorities.

The ironic thing about this is that, politically, stuffing things into one big beautiful bill is probably a defect of the reconciliation process, not a benefit. It leads to unwieldy, distracted packages like the Inflation Reduction Act and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which both lacked a coherent policy vision or subject area, and thus proved difficult for Biden and Trump, respectively, to sell to the public. (Trump has already tried rebranding his big bill as the Working Families Tax Cuts Act, recognizing that the current name may accurately reflect the fact that a lot of different things are stuffed into it, but gives no information about its contents, making it hard for the public to latch onto it.)

It’s probably better for a president to pass multiple different bills through Congress rather than one big one, but Trump really only knows how to legislate in the context of reconciliation, where bills are stuffed to the gills and where there is no need to consult the other party. However, reconciliation bills must be related to revenue or spending, which means the SAVE America Act would not qualify. Whether as a package, or as individual component parts, it needs to go through the normal, bipartisan legislative process where 60 votes are a requirement.

I’ve written before that legislation rarely gets through that 60-vote threshold on the most polarizing, attention-grabbing topics — which means bills on these topics either go through the partisan reconciliation process (e.g. health care bills) or fail (e.g. election-related bills proposed by both parties). This leads to the prevalent sense that Congress is highly partisan and highly deadlocked. But, as I’ve also written, underneath the surface, there are constantly bills being passed through the bipartisan legislative process, which might not be polarizing but can still be highly consequential. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a great example.

Matthew Yglesias and Simon Bazelon have called this second legislative route “Secret Congress”; Kevin Kosar has recently termed the first route “Toxic Congress.” Trump’s recent threat is as perfect a depiction of these two Congresses, and the overlooked nature of the first one, as you can imagine. He is literally pledging to prioritize the partisan legislative process over its bipartisan companion, promising not to sign anything in the second bucket unless his one big demand from the first bucket gets through.

However, bills in the first bucket are doomed to fail unless they concern revenue or spending, which means this is just a way of publicizing guaranteed failure while hiding achievable successes. Because he is saying he won’t visibly sign any of these forthcoming governing achievements (though they will become law anyway), he is only making “Secret Congress” more secret, pushing it further into the shadows. Prioritizing failure over achievement isn’t the most intuitive way to market a presidency, unless one thinks their electoral success is more premised on angering their base about things not accomplished than pleasing swing voters by alerting them to things that have gotten done. Trump, to be clear, is far from the first president to make this bet, which is why “Secret Congress” remains so secretive in the first place — and part of why Americans remain so dispirited about their legislature, despite the fact that more is getting done than they may think. Toxicity sells, many presidents and lawmakers have found; governing often doesn’t.

But promising not to sign any “Secret Congress” bills while trying to focus all public legislative attention on a “Toxic Congress” bill is a particularly blatant way of doing this.

Even amid the SAVE America Act controversy, and a war, and a partial government shutdown, and numerous other partisan controversies, the bipartisan legislative process keeps on humming in the shadows, as the housing bill shows. There are other bills advancing, too. The Senate unanimously passed a major child online privacy bill last week, one day after the House Financial Services Committee unanimously advanced a bill reauthorizing and reforming the Defense Production Act, an important Korean War-era statute.

The tragedy of it all is that, if Trump and other presidents paid attention to what gets passed (and how) and what doesn’t, even some polarizing bills currently in the “Toxic Congress” bucket would probably get passed. In the Biden era, various gangs of lawmakers succeeded in negotiating bipartisan bills on gun control, electoral reform, and other hot-button issues.

Set a gang loose on the SAVE America Act and there’s at least a chance they could come up with a broadly supported compromise, just like Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren were able to do on housing. Maybe Republicans get voter ID (backed by 81% of the public) and Democrats could get Election Day-as-a-national holiday (backed by 72% of the public). There are plenty of reasons to think that this effort would fail, including the fact that Democratic-aligned interest groups are much more opposed to voter ID than Democratic voters. (Then again, now that the politics of voter turnout are shifting, maybe there will be a change in thinking in the coming years.)

But it’s revealing that Trump didn’t even try to fashion a bipartisan compromise, following in the footsteps of other major bills that actually are advancing across party lines as we speak, even in these most partisan of times. Nor has he done so on other issues where his executive actions could potentially be converted into a popular, bipartisan legislative agenda. On the SAVE America Act and other issues, he’s skipped straight to the partisan demand, bypassing the “Art of the Deal”-style attempts at legislative negotiation that he at least considered in his first term.

In the ultimate triumph of “Secret Congress,” however, bills will literally keep becoming law without him, even if he refuses to sign them. The legislative process marches on. The only question is whether Trump wants to play a role in it.

A poll conducted by Heatmap last September found that 44% of voters would support a data center being constructed near their home, and 42% would oppose it.

Heatmap asked the question again in a poll in February. This time, 28% said they would support such a facility; 52% said they would oppose it.

Support went from +2 to -24 in a matter of months. The main concern driving this reversal seems to be the fear that when an AI data center is built, energy bills for everyone in the area will go up.

This is a clear political problem for an administration that has embraced the AI industry so fully. So it’s not surprising that, this week, President Trump convened Big Tech executives and tried to do something about it (or, at least, tried to be seen as doing something about it). Trump had executives sign something he called the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a commitment on the part of companies like Amazon, Google, and OpenAI that they will shoulder the energy costs of their data centers themselves by willingly paying higher utility rates and investing in new power plants.

Many experts are skeptical that this will work, partially because the pledge is non-binding and concerns issues that will mainly play out on the state level, including negotiations over utility rates and permitting for new power plants.1 But regardless of the plan’s effectiveness, it’s clearly good politics for Trump to at least recognize this is an issue, and to give the appearance that he is taking a step towards fixing it.

AI is an issue gaining political salience, and in an alternate timeline, it’s possible to imagine this event having generated big headlines. In this timeline, however, the U.S. is at war with Iran. The data center pledge was buried on page B3 of this morning’s New York Times. It didn’t get much play on TV or social media.

In fairness, Trump himself didn’t seem all that interested. “These are exciting times,” he said at the top of the event. “I think you probably want to speak about war rather than this, but this is very important.” He then launched into several minutes of giving the AI executives an update on the Iran conflict (“Somebody said on a scale of 10, where would you rate it? I said, about a 15”), before turning to the matter at hand.

Before long, however, he started getting fidgety, admonishing the last three speakers to go “really fast” or “very quickly.”2 Finally, Trump called it a day: “I have to go back and look at the war,” he explained. “You know, I have a lot of things happening.”

The moment perfectly encapsulated the current state of the Trump White House: the president was holding an event on an issue Americans care about (rising prices), but it received almost no attention because of his much less popular foreign adventurism. And the president himself played a role in that distraction: his comment at the end about the war was really the only one from the event that went viral.

Last November, on the day that Democrats scored victories across the map on an “affordability” message, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told journalist Chris Whipple for a now-infamous profile that it was time for Trump to pivot from focusing on foreign policy to highlighting kitchen-table issues. “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” Wiles said. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.”

But Trump has shown no interest in such a pivot. (During his 2024 campaign, his advisers reportedly had to work hard to get Trump to stay focused on the economy and inflation, which he would complain to them was “boring.”) In the time since Wiles said that Trump should return his focus stateside, the president has deposed not one but two foreign leaders; he is now engaged in a Middle East conflict that threatens to spiral into a drawn-out war.

