Megyn Kelly faced MAGA backlash for criticizing President Donald Trump's baseless claims of election fraud after last week's Republican wipeout.

The 80-year-old president had previously said he accepted the GOP's midterm losses, but he cast doubt on the results Monday morning in a Truth Social post.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote. “Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”

Kelly, a former Fox News anchor and popular conservative podcaster, signaled her disagreement on X.

"Just stop," she posted.

Her complaint did not land well with MAGA diehards.

"Megyn Kelly tells President Trump to stop talking about the rigged elections," sniffed conservative influencer Toria Brooke. "This is the same woman who has flip-flopped on Islam, as Muslims are bragging about taking over the United States. Kelly went from shunning it to touting it as what Tucker Carlson needs to cater to: 'Since it’s his new audience.'"

"At some point, even the most blind among us will realize that certain notable media figures were never on our side but used to steer and corral us," seethed the widely followed Awakened Outlaw account.

"The same 'journalists' who wanted us to stop talking about pizza gate, now want us to stop talking about election fraud," agreed X user Hello George, who punctuated his post with a clown emoji.

"Just stop what, Megyn? You spent years riding the wave when it was profitable, nodding along," shamed X user Vitruvius Republic.

"You should stop," chided X user Joe Dan Gorman.

"Megyn just STFU," huffed MAGA fan Micki Way.

"Apparently, @megynkelly wants us to all just embrace the most fraudulent election in American history and accept what is absolutely mathematically and electorally impossible," grumbled MAGA singer-songwriter Jefferson Revere. "That must’ve been quite a paycheck to Cash to take that position. I hope they’ve got the dirt on who paid you off, lady."

Brett Shumate, who led the Justice Department’s most aggressive courtroom defenses of President Donald Trump’s policies, quit Attorney General Todd Blanche’s department, the fifth senior official to leave since the election.

Blanche announced on X Monday that he had accepted Shumate's resignation as assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Division. The post gave no reason for his departure.

“We are grateful for Brett’s service at DOJ and wish him continued success,” Blanche wrote.

Shumate signed his name to some of the most controversial matters of Trump’s second term, including the tariffs case he argued and lost on appeal before the Supreme Court struck the tariffs down, Law&Crime reported.

“Civil Division head not a high profile job but VITAL to defending administration policies and priorities in court,” Politico reporter Josh Gerstein wrote on X.

The division’s Federal Programs Branch, which defends executive orders and other administration priorities, shrank from 113 attorneys to 71 in the first few months of Trump’s term while each lawyer’s workload rose 44%, according to internal charts obtained by The Hill.

Shumate’s departure takes the division’s top official away from a defense team that had already lost more than a third of its lawyers.

“Federal Programs Branch now down to about negative five attorneys, give or take a few,” appellate lawyer Sean Marotta joked on X.

The department told The Hill in September that the Civil Division had hired more than 200 new attorneys since Trump took office. It said the division was winning in court.

News of top-level exits has come far faster since Democrats won control of the House and Senate on Nov. 3 than in the weeks before.

Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon resigned Nov. 5, and National Security Division chief John Eisenberg and Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami who oversaw a probe of Trump’s adversaries, followed Nov. 6, Politico and The Hill reported. Henry Whitaker, a counselor to Blanche, is also leaving, Politico reported.

Dhillon was the second Senate-confirmed department official to leave in recent weeks, after Patrick Davis, the department’s liaison to Congress, resigned in October, Bloomberg Law reported. She told Fox News Digital that she decided to leave weeks before the election and that the White House asked her to wait until it was over.

“It breaks my heart that DOJ has become a sinking ship under this AG,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote on X Monday.

“The Department’s mission is unchanged: enforce the law, combat crime, and protect the American people,” Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in a statement last week, according to Politico.

Staff shortages had strained the department’s work in court long before the post-election departures.

A Federal Programs Branch lawyer cited his office’s understaffing last year when a judge asked why the government had not offered more evidence at a hearing over the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bloomberg Law reported.

“[T]he refrain of ‘understaffing’ and ‘too many cases’ has worn out its welcome, particularly when it comes at the expense of individual rights,” U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino wrote earlier this year in a Minnesota case in which she found a government lawyer in contempt for not following her order, CBS News reported.

“I am hearing that DOJ is restaffing quickly, with more than one interview taking place with Blanche this week,” Washington Examiner reporter Kaelan Deese wrote on X Monday.

A permanent replacement would need Senate confirmation, which Shumate won on a 51-41 vote last year, Bloomberg Law reported at the time. Senate Democrats will have the power to delay any confirmation starting in January, Politico reported. That could leave an acting official running the division Shumate led.

President Donald Trump went back on his word Monday to accept the results of the midterms, pushing unsubstantiated election fraud conspiracies in an online outburst, though onlookers quickly noted that the president’s latest push lacked the scorched-earth fervor of his 2020 crusade.

“Heart's just not in it this time,” observed journalist Benjy Sarlin, editorial director for politics at Vox.

In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump questioned how “the Polls” could “be so wrong” and suggested, without evidence, that “early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible” for Republicans to have won.

Rather than declaring the election stolen outright as he did in 2020, Trump couched his claims as questions — a rant one critic dismissed as “flaccid,” and another said betrayed the president’s waning enthusiasm.

“You can tell his heart just isn’t in it anymore. Trump ’15 would call Trump ’26 low energy,” argued Democratic strategist Rodericka Applewhaite, a former Biden administration official.

Jon Favreau, a prominent podcaster and ex-speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, suggested that Trump’s delayed refusal to accept the results of the midterms was the result of his aide Natalie Harp, whom Favreau accused of “gatekeeping” the scope of Republicans’ historic electoral defeat last week.

Some, like progressive and liberal influencers Jared Shult and Ed Krassenstein, respectively, were largely indifferent to Trump’s seemingly tepid response. Shult called Trump “mentally deranged,” and Krassenstein called him a “loser,” telling him to “shut the f--- up.”

Others, like Tangle News founder Isaac Saul, remained fixated on Trump’s apparent rhetorical shift.

“It all feels pretty flaccid. Nobody *actually* thinks these results are nefarious, and it seems like there's a lot of impatience on the right with anyone suggesting these losses were due to fraud and not policy. Even Trump seems to be offering this as an afterthought,” Saul wrote.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could face a House vote as soon as Wednesday on eight articles of impeachment accusing him of waging illegal wars, killing civilians and abducting a foreign head of state.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told MS NOW he plans to force a vote on his resolution Monday. Once he does, House GOP leaders must act within two legislative days, and his resolution charges Hegseth with high crimes and misdemeanors on eight counts:

• Launching the Iran war without a declaration of war, congressional authorization or an attack on the United States
• Defying Congress by continuing the war after both chambers voted to order U.S. forces out of Iran, which the resolution calls a first in American history
• Ignoring War Powers deadlines by fighting on after every legal time limit expired
• Gutting civilian protections before a U.S. strike on an Iranian elementary school killed at least 156 people, including at least 120 children. The resolution says Hegseth “effected the murder of civilians.”
• Extrajudicial killings of at least 243 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, including a follow-up strike that killed two survivors clinging to wreckage
• Suppressing free speech by retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) for telling troops, “You can refuse illegal orders”
• “Kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader” in the raid that captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, which the resolution says was really about oil
• An unlawful war in Yemen that killed an estimated 224 civilians, launched even though Hegseth wrote in the leaked Signal chat that “we can easily pause”

The push has picked up momentum since Democrats won both chambers of Congress last week. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who is set to become the first Black speaker in January, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that he’s “a hard yes.”

Two House Republicans told MS NOW the vote could succeed.

“I think the numbers are there,” one GOP lawmaker said. “I think he’s been incompetent. It’s been all about bravado and not about strategy.”

The same lawmaker said Hegseth should step down rather than make Congress act. “He needs to have the honor and the integrity of knowing that he’s done a bad job in service to the country in this particular position, and he needs to resign and save face,” they said.

A source familiar with Hegseth’s thinking said his team believes he has a solid defense because he “carried out the lawful and well-informed decision by the president.” His camp doesn’t expect a Senate trial before Congress adjourns, but it anticipates Democrats will try again next year.

Trump has stood by his defense secretary. “I think he’s doing a fantastic job,” he said after the election.

Massie, who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger in May, first filed the articles in September. GOP leaders canceled votes and sent the House home early, pushing the fight past the election.

Outgoing Senate Majority Leader John Thune is reportedly putting pressure on Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) not to hand off the seat to a MAGA member of the House that the South Dakota Republican does not find palatable.

There has been a scramble over who will fill her seat since she was victorious last week in her bid to become Tennessee’s new governor at age 74.

With rumors floating that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been eyed for the job as he faces impeachment in the House, conservative Tennessee radio host Todd Starnes posted on X that Rep. Tim Burchett, a frequent cable news guest, is in the mix.

According to Starnes, a former Fox News contributor, “Sources tell me that John Thune is actively campaigning to stop Marsha Blackburn from naming Rep. Tim Burchett as her replacement in the U.S. Senate. Thune does not want Burchett anywhere near the Senate chamber. And that's what makes Burchett the perfect choice!”

In an interview with Starnes, Burchett claimed he has a “double-digit” approval number over any of his competitors for the seat and added he received word over the weekend that “Thune does not want me because I would not be, I would do what leadership want me to do type thing, and I said, you know what? You’re exactly right.”

