President Trump is pressuring former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other “disloyal” Republicans to vote against Democrats’ resolution to bar his emergency declaration to impose tariffs on Canada.
The message — targeted at McConnell, as well as Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul — said they “are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels.”
“President Donald Trump’s deliberations over his plans to impose reciprocal tariffs are coming down to the wire, with his team said to be still finalizing the level and scope of new import taxes he is slated to unveil on Wednesday afternoon,” Bloomberg reports.
“In meetings on Tuesday, Trump’s team continued to hash out their options ahead of a Rose Garden event scheduled to begin as US markets close at 4 p.m. on Wednesday.”
“The White House has not reached a firm decision on their tariff plan even though Trump himself said earlier in the week that he had ‘settled’ on an approach.”
“Xavier Becerra, the former health secretary under President Joe Biden, is joining the burgeoning field to be California’s next governor — regardless of whether Kamala Harris seeks the post,” Politico reports.
Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), who flipped a GOP district in 2018 and once went viral for a speech she made, announced she’s running for U.S. Senate next year, the Detroit Free Press reports.
“Her entry into the race — which she has teased in recent days on cable TV as she spoke about her book, Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It, in which she extols people to remain politically active — gives the race to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) its first major candidate, one who can both raise substantial amounts of money and has developed a national brand as a passionate voice for her party.”
“Donald Trump’s attorney Boris Epshteyn made a bold assertion during a meeting in late 2023: Trump wouldn’t necessarily be limited to two terms in office,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Speaking to an associate in October 2023 in downtown Washington, Epshteyn pushed back on the notion that Trump would be a lame duck if he won the election in 2024. Epshteyn said he had studied the law—and he believed Trump could find a way to run again in 2028.”
In a new book, Joe Biden’s former White House chief of staff Ron Klain paints a devastating picture of the then president’s mental and physical state before the debate with Donald Trump that sent his 2024 campaign into a tailspin, The Guardian reports.
According to Klain, who returned to help prep Biden for his debate, it turned out Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was” and left debate preparation “and fell asleep by the pool.”
He obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation” and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job.”
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Paul Krugman: “As I said, I don’t know exactly what will be announced later today. One safe prediction, however, is that over the next few days we’ll see many news analyses purporting to explain the thinking behind this radical change in U.S. policy.”
“Such analyses will be a waste of time, because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.”
“I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had it in the bag. I thought Musk was gonna be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on.”
— Pam Van Handel, Chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County, quoted by Politico.
“The White House is preparing an estimate of what it would cost the federal government to control Greenland as a territory, the most concrete effort yet to turn President Donald Trump’s desire to acquire the Danish island into actionable policy,” the Washington Post reports.
“While Trump’s demands elicited international outrage and a rebuke from Denmark, White House officials have in recent weeks taken steps to determine the financial ramifications of Greenland becoming a U.S. territory, including the cost of providing government services for its 58,000 residents.”
“Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) record marathon speech on the Senate floor won the floundering Democratic Party something it has desperately needed in the Trump era: attention and the applause of its base,” Axios reports.
“Booker’s stemwinder was the rare incidence of Democrats stealing the spotlight from Trump, who has commanded nearly every news cycle since returning to office.”
“I want to emphasize what Cory Booker did over the last 24 hours may have changed the course of political history. I watched a lot of it. I listened to words. I listened to phrases. How he presents himself did criticize Donald Trump. Of course he did. But he struck the kind of tone that grassroots Democrats are looking for. He gave them a reason to fight. He gave them a reason to stand up and say, this is my country too. Of course, every Republican watching will say, this is nonsense. But he is not speaking just to Republicans, he’s speaking to Americans, and what I saw over the last 25 hours absolutely blew me away. And just as you sometimes make projections or predictions, I’m gonna do one right here. That speech puts Cory Booker as one of the leaders for the Democratic Party for 2028.”
— GOP pollster Frank Luntz, on NewsNation.
Playbook: “In truth, Dems had been desperate to make yesterday’s elections all about Musk, who has several significant drawbacks in his unlikely new role as GOP election figurehead. They include dismal personal poll ratings, unfathomable wealth and a tendency to talk about Social Security as if he’d quite like to give it the chainsaw treatment.”
“But Musk played right into Dems’ hands — plowing not just millions of dollars into the race in Wisconsin, but huge amounts of personal and political capital, making himself the most visible GOP campaigner on the election trail.”
Dan Bongino, the FBI’s deputy director, who rose to popularity as a conservative podcaster bashing Democrats and praising President Trump, sought to reassure the bureau’s employees that he would not act as a “partisan political figure,” the New York Times reports.
Don Moynihan: “Money is a an aggressive growing tumor at the heart of American democracy. The 2023 Wisconsin state supreme court race cost $56 million, a national record at the time. The 2025 version blasted that out of the water, and could end up costing almost twice that much.”
“To give a sense of out-of-kilter we are, a single state court race saw significantly more spending than the entire United Kingdom national election.”
A new Blueprint poll finds Donald Trump’s net job approval rating is -6, while Elon Musk’s is -16.
Key takeaway: Musk’s favorability score has steadily declined since the election and half of voters say he’s not competent to manage a government agency.
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.