If the only impact of that was to distract from policies Trump is pursuing to ease American concerns about the cost of living, that alone would be politically risky, seeing as war with Iran is unpopular and 68% of voters already believe Trump’s focus is in the wrong places.

But when you then consider that the war is not only unpopular on its own terms, but could then also go the extra step of actually worsening the economy and making Trump’s biggest vulnerability bigger: you start to get a sense of just how dangerous for Trump this war could be politically.

Below the fold: My full analysis on the political and economic impact of the unfolding war in Iran… the sleeper votes still to come in Congress on the war… and why Iran ≠ Venezuela …

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Before the iPhone.

Before Google.

“Friends” had just debuted and the O.J. Simpson trial was about to begin.

Barack Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. Donald Trump hadn’t even started hosting “The Apprentice.”

In a sign of shifting tides, the marquee races in the Lone Star State went red that year. Kay Bailey Hutchison was re-elected to the Senate, and a young man named George W. Bush defeated incumbent Democrat Ann Richards, becoming only the state’s second Republican governor in the 120 years since Reconstruction.

But other members of Richards’ ticket still held on, including the state’s lieutenant governor and attorney general. They were the last Democrats to taste a major victory in Texas; no other state has gone so long without electing at least one Democrat statewide.1

It hasn’t been for lack of trying.

There was 2014 gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who launched to national stardom with her 13-hour abortion filibuster in pink tennis shoes. Then there was Beto O’Rourke in 2018, and Colin Allred in 2024, both Senate candidates who made Democrats swoon.

Nope. Nope. And nope.

What do you know: it’s a year that ends in “2,” “4,” “6,” or “8,” which means Democrats are trying once again to hunt down their white whale. And after last night’s primary elections, the first of the 2026 midterms, the party once again feels like it’s their best chance in Texas yet.

Republican strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson put it well on X. For Democrats to win a Senate race in Texas, three stars would all have to align:

An exceptionally good political environment,

A good Democrat,

And a bad Republican.

Let’s take them in order.

A rosy political environment for Democrats? Check. President Trump’s approval rating is stuck in the low 40s. Dissatisfaction with the economy is soaring. And the U.S. has potentially found itself in yet another drawn-out war in the Middle East.

In Texas specifically, per Emerson College, Trump’s approval rating is at 48% — eight points behind his 56% share of the vote there in 2024. It is likely to be a difficult year for Republicans nationwide.

A strong Democratic candidate? National Democrats think they’ve checked this box as well. Until last night, the Texas Democratic Party was engaged in a bitter primary battle for this year’s Senate seat, between Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico.

Unlike in most Democratic primaries, the divide wasn’t really ideological: Crockett and Talarico aren’t that far apart on the issues, and it’s not really clear that either one is more progressive or moderate than the other.

Instead, theirs was a stylistic difference. Crockett is the consummate fighter, known for her viral takedowns of Republicans, like when she said that Marjorie Taylor Greene had a “bleach-blonde bad-built butch-body” at a House committee hearing (and then quickly moved to trademark the phrase and started selling “B6” shirts as part of a “Clapback Collection”).

Talarico is the preacher trying to use his faith and a more conciliatory message to reach across party lines (The New York Times: “Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?”; The New Yorker: “James Talarico Puts His Faith in Texas Voters”; Politico: “He’s Deeply Religious and a Democrat. He Might Be the Next Big Thing in Texas Politics”; you get the point).

Last night, Democratic primary voters chose Talarico’s approach: he won the Democratic Senate nomination with 53% of the vote to Crockett’s 46%.

For all the talk of a potential Democratic Tea Party, and the idea that the party’s base is looking for candidates who will be maximally combative, concerns about electability seem to have dominated once again in a Democratic primary.

Notably, from the available polling, there wasn’t much evidence that either Talarico or Crockett had a quantifiable edge against their potential Republican opponents. (Polls showed that they were both equally long-shots.) But Crockett concerned some Democrats when she explicitly stated her belief that she wouldn’t need to win over Trump voters to flip a state the president has won three times.

Talarico, meanwhile, based his campaign on reaching out to voters skeptical of Democrats, even appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast (where the influential host encouraged the 36-year-old state legislator to run for president).

Even without hard evidence that he was the more electable option, Talarico was the nominee that many Democratic strategists were hoping for — and that Republicans most feared, as evidenced by the GOP’s efforts to boost Crockett.

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A weak Republican candidate? TBD.

John Cornyn is the incumbent Republican senator; he’s held this seat since 2002. He is a mainstay in Washington, having chaired the Senate GOP’s campaign arm for two cycles and served as Mitch McConnell’s No. 2 for six years. Last year, he was defeated in his bid to succeed McConnell as the Senate’s top Republican.

Cornyn is a rock-ribbed conservative, but he’s upset some Texas Republicans by brokering a bipartisan gun control bill after the Uvalde shooting in 2022 and by voting to certify the 2020 election. This year, he faced a primary challenge from Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general.

Paxton has a, well, checkered past: in 2015, he was indicted for alleged securities fraud. (The charges were ultimately dismissed after Paxton agreed to pay restitution and perform community service.) In 2023, he was impeached by the Republican-led state House over allegations of bribery. (He was acquitted by the state Senate.) Last year, his wife filed for divorce, accusing Paxton of adultery.

But he is an ideological purist: while Cornyn was voting to certify the 2020 election, Paxton was helping lead Trump’s legal efforts to overturn it; while Cornyn was negotiating with Democrats on guns, Paxton was filing upwards of 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration.

Sensing blood in the water, another Republican jumped in to challenge Cornyn as well: Rep. Wesley Hunt, a former Army officer currently in his second term in the House.

In Texas, if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote in the March primary, the two top vote-getters compete in a May 26 runoff. The three-way GOP primary ended up guaranteeing that Tuesday night ended without clarity as to who will face Talarico in the fall.

Cornyn ended up outperforming his polls, taking first place and 41.9% of the vote — though Paxton was close behind, nipping at his heels with 40.7%. Hunt finished in a distant third, with 13.5%.

Republicans are now girding for an intense, 12-week campaign between Cornyn and Paxton, with GOP strategists praying that the longtime senator will win out. The runoff is likely to be expensive: Cornyn and his backers have already spent more than $70 million on ads during the primary battle, setting a record for ad spending by a congressional incumbent. Paxton and his allies, meanwhile, spent only about $4 million on ads, which was enough to finish almost even with the senator.

The runoff will likely hinge on Trump’s endorsement: GOP leaders are begging the president to abandon his ally Paxton and support the more electable Cornyn, and they’re hopeful that Cornyn’s first-place finish will help him win the presidential nod.

It’s not even clear that a Talarico vs. Paxton race would be enough for Democrats to buck their decades-long losing streak in Texas, but it pretty much approximates the matchup that Democrats would have created in a lab: a smooth-tongued, religious Democrat put up against the most scandal-plagued, controversial Republican candidate imaginable. Democrats are also especially optimistic after turnout in their primary (2.2 million votes) outpaced turnout in the GOP primary (2.1 million votes), despite both parties hosting fiercely competitive contests, suggesting a potential enthusiasm advantage. And they certainly don’t mind the fact that Texas Republicans will spend the next 12 weeks battering each other, while the Democratic nominee is already set.

Just as winning Texas will be an uphill battle for Democrats, so will taking back the Senate majority overall. The party needs to protect all of its current seats (including in battleground states like Georgia and Michigan) and flip North Carolina and Maine and win two seats out of a hodgepodge of reach states including Ohio, Alaska, Iowa … or Texas.