Burchett added, “Thune is a good guy, but I don’t think his leadership is what we need right now.”

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Forbes reporter Dan Alexander on Sunday thoroughly debunked claims made by President Donald Trump that his net worth grew by $3 billion since his return to office solely due to gains in the stock market.

During an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” Trump was asked by Ross Douthat about a Forbes estimate showing that Trump’s net worth had grown from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7 billion in 2026.

“Your net worth went up by $3 billion...” Douthat began.

“So did everyone’s!” Trump replied.

“My net worth did not go up by $3 billion,” Douthat shot back.

“Well, you should have had stock,” Trump said.

Trump then claimed that he didn’t pay too much attention to his net worth and said, “I guess it’s gone up” over the last two years.

Alexander responded to Trump’s claims in a social media post, giving a detailed breakdown of how Trump’s net worth grew by $3 billion, and emphasizing that “the president’s answer here is nonsense.”

Alexander began the story in 2024, when Trump grew his net worth by $1.8 billion while running for president, when the Trump Media and Technology Group became a publicly traded company after a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp.

The Forbes reporter emphasized that this was just the start of Trump’s political profiteering, which he would really kick into high gear in the latter half of 2024.

“Just before the election, Trump kicked off a venture named World Liberty Financial, selling a crypto token and offering vague promises of a ‘financial revolution,’” Alexander explained. “For Trump, the proposition was clearer: a 52.5% cut of every dollar investors put in after the initial $30 million.”

Twenty days after Trump’s triumph in the election, Chinese billionaire Justin Sun invested $30 million into World Liberty Financial, which ensured that the Trump family “would collect,” wrote Alexander.

“The crypto community went wild, and money started pouring in, especially as the inauguration approached,” Alexander continued. “One day before Trump took office, Sun announced another $45 million investment.”

During this period, Trump also launched his official meme coin, which quickly shot up in value before crashing back down, leaving most of its investors billions of dollars underwater.

Alexander noted that foreign investments into World Liberty Financial continued pouring in after the election, especially from firms located in the United Arab Emirates.

The Wall Street Journal would later report that many of these investments were made by associates of an Abu Dhabi royal family member who “secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for” $500 million.

“All this dealmaking leads to staggering amounts of cash by the end of 2025,” Alexander explained, with World Liberty Financial and the Trump meme coin producing “$1,425,000,000 of liquidity... in one year.”

In addition to crypto schemes, Trump also vastly expanded his overseas licensing empire, which in 2025 generated 10 times more income than it did just two years prior, Alexander wrote.

Summing up his findings, Alexander wrote that Trump over the last two years had made $1 billion off World Liberty Financial dealings, $1 billion from the sale of crypto tokens, $400 million in branding ventures, and $500 million after an appeals court wiped out a fine he had been ordered to pay as part of a civil financial fraud case.

This means that Trump’s vast enrichment over the last two years has come from his own personal business dealings, not just gains in the stock market.

“In fact, almost none of Trump’s $3 billion in gains from the fall of 2024 to the fall of 2025 came from stock,” wrote Alexander. “In the fall of 2024, we estimated that the president’s liquid assets totaled about $415 million. After analyzing his financial disclosure, we pegged about 10% of that in stock.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche was repeatedly talked over by a passerby who insisted St. Louis is “pretty safe,” as he argued the heavily Democratic city has a violent crime problem.

The exchange came Monday at a downtown news conference, carried live by LiveNOW from Fox, where Blanche announced that St. Louis has been awarded $68 million through the Justice Department’s Model Cities Initiative.

St. Louis is one of four jurisdictions sharing nearly $300 million under the program, according to the Justice Department.

Blanche measured the city by its murder rate, while the woman measured it by her own walks downtown.

“St. Louis has the second-highest murder rate among large U.S. cities, at almost four times the national average,” Blanche said in his opening remarks.

“I live in California,” the woman said later, during the question-and-answer session. “I feel pretty safe. I’m staying at the hotel. I just happened to come outside.”

“I live here half of the time,” she said. “I always walk downtown, so I’m able to observe what needs to happen and what doesn’t need to happen. … It’s pretty safe, honestly!”

She also complained about police pay and the vacant buildings downtown.

“The city — the police of St. Louis does not make enough money,” she said. “They’re barely at $40,000 to $50,000. … It’s not a Republican or Democratic type of thing here.”

“There’s so many vacant buildings downtown,” she said. “… When I go to other cities, I have something to see. There’s nothing to see.”

Blanche twice tried to answer her and was cut off mid-sentence.

“Well, look — so look, this isn’t —” Blanche began as the woman kept talking.

“So sorry,” he said, trying again. “I don’t know if you have a question, but just to restate what we’ve been saying for the past 20 minutes, OK? There are —”

“Sorry,” Blanche told her as she kept going. “I let you talk, OK? So let me talk, all right?”

“So there are still parts of this city — and the city overall has a violent crime problem, OK?” he said. “A lot of cities in this country do. You’re right.”

“But St. Louis does,” Blanche said after she cut in again. “And so while we have seen great strides … over the past year to see some of these numbers come down, they’re not where they should be. The murder rate is still way too high here.”

“So, other questions?” Blanche then asked.

The city’s mayor did not sign off on the grant Blanche came to deliver.

Mayor Cara Spencer, a Democrat, leads a city that gave Democrat Kamala Harris about 81% of its vote in the 2024 presidential election, according to certified state results.

“Not just the police chief, not just the senator, not just the governor, but the entire city is making a commitment to work with the Department of Justice and invest in law enforcement,” Blanche said in his remarks.

“[I] was really truly floored to learn that the president of the board of police commissioners signed for the mayor,” Spencer told St. Louis Magazine last week. The state-run police board applied for the grant without city officials’ blessing, the magazine reported.

St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy has said the department applied after the federal delegation approached it, and he promised Spencer that the city will be involved as the grant is carried out, according to St. Louis Public Radio.

The top Tennessee Republican received nearly 1 million fewer votes in 2026 than 2024, a turnout collapse that reverberated down-ballot, costing the GOP half a dozen state House seats and effectively neutralizing the party’s mid-cycle redistricting of the state’s U.S. House map.

Gov.-elect Marsha Blackburn garnered roughly 1.9 million votes in her landslide reelection victory for U.S. Senate in 2024, but two years later, the coalition powered by President Donald Trump that delivered her an impressive statewide win has almost disappeared.

Blackburn received around 950k votes in the governor’s race, defeating her Democratic challenger by 2.5%, and in the process became the first Tennessee governor to win less than 50% of the vote since before World War II.

Kent Syler, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University, said Rutherford County was at the center of the GOP’s long night.

Blackburn, U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty, and U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais, in his likely narrow defeat to Democrat Victoria Broderick, all lost Rutherford County. Democrats also flipped three state House seats in the county.

“It was a complete surprise,” Syler said.

Democrats in Tennessee didn’t receive more votes in any county in 2026 than in 2024. Instead, nearly a million Republican voters chose not to vote for Blackburn, primarily in Tennessee’s urban and suburban counties.

Turnout for midterm elections is typically much lower than for presidential elections, particularly in the Trump era, because Trump drives rural Republican turnout at record levels. Trump and Blackburn won their 2024 elections, each garnering 64% and 63, respectively in Tennessee.

During Tuesday’s election, Blackburn received 45% of the vote, a 19% drop in two years.

Dawn Schluckebier, an advocacy director with the nonpartisan think tank ThinkTennessee, said the narrow margins of victory for Republicans were the biggest takeaway of the night.

“This is something we haven’t experienced in Tennessee in a while,” Schluckebier said. “Overall competitiveness across the board.”

2026 looks a lot like 2018, except for Blackburn

Hagerty won his reelection to the U.S. Senate Tuesday with 55% of the vote, roughly by the same margin Blackburn won her first U.S. Senate election in 2018.

The 2018 midterm election is the closest comparison to 2026 because it featured the same president and an open governor’s race in Tennessee. But turnout in 2018 was slightly higher in total votes and percent of electorate than in 2026.

In Tuesday’s selection, the difference between Blackburn’s narrow gubernatorial victory and Hagerty’s easy win comes down to David Hatley, an independent candidate. Hatley explicitly targeted Blackburn and the conservative vote by spending nearly $12 million of his own cash.

When combined, Blackburn and Hatley received about 1.15 million votes in the governor’s race, and Hagerty received 1.14 million.

State Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville Democrat who chairs the party’s state House Democratic caucus, said Blackburn was uniquely unpopular.

“Our polling consistently showed four unpopular things in Tennessee were Trump, Blackburn, toll lanes and (private school) vouchers,” Clemmons said.

Visual: The partisan lean of Tennessee’s proposed new U.S. House map

Blackburn, legislative leaders pushed gerrymander that nearly cost Republicans five U.S. House seats

After redrawing Tennessee’s U.S. House map in May, Republicans hoped to increase their advantage from 8-1 congressional seats to 9-0. But after Tuesday’s results, it looks like the party will still hold an 8-1 advantage.

Broderick, the Democratic nominee in Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District, leads DesJarlais, the Republican, by 285 votes, with roughly 700 provisional ballots still to be counted.

