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Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) avoided ruling out a 2028 bid for the White House, arguing voters are ready for a “new generation” of candidates, Politico reports.
Said Slotkin: “We are not well as a country right now, and people are not looking to just go back to where they were.”
Punchbowl News: “Trump’s push for a federal gas tax holiday isn’t going over well with Senate Republicans. Thune was more critical of the idea on Tuesday than he was even the day before.”
“Thune wouldn’t commit to holding a standalone floor vote on a gas tax suspension, saying it was more likely that a vote would occur as an amendment to a different bill.”
Said Thune: “That does, obviously, impair significantly the highway trust fund, which is already getting transfers from the general fund because it’s not keeping up. I’m not discounting it, but I’m saying there are implications around that that we need to think about.”
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that he would join President Trump on his trip to China this week,” the New York Times reports.
“Defense secretaries, including Mr. Hegseth, have previously traveled with presidents on overseas trips, to provide advice and represent the U.S. military during the visits. Mr. Hegseth has traveled to Asia several times in his tenure, mostly to attend security conferences and visit troops in the region.”
“Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and more than a dozen chief executives are also set to be in China with the president.”
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“A new mystery super PAC with ties to Republicans has spent more than $1 million meddling in at least three Democratic congressional primaries to select preferred opponents in what appears to be an effort to retain control of the House,” the New York Times reports.
“Among the candidates the super PAC has begun spending to promote is a left-wing sex therapist in Texas who has been accused of bigotry and antisemitism by leaders in both parties. The group is also running ads in Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, which holds its primary on Tuesday.”
“President Donald Trump shared a Truth Social post late Monday night that called for the arrest of Barack Obama, accusing the former president of treason, without evidence,” the Washington Post reports.
Daniel Dale called Trump’s late-night posting spree “detached from reality.”
CNBC: “Kevin Warsh took another step towards becoming Federal Reserve chair on Tuesday, clearing a key Senate vote that puts him on the central bank Board of Governors.”
“The upper chamber voted to approve Warsh’s nomination by a 51-45 vote, on a mostly party-line basis. Only Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., crossed lines to vote for President Donald Trump’s pick.”
U.S. Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary plans to resign on Tuesday, the latest leadership change at the federal health department and after weeks of public speculation and a mounting pressure campaign, Reuters reports.
G. Elliott Morris: “The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result…”
“The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!”
Adam Serwer: “People keep trying to kill the president. The closest call came in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, when Donald Trump (then a candidate) had his head grazed by a bullet. Other apparent attempts include an incident at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, and possibly another that resulted in a Secret Service shooting at Mar-a-Lago in 2026. The latest would-be executioner, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was stopped long before he got anywhere near Trump. Nevertheless, these repeated incidents are disturbing symptoms of an obsession with vigilante violence that has infected the country.”
“No figure on the left in a position of power comparable to that of the president has called for violence the way that Trump has—but the sentiment that he deserves to be killed is easy to find online. Imagining that assassinating a president would solve any kind of problem is delusional. Presidents are chosen by the electorate; their supporters and their politics do not disappear when they die.”
President Trump urged New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to “cherish” billionaires like Ken Griffin after the Citadel CEO threatened to bolt from a Park Avenue skyscraper project and move to Miami in response to the socialist mayor’s attacks, the New York Post reports.
Said Trump: “When you lose people like that, it’s sort of not recoverable.”
He added: “Always you say something’s recoverable, right? But it’s not recoverable. Then they build something else. They’re going to be there for 30 years. They don’t come back. And you’ve got to do the opposite. You’ve got to cherish them.”
David Graham: “The Iran war will pose a challenge for Vance, Rubio, or any other administration official who mounts a run. In that way, it’s a microcosm of two challenges that any would-be Trump successor will face. First, they will need to forge a base of support, which means trying to keep together as much of the MAGA coalition as possible. Trump’s ideological flexibility and personality-based politics have allowed him to assemble a group that doesn’t agree on anything except loving Trump and hating Democrats, and that group is already starting to splinter, in part due to criticism of his handling of the war. (Interestingly, Rubio and Vance are latecomers to Trumpism compared with many GOP voters.)”
“But just keeping a majority of the MAGA base united won’t be enough to win a general election. The second challenge will be for candidates to distance themselves from the things that have made Trump a historically unpopular president among the general population without infuriating Trump and alienating his hard-core supporters. Think about how loath Kamala Harris was to criticize Joe Biden during the 2024 election, and how that may have hurt her with swing voters—and then imagine how that might work with a president who is both more vengeful and more influential with his base.”
G. Elliot Morris: “In 1976, the U.S. House of Representatives had 101 ‘structurally competitive’ congressional districts. By ‘structurally competitive,’ I mean seats that either party had a reasonable chance of winning in an electoral cycle that was perfectly tied nationally — those seats where the Democratic Party’s vote margin was within 5 points of the vote margin for the Demoratic nominee for president in the most recent election.”
“Last November, in contrast, the number of competitive seats was just 42. Under the new partisan gerrymanders that Republicans and Democrats (but mostly Republicans) have passed for the 2026 midterms, the number falls to a new all-time-low of 33.”
“That’s right: Just 33 out of 435 — less than 8% — of districts were decided by less than 5 points, in terms of partisan lean, last year.”
Chris Rabb (D), who is locked in a tight primary for a seat in Congress, is disavowing an Instagram post that promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory about the deadly Hanukkah massacre in Australia’s Bondi Beach, saying a former staffer was responsible, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
“The Pentagon put the cost of the war on Iran at ‘closer’ to $29 billion, roughly $4 billion more than two weeks ago,” the New York Times reports.
“The FBI has begun interviewing current and former CIA employees as part of the Department of Justice’s investigation into ex-CIA director John Brennan over his role in an intelligence finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help Donald Trump,” Reuters reports.
“The Wall Street Journal received grand jury subpoenas for reporters’ records as part of a Justice Department leak investigation, as the outlet said that they would oppose the effort,” Deadline reports.
Vivian Salama: “Reliability. It’s a word I hear constantly from officials around the world when the conversation turns to the Trump administration—and especially, these days, the Iran war. In the past, Trump supporters, and even many U.S. allies, viewed Trump’s famous unpredictability as unorthodox but at times effective, a useful means of wrong-footing opponents or shaking up the tired status quo.”
“Many now see something more unsettling in Trump’s international relations, including in the 10-week war: What once was viewed as strategic unpredictability now feels like destabilizing unreliability.”
John Oliver explains the “shadow docket” — which has become a shortcut for rapidly advancing the Trump administration’s agenda through the nation’s highest court.
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.
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