Democrats are now two-for-three in their needed criteria to even have a shot in the Lone Star State. Both parties will be watching closely until May to see if that final domino clicks into place.

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More results from last night’s primaries

• Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) became the first congressional incumbent to lose to a primary challenger in the 2026 cycle, after being trounced by state Rep. Steve Toth (R-TX). Crenshaw’s support for Ukraine aid, as well as feuds with Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson, helped fuel Toth’s MAGA-centric challenge. Crenshaw was the only House Republican from Texas not to receive Trump’s endorsement, underlining the president’s grip on the GOP.

• Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), who is battling allegations that he had an affair with an aide who then died by suicide last year, was forced into a runoff with a primary challenger, conservative activist Brandon Herrera. In last night’s vote, Herrera narrowly outperformed Gonzales, taking 43.3% of the vote to the congressman’s 41.7%.

• Rep. Christian Menefee (D-TX) finished ahead of Rep. Al Green (D-TX), 46.1% to 44.2%, in a member-on-member battle forced by recent redistricting, but the fight will continue into a runoff as well. The race, between 37-year-old Menefee and 78-year-old Green, has become one of several generational fights splitting the Democratic Party this year.

• After a pair of uncompetitive primary elections, North Carolina’s Senate matchup — set to be one of the most important in the country — is set: former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vs. Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley.

• Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC) is locked in a close primary battle with Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam. Foushee’s previous support for Israel has become a focal division point in the race, which Allam is running with the support of Bernie Sanders and other top progressives. With 95% of the vote in, Foushee currently boasts a tight lead, 49.2% to 48.2%; no winner has been declared.

• Also too close to call: a re-nomination battle for North Carolina Senate president pro tempore Phil Berger, the most powerful Republican in the state. Trump waded into this primary race to boost Berger after the legislative leader championed a push to redraw North Carolina’s House map, but the incumbent currently trails conservative sheriff Sam Page by a mere two votes. Never say your vote doesn’t count, folks.

The first few days of a new war are the most crucial to win public support, which is why a military blitz abroad is usually accompanied by a flurry of activity at home.

In their book “Selling War to America,” NYU professors Eugene Secunda and Terence Moran write that voters are typically dazzled by these messaging campaigns, which are planned down to the minute. “Americans will always buy a war if it is marketed properly,” they write.

So far, Americans do not seem to be buying President Trump’s war with Iran: according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, just 27% of Americans approve of the operation. (43% disapprove; 29% said they weren’t sure.) But then again, Trump doesn’t really seem to be marketing it. The U.S. has launched its most significant military operation in at least a decade, but from listening to the president, you’d barely know it.

Trump has shorn the playbook typically used by the White House to place the U.S. on war footing. There has been no Oval Office address by the president, dramatically announcing an attack. There has been no speech by the Secretary of State at the UN, urging allies to join an international coalition. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not hold a briefing at the Pentagon until this morning, more than 48 hours after the war started.

Incredibly, that briefing today was the first time a U.S. official spoke live on television since the war started Saturday morning. Not a single Trump adviser appeared on the Sunday shows — which means the U.S. was outmatched on American television by Iran, whose foreign minister gave an interview to George Stephanopoulos. We’ve heard nothing from Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as National Security Adviser. Even ubiquitous spokespeople like Stephen Miller have gone silent.

The president’s main commentary has come from his Truth Social feed, where he posted an eight-minute video to announce the war at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and then a six-minute follow-up around 4 p.m. on Sunday. Both messages were pre-recorded. When he announced the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, on Saturday afternoon, he did so by posting a paragraph on social media.

Trump has also spoken to several reporters who have his phone number and seem to have called him up spontaneously, representing outlets from the New York Times and the Atlantic to the Daily Mail and MSNOW. But these calls typically last only a few minutes, without the ability for the public to see Trump, or even hear him, since audio of these calls is rarely posted. He did not speak about the war live and in public all weekend.

For a president so attuned to the visual dynamics of everything, including combat, who typically loves to appear non-stop on television, it was an odd choice to announce a war basically how Theodore Roosevelt would have, with a series of print interviews.

The result has been a war that hasn’t really felt like one, led by a commander-in-chief who has appeared as a disembodied voice, quoted in news articles, but rarely seen: like the Wizard of Oz presiding behind the curtain, except behind a telephone. None of the urgency and bravado that usually comes with selling war to the American public has been on display.

The commentary we have heard from Trump has often been strangely nonchalant. In his video on Sunday, Trump announced that three Americans were killed in a counter-attack by Iran against a U.S. base in Kuwait. (A fourth death has since been confirmed.) “And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more. But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case,” Trump said. Has any American president ever responded to the likelihood that American troops will die by saying, “That’s the way it is”?

Later on Sunday, returning to the White House from Mar-a-Lago, Trump was briefly seen by reporters, and peppered with questions about his plans for Iran and whether he had a message for the families of the service members killed. All he did was stop to look at new statues of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin he had installed in the Rose Garden. “Unbelievable statues,” Trump said. “Come and look at them.”

In general, his routine does not seem to have been altered by becoming a wartime leader. He still attended a GOP fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday night. His schedule today includes blocks of “Executive Time,” “Signing Time,” and two unspecified “Policy Meetings.” He has no plans to speak specifically about Iran, although he has a pre-scheduled ceremony to award the Medal of Honor to three veterans (from World War II, the Vietnam War, and the war in Afghanistan) where he will presumably address the current conflict. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt does not have a briefing scheduled.

Trump has also continued his normal posting cadence on Truth Social, mixing important communications about the war with posts about Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis and a 2024 news article about being endorsed by Lady Gaga’s father.

Why isn’t Trump using his usual full-force tactics to win public buy-in for the war?

Perhaps because he knows it’s a tough sell. Trump has called himself a “President of Peace,” and was elected promising to get the U.S. out of wars, not start ones. His anti-intervention rhetoric was key to his victory in 2024, including his success winning over young men and many of their favorite podcasters.

First, we were told that Trump would eschew foreign intervention. Then, we were told that he had adopted, in Trump’s words, the “Donroe Doctrine” (advancing U.S. control over the Western Hemisphere) and, as the Atlantic called it, “the One and Done Doctrine” (only using military force in short bursts, like bombing Iran last June or capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro earlier this year).

The war with Iran puts the lie to both alleged doctrines: Iran is not in the Western Hemisphere, and even Trump acknowledges that this operation won’t merely consist of killing the Ayatollah and getting out. He told the Daily Mail that he expects the war to be “about a four-week process,” and told CNN that “we haven’t even started hitting them hard.”

Trump may be hoping that, instead of making the case to Americans why the current war fits with his previous philosophies, he can simply downplay the operation and try to limit his time in public view — so that he can ride in and take the credit if the war goes well, or try to distance himself and reduce attention to the war if it goes poorly. Ultimately, Trump knows, most voters only care so much about foreign affairs one way or the other; most members of the public would likely prefer he spend his time on the economy, but maybe they are checked-out enough on international matters that it at least won’t hurt him politically (especially if he doesn’t push it in their faces), even if it also doesn’t help.

The other possibility is that Trump hasn’t yet decided what to say.

This is the second time in as many months that Trump has toppled a foreign head of state and, as with Venezuela, it’s unclear whether he entered the operation with a coherent strategy or reason for launching the attack.

That fact could help explain why Trump’s advisers have also mostly stayed away from the spotlight at the outset of the war, because the justification is so fluid that they run the risk of contradicting him or each other.