Erin Covey, the head of the Cook Political Report’s U.S. House ratings, said Broderick’s win would be “the reddest seat that Democrats flipped last night,” with Trump winning the district by 24% in 2024. Cook is a nonpartisan election-rating organization that analyzes federal and gubernatorial races.

District 4 was one of six seats redrawn in May, as state Republicans, with a push from Blackburn and Trump, tried to gerrymander the state’s congressional map to win every U.S. House seat.

But to do so, Republicans had to shrink their margins in six seats, all of which Republicans won by 5% or less Tuesday.

On a smaller scale, state Republicans’ 2022 redistricting in Rutherford County, designed to increase their state House seats, likely led to the loss of three of the county’s five districts.

The county has been subtly shifting toward Democrats as the population has increased and it’s become a hub for workers who can’t afford to live in Nashville. In August, eight Democrats won seats on the Rutherford County Commission, a harbinger of November’s results.

The state House Democratic caucus actively tried to flip seats in Clarksville, Knoxville and Memphis, but the wins in Rutherford came as a surprise.

Syler said the Republican redistricting effort in 2022 could, in hindsight, be called a mini-dummymander, which refers to when a party goes too far to gerrymander seats so that, in wave elections, it loses districts it otherwise would have safely held under previous maps.

For example, in Rutherford, a packing of Democratic votes probably leads the party to lose one seat, not three.

“Republicans got greedy in Rutherford,” Syler said.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

According to MS NOW host Stephanie Ruhle, there appears to be a concerted effort to make ousted Donald Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles the fall guy for White House corruption, with one of her guests predicting a “war” is coming.

Discussing new accusations being leveled at Wiles, Ruhle exclaimed, “Okay, so I'm not defending Susie Wiles, okay? But are we really being fed this line now: Trump's not corrupt, JD Vance isn’t, it's not the sons. It's not [Steve] Witkoff, it's not Jared [Kushner]. It's not Howard Lutnick — just Susie Wiles and her two deputies?”

”That's what we're supposed to swallow?” she asked her panel.

“It looks like it,” laughed podcaster and military veterans advocate Paul Rieckhoff.

“Last week was fun, right?” he continued. “There's a lot of elation, a lot of inspiration. This week is going to be nasty, and this week is going to be wild. And this week is going to be combat.”

“And I'll tell you this, they better hope Susie Wiles doesn't talk because if she turns against them, she probably has more on them than just about anybody else,” he elaborated. “But I think what they're doing is clearly circling the wagons and preparing for war and doubling down on Stephen Miller is a declaration of war."

"They're doubling down on [Pete] Hegseth, who they will likely vote to impeach this week. I hope they do it on Veterans Day, because that would be a great way to show they actually support veterans in our military,” he quipped. “But this is going to be very, very deep combat. And a cornered animal is a dangerous animal and that's what Trump is right now.”

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Former Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) drew a wave of criticism from progressives and journalists on Monday over his new gig, which one critic warned would only leave Americans “more jaded and distrustful” of their elected leaders going forward.

“What a corrupt windbag,” wrote journalist Zaid Jilani, reacting to Tester’s late-career pivot.

A self-described “dirt farmer,” Tester lost his 2024 reelection bid handily to now-Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) and has since largely stepped away from politics, returning to the Montana farm his family has worked since 1912. A new report from NPR published on Monday, however, revealed that Tester has since been recruited by a company close to the Trump administration and whose co-founder has long supported President Donald Trump.

That company is Palantir — co-founded by Trump ally and billionaire Peter Thiel — which, according to NPR, hired Tester as an adviser.

“Just about the grossest way he could end his career,” wrote pollster Adam Carlson. “I can count on one hand companies that are more evil and have caused more direct human suffering than Palantir. And these kinds of revolving door antics make the public even more jaded and distrustful of their elected officials.”

Human rights groups have long accused Palantir of profiting from human suffering, pointing to its $30 million no-bid contract to build ICE’s “ImmigrationOS,” software meant to help the agency choose whom to deport and track migrants who leave the country. Amnesty International and other critics have also condemned the company’s work for the Israeli military during its war in Gaza, which a United Nations commission and countless human rights groups have declared a genocide.

Former Obama administration official and prominent podcaster Tommy Vietor called the development “depressing,” progressive organizer and strategist Melissa Byrne wished Tester “good riddance,” and Washington-based political strategist Hamid Bendaas argued the hire showed the damage “moderate Democrats” can inflict on their own party.

“Understated problem with moderate Democrats that doesn’t turn up in [Wins Above Replacement] is that their business friendliness and desire for personal wealth by any means often veers into open corruption that tanks the party’s brand,” Bendaas wrote.

In a statement to NPR, Tester insisted that his new role with Palantir was “not lobbying” and was strictly “advisory in nature.”

Republicans turned on one another after a college Republican group vowed that “demon worshippers” won’t be tolerated in the party, targeting President Donald Trump’s departing civil rights chief.

The post, from an X account calling itself the Georgia College Republicans, appeared Friday.

It quoted news that Harmeet Dhillon, a Sikh American lawyer, had resigned as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. However, the post did not drive Dhillon from the administration. She says she chose to leave weeks earlier.

“Demon worshippers will not be tolerated in the Republican Party,” the group wrote.

Attorney General Todd Blanche had announced her resignation Thursday, about a year and a half after the Senate confirmed her as Trump’s nominee. Dhillon told Fox News Digital she made the decision weeks before Republicans’ midterm losses.

Dhillon challenged the account’s right to speak for Republicans, and a campus chapter that defended it fired back at her.

“What are you children going to do about it?” Dhillon wrote on X Saturday. “Also, who are you? Show your faces and tell us how you are going to control who gets to be a Republican.”

In a later post, Dhillon called the account’s operators “incel groyper losers,” using a term for followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes, according to The Algemeiner.

In the same post, she shared a rival statement from the Georgia Association of College Republicans thanking her for her service.

“You’re crashing out on college students and the same people you’re clutching your pearls for care more about a title in Washington than ever standing by their convictions,” the College Republicans chapter at Georgia Gwinnett College replied.

The account belongs to a far-right splinter group that the Georgia Republican Party does not recognize, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Monday.

The paper said the group had attacked Dhillon as a “devil worshipper” and that state party Chair Josh McKoon made clear the recognized group is the Georgia Association of College Republicans.

Yet the splinter group’s website features a photo of McKoon at Kennesaw State University in October 2025, according to its caption.

The state party is distancing itself from a group whose website features its own chairman.

The account’s X profile also lists the College Republicans of America, a national campus network, as a partner.

That network’s political director, Kai Schwemmer, appears in the Georgia group’s photos at Georgia Tech in April. He spoke in 2022 at Fuentes’s “America First PAC” conference and has praised Fuentes, The Algemeiner reported in March.

“This is blasphemy,” Fuentes said of Dhillon’s Sikh prayer at the 2024 Republican National Convention, The Guardian reported. “This is total blasphemy.”

The account’s national partner chose an admirer of the man who condemned Dhillon’s prayer in 2024 as its political director.

Dhillon is not the first Indian American in Trump’s circle to be branded a demon worshipper, and at least one of her attackers has done it before.

“Demon worshipper,” right-wing pastor and podcaster Joel Webbon wrote on X about Dhillon on Saturday. “Get out of my country.”

“Go back home and worship your sand demons,” Webbon wrote in October 2025, after FBI Director Kash Patel posted a Diwali greeting, Salon reported. “Get out of my country.”

“You are not an American, you are a demon worshipping foreigner,” one X user told Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican then running for Ohio governor, during the same holiday.

Former Justice Department attorneys have accused Dhillon of abandoning the division’s traditional civil rights mission in favor of conservative causes, The Associated Press reported.

Under Dhillon's leadership, more than 75% of the division’s staff left last year, according to CBS News.

“We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more,” Dhillon wrote on X as she announced her exit Thursday.

Congressional Democrats are preparing a workaround for the wall of resistance they expect from the Trump administration by going after the private companies and individuals who made deals with the government.

Four people familiar with the planning told MS NOW that Democrats, who are about to take control of Congress, expect President Donald Trump and his appointees to widely refuse subpoenas for documents and testimony.

The Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute anyone for defying Congress, and the federal government could simply pay any fines that follow a contempt finding, so Democrats plan to go where the administration can’t block them.

A lot of the relevant evidence sits in the email accounts and files of law firms, corporations and former officials, who are far more likely to comply, and corporate America has gotten the message.

“We can expect subpoenas to go after internal corporate communications, as well as communications between corporate executives and administration officials,” said Daniel Suleiman, a former Justice Department official now at the Covington & Burling law firm.

Suleiman has advised clients to contact congressional committee staff proactively if they think they might be targeted. Many are already doing so.

“I just have done 15 meetings in the last 72 hours with corporate counsel,” a senior congressional aide told MS NOW.

Democrats say one of the most promising areas is the alleged “pay-to-play” market around the administration. Trump-connected lawyers have reportedly been paid millions of dollars to lobby for pardons, contracts and antitrust relief. The companies and individuals who made those payments will likely have little choice but to tell Congress how much they paid and what they think they got for it.

Other likely targets include alleged self-dealing by the Trump family, the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, ICE’s use of force, and the deals law firms, media companies and universities struck with the administration.

Picking a starting point is the hard part. When House committee staffers were asked to prepare 100-day plans, “everybody turned in 15 years worth of work,” the senior aide said.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday on CNN that he might prosecute members of Congress over what he called intimidation, though he didn’t say what law he thought had been broken.

