For his second term, Trump filled his team with people he remembered from various media circuses. His administration then ran the country with the management skills of a bunch of circus performers. Perhaps there was some way to predict that outcome.
It's utterly bizarre for people to act like Vance's "blame Israel" approach is a serious effort to explain the election. If you're not a Republican primary voter, that isn't for you. It's 100% about factional positioning in the ruins of MAGA.
"Why was I more popular with the evil deep state RINOs running my administration rather than my own handpicked-for-loyalty minions?" Trump didn't ask.
This entire line of thinking. Dems didn't "win," they were picked by the public that absolutely wants them to be incrementalists because Trump sucked that much, because he also refused to be the incrementalist the voters rejecting Biden wanted him to be.
.@SeanTrende on the looming progressive vs mod dem wing: "we just won the biggest margin since 1974 and you want to be incrementalists?"
Wait. Trump says he is ending aid to Israel to neutralize an AES talking point, and chose wait until election day? Classic Trump strategic decison-making.
The idea that the GOP will learn a lesson from being wiped out is predicated on the existence of "the GOP" as a persistent entity. Is it primary voters, who will blame fraud and claim "we just didn't fight hard enough"? The party leaders with no institutions left? There's no one.
You can't just "tell a Dad joke." The whole premise of a Dad joke is you can roll your eyes, sigh, complain that it's not funny, but your Dad stands unbent, undeterred, unashamed, and there's nothing you can do about it, because he's your Dad.
Next week, The Young Turks will reveal that the Pope is known to have ties with the Catholic Church.
The problem with the Trump administration's "Elon Musk limited Ukraine's Starshield, not us," argument is that it's the exact same situation that caused them to blow up their relationship with Anthropic. If Musk can shut it down, the government doesn't have control.
Celebrity I've never heard of has never heard of other celebrity I've never heard of.
Martha Plimpton is slamming Shane Gillis' "SNL" monologue, calling it "really f****g stupid":
“There’s this Shane Gillis guy who I’ve never heard of who said some really f*****g stupid sh** on live on air on ‘SNL’ on Saturday. It’s like really stupid sh**. He deserves a spanking from his mom.”
variety.com/2026/tv/news/sha…
The problem with "stop Trump by winning Congress" is that Trump isn't relying on Congress to harm America, and Democrats holding Congress doesn't give them any power to stop him, unless they can get a bunch of Republicans on board to get to 2/3.
"Don't start the war with Iran" was good advice. But "End the war with Iran" requires being clear up front: Iran is not going to let the war end for free. The question is how many billions of dollars of American money are people willing to pay to Iran's regime to end the war.
Americans and Islamists were the only people who actually believed in winning fights, and now that America gave up, there are a lot of folks (outside Ukraine and Israel) scratching their heads about how to actually fight their enemies without American hegemony to hide behind.
Bush Derangement Syndrome primarily affected his opponents, but Trump Derangement Syndrome affects people on all sides, his supporters especially. No one is more afflicted than Trump himself.
So few politicians are willing to take action to address the deficit. But Trump has made it so you can directly reduce the deficit by $1.3T by voting Democrat in November. Huzzah for Trump's unique political skills!
There's a universe where I might allow a child-murderer to go free if that's what the law requires. There's no universe where I would then show my face on a TV show to complain that someone else didn't.
The legal/illegal immigration distinction matters to people who see the distinction as legitimate. People no longer respecting the distinction after simply granting legal status willy-nilly is not a sign they were lying, it's a sign that they think the terms have changed.