Trump administration officials anonymously told reporters on Saturday that the U.S. had received “indicators” that Iran was planning to use ballistic missiles against American bases “potentially preemptively,” which they said was a key reason for the U.S. attack. But according to CNN, Pentagon officials acknowledged to congressional staffers at a briefing Sunday that Iran was not planning to strike U.S. forces or bases in the Middle East unless Iran was attacked first.

“This is not about choosing Iran’s next leader or forcing regime change,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) said on CNN. But Trump has suggested that this is about both: in his initial message on Saturday, he appeared to call for regime change, urging the people of Iran to “take over your government.” Contrary to Luna’s statement, and Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) that “the people will pick” Iran’s next leader, Trump has also suggested that the decision lies with him, telling the New York Times that he has “three very good choices” for the country’s next leader.

Secretary Hegseth tried to square the circle this morning by saying, “This is not a regime change war, but the regime did change.” It is not clear what it would mean to be in a non-regime-change-war that nevertheless achieved regime change. If Khamenei’s death can be considered a regime change — and Hegseth is saying that it should be — then this would almost have to be a “regime change war” by definition, since it was the U.S.-Israeli attack that killed him. Khamenei did not die by accident.

Then again, it’s not even clear that Hegseth is correct that the regime has changed, or that Trump is pushing for that outcome, since he has vacillated on that point. Although he called for a popular uprising on Saturday, he has at other points suggested that he would be comfortable with keeping one of Khamenei’s deputies in charge, much like he did with Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela.

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump also told the Times.

In short, the vacuum of clear statements from Trump or his top advisers has led to a confusing mess of assertions from Republican lawmakers and anonymous officials that has created uncertainty about why the U.S. went to war or what comes next. In addition to Luna and Graham quickly being contradicted on whether the U.S. would pick Iran’s next leader, Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) said on CBS News that Secretary Rubio told him privately “that we did not target Khamenei and we were not targeting the leadership in Iran,” appearing to suggest that Israel had killed the Iranian leader alone. All indications, including from the White House, are that this is not true; it would be helpful to hear from Rubio directly about what comments Turner might be referring to.

And then, of course, when Trump has spoken, through reporters, he has contradicted himself on both his mission and strategy, and hardly helped improve the image of a careful plan for the day after. Trump told ABC News that the next leader of Iran is “not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead”: the U.S. had killed its own preferred successors in the attack. “Second or third place is dead,” Trump said.

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One way Trump’s march to war has been similar to other presidents’ has been his decision not to seek authorization from Congress. Just as he has barely sold the war to the public, he has also expended little effort to persuade lawmakers: he had the House and Senate arrayed before him last week at the State of the Union, and he barely spoke about Iran. (Of course, that also would have been a great opportunity to make his case to the public.)

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but it also designates the president as commander-in-chief, a fact that presidents have often used to launch major military operations without congressional approval, from Harry Truman in the Korean War to Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada to Bill Clinton’s bombing of Kosovo.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 states that the president only has the power to “introduce United States Armed forces into hostilities” without congressional approval in the case of “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” (Many presidents have argued that the resolution is unconstitutional.)

The resolution also creates a process for lawmakers to fast-track measures requiring the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities. Democrats in both the House and Senate are set to use this process to force votes later this week on resolutions requiring withdrawal from Iran.

Both votes will likely fall mostly along party lines, but not strictly, in keeping with the fact that foreign interventionism — and particularly when related to Israel — has opened splits in both parties in recent years.

A handful of hawkish Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Greg Landsman (D-OH), have expressed support for the Iran operation.

On the right, Trump is the one who breathed new life into the Republican Party’s isolationist wing over the last decade; now, he has all but neutered it. In his short time in the Senate, JD Vance made anti-interventionism his calling card; when he endorsed Trump’s 2024 campaign, he did so with an op-ed headlined, “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has spent her career railing against Middle East interventionism and the idea of going to war against Iran.

Neither Vance nor Gabbard have commented on the operation since it started, which is highly unusual for the Vice President and Director of National Intelligence in any administration — let alone one where every presidential action is normally followed by praise from his subordinates.

According to a Wake Up To Politics analysis, 98 out of 100 U.S. senators have issued statements on the Iran operation. The two exceptions are Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, both Missouri Republicans who have established themselves as two of the chamber’s leading isolationists. Rather than risk abandoning either Trump or their principles, the pair has chosen to stay silent.1

The few GOP isolationists who have openly criticized the operation are mostly only those who have already alienated themselves from Trump, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Whether hawk or dove, many Republican lawmakers are likely worried about the political impact of launching an as-yet-unpopular war in an election year — especially without even trying to make it popular and, seemingly, just hoping it will fly under the radar.

Of course, there are many ways this could go. The best-case scenario for Trump is a democratized Iran, which still likely wouldn’t bring much of a domestic political benefit, but would at least burnish his legacy. (He may then go for a three-peat, attempting to dislodge the leaders of Venezuela, Iran, and then Cuba.)

The worst-case scenario is a drawn out war: boots on the ground, American casualties, draining U.S. munitions. Not only would this be politically costly on its own terms, it could also be doubly damaging for Trump because it could run the risk of hurting the economy: the price of oil is already surging after the attack.

There is also the middle-case scenario, where Iran plods on approximately like Venezuela: led by a functionary from the old regime, not mired in chaos, but also with little having changed on the ground, while the situation has mostly dropped out of the American headlines.

Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” of foreign conflicts — You break it, you own it — is often cited, but might not necessarily apply to Trump, who is all too happy to foment chaos and then leave a situation if it isn’t going to his liking, without feeling any sense of ownership.

Within this middle case, Trump’s hope would be to cow the new functionary leader — like Rodríguez in Venezuela — into fearing that he may attack them next, so that they will do his bidding, although it’s unclear what exactly doing Trump’s bidding would look like. (Simply not attacking the U.S.? Or moving towards democracy?) The downside would be if that person doesn’t listen to Trump, and because Iran has a very different ideology and sensitive location than Venezuela, continues to attack the U.S. and its allies, potentially leading the middle-case scenario into the worst-case scenario of all-out war.

Trump, supremely confident in his abilities to steer things towards the best- or middle-case based on his experience in Venezuela, seems ready for whichever scenario comes. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told the New York Post.

It is a big gamble to assume the American public — especially one to whom a concrete case was never made as to why the war was started in the first place — will feel the same.

Happy Friday! In this week’s paid-subscriber deep dive, we’ll take a look at allegations that the Trump administration is flouting court orders in immigration cases — and examine the key legal dispute that has created these hundreds of cases in the first place.

Over the last year, I’ve been closely tracking an important question: whether the Trump administration is complying with the (many) court orders ruling against its actions.

My basic thesis has been this: There is no question President Trump is pushing the bounds of executive action in many areas. In some ways, what he is doing is unique. But in others, it represents a years-long trend of presidents trying to find ways to implement their agendas without Congress. As with his predecessors, many judges are striking down Trump’s most creative uses of executive action. As long as Trump complies with these rulings, I’ve written, his administration should be understood as an exacerbation of these confrontations between the executive and judicial branches, but not necessarily as a break from how they have historically played out. It would mean that Trump is trying to push the guardrails, but ultimately staying within them when they push back.

On the other hand, if he were to flout court orders, that would be crossing a big red line. It would mean there is little that could hem the president in, if he tries to subvert Congress and continues doing so whether or not his actions are blessed by the courts. It would mark the president as fundamentally lawless, every bit as free from checks and balances as his supporters boast and his opponents fear.