“They’re talking about going after companies, private companies who happen to have made investments in this country over the past couple years. That is not oversight,” Blanche said.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, brushed it off.

“They can come after us however they want,” Garcia said. “We’re not going to be intimidated.”

Comments made by Donald Trump during a “60 Minutes” interview aired on Sunday night could presage a battle of wills in the White House with his new chief of staff.

Trump’s surprising admission that his deportation push may have been too harsh sets him up for a “collision course” with Stephen Miller, the hard-liner who built the policy, according to The PunchUp’s Tim Latchem.

The president made the remarks to Ross Douthat in an interview taped Friday, just three days after voters handed control of Congress to Democrats. Pressed on whether his deportation campaign had overreached, Trump didn’t argue.

“I think it might be too tough, yeah,” he said. “I think ultimately—that hurt me.”

As Latchem notes, Trump went further, conceding that the crackdown had caught up hotel workers, landscapers and immigrants who paid taxes and whose only violation was crossing the border illegally. He suggested "a possible compromise" in which longtime undocumented residents, those who have lived and worked in the U.S. for 10 or 15 years, could stay, while serious criminals would still be deported.

Trump said he was "open" to working with the incoming Democratic majority and claimed Democrats had “already called me” about a deal, though he didn’t elaborate.

According to the PunchUp report, for much of Trump's MAGA base, that sounded like amnesty, and they were furious.

“NO AMNESTY. Not now, not EVER. EVERY SINGLE ONE must GO,” right-wing commentator Nick Sortor wrote. Derrick Evans, a former West Virginia lawmaker, posted, “He might as well have said the word amnesty. I have no words for this.”

Evans later added, "I’m the highest ranking elected Republican to be arrested and thrown in prison for peacefully protesting on January 6th. I say that to say, if was in Congress I would personally file Articles of Impeachment against any President who even mentions amnesty, including Trump. Amnesty is treason as far as I’m concerned."

The White House quickly went into damage control, according to the report. Its Rapid Response X account insisted that “the word ‘amnesty’ was never even said in this entire exchange.”

Latchem wrote, "Trump’s admission is remarkable considering his second term has been dominated by a brutal immigration crackdown that brought death, bloodshed and public anger to American streets."

President Donald Trump’s promise to hand out “tremendous numbers of pardons” when he leaves office is a sign that people around him are nervous about legal exposure, according to a former Justice Department pardon attorney.

Liz Oyer appeared on CNN with Kate Bolduan, who played a clip from Trump’s new “60 Minutes” interview, where he was asked whether he expected to issue a lot of pardons at the end of his term, and the president said, “Yes, I do.”

Trump said he didn’t expect to pardon himself but believed he had the power to. He added: “More importantly, I don’t want to have good people that are serving this country and doing a great job spending the rest of their life like I had to do for four years, defending myself by radical left lunatics, by people that were very nasty and mean. I intend to issue tremendous numbers of pardons.”

Oyer said the message was clear.

“It’s definitely an indication that people inside the administration are worried,” Oyer said. “They believe they need legal protection because they have pushed the limits of the law in furtherance of Donald Trump’s political agenda.”

“No doubt there are people all around Donald Trump who are banking on getting pardons at the end of this administration,” she added.

But Oyer warned that a sweeping pardon of the executive branch could be challenged in court.

“By pardoning everyone in the executive branch, he is essentially placing the executive branch outside the reach of the laws passed by Congress,” she said. “So I think there would be a good legal argument to make that those pardons would not be valid.”

She said officials counting on blanket protection “are taking some real risks there. They may not get the protection that they are ultimately counting on.”

Oyer said the pardon power “has become completely degraded under Donald Trump” and is “losing the perception of any legitimacy in the eyes of the public,” adding, “That’s not what the framers of the Constitution intended.”

Earlier in the interview, Oyer brushed off Trump’s claim to “60 Minutes” that he has no idea what’s going on with his investments.

Asked whether she believed him, Oyer replied: “No.” She said that even if it were true, “that’s really beside the point,” because the president “is invested in every single sector that he also regulates.”

She urged Congress not only to investigate but to close what she called “one of the biggest legal loopholes” on the books – the president and vice president are exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest law that applies to the rest of the administration.

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Former President Joe Biden revealed that President Donald Trump privately told him they would be “good friends” just days after leading what he said was an insurrection at the Capitol, leaving the former president “too stunned to respond.”

Biden described the meeting, held eight days after the 2024 election, in an excerpt from his White House memoir, “Promise Me, America,” that The Atlantic published Monday.

The same excerpt says Trump “led an insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, and that what he did that day “should follow him to his grave.”

Biden wrote that Trump’s tone in the Oval Office was so friendly that it “bordered on fawning.”

“You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends,” Trump told him, according to Biden.

“I think I blinked, too stunned to respond,” Biden wrote.

“Yes, if it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together,” Trump continued, according to Biden.

Biden wrote that Trump called his record on job creation “extraordinary” and said he had been relieved he didn’t have to run against Biden.

“I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand,” Biden wrote.

Biden recalled that the meeting did not ease his worry that Trump would dismantle his policies, and that once in office, Trump “pardoned nearly 1,600 insurrectionists who had been convicted for their violent acts on January 6, 2021.”

“In the new regime, it was as if that terrible day had never happened at all. Indeed, that seemed to be the point,” Biden wrote.

The man who told Biden they would be “good friends” is the one Biden goes on to accuse of leading an insurrection.

“Donald Trump led an insurrection. His goal was to remain in power after the American people had voted him out of office. That’s the truth. It was a violent assault,” Biden wrote.

“The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons. They deserved prison terms,” he added.

“You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalized and call yourself a friend of law enforcement,” Biden wrote. “What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave.”

Trump’s pardon proclamation said the clemency “ends a grave national injustice." NBC News said it had asked the White House for comment on the excerpt.

Biden wrote that the rioters deserved prison. He stopped short of saying Trump should have been convicted over Jan. 6, an outcome his own Justice Department took years to seek and never secured.

Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, named Jack Smith special counsel in November 2022 to oversee key parts of the Jan. 6 investigation. Smith eventually charged Trump in August 2023, more than 2 1/2 years after the attack.

After Trump won the 2024 election, Smith asked judges to drop the case, citing the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president, Business Insider reported.

Smith’s final report said that but for Trump’s election, the evidence was “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial." Trump had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Trump responded on Truth Social by calling Smith “a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election,” according to Business Insider.

Biden wrote that the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling was “a death knell for accountability.”

Biden’s full memoir is due Nov. 17, and he said his health will limit his promotion of the book as he undergoes cancer treatment, The Associated Press reported.

Days after telling The New York Times he was “absolutely willing” to accept the midterm results, President Donald Trump questioned in his own words Monday whether the election was “honest,” insisting that early vote “dumps” had made it “impossible to win.”

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”

Experts had warned before Election Day that Trump might challenge the results. Until Monday, Trump had mostly let others do the talking, resharing posts over the weekend that doubted Democratic vote totals, Forbes reported. Some of those posts questioned late-night vote counts, echoing theories debunked after his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden. Days before Election Day, the White House’s rapid response account pushed a similar line on overnight vote shifts.

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in last week’s elections, according to Forbes. The Associated Press reported that plenty of Trump allies accepted the outcome, though some, including Katie Miller, the wife of White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, and far-right activist Laura Loomer, accused Democrats of cheating. Kari Lake also alleged fraud without evidence, drawing a sharp rebuke from former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.

One researcher told the AP that Trump’s acceptance of the results may have helped keep fraud claims in check, noting that in past elections he had amplified them. There was also no rush of court challenges after the vote, even though Trump’s Justice Department had prepared for that possibility before Election Day.

After “a few days of licking his wounds” following the GOP’s historic midterm defeat last week, President Donald Trump was “already back to his old ways” and seeking “revenge against his enemies,” former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor argued Monday.

But according to Taylor, a fatal flaw in the president’s newly promoted top aide is poised to “catastrophically” sink that campaign.

Last week, Trump announced that Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff effective Monday. The announcement sparked panic, with critics having long accused Miller — the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration and deportation agenda — of harboring white nationalist views.

But Taylor, who worked alongside Miller during Trump’s first term, argued that the same trait fueling those fears could ultimately be Miller’s undoing.

“I think his promotion is (in the end) good news for the political opposition. Stephen Miller always overreaches. Always,” Taylor wrote in an analysis published Monday on his Substack.

Miller was the driving force behind the 2017 travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, the 2018 practice of separating migrant families at the border, the deployment of troops to American cities and the immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Each was ultimately reversed or scaled back amid court defeats, public outrage and mounting political pressure.

“His instinct is to drive to the extreme and keep driving until something stops him. Something always does. The problem is that we have to get to the extreme first. That’s what I mean when I say he will fail catastrophically,” Taylor wrote.

“The catastrophe cuts both ways. He’ll create chaos in this country unlike anything we’ve lived through so far in Trump 2.0, because for the first time there’s no one in the building to slow him down. And that chaos is going to do what family separation and Minnesota did, which is [to] infuriate the American people to the point that the president is forced onto his back foot until he topples over.”

MS NOW host Rachel Maddow wants Attorney General Todd Blanche impeached, and her new book proposes a rule that would have kept him out of the Justice Department in the first place.

