Hello and happy Saturday. I have to say, it has been a pretty decent week in the Ohio bureau. My Buckeyes continue to dominate the college football scene, I found the perfect Christmas tree, and we’re spending the weekend visiting family in Indiana. My week certainly went better than President Donald Trump’s.
On Tuesday, Congress voted almost unanimously to approve the release of the Epstein files. The same day, a federal court blocked Texas’ newly drawn congressional map, a move made at Trump’s behest to help the GOP pick up seats in the 2026 midterms. (The matter is now before the Supreme Court.) On Wednesday, a federal judge criticized the government’s handling of its prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, saying that “government misconduct may have tainted the grand jury proceedings,” and ordered prosecutors to turn over records from the grand jury proceedings to Comey’s legal team. On Thursday, the September jobs report, unreleased until now because of the shutdown, showed that unemployment ticked up to 4.4 percent, its highest level since October 2021. And Trump has spent the last week rolling back some of his signature tariffs in an attempt to bring prices down.
I can’t run through all those lest I take up your entire Saturday (and I’d miss the tailgate party we’re headed to), but we covered a few of them.
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In the matter of Texas redistricting, the Justice Department had sent the state a letter saying that its existing congressional map was racially gerrymandered and should be adjusted to provide Hispanic voters better representation. One problem: A three judge-panel, in a scathing opinion written by a Trump-appointed judge, ruled that a partisan gerrymander would have been fine, but what Texas did was actually impermissible racial gerrymandering. If that weren’t bad enough, Jonah Goldberg writes that Texas’ move was dumb not only legally but politically.
But wait, there’s more. The idea that this “fortuitous coincidence” would help Republicans was based on the assumption that Trump’s legitimately impressive success in 2024 (48 percent overall) with Hispanics was permanent.
As I wrote recently, this assumption looks increasingly shaky. It’s pretty obvious that most of those Hispanic voters hadn’t converted to full-on MAGA. They were nostalgic for the pre-pandemic economy of the first Trump term. Moreover, the idea that large numbers of Trump-supporting Hispanics who believed that his immigration enforcement efforts would concentrate solely on violent criminals and drug gangs would overlook not just a disappointing economy, but months of harassment and deportations of hardworking and law-abiding Hispanics, regardless of their immigration status, was preposterous.
In short, Hispanics, broadly speaking, weren’t MAGA voters, they were traditional swing
As for the Epstein files, well, they present a number of problems for Trump, even beyond the fact that he was a friend of Epstein and has been referenced in some of the documents that have already been made public. After he campaigned on releasing them (and staged an event at the White House sharing binders of some of the documents with right-wing influencers), he changed his tune over the summer. But many in MAGA world had been calling for the files’ release for years, and it has now created a rift on the right. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has never backed down in her insistence that they be made public, and she and Trump had a major falling out last Friday. (Late yesterday, she announced that is resigning her seat in Congress in January, saying she did not want to subject voters in her district to an ugly primary fight.) Facing pressure from his base, Trump said Monday that he would sign the bill if Congress passed it.
In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio wrote about the pushback from the right that got us here.
This is the first time in the Trump era, I believe, that the president’s supremacy as arbiter of populist orthodoxy has been successfully challenged. And success breeds success: Having just asserted themselves on Epstein, who’s to say whether emboldened populists won’t feel their oats and push back aggressively if the U.S. starts bombing Venezuela tomorrow? “Regime change is ‘America First!’” the president will bellow. Greene and her fans will answer: “Says who?”
I would not have guessed that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a notorious Trump-slobberer even by modern Republican standards, would lead the first meaningful right-wing rebellion against autocracy of this era.
And then there were tariffs. Trump has rolled back 10 percent duties on food items like beef and coffee and separately rolled back 40 percent tariffs on food from Brazil. He also ended tariffs on Swiss goods after a delegation of Swiss executives visited the White House and presented the president with gifts, including a Rolex clock and a gold bar.
As Kevin Williamson wrote in Wanderland:
With a bit of golden encouragement from the Swiss (who are unsentimental about these things), Donald Trump has started rolling back tariffs on many goods, not only those Rolex watches but also on many common items of consumption at a less-elevated level: beef, coffee, etc. The Democrats have discovered this “new word,” as Trump put it: “affordability.” The notion that “affordability” is a “new word” is right up there in the book of Trump quotations alongside “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
And so Trump has now discovered an interesting economic phenomenon: When you make something more expensive, it is more expensive.
We have a ton of other great stuff you might have missed. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend.
I wonder if we’re entering a Black Mirror-esque world where it becomes increasingly impossible to accept that the dead are no longer with us. In the same year that Her hit cinemas, the Season 2 premiere episode of Charlie Brooker’s Twilight Zone-esque sci-fi television show explored a widow attempting to cope with the loss of her dead husband. She discovers an online service that can digitally re-create a person through past online communications and social media, with a more advanced version being able to transfer that consciousness to a high-tech android. Predictably, the robot’s limitations are gradually revealed, and the protagonist eventually has to come to terms with the fact that her husband is truly gone. At least, sort of. Somewhat unsatisfyingly, the episode ends with the widow keeping the android around. She accepts that it isn’t her husband, but at the same time, she is also unable to dispose of it due to the attachment she has fostered. Back in 2013 this may have been an interesting what-if fictional scenario, but over a decade later we’re now approaching it becoming a reality. Until recently, the passing of someone marked the end. A dead relative or celebrity’s legacy may live on through the memories they leave behind, but no one would expect new material and new conversations from beyond the grave. Today, via artificial intelligence, everyone from tech companies to media conglomerates are trying to flip the script on how humans have perceived life and death for, well, ever.
There are two stories that could be told about the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. One story is that the White House has pursued a massive reorientation of the federal government to deport as many people as possible as quickly as possible in an effort involving not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) but a host of non-immigration law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI to the IRS. These agencies have descended in force on cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and now Charlotte, North Carolina, executing huge and aggressive enforcement raids. The president campaigned on deporting millions of people, and he’s doing just that with the help of White House Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, who’s reportedly overseeing the operation. There’s a lot of truth to that story, particularly the diversion of a large portion of federal law enforcement resources away from investigating and prosecuting violent criminals, gangs, and human traffickers to helping ICE and CBP round people up. But the other story is how difficult it is to conduct deportations on a massive scale.
The last time I wrote about the Ukraine war the president was trending hawkish, supplying Ukraine with intelligence on targets inside Russia and weighing whether to sell Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv. Then he had a phone call with Putin and emerged a dove once again. (“Would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition?” the president claims he asked the czar.) Days later, in a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump denied Ukraine’s request for Tomahawks, urged Zelensky to cede the entire Donbas region to Russia, and reportedly mused about giving security guarantees to Kyiv—and Moscow. Then, a few days after that, the White House slapped sanctions on Russia’s two biggest oil companies and lifted the restrictions it had imposed on Ukraine’s use of long-range European missiles. The currents had shifted again. The only thing that can safely be said about the future is what I wrote at the end of that last newsletter about the war: Situationships are never really over.