At the highest level, the Supreme Court, we know that Trump has (begrudgingly) complied with adverse rulings. The court ruled that the National Guard should be removed from Chicago, and it has been. The court ruled that Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be brought back to the U.S., and here he is. The court ruled that, at least for the time being, he cannot remove Fed governor Lisa Cook; she remains in office, and continues to vote on interest rates.

In perhaps the highest-profile example, exactly one week ago, the Supreme Court struck down the president’s signature economic policy, his sweeping global tariffs. Trump said that the justices were “an embarrassment to their families,” “a disgrace to our nation,” “disloyal to the Constitution,” and “swayed by foreign interests.”

But that was all rhetoric. In a legal sense, what mattered was Executive Order 14389, which was issued shortly after the ruling. “In light of recent events,” the executive order said, the tariffs imposed under nine previous executive orders — the ones at issue in the Supreme Court case — “shall no longer be in effect and, as soon as practicable, shall no longer be collected.”

I agree with the assessment of Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush-era Justice Department official:

The Trump press conference was an amazing portrait of a president who claims to be unbound by law seethingly acquiescing in a court ruling on “an important case to me” that he abhorred with every fiber of his body. It is clear the administration will use every alternative legal tool at its disposal to replicate or go further in deploying international economic weapons. That is its legal prerogative. But still, Trump’s anger combined with his acquiescence in the ruling elevated the Court and was a remarkable testament to its power.

Trump’s comments about the court only made him seem small. He can complain all he wants, in as hyperbolic terms as he wants, but at the end of the day, when the court told him to stop collecting certain tariffs, he did. Even Trump, as powerful as he imagines himself to be, has been too meek to cross that big red line, proving who (still) wields ultimate power in our system and who is left on the sidelines complaining about it.

As Goldsmith wrote, this analysis is not impacted at all by the fact that Trump is now using other statutes to impose other tariffs. The Supreme Court did not say “you can’t impose tariffs”; it said “you can’t impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.” The court freely acknowledged that there are other statutes that do allow the president to impose tariffs (although, importantly, all of those statutes come with limits), and explicitly said that it was not ruling on the legality of Trump using those.

This is similar to how the Supreme Court did not tell Joe Biden “you can’t cancel student loan debt”; it said “you can’t cancel student loan debt under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act.” Biden then tried to cancel student loan debt in other ways, which sparked their own legal battles, just as Trump’s newest tariffs will likely be met with court challenges as well.

But all of this has been about the Supreme Court, which is only one of more than 100 courts in our federal system.

Over the past few weeks, several of the judges in these lower courts have raised concerns about the Trump administration — and, specifically, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — complying with their orders. In some cases, this has led to judges threatening to find the administration in contempt, the main weapon in a judge’s arsenal when met with a noncompliant litigant.

Many of these cases have involved the immigration crackdown in Minnesota; two judges in the state have gone so far as to find the Trump administration in civil contempt.

All of these allegations of noncompliance spring from cases dealing with the same, very specific legal dispute: a fight over the Trump administration interpreting a decades-old immigration statute in a new way. Many news outlets have covered the contempt findings, but few have gone into detail explaining the underlying dispute.

Below the fold, we’ll answer these questions: What is the important legal disagreement driving these cases? What does it mean for the administration to be held in civil contempt? Is it working?

Let’s dive in…

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Last night, President Donald Trump briefly turned his address to Congress into something new: a live poll.

The speeches have long been about more than just what the president says; they are also about how the audience responds in the room. When does the opposition party stand and applaud? Was that Supreme Court justice grimacing?

But Trump never fails to make the implicit explicit, and last night, he lifted this long-running parlor game out of the shadows, into a central element of his address.

“One of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their representatives really believe,” Trump said about an hour into his 108-minute speech, the longest in State of the Union history. “So, tonight, I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration in reaffirming a fundamental principle. If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

Cut to a standing ovation from Republican lawmakers, and stony silence from the Democratic side of the aisle. Trump shook his head and gestured out at the seated Democrats, letting the moment last for several beats. “Isn’t that a shame?” Trump said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up.”

The moment represented a fundamental truth about Trump’s political career: He may love having the stage all to himself, but — paradoxically — he does better when he shares it.

Over the last decade, Trump has shown himself to be a ruthlessly effective campaigner, cutting rivals down to size and showing a keen ability to mold their vulnerabilities into a dominant narrative: “Crooked Hillary.” “Sleepy Joe.” (Even, once upon a time, “Little Marco.”) He is at his best politically when he has someone he can hold up as a villain, and he can pummel them, again and again and again.

His performance is more uneven, on the other hand, when he is squarely in the spotlight (unfortunately for him, his favorite place to be). Twice now, he has shown himself to be an expert attack dog, persuading Americans that he is a better choice than his alternative, before watching his poll numbers falter as soon as he switched from campaigning to governing. It is easier to thrash someone else’s economy, Trump has found, than to lead one for yourself.

Thirteen months into his second term, with his popularity sagging and the midterms approaching, Trump now finds himself in desperate need of a foil — and he knows it.

Trump’s favorite pronoun is usually “I”: last night, he used it 119 times. But he used “they” even more (122 times), often to denounce the assembled Democrats.

“Now the same people in this chamber who voted for those disasters suddenly used the word ‘affordability,’ a word, they just used it,” Trump said, railing against Biden-era policies and seeking to place blame for the economy on his predecessor. “Somebody gave it to them, knowing full well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure. You caused that problem. You caused that problem. They knew their statements were a lie. They knew it. They knew their statements were a dirty, rotten, lie. Their policies created the high prices.”

“We can never forget that many in this room not only allowed the border invasion to happen before I got involved, but indeed they would do it all over again if they ever had the chance,” Trump said at another point.

“They have instituted another Democrat shutdown,” he added later, referring to the ongoing funding gap for the Department of Homeland Security, now in its 12th day.

Seeking to recreate the success of his 2024 ad needling Democrats on transgender issues, Trump said last night: “Surely, we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will. Who would believe that we’ve been talking about that? We must ban it and we must ban it immediately.”

When Democrats stayed seated, the president ad-libbed: “Look, nobody stands up. These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”

Much of the address proceeded this way, as Trump tried to steer focus away from matters like the Epstein Files or the recent killings of American citizens by immigration agents, and towards wedge issues where he could paint Democrats as prioritizing illegal immigrants or transgender Americans (as the ad put it: for they/them, not for you).

Ever the producer, Trump placed these moments between others where he could seize the mantle of patriotism, tying himself to groups that no one could object to, like 100-year-old veterans and Olympic gold medalists. Over the course of the speech, Trump awarded two Purple Hearts, two Medals of Honor, the Legion of Merit, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — in addition to bringing in the U.S. men’s hockey team mid-speech and orchestrating a live reunion between a Venezuelan political prisoner and his niece.

Trump similarly focused on policies that command broad support, calling on Congress to pass populist initiatives like banning investment firms from buying single-family homes and codifying his most-favored-nation drug-pricing deals. He tried to hover in safe territory, while shoving Democrats into the danger zone. They’re extreme; I’m just pushing common-sense.

The president repeatedly singled out individual Democrats, seeming to try to goad them into responding (and creating a repeat of last year, when the party’s heckling and sign-waving mostly fell flat). “Did Nancy Pelosi stand up, if she’s here?” Trump asked after calling on Congress to pass a bill banning themselves from trading stocks. (New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani might have made for a good foil, too, except Trump stepped on attack against the democratic socialist by saying, “I think he’s a nice guy, actually, speak to him a lot. Bad policy, but nice guy.” Reportedly, the two are texting buddies.)