Maddow made her call Sunday evening onstage with fellow MS NOW host Chris Hayes before a sold-out crowd at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. She was promoting “Department of Fate,” a history of the Justice Department from its founding in 1870 to the Trump era, and cited Blanche’s interview with convicted Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, The Advocate reported.

“I mean, Todd Blanche should be impeached,” Maddow said, adding that she was speaking “not as a news anchor, but as the author of a new book about the Department of Justice.”

Among the reforms in the book, Maddow proposes barring a president’s former personal lawyers and campaign workers from serving in the department, according to The Advocate. Blanche was Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before becoming his attorney general.

Weeks earlier, in an interview with The Advocate, Maddow delivered a chilling verdict on the department.

“It’s essentially dead and will need to be refounded from the ground up, which is what this book is about,” she said.

In a separate October interview with the Shepherd Express, Maddow drew a line between Trump’s two terms, saying that in the second, he has “gotten rid of the Justice Department as we knew it.”

Her call echoes Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who is in line to chair the House Judiciary Committee. Raskin said on MS NOW last week that Blanche “could possibly face impeachment hearings.”

With Democrats projected to hold roughly 255 House seats after last week’s midterm sweep, the party will gain subpoena power and the ability to launch the kind of investigations into Trump’s administration, family and businesses that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has warned about.

Blanche was narrowly confirmed after Trump fired Pam Bondi in April. He drew fresh criticism last week after saying the Justice Department would serve as legal defense for White House chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Impeaching Blanche would break new ground, as no attorney general has ever been impeached, and only two Cabinet officials in U.S. history have been: Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024.

Actor and comedian Russell Brand, who later became an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, has been sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault.

The sentence comes days after a London jury found Brand, 51, guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, according to Variety. Jurors cleared him of two additional rape charges and an attempted indecent assault charge. Brand had denied all of the allegations.

Under British law, rape carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, while sexual assault carries up to 10 years.

According to Variety, the judge declined to grant Brand conditional bail after the verdict, and he was taken into custody. Brand showed no visible reaction as the verdicts were read. On his way to the holding cells, he gave his lawyers a thumbs-up and mouthed “I’m OK” and “I’m good,” Sky News reported. His wife, Laura Brand, quickly left the courtroom.

The case covered alleged attacks between 1999 and 2009. Prosecutors brought three rape counts, including one of oral rape, along with a 2001 attempted indecent assault charge tied to MTV’s U.K. offices and sexual assault counts dating from 2004 to 2009.

According to Variety, Brand could face more charges. London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed after the trial that it is investigating new rape allegations from two other women. Brand has been questioned but not charged in those cases.

Months before the Department of Justice shut down an investigation into a Tennessee congressman with a reputation for slavish loyalty to President Donald Trump, his lawyer made a plea to top officials.

A lawyer for Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) sent a letter last November to Ed Martin, formerly the pardon attorney and chair of the Weaponization Working Group at the Department of Justice, “seeking the termination of the Department’s criminal investigation,” according to the now-released emails.

When John S. Irving, Ogles’ lawyer, didn’t receive an immediate response, he added Jordan Fox, the chief of staff to then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, to a follow-up email about two weeks later requesting confirmation.

Martin responded: “Received. Thank you.”

It remains unclear whether Martin, who left the Trump administration in September, followed up with Irving. Neither he nor Irving could be reached for this story. It’s also unclear whether anyone from Blanche’s office responded to Irving’s email.

But in May 2026, Ogles’ legal team filed a motion indicating that government lawyers from the DOJ’s criminal division informed them they would return his cell phone and destroy emails obtained through search warrants, effectively signaling the end of the investigation.

“It’s a warning to the American people that it matters who leads,” Ogles said during a press conference after the Department of Justice dropped the investigation, while standing alongside a placard reading, “Weaponized and Wiretapped: Real Stories, Real Corruption.”

“Thankfully, because of President Trump and his leadership, getting back to law and order, this DOJ has cleared me,” Ogles added.

The left-leaning nonprofit American Oversight, which obtained the lawyer's emails through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, has requested that Office of the Inspector General open an investigation into “potential misconduct” by department officials to determine whether the decision not to pursue prosecution was motivated by political favoritism.

“Members of Congress who are political allies of the incumbent president should not be able to evade prosecution by going through improper channels to request leniency or favoritism,” Katherine M. Kennedy, interim chief counsel at American Oversight, wrote to Inspector General Don R. Berthiaume last month.

Ogles’ initial foray into national politics was thwarted by more well-funded Republican competitors, namely Marsha Blackburn, who now serves in the U.S. Senate. He had planned to challenge then-Sen. Bob Corker, a thorn in Trump’s side, in 2018. But when Corker announced his retirement, Blackburn, then a congresswoman, declared her intention to run for the vacated seat, and Ogles dropped out while acknowledging her superior fundraising ability.

Ogles found another opportunity in 2022 in the newly redrawn 5^th Congressional District, which forced a Democratic incumbent into retirement. Ogles faced a former state House speaker and a Tennessee Army National Guard brigadier general in the Republican primary that year.

In May 2022, with the Aug. 29 primary more than three months out, the Ogles campaign announced it had raised $453,000, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI agent to obtain a search warrant to access the lawmaker’s cell phone. The search warrant application was unsealed last month by a federal judge in Tennessee.

The announcement cited the Ogles campaign as saying that “none of his fundraising totals came in the form of loans,” while explaining that, because of his late entry into the race, “he won’t have to make official disclosures until July 15 — 20 days before the primary.”

But when the campaign filed its quarterly report on July 15, it reported a $320,000 loan from the candidate, while only transferring $20,000 into the campaign account. The inflated loan amount boosted the campaign’s reported cash-on-hand balance to $508,798, when it should have been reported as $208,798.

When Ogles’ campaign treasurer was questioned by congressional ethics investigators about why the campaign reported a $320,000 loan, while only actually transferring $20,000 into the account, according to an Office of Congressional Conduct report cited by a federal judge, the treasurer reportedly said, “It just looks better when you have more money, right? And scare away the competition and buy the primary. That’s my guess, but I — I don’t know.”

Ogles could not be reached for this story.

Ogles’ spiked investigation has drawn comparisons to that of former Rep. George Santos, which also began under the Biden administration. But unlike Santos, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to falsifying loan information to pad his campaign finance reports, Ogles’ investigation carried over to the new Trump administration.

Even in a party where loyalty to Trump — at least before the Nov. 3 midterms — has been a political requirement, Ogles has stood out for his fervent support of the president. Ogles showed up to support Trump at his criminal trial in Manhattan in 2024. Following Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Ogles filed legislation to allow Trump to run for a third term, along with a resolution supporting Trump’s ambition to take over Greenland.

During his press conference in May 2026 decrying the supposed “weaponization” of the Department of Justice under the Biden administration, Ogles presented himself as a target of political retribution.

“I dropped articles of impeachment against Kamala Harris and Joe Biden,” Ogles said. “I had been one of the attack dogs against the Biden administration. The morning after my election, they came to my home, and they seized my phone. And I later found out they’d seized my emails. Now, this is important because our Constitution creates a wall of separation — the Speech and Debate Clause — and the Biden administration was willing to intentionally violate that clause to punish its adversaries, to target conservatives, specifically to target Republicans.”

Ogles has fared worse with voters than with federal authorities: Despite Trump’s endorsement, Ogles lost his Republican primary in August to former Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher. Meanwhile, American Oversight argues Ogles’ treatment needs to be scrutinized in light of the federal investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), whom Trump has mercilessly attacked on the campaign trail.

“A congressman under criminal investigation had his lawyer ask Ed Martin — the official running DOJ’s so-called Weaponization Working Group — to make the case go away,” Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, told Raw Story. “An administration that claims to be ending ‘weaponization’ owes the public an explanation when it pursues the president’s critics but drops an investigation into one of its allies. Political loyalty cannot determine who faces scrutiny and who gets a pass. The inspector general must find out whether anyone intervened on Ogles’ behalf and why the DOJ shut this investigation down.”

The Department of Justice did not respond to an email from Raw Story for this story.

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager is warning that last week’s Democratic sweep has handed Republicans an expensive new headache for 2028.

Bill Stepien, who managed Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, told Politico last week that the midterm results make the mechanics of the next presidential race harder for the GOP, especially after Texas went blue, and political analyst Paul Waldman told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that it’s “impossible to overstate what an earthquake it was” in the Lone Star State.

“If Democrats win Texas in any presidential campaign in the near future, there is absolutely no way Republicans can win the presidency,” Waldman said on Sargent’s podcast, “The Daily Blast.”

He argued Democrats should pour “a couple of billion dollars — that’s billion with a B” into opening offices in every one of Texas’ 254 counties. “That can be the entire ball game,” he said.

Sargent said it’s unclear how lasting the Democratic gains will be, but Republicans now have to worry about Texas “in a new way.”

“They’re going to, at an absolute minimum, have to spend enormous sums of money to prevent it from slipping away,” he said.

Part of the Democratic surge came from a backlash against Republicans running the state. Waldman pointed to Democrat Gina Hinojosa’s governor’s race, where she campaigned hard against Gov. Greg Abbott’s school voucher plan. The plan was especially unpopular in rural Texas, where there are no private schools and families rely on public schools.

