Trump’s Hand-Picked RNC Chair Predicts Doom
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Discharge petition
12 min read
The article opens with a discharge petition bypassing Speaker Johnson's control. This obscure but powerful House procedure allows the minority to force floor votes, and understanding it illuminates the specific mechanism weakening Johnson's speakership.
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Insurrection Act of 1807
14 min read
Trump's threats to send troops into Chicago and other Democratic-run cities invoke the legal framework of domestic military deployment. The Insurrection Act is the primary statute governing when a president can deploy federal troops domestically, making it directly relevant to his 'war from within' rhetoric.
Another day, another discharge petition short-circuiting the power of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Yesterday, the House passed a bill overturning a Trump executive order stripping union protections from some federal workers, a bill that began as a petition circulated by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine).
It came as some surprise to everyone that Johnson, thrust unexpectedly into the speaker’s job in 2023 at a moment of maximum intra-conference chaos, managed to keep things ticking along as smoothly as he did for a while. Now, however, he seems to be landing pretty much where many people expected him to be from the jump: a weak speaker whose fractious conference increasingly ignores his playbook to do what they want. Happy Friday.
Republicans Are Bracing for Midterm Disaster
by Andrew Egger
“It’s not a secret. There’s no sugarcoating it. It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.”
“We are facing almost certain defeat.”
“The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard.”
“You hit the nail on the head. This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms.”
These pessimistic assessments of Republicans’ chances in next year’s midterms are the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from disgruntled GOP operatives outside the MAGA camp. This week, however, they’ve been coming from someone way crazier: Joe Gruters, the Trump-diehard chair of the Republican National Committee, who has been barnstorming conservative radio this week.1
Gruters isn’t throwing Trump under the bus. Quite the opposite: As Democrats overperform in special election after special election and Republican confidence in the midterms craters, he’s trying to set expectations low—way low. After all, he says, the guys in power nearly always lose the midterms. And as once-unimaginable cracks have begun spiderwebbing across the MAGA coalition, he’s making a specific case to his party: “The only person that could bring the nose up and help us win is the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”
Still, it’s remarkably abnormal to see the chair of the institutional Republican party—the head of the party’s campaign apparatus!—openly predict doom for his candidates. It
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