Knowing that few voters are turning on a television to watch an hour-and-a-half-plus political speech in 2026, these moments — celebrating feel-good stories and confronting Democrats — all seemed to be engineered to be viral social media clips as much as anything. Indeed, the White House has posted several of them on TikTok; the best-performing, closing in on 1 million views, is the moment when he dared Democrats not to agree that the U.S. government must put American citizens, not illegal immigrants, first.

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As far as political strategy goes, this isn’t a bad one.

Pick your poll, and they’ll all tell you that Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular: a Washington Post/ABC survey says that 60% of Americans now disapprove of his job performance, a first since January 6, 2021; meanwhile, per CNN, only one-quarter of Independents approve of his second term, an all-time low and a political disaster.

But as Trump seems to realize, perhaps his only saving grace is that Democrats are almost as unpopular.

According to a recent AP/NORC poll, the percentages of Americans who say they trust Republicans more on the economy and immigration has slipped in recent months — but remains higher than the percentage who say they trust Democrats. Democrats boast an advantage on health care, but on the all-important question of cost of living, the two parties are tied: 27% say they trust Republicans more, 27% say Democrats. Even more, 36%, say neither.

That Post/ABC poll showing Trump with a 60% disapproval rating (and a 39% approval rating)? It also shows a strikingly competitive midterm environment, with 47% of registered voters saying they would vote for a Democratic congressional candidate this fall and 45% saying they would vote for a Republican. That’s a much smaller gap than you might expect based on Trump’s approval rating; at this point in 2018, Trump was about as unpopular but the Democratic advantage on the Post/ABC generic ballot was 10 points larger.

Another Post poll, from September, found that more Americans said the Democratic Party was “too liberal” (54%) than said the Republican Party was “too conservative” (49%). Trump’s best hope at political survival, like in 2024, is convincing Americans that, whatever they think of him, his opposition is more extreme, a task he seemed focused on last night.

Here, he finds himself in the same exact place as Joe Biden, confronted with an economy that is neither crashing nor soaring — and the need to convince Americans that they should accept that as a win, rather than a reason for mounting dissatisfaction. “The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” Trump said last night, something polls show that few Americans believe.

In that situation, Biden also used his State of the Union addresses to promote populist economic proposals and elevate a foil: in his 2024 speech, he repeatedly railed against “my predecessor,” meaning Trump. In Biden’s case, the speech worked to temporarily solidify support from fellow Democrats and assuage their chief concerns about him (his age).

But it did nothing to help his overall political position or to change Americans’ perceptions of the economy. Within a few months, he would drop out of the presidential race.

If Trump’s speech also successfully rallies his base — which is much less enthused about the midterms than Democrats — then it will be something of a success. But it is hard to see the address solving any of his bigger problems.

Like Biden, Trump often complains that he is not getting enough credit for his policy achievements. According to an Echelon Insights poll before the State of the Union, 88% of voters have heard “some” or “a lot” about the ICE raids and protests in Minnesota, while 76% have heard about Trump’s hopes of acquiring Greenland.

Markedly fewer (45%) have heard about “Trump accounts,” the investment accounts for children, or about TrumpRx, the president’s new portal to access discounts on prescription drugs (42%). Trump promoted both initiatives in his address last night, but in all likelihood, most of the viewers who were watching are the type of highly engaged voters who already knew. (One bright spot in the poll: 60% of Americans have heard about Trump’s elimination of tax on tips. Interestingly, Trump told news anchors before the speech that he would announce a new slate of tax cuts to be passed through the party-line reconciliation process, but he never did so in his address. In what could be his last State of the Union speech with a Republican House speaker behind him, Trump signaled no plans for another reconciliation package, as some Republicans had hoped.)

Trump’s claims throughout his speech often elided context: Trump boasted about having “lifted 2.4 million Americans, a record, off of food stamps,” making it sound like he had rescued them from poverty. In fact, that is the number of Americans expected to lose food stamp benefits due to new work requirements enacted by the One Big Beautiful Bill. Trump said that he had secured commitments for more than $18 trillion in investments in the U.S. economy, a number that appears highly exaggerated. He took credit for a retirement savings plan that was actually the result of a Biden-era law.

Trump’s speech also frequently lacked focus, veering from topic to topic over the course of 100+ minutes, but never proposing a coherent legislative agenda or message for the midterms. The Democratic response, delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, was focused around three central questions: “Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? Is the president working to keep Americans safe, both at home and abroad? Is the president working for you?”

Like incumbent presidents before him, Trump can try to make his opposition party the focus of the midterms — but it is more likely that the contest will be a referendum on these questions, than on anything a grab-bag of populist proposals or a few live medal presentations can fix.

In a speech focused on hugging popular policies and groups, and placing Democrats on the losing side of several issues, Trump dropped this strategy just once, to praise his beloved tariffs and bash the Supreme Court (with some justices in attendance) for its “disappointing ruling” last week.

But polls show the tariffs to be deeply unpopular, and helping fuel the perception that Trump has the wrong priorities. Voters overwhelmingly blame Trump, not Biden, for the state of the economy, with tariffs playing no small part.

Elevating an unpopular opposition isn’t an unreasonable strategy for a president in Trump’s position. But with perceptions of the economy already hardened, and Trump’s year of constant movement having already shoved Democrats out of the limelight and put himself there instead, it may simply be too late.

As a point of comparison, if you look at other candidates for that title: the majority opinion in Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case, was 43 pages long. The majority opinion in the Dobbs abortion case lasted 79 pages. The campaign finance ruling in Citizens United took 54 pages.

Roberts’ opinion in Learning Resources v. Trump, the tariffs case, lasted a mere 21 pages, and even fewer (around 12) if you count only the parts where he was actually speaking for a majority of the court. (Not everyone in the majority joined all of Roberts’ opinion, as we’ll discuss below.) The prose is not flowery, but blunt and workmanlike. You could read only these three paragraphs, from Roberts’ conclusion, and walk away with a pretty solid sense of the whole thing:

The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope. In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.

[The] grant of authority [in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which Trump used to justify the tariffs] to “regulate . . . importation” falls short. IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties. The Government points to no statute in which Congress used the word “regulate” to authorize taxation. And until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power.

We claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs. We claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by Article III of the Constitution. Fulfilling that role, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.

Why, then, does the total amount of writing produced by the court in Learning Resources stretch out over 170 pages? Out of the nine justices, seven wrote opinions in the case: Roberts’ majority opinion, four concurrences, and two dissents.

This morning, we’ll try to tease out some of the nuances that emerge across these writings, especially on a central question that runs throughout all seven, about whether (or to what degree) the Supreme Court should be trying to elevate one of its two fellow branches of government over the other.

Let’s start here: Just like how no easy decisions land on the president’s desk, no easy cases end up at the Supreme Court.

As Roberts noted above, in Learning Resources, President Trump took a vague portion of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), allowing the president to “regulate…importation” during a national emergency, and said that those words gave him the power to impose tariffs.

That’s certainly not an obvious interpretation of IEEPA, but it’s not an insane one either. It’s not as if Trump took a statute that says, “The president can deport illegal immigrants,” and went, “Aha! I can impose tariffs!” That would be an easy case. This one is a much closer question. That’s what makes it a Supreme Court case.

The best parallels to Learning Resources, where Trump was trying to claim an expansive grant of executive power, are cases from the previous administration where then-President Joe Biden was trying to claim sweeping executive power, a set of disputes which hung over the tariffs case.