“If you’re not happy, those are the people to blame,” Waldman said, describing the Democrats’ pitch.

National trends also point the wrong way for the GOP. According to New York Times data, Democrats won Latino voters 69 percent to 29 percent, a 29-point swing, and nearly reached parity with white voters. Waldman noted that Texas has a non-white majority, and said there’s little evidence Republicans’ 2024 gains with Latino and Black voters were more than a one-time result.

Texas isn’t the only state worrying Republican strategists. GOP strategist Kurt Steiner told Politico that “Ohio should be considered a battleground” after Democrats won the governor’s and Senate races there. Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats warned that “you can also die by the brand as well.”

During the midterm campaign, President Donald Trump made a string of eye-popping promises to voters, all with the same catch – Republicans had to win.

Now that Democrats have swept both chambers of Congress, those promises are in limbo, and one of them involves veterans and families sickened by toxic water at a Marine Corps base, reported NBC News.

At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, in the campaign’s closing days, Trump said he would direct the Justice Department to “settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible” for people harmed by contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune, but he attached a condition.

“If we don’t win, there’s no money. If we do win, you’re getting it, and it’s going to be finally over with that nightmare that’s been going on for so many years,” Trump said. “We will never abandon the heroes who served America.”

Asked why the election had anything to do with the claims, Trump gave a meandering answer.

“Well, because if we’re not there, then somebody else is going to have to settle it,” he said. “So if the Republicans don’t do well, I would say that maybe they won’t get their money.”

Service members stationed at the North Carolina base, along with their families, drank contaminated water from the early 1950s into the 1980s. Congress passed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act in 2022 to speed up compensation. Even so, claims have dragged on for years, and some victims have died while waiting.

Around 3,600 cases are pending in federal court, and hundreds of thousands of administrative claims are still under review by the Navy. The court cases are moving through the judicial process and are outside Congress’ control.

Camp Lejeune wasn’t the only promise Trump tied to GOP wins. His most frequent pitch was a $5,000 check for every adult citizen. The checks would cost an estimated $1.2 trillion, and Trump never explained how to pay for them. Even before the election, an NBC News Decision Desk Poll found only 14 percent of adults expected to get one.

In Kentucky, Trump said the Pentagon would invest $100 million in a pharmaceutical plant in Winchester “if the Republicans win.” The Pentagon’s own announcement that day described an $80 million loan with no election strings attached, and the company hasn’t settled on Winchester.

In Kansas, Trump said he’d only make year-round E15 fuel sales permanent if Republican Sen. Roger Marshall won. “If Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it,” Trump said. Hamilton won, becoming the state’s first Democratic senator in 94 years.

The White House didn’t address the specific promises. A spokesman said Trump “will work with anyone willing to advance solutions that strengthen our economy.”

Following the midterm blowout for the Republican Party that has been viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump’s second term, the president has entered the “third act” of his political career and is more dangerous than ever.

That’s the warning from Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist, former Johns Hopkins University professor and frequent Trump critic, who told the Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles that the president likely took the GOP’s defeat personally.

“Hell hath no fury like a malignant narcissist scorned,” Gartner said. “I think we’re now in the third act of the tragedy, and I think we’re in more danger now than we’ve ever been.”

According to the Daily Beast, Gartner believes the 80-year-old president may now be even more inclined to wreak havoc. “He’s going to act out in the ways that are destructive—to show his power and dominance, and to gain the sadistic sense of pleasure that he gets from destruction,” Gartner said.

He compared the moment to a dangerous stage in an abusive relationship.

“I feel like we’re at the stage where a woman who’s been abused goes, ‘Thank God. I kicked him out of the house, I have a restraining order, I’m finally safe,’” he said. “And that’s often the time when the really destructive abusers say, ‘Okay, now I’m gonna kill the b---h.’ I think that he is that guy, and we are the b---h. And he doesn’t care if he kills us all.”

Gartner admitted he doesn’t have much advice to offer on how to deal with the impulsive president because he doesn’t believe “anyone can contain him.”

“I don’t think there is a strategy that will work,” he told Coles. “I think that he is going to do what he is going to do, and he’s going to reap maximum chaos, maximum destruction, maximum confusion.”

He warned that Democrats’ victory celebrations may be short-lived. “We’re so elated that Democrats have taken both houses of Congress, but I think he’s going to be successful over the next two years at stymying virtually every effort that they make,” he said.

Gartner argued Democrats will have little leverage because Trump has no agenda he needs them for. “Any bill that they pass that could help America is a bill he wants to thwart. That’s how his psychology works,” he said. “He doesn’t care if shutting down the government hurts the country. Look, he didn’t care that his actions hurt his party, right? He could care less.”

“At no point did he ever think maybe I should change my behavior because it’s gonna hurt my party,” Gartner concluded. “He doesn’t care about his party or his country or anyone else.”

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Fox News’ Shannon Bream drew widespread mockery after critics said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “whipped” her “into shape” when she tried to corner him with a series of “gotcha questions.”

“Mamdani whipped her into shape with ease. I don’t know who she thought she was playing with,” wrote Nicolas-Tyrell Scott, a British music and culture journalist.

A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to address his standing with the leftist organization, a group that reported at least 105 electoral victories in last week’s midterms, including eight U.S. House seats.

“You are a self-described democratic socialist — the DSA had a really good night on election night, but Third Way, which is a center-left Democrat group, has cautioned against reading too much into that,” Bream said.

Laughing, Mamdani quipped, “I’m sure they have.”

A Washington-based centrist think tank, Third Way has long been at war with progressive Democrats, and last week, just two days after the midterms, attacked Mamdani’s “policy ideas” as “deeply unpopular in the red and purple places Democrats must win to retake Congress and the White House.”

“We therefore urge Democrats at all levels to resist the pressure to align with Mamdani’s politics and agenda,” the group said in a statement.

Mamdani dismissed Third Way’s warning and said that he was a “proud” member of the DSA, prompting Bream to hit the New York City mayor with a series of questions.

“Okay, get rid of borders?” Bream asked.

“No,” Mamdani said, smiling.

Bream then pressed Mamdani on whether he wanted to get rid of the Supreme Court and jails. He answered “no” to each before Bream asked whether the DSA would kick him out.

“No,” Mamdani said, grinning.

Micah Erfan, a liberal media strategist and commentator, argued that the exchange was “absolutely brutal” and that Mamdani “completely” disproved Fox News’ “entire narrative in 30 seconds.”

Freelance journalist Lee Burkwood argued that Bream’s “gotcha questions” fell flat entirely due to Mamdani’s “very slickly done” response, and Richard Hanania, a right-wing political writer, conceded that conservatives’ own caricature of Democrats has made them easy to outmaneuver.

“They’ve created such an absurd caricature of Democrats that all they have to do is show up and not sound crazy and they can own conservatives,” Hanania wrote.

The attorney who filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a woman who alleges she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Hope for Prisoners’ founder Jon Ponder while in the state’s custody says he intends to depose Nevada’s top law enforcement officials to learn what they knew about Ponder and when.

“We certainly intend to depose all board members and any public officials who had knowledge of the systematic sexual abuse that was allowed to continue within Nevada Dept. of Corrections by Mr. Ponder and Hope for Prisoners,” attorney James Beckstrom said via email when asked if he expects to depose District Attorney Steve Wolfson and Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill, who were board members in 2020, and Gov. Joe Lombardo, who was sheriff at the time.

The Current was first to report that the Hope for Prisoners board of directors was advised by its attorney in the summer of 2020 to terminate Ponder following an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct.

The board ignored the recommendation after President Donald Trump’s surprise pardon of Ponder at the 2020 Republican National Convention, according to a letter to the board from member Kristina Wildeveld, who resigned when the board took no action.

Other members of Hope for Prisoner’s board in 2020 included former Gov. Robert List, Latin Chamber of Commerce president Peter Guzman, who introduced Lombardo at his election night gathering Tuesday, and former Metro Asst. Sheriff Todd Fasulo, who served as chairman of the board.

The Current reached out to the former board members and Lombardo, but did not hear back.

Beckstrom represents a former Nevada inmate who is identified as RS in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed Oct. 29. She alleges that Ponder used his influential relationships to gain access to her and others, and coerced her into engaging in sexual acts by promising contact with her children.

“There is nothing I wouldn’t do to see my children,” RS later said, according to the lawsuit.

RS asserts she was directed by Ponder to perform oral sex in his office, that he arranged chairs at the Jean prison “church” service so he could touch her out of the view of the camera, and that he took her inside a storage closet at the prison to kiss her.

The suit alleges Ponder violated RS’ constitutional right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, including sexual abuse by those with authority over her.

There is no cap on monetary judgments against the state for civil rights claims.

RS is also one of seven alleged victims in a 25-count grand jury indictment handed down in September against Ponder. The charges include four counts of sexual assault that each carry a potential life sentence. Other charges include kidnapping and unauthorized contact with inmates.

Ponder has been released from the Clark County Detention Center on $400,000 cash bail, which was reduced from $1 million in October by Judge Ron Israel.

His attorney, Robert Draskovich, has filed a motion to withdraw from the case, noting Ponder’s case originated in Justice Court but was transferred to District Court following the indictment, and Ponder is no longer able to retain him.

‘A prolific sexual predator’

The criminal allegations in the indictment against Ponder, a three-time convicted bank robber and domestic abuser, span 11 years — from 2015 through this year.

