Indiana state Sen. Mike Bohacek (R) said he would oppose President Trump’s overtures to redraw the state’s congressional district lines after the president used a slur often made against people with disabilities, the Indianapolis Star reports.
Trump referred to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as “seriously retarded” in a Thanksgiving social media post.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon his intention to grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States in a sweeping drug case, the New York Times reports.
A new Gallup poll finds President Trump’s job approval rating has fallen five percentage points to 36%, the lowest of his second term, while disapproval has risen to 60%.
His prior second-term low point in approval was a statistically similar 37% in July, and his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“President Trump spoke by phone last week with Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, and discussed a possible meeting between them, even as the United States continues to threaten military action against Venezuela,” the New York Times reports.
“Democrats overperformed with young men in the off-year elections. Now comes the hard part: Replicating those results in the midterms amid an ideological divide in the party,” Politico reports.
“While Democrats across the board outdid their party’s performance in 2024 by wide margins, their gains with young male voters were even more drastic in several races. Party leaders are bullish Democrats can maintain that momentum heading into next year.”
President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson plan to hold a Monday evening tele-rally to boost a Republican candidate in a high-stakes Tennessee special congressional election, Axios reports.
Politico Poll: “More than half of Trump’s voters last year — 55% — describe themselves as MAGA, but a critical 38% do not, according to the survey.”
“And it’s here where the fissures start to emerge: Among those self-described MAGA voters, 47% say the current economy still belongs fully to Biden, compared to just 26% of non-MAGA Trump 2024 voters.”
“This divide becomes even starker on areas Republicans typically don’t own, like health care, where the White House is struggling to forge a path to extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies: 85% of MAGA Trump voters trust Republicans more to bring down health care costs, whereas just 55 percent of non-MAGA do — with 19% instead trusting Democrats and 27% saying they don’t know.”
“The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs,” the Washington Post reports.
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said.”
First Lady Melania Trump announced that she is launching her own production company, Muse Films.
Her first film is called “Melania.”
A must-read: Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus.
Garrett Graff: “This is almost surely the best book I read all year — which is not something I would have predicted about a 1,000-page biography of William F. Buckley, someone I knew very little about ahead of the book…”
“Tanenhaus worked on this book for almost a quarter century and I would guess it’s a shoe-in for next year’s Biography Pulitzer… but it encompasses everything great about a masterful biography — and even made me laugh out loud at parts. The book, as majestic as it is as a piece of writing and research, is not altogether complimentary about Buckley — you can’t walk away from the book without reeling from his racism and seeing clearly the path from Buckley to Donald Trump.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak resigned on Friday, several hours after investigators from the anti-corruption agency raided his house, Axios reports.
“Zohran Mamdani’s decisive win in New York City — along with key victories in New Jersey and Virginia — suggested Democrats are headed into the midterms from a position of strength. But they didn’t capture how deep that strength ran,” Politico reports.
“Across suburbs, rural counties and small towns in New York, Democrats posted electoral gains that rival — and in many cases surpass — the party’s 2017 ‘Blue Wave.’ In a state with enough competitive House races to decide control of the chamber, the outcome amounts to a wakeup call for already-wary Republicans.”
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President Trump attacked another female reporter after she asked him about the vetting of the suspect in a Washington, D.C., shooting that killed a National Guardsman, calling her a “stupid person,” The Wrap reports.
Asked Trump: “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?”
Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll, a dramatic decline over the last decade.
Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the concept that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”
Politico: “At least 225 judges have ruled in more than 700 cases that the administration’s new policy, which also deprives people of an opportunity to seek release from an immigration court, is a likely violation of law and the right to due process.”
“Those judges were appointed by all modern presidents — including 23 by Trump himself — and hail from at least 35 states… The number of judges opposing the administration’s position has more than doubled in less than a month.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered a bleak assessment of the U.S.-Canadian relationship, CTV News reports.
Said Carney: “We know that this decades-long process of our ever-closer economic relationship between Canada and the United States has ended, and as a consequence of that, many of our strengths have become our vulnerabilities, particularly in those industries that are most tightly integrated with the United States.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