In Biden v. Nebraska, for example, the former president took a provision in the HEROES Act allowing the executive branch to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applying to [a federal] student-loan program” during a national emergency, and said that this allowed him to unilaterally cancel $430 billion in federal student loan debt. Like Trump with IEEPA, this wasn’t an insane interpretation of the HEROES Act, but it wasn’t an obvious one either.

What should the Supreme Court do when confronted with these not-obvious, not-insane statutory interpretations?

All nine justices would tell you that they start with the text of the statute (“We’re all textualists now,” Justice Elena Kagan famously said in 2015), but this will only take us so far.

Both Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the main dissent, use Black’s Law Dictionary to define “regulate” as meaning to “fix, establish, or control; to adjust by rule, method, or established mode; to direct by rule or restriction; to subject to governing principles or laws.”

Roberts then writes:

But the facial breadth of “regulate” places in stark relief what the term is not usually thought to include: taxation. The U.S. Code is replete with statutes granting the Executive the authority to “regulate” someone or something. Yet the Government cannot identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax. The Government concedes, for example, that the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot tax the trading of securities, even though it is expressly authorized to “regulate the trading of . . . securities.”

Kavanaugh, meanwhile, offers this:

Imposing tariffs on imports is clearly a way of controlling imports (Black’s); governing or directing imports according to rule (Webster’s, American Heritage); adjusting imports by rule, method, or established mode (Black’s, American Heritage); or more generally subjecting imports to governing principles or laws (Black’s). So the dictionary definitions amply demonstrate that tariffs are a means to “regulate . . . importation” of foreign imports.

It appears we’ve reached an impasse; the bare text, it turns out, only takes us so far.

Enter the Major Questions Doctrine, which the court’s conservative majority has proposed to use for exactly these cases of non-obvious, non-insane interpretations.

Put most simply, the Major Questions Doctrine says that when a president is trying to do something of vast “economic and political significance” by executive action, he needs to be able to point to “clear congressional authorization” for the action. If a presidential interpretation is passable, but not overwhelmingly obvious, MQD says that the presumption should cut against the president. A tie should go to Congress.

In Learning Resources, the court split 3-3-3 on the Major Questions Doctrine and its application to the case.

• Conservative justices John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett believe in the Major Questions Doctrine and believe that it applies here (i.e., that Trump lacked “clear congressional authorization” for the tariffs), and thus ruled against Trump.

• Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson don’t believe in the Major Questions Doctrine but believe that Trump lacks authorization for the tariffs as a simple matter of textual analysis, without any need for a tie-breaker, and thus ruled against Trump (but didn’t join the parts of Roberts’ opinion that used MQD analysis).

• Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh believe in the Major Questions Doctrine but don’t believe it applies here (i.e., that IEEPA passes the test of having given Trump “clear congressional authorization” for the tariffs, and also that MQD shouldn’t be used in foreign affairs cases), and thus ruled in Trump’s favor.

This yields some interesting alliances. Six justices believe in MQD, and six struck down the tariffs, but they are two different groups, because three of the pro-MQD justices thought that the tariffs pass the MQD test, while three of the anti-MQD justices thought the tariffs should be struck down even without the doctrine.

To make things even more confusing, Barrett wrote a separate concurrence basically saying that she supports MQD, but that it shouldn’t hold so much weight; that it should be less of a hard-and-fast rule of thumb (when it’s unclear from a statute whether a certain power has been delegated to the president or been reserved by Congress, always err on the side of Congress) and more of a general guide.

Of the seven opinions produced by the court in Learning Resources, the most strident is easily Gorsuch’s.

Over the course of a 45-page concurrence (more than double the length of the Roberts opinion he was concurring with), Gorsuch takes just about everyone on the court to task.

Addressing the liberals, he suggests that Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson are hypocrites for upholding Biden-era executive actions but striking down Trump’s. Thanks for agreeing with me about Trump! But then why didn’t you agree with me on Biden?

Addressing the dissenting conservatives, he suggests that Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh are hypocrites for striking down Biden-era executive actions but upholding Trump’s. Thanks for agreeing with me about Biden! But then why don’t you agree with me on Trump?

And he even devotes several pages to yelling at Barrett — one of his two colleagues who actually did agree with him on both Biden and Trump — for believing in MQD but not using it as the hard-and-fast rule he wants it to be.

In Gorsuch’s words, the Major Questions Doctrine is an explicitly “pro-Congress” philosophy, actively putting its thumb on the scales for Congress’s ability to decide major political and economic questions, unless it has clearly delegated otherwise.

The court’s foremost congressionalist, Gorsuch concludes his concurrence with a paean to the legislative process. It is worth reading in full:

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason.

Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.

There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.

In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

Congress is the Article I branch, for a reason, Gorsuch seems to say. It is the most deliberative and representative branch, and therefore deserves extra deference, while a branch that reports to one man should receive extra scrutiny.

Kagan, writing a concurrence for herself and the other liberals, agreed that Trump’s tariffs should be struck down, but declined to adopt such a reflexively pro-Congress stance.

She referred to MQD as “the so-called major-questions doctrine,” refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the rule, much less that it should apply here. Describing her process of interpreting statutes that delegate contested amounts of power from Congress to the president, Kagan wrote: “I consider a delegation provision’s language, broaden the scope to take in the statutory setting, and apply some common sense about how Congress normally delegates.”

But no thumb on the scale to help settle a tie. Rebutting Gorsuch’s contention that her method was not sufficiently deferential to the legislature, Kagan insisted that it would instead lend to the role of a neutral arbiter, and would “not always favor (or always disfavor) executive officials, given the variety of delegation schemes Congress adopts.”

Left unexplained was exactly how that method had led Kagan to rule, for example, that “waive or modify” gave Biden the extraordinary power he sought in a declared emergency but “regulate…importation” failed to do the same for Trump. Gorsuch pointed this out, but Kagan declined to respond. “I’ll let Justice Gorsuch relitigate on his own our old debates about other statutes, unrelated to the one before us,” she wrote.

The point is a fair one, though. Kagan is clearly hesitant to adopt MQD as a hard-and-fast rule, possibly for the principled reason that she believes that it tips the scales too far towards Congress (in the past, she has called the doctrine “anti-administrative state”) and possibly for the more partisan reason that she doesn’t want to take her ability to rule in favor of future Democratic presidents off the table.

It makes sense to be hesitant about a rule, which can too inflexibly lock a justice in. But without a pre-declared rule guiding your thinking, Gorsuch suggested, a justice can run the risk of appearing to play favorites, if you claim to simply be going off the text of the statute, but are seemingly always breaking your ties based on a partisan, not institutional, preference.

In her concurrence, Barrett also writes about the follies of using MQD as a reflexively pro-Congress rule, or anything more than an interpretive guide to “ascertain the most natural reading of a statute.” It is not the court’s job to always lean in favor of Congress, she argues:

…[I]f the Constitution permits Congress to give the Executive a particular power, who are we to get in the way? Does the Judiciary really protect the Constitution by impeding the constitutional action of another branch? If Justice Gorsuch thinks that we should forgo the most natural reading of a statute because it is preferable for Congress, rather than the President, to make big decisions, that way lies “a lot of trouble” for the textualist.

Finally, Kavanaugh — writing for himself, Thomas, and Alito — embraces MQD but argues that it should be more deferential to the president in foreign affairs cases (and also that “regulate…importation” encompasses tariff power either way).