“The stark reality is that Jon Ponder is a prolific sexual predator,” prosecutor Michelle Fleck said at the October hearing to lower Ponder’s bail.

Metro, under Lombardo’s watch, forged a community partnership with Hope for Prisoners and hosted its monthly graduations at LVMPD headquarters, as well as an appearance by Trump.

As governor, Lombardo has supported additional state funding for the organization, which also receives federal funds.

In 2020, Metro denied the Current’s request under the Nevada Open Records Act for Wildeveld’s letter, which was sent to McMahill at his Metro email address. Wolfson, the D.A., denied the same request for the letter, which was sent to his county email.

Metro and the D.A.’s office claimed the letter was sent to the officials in their personal, not official capacities, and therefore not subject to the Open Records Act.

In 2022, the Current asked Lombardo to look into the department’s denial. He later said he was unable to release Wildeveld’s correspondence.

Lombardo has remained silent when asked if Metro conducted its own investigation of Ponder in 2020. When the allegations resurfaced in a 2024 lawsuit, Lombardo, who had become governor, again would not respond.

NDOC recently denied the Current’s request for communication between the governor’s office and the department regarding Ponder, asserting the records may be used as evidence in the criminal case and could “undermine the constitutional rights of a defendant to a fair trial.”

Other board members, citing confidentiality requirements, have refused to comment in the last six years, but will likely be required to comply with a subpoena for deposition, says attorney Lisa Rasmussen, who has sued the state over inmates’ civil rights violations.

“Whatever was board confidential business is so out there in the media now that invoking confidentiality is just not going to work,” she said.

In addition to Ponder and HFP, the federal suit names two prison officials, Jennifer Nash and William Reubart.

“You have to sue them individually under the theory that they’re acting under the color of their authority,” says Rasmussen. “You can add the state, but it’s not necessary.”

Attorney General Aaron Ford, who defeated Lombardo in the race for governor last week, will likely be required to file an initial response to the lawsuit on behalf of NDOC, which his office represents.

The bulk of defending NDOC will eventually fall to Attorney General-Elect Nicole Cannizzaro, a former prosecutor under Wolfson.

Ford has called Ponder’s alleged crimes “appalling, and I’m praying for the victims to receive the full measure of justice.”

He said it’s “crucial for more information to come to light, not just about what Ponder was doing, but about who knew about it and failed to stop it. There are allegations that Wolfson and Lombardo may have known about it, but that’s for an investigation to uncover.”

The suit alleges Ponder was permitted to bypass security restrictions at Nevada prisons.

NDOC spokeswoman Teri Vance said Ponder had limited access “equivalent to that of other NDOC hired contract employees,” and added NDOC “maintains strict policies and procedures governing visitors to its facilities. Protocols are in place to ensure compliance with these requirements and to review adherence to applicable policies and procedures.”

Vance did not address the allegations that prison officials Reubart and Nash were aware of Ponder’s alleged acts, but did not report it, as required under the the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

When Jean Conservation Camp officers complained about Ponder’s behavior, Reubart and Nash overrode their concerns and told them to stop treating Ponder like an inmate, the suit alleges.

Reports of sexual assault or harassment by a staff member against an inmate in Nevada prisons average about 27 a year. In the last five years the Nevada Office of Inspector General investigated 136 reports and substantiated 14 cases.

The lawsuit says emails likely exist detailing the concerns raised by officers, and the case should be easy to substantiate, says Rasmussen.

“I think there’s an awful lot of evidence against Jon Ponder,” she said.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

Not subtle. Not nuanced.

Americans launched an almighty middle finger at the Mob Boss of Mar-a-Lago, repudiating him and his congressional Flying Monkey squad.

The Bible-spouting Pharisee Mike Johnson will no longer be Speaker of the House; the sclerotic Chuck Grassley will no longer chair the committee that placed Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch on the U.S. Supreme Court; and no longer will Congress sign off on obscene funding for the Iran war.

MAGA myrmidons crashed and burned in Trump-voting states across the nation — not Florida, of course, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

Ohio, for example, where tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy saw nothing wrong with running an attack ad starring the estranged mother of opponent Amy Acton, a woman who defended her husband even though he’d been indicted for raping Amy when she was 12.

Or Texas, for God’s sake. Texas, a state so red it puts cheap Santa suits to shame, spurned Ken Paxton, Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate.

The epically sleazy Paxton, who was impeached by his own party, got taken to the woodshed by a fresh-faced seminarian with a strong resemblance to Opie Taylor.

Elon Musk must be sick as a parrot. He burned through millions of dollars trying to get his Texas supplicants elected, to no avail. Now, SpaceX and Tesla stock is heading downhill and Texas’ new Democratic government is likely inclined to investigate him, his dodgy finances, his campaign donations, and his environmentally disastrous space city.

Now that Texas is no longer friendly to the bazillionaire oligarch and professional baby-daddy, what do you want to bet Musk moves to Florida?

All the best authoritarian creeps end up here: Trump, his boys, the Kushners, Jeff Bezos, and Flávio Bolsonaro.

But Iowa? Kansas? Seriously? Kansas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

New new South

South Carolina hasn’t chosen a Democratic senator since Fritz Hollings was re-elected in 1998. It’s got one now.

The South, land of slavery-excusing, abortion-banning, vaccine-hating, and mandating religious instruction in public schools is getting bluer.

They’re still counting in the Mississippi Senate race, where Democrat Scott Colom leads incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. His lead is small, but y’all, this is Mississippi, a state Trump won by more than 20 points in 2024.

In North Carolina, voters flipped a U.S. Senate seat, gave Democrats the majority in the state House of Representatives, and made substantial gains in the state Senate.

In Georgia, the top offices are now as blue as deep water.

Democrats hold both U.S. Senate seats, have taken control of the state House of Representatives, and elected the nation’s first Black woman governor.

Then there’s Florida, which never fails to disappoint.

While most the country rejected Donald Trump’s toxic regime, Florida bucked the trend toward sanity and stuck with Republicans.

Byron Donalds made history as the state’s first Black governor.

This should be a proud accomplishment, except the man is a Trumpist to the core.

During the campaign, he inched away — a little — from references to Trump’s endorsement.

Trump’s approval rating was (and is) in the low-to-mid 30s.

However, once Donalds won, the sucking-up resumed. The man who likes to call Trump “Daddy,” declared: “Mr. President, I want you to hear from Florida that we are still red!”

And Trump is still a racist.

Even Florida shifted

Florida could have made more history by electing Angie Nixon, who’d have been our first Black senator.

Instead, we chose former Attorney General Ashley Moody, appointed to serve out Marco Rubio’s term after he was elevated (if that’s the right word) to be Trump’s secretary of state.

James Uthmeier, appointed to fill the attorney general post after Moody decamped for D.C., won his election, too.

He’s a self-proclaimed devout Christian, yet remains proud of “Alligator Alcatraz,” that giant human rights violation of a prison camp in the Everglades.

Government inspectors (Trump administration inspectors!) found the facility abused detainees, some of whom accused the state of “torture.”

Uthmeier can now continue his mission to shut down drag shows, ban Judy Blume novels, instruct bishops in Roman Catholic theology, and defend himself against accusations of misdeeds in the HOPE Florida scandal.

Still, Florida was not a total bust for Democrats.

These races were far closer than they should have been, given how this state has been blindly electing Republicans for the past 30-odd years.

Angie Nixon was less than three percentage points behind Ashley Moody. That’s a major shift: Marco Rubio beat Val Demings by 6.5 percent in 2022 and Rick Scott’s 2024 margin over Debbie Murcasel-Powell was over 12 points.

The last time he ran, Ron DeSantis romped (an unseemly image, but still), beating Charlie Crist by nearly 20 points.

David Jolly got within 1.3 percentage points of Donalds.

As for Uthmeier, his win over José Javier Fernandez was thread-slim, despite having more than three times as much campaign cash.

There’s more (qualified) good news for Dems.

If Republicans prevail in the two neck-and-neck races that are, at the time of writing, still too close to call, the party make-up of Florida’s congressional delegation will remain the same as it was last year.

‘Oops’

But Republicans thought they could grab even more seats.

Remember that redistricting stunt they pulled to pad their numbers and get rid of the likes of Kathy Castor, the long-time representative from Tampa Bay?

It didn’t quite go as planned.

Three of the four redrawn districts went to Democrats; incumbent Darren Soto leads in the fourth.

Nationwide, what the gerrymandering Republicans thought was a sure bet to net them more seats blew up in their faces.

Most of their redrawn districts went to Democrats.

As the Texan sage and failed presidential candidate Rick Perry once said, “Oops.”

Despite Florida’s Cabinet remaining DeSantisite, Republicans have lost their supermajority in the House and their total control of the Senate is teetering on the brink after Maitland Mayor John Lowndes whipped incumbent DeSantis acolyte Jason Brodeur, one of the most powerful politicos in the state.

The question will be: Will Florida Republicans get a clue and realize they’re not as popular as they used to be?

During a post-election press conference, DeSantis congratulated Florida (and, by extension, himself) for bucking the national trend, while warning the midterms were “as close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.”

Scary! His party has lost two key states, Ohio and Texas: “If the Republican Party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor, then we are not going to be viable moving forward.”

Texas was always what Florida wanted to be when it grew up.