“[I]n the foreign affairs context, this Court has interpreted statutes as written,” Kavanaugh wrote, “with respect for the primacy of Congress’s and the President’s roles in foreign affairs and without using the major questions doctrine as a thumb on the scale against the President.”

Again, this could be read as partisan or principled. On one hand, it is true that we prize Congress for being deliberative — but we also want the executive to be energetic (or, at least, so said Hamilton), and nowhere more than in the arena of foreign affairs. The president is the nation’s commander-in-chief, and chief diplomat as well. No one disputes that Congress couldn’t exactly negotiate trade deals with other countries. Perhaps, here, we should give the president a wider berth.

But there’s Gorsuch again, reminding his colleagues of their own past rulings. If vague statutes should be construed in a president’s favor when it comes to foreign affairs, then why did Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh rule against Biden in West Virginia v. EPA, when the court struck down a presidential claim of authority on climate change:

In West Virginia, the Court applied the major questions doctrine over a dissent expressing concern that doing so would deny the EPA (and therefore the President) the power to respond to “the most pressing environmental challenge of our time”—“[c]limate chang[e].” A challenge, the dissent continued, that threatened consequences global in scope, including “mass migration events[,] political crises, civil unrest, and even state failure.” Was West Virginia a “foreign affairs” case? How about our major questions cases addressing efforts to combat the global pandemic that was COVID–19 [when the court also ruled against Biden]?

Perhaps, Gorsuch suggests, no exception is better than an exception inconsistently applied.

The issues raised by Gorsuch’s concurrence may be secondary to the headline news about the tariffs, but they set the table for the coming years of Supreme Court separations-of-powers jurisprudence in an important way.

Will the Supreme Court continue to read executive power cases statute by statute, with justices on the wings ruling for or against a president seemingly based on party — and then aligning with justices in the middle who consistently take a skeptical-of-executive-power view — so that the presidents are normally constrained, but almost by accident?

Or will the court, confronted with enough abuses of executive power, decide to put a “thumb on the scale” for Congress, engaging in a broader attempt to reorient the U.S. government in favor of legislative power?

Gorsuch obviously wants to take the latter path, but neither his conservative nor liberal colleagues are not on board. Barrett, for example, described Gorsuch’s pro-Congress push as a “project” that “may be desirable or even constitutionally inspired,” but is in “significant tension with textualism.” Gorsuch’s approach might be the right one, in line with the court’s role as a constitutional protector (which may mean being most protective of Congress, whose laws are the ones the president’s executive power is supposed to be executing in the first place).

Or it might be an inappropriate project for a justice to take on from the Supreme Court bench. Ultimately, perhaps, the branch to protect Congress has to be Congress itself.

“Congress possesses a variety of tools to limit the President’s tariffs—directly via new legislation or, perhaps more readily, by not approving annual appropriations necessary for the Executive Branch to continue to implement the tariffs,” Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent.

Of course, it’s not that simple, both because a president might cow a Congress of his party into supporting his agenda (imagine that!) and because, even a Congress where a majority opposes certain tariff actions — like, well, this one — might not be able to force its will without a two-thirds, veto-proof majority, as Gorsuch pointed out. Although, of course, that still doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the Supreme Court’s place to pick a favored branch.

The ultimate answer in this dispute matters because presidents will keep building sandcastles. Presidents will keep trying to expand executive power; to ensure they’re stopped consistently when they go too far, either the Supreme Court will have to adopt a pro-Congress view … or Congress will.

The court will have many opportunities to think through these issues, as they have many more cases on Trump’s executive actions still to hear, and then surely there will be cases from the next president as well, and the next one and the next one — right up until Congress takes the hints Gorsuch was giving it, and tries to do some legislating itself, if they ever will.

There may even be more tariff sandcastles to come. In response to the “supreme court” ruling — Trump announced this morning that he will only be using lower-case letters to refer to the court from now on, a blow the justices will surely have difficulty recovering from — the president excoriated the court, and also announced that he would be imposing new 10%, then 15%, global tariffs.

I have seen some people suggesting that this should be understood as Trump defying the Supreme Court, but presidents responding to legal losses by looking for new statutory means to achieve a similar task is very normal. After the court ruled against Biden’s student loans plan, he did the same.

The court ruled that Trump could not impose tariffs under IEEPA, not that he could not impose tariffs at all. Whether the new tariffs are legal is another question — and the answer may be even more complicated than the IEEPA case. For his new tariffs, Trump is using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose import taxes to “deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”

“A balance of payments deficit is not the same thing as a trade deficit. You cannot have a balance of payments if you have a flexible exchange rate, as the US currently does,” economist Peter Berezin has written, summarizing the views of other experts who do not believe Section 122 can currently be used because the U.S. does not currently face the circumstances required by the law.

Once legal challenges to the 15% tariffs start springing up, the court will be stuck with a Humpty Dumpty question — whether a circumstance exists simply because the president says it does — another opportunity to consider how much deference to give the president vs. Congress on uncertain statutory questions. (The court declined to answer the Humpty Dumpty question in the IEEPA case, dodging the question of whether a true national emergency under IEEPA existed by saying that IEEPA doesn’t allow tariffs, emergency or not.)

Trump’s most sweeping assertion of tariff power might be dead, but the shifting separations-of-powers alliances and disputes on the Supreme Court will very much remain a live dynamic.

No, I’m not talking about Stephen Colbert and James Talarico. I’m talking about the “Singing Governor,” of course.

You know the song “You Are My Sunshine”? (🎶 “My only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray…” 🎶) Did you know it was first made famous by a governor of Louisiana?

Jimmie Davis was a prominent 20th-century country singer who helped popularize the genre across the United States. He didn’t actually write “You Are My Sunshine,” as he sometimes receives credit for, but he did buy the rights to the song for $35 in 1940. Davis and a partner recorded the song, and that’s what made it a hit.

At the time, he was serving as the Commissioner of Public Safety in Shreveport, Louisiana. In 1942, he was appointed to the statewide Public Service Commission. Two years later, he was elected governor. Davis would often play “You Are My Sunshine” at campaign stops. (His obituary notes that when voters would ask him “where he stood on a particularly contentious issue,” Davis would start singing. “It’s better in a political campaign to give folks very little talking and a whole lot of songs,” he said.)

Davis served as governor from 1944 to 1948 — at the time, Louisiana limited its governors to a single consecutive term — but he ran again (successfully) in 1960 for a second, non-consecutive term.

That’s where our story begins, because during that campaign, Davis was booked to sing “You Are My Sunshine” on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which was hosted at the same network and same theater that “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is now. (Technically, it wasn’t called the “Ed Sullivan Theater” yet, but it was still the same building.)

At the last minute, CBS pulled the plug. The network worried that “his appearance ‘even as an entertainer’ might obligate CBS TV affiliates serving Louisiana to grant equal time, if requested, to qualified gubernatorial opponents,” the New York Times reported in 1960.

This is the earliest example I can find of the equal time rule being invoked in the context of late-night TV, which was only about a decade old at that point, and it seems to have come up less because a comedy show was trying to host a politician and more because a famous singer happened to be a political candidate.

What is the equal time rule? Has it been invoked against other late-night shows since then? Now that it’s being resurrected, could partisan hosts like Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow be forced to interview their political rivals?

We’ll get into all of that and more beneath the paywall, including some stories you won’t read about in any of the other Colbert coverage, like Jimmie Davis and Ed Sullivan … and the time that the eccentric candidate below used the equal time rule to force his way onto the “Tonight Show,” forcing Congress to change the law not once, but twice …

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