But, as DeSantis boasted, “Our line of scrimmage held better here in Florida.”

Amendment 3

He’s even more pleased Amendment 3, his pet anti-local government project, passed.

Appealing to greed usually works: Voters have chosen to dismantle our property tax system.

Homeowners will be happy to get the extra cash, though the one-third of Floridians who rent won’t get anything out of this.

And nobody will like it when their local taxes and fees shoot up to fund basic services, when the potholes don’t get fixed, law enforcement loses officers, firefighters get laid off, libraries and neighborhood clinics close, cultural events are canceled, and parks neglected.

None of that matters to DeSantis. Amendment 3 is his calling card for another presidential bid, an accomplishment he thinks he can run on.

But Florida might not remain the Ghost of Texas Past DeSantis and the Republicans want it to be.

This year shows even the reddest of reds can fade.

The presidential race in 2028 may bring another Democratic opportunity in Florida.

Ashley Moody must run again to keep her U.S. Senate seat. It’s possible she’ll again face Angie Nixon.

Given the stinking miasma of the Trump administration will still be hanging over Republicans in general, and Moody in particular, Nixon could prevail this time.

Perhaps the Florida Democratic Party — long a by-word for dysfunction — will look across the border at Georgia, where Black women hold the top state offices, and learn.

The national Democratic Party may finally (finally!) invest in the state, recruiting good candidates, growing the voter base one citizen at a time, and spending actual money here.

It won’t be easy, obviously, but the midterms have blown a chill wind through Republican Florida.

As the good old Game of Thrones saying goes, “Winter is coming.”

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

Retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, warned that President Donald Trump’s latest comments about Ukraine point toward a peace deal that would hand Russia a large share of the country.

During his “60 Minutes” interview, Trump complained that the U.S. had “got nothing” for the weapons it sent Ukraine. When interviewer Ross Douthat countered that the U.S. “got Ukrainian independence for it,” Trump disagreed.

“You haven’t gotten anything yet," Trump said. "Let’s see how it all works out.”

Trump said he expected a deal to get done, adding, “they’re going to end up with a little bit different shape, Ukraine.”

"CNN News Central" anchor Kate Bolduan asked Stavridis what he heard in that phrase and what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky might hear.

“Well, it sounds ominous,” Stavridis said.

He said the remark likely refers to the roughly 20 percent of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin now controls, the eastern stretch linking Crimea to Russia.

“It’s kind of a trade land for peace deal, if you will,” Stavridis said. “Certainly Zelensky will hate that deal. I hate that deal. We all should hate that deal.”

He added that Putin would also be unhappy with that outcome.

“He doesn’t want that 20 percent. He wants the whole thing,” Stavridis said.

He warned that whoever ends up with the territory would be inheriting a wasteland. “That 20 percent, Kate, has been a battlefield for four years,” he said. “It’s full of unexploded ordnance, burned-out villages, broken bridges, on and on. It’s a poisoned chalice, in my view.”

Still, Stavridis predicted that’s “probably the deal we’re going to get to.” He said the most important part would be what Ukraine gets in return – full independence, a path to the European Union, reconstruction funds, and “NATO-like” security guarantees, though probably not NATO membership right away.

Those guarantees, he said, would have to mean that “if Putin decides to try and take another bite to reshape the form of Ukraine again, there would be real teeth” in a European and U.S. response.

Stavridis also suggested Trump’s sudden interest in foreign deals is about his troubles at home.

“The president, having had a very tough midterm, obviously, and real domestic constraints, is looking to go abroad to find some problems he can solve,” he said. He added that the negotiations ahead will be “very difficult.”

Bolduan closed by noting that getting a deal done “might involve staying on message and having a clear strategy on how to get from point A to point Z.”

- YouTube youtu.be

Republicans racing to cram President Donald Trump’s agenda into the final weeks of their congressional majority are set to lose a Senate vote ahead of schedule, thanks to a little-known Ohio law.

Sen. Jon Husted’s term ends Dec. 15 under state law, The Washington Post reported. The Ohio Republican was appointed last year to finish the term JD Vance gave up to become vice president, but he lost last week’s special election to former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Brown may be sworn in early, which would cut the GOP’s 53-47 edge before Democrats take full control of Congress on Jan. 3.

The squeeze comes during an already crowded lame-duck session. Congress is scheduled to be in session for just five more weeks, and some Republicans want colleagues to “stay every day,” as Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) put it, through the holidays to confirm Trump nominees and pass bills.

A centerpiece of that push is a possible reconciliation bill, which can bypass a Democratic filibuster. It could include money for the Iran war. Without it, the military says it will lack much of the funding needed to restock precision weapons the war has drained, according to the Post.

But the process requires both chambers to adopt a budget resolution before passing the bill itself, leaving almost no room for defections. And the senator whose committee plays a key role says he’s still waiting on the White House.

“Now I’m hearing from the White House they want to do one,” Senate Budget Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) said last week. “Well, good. This takes a lot of time and effort. We need to know what the product’s going to be. Haven’t heard.”

Lawmakers also must avert a government shutdown when funding runs out after Dec. 11.

The House math is even tighter. Republicans can lose only two votes there. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who often breaks with his party, is sponsoring a resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that could get a vote as soon as this week. Rep. Neal Dunn (R-FL), who has been ill, hasn’t voted since July.

Democrats are dealing with absences too. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) expects to miss several weeks of votes while recovering from a stroke.

Democrats are signaling that the days of Republicans coasting in the Deep South may be over after last week’s midterms, when the party either pulled off upsets or came close in states long written off as safely red.

Democratic leaders now say the results are “proof of concept” that the party should compete hard in the South, which would force Republicans to spend money protecting turf they once took for granted, reported the Washington Sun.

“In the past, the party would invest in places like Mississippi just enough to force the Republicans to spend money,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) told the Sun. “Same thing in Texas, same thing in South Carolina, same thing in Georgia. Until we began to win.”

Southern Democrats have plenty of evidence to tout. In South Carolina, Annie Andrews flipped a Senate seat. In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom led Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by about 2,000 votes as of Friday afternoon. In Florida, Angie Nixon came within three points of Sen. Ashley Moody. Democrats also flipped Senate seats or picked up statewide offices in North Carolina and Georgia.

Warnock recalled a meeting where donors laughed at him for urging them to pay attention to Colom’s race.

“I think Mississippi got the last laugh Tuesday night,” he said.

Even where Democrats came up short, the margins were tight. In Tennessee, state Rep. Justin Pearson lost by just 1 percentage point in a House district drawn to heavily favor Republicans, even though national Democrats didn’t make his race a priority until October.

“There’s a paradigm shift happening and a deep recognition that there’s no way to House majorities, Senate majorities without the South,” Pearson said. “The South is the future of the country, and we need to start investing in it like it is.”

The results are prompting Democrats to rethink the conventional wisdom that a polarized electorate shrinks the battleground to a few swing states. That could mean Republicans have to defend far more ground in 2028.

“The lesson we should take from this is that when we have good candidates and we invest, we can win anywhere,” said Amy Morton, a Georgia-based strategist who leads the firm Southern Majority.

Georgia Democratic Party Chair Charlie Bailey predicted national groups will start pouring money into other Southern states.

“Mississippi, South Carolina. I mean, this shows that you can win,” Bailey said. “We can win in the South, and we got to have the right candidates. We got to have the right message. We got to have the money to build the organizing.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin vowed the party “will continue to invest in the South” heading into 2028.

The Republican midterm wipeout has positioned one of Donald Trump’s least favorite GOP senators to create nothing but headaches for him when Democrats take control in January.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is set to become the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, a post that opened up when Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) lost her seat. For Trump, that means dealing with an "increasingly powerful Republican antagonist who could pose a bigger liability for his agenda," Politico reported.

The Alaska senator, 69, won’t control the committee; Democrats will, but she has promised to “get back to governing in the middle,” and she’s expected to join forces with Democrats to defend Congress’ control over federal spending against Trump’s encroachments, according to the report.

Two fights are likely to be at the top of the list: budget director Russ Vought’s attempt to have political appointees sign off on grants, and any repeat of Trump’s mass cancellation of federal funds. Murkowski has publicly condemned both.

Former Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), who led House Appropriations early in Trump’s first term, predicted Vought is in for a fight.

“Russ Vought’s gonna meet his match,” he told Politico. “She believes in the process, the power of the purse, and I think she’s going to be a power to be reckoned with. Not that Susan wasn’t. But I’m hugely admiring of Murkowski’s outspokenness. She’s had quite a lot of opinions on the administration breaking the law.”

Her independence could cost her. If she runs again in 2028, Murkowski will almost certainly face a primary opponent with Trump’s blessing. He already endorsed one against her in 2021 and labeled her “bad for Alaska.”

Democrats, who expect at least a four-seat majority with races in Mississippi and Alaska still being counted, could find her a reliable partner. And with a wave of Republican incumbents voted out, a moderate like Murkowski may now carry more weight in the Senate GOP, the report notes.

“She’s bigger than the appropriations process, which is great,” Frelinghuysen said. “She’s going to be a voice that people are going to be listening to, especially after this election.”

Seniority rules mean the job is hers for the taking. She hasn’t formally accepted it, but she told an Alaska radio station after the election that Collins’ loss “is going to put me in a position of higher leadership” on the committee, a boost that could also help her if she seeks another term.