Political Wire

Most Presidents Lose Power Quickly

· Leave a Comment

Ron Brownstein: “The last five times a president went into a midterm election with unified control of government, voters have revoked it. That list includes Joe Biden in 2022, Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006, and Bill Clinton in 1994. This streak seems virtually certain to continue next month with Republicans on track to lose the House and maybe the Senate.”

“That will extend a dismal record, raising to six the number of consecutive times a president has gone into a midterm with unified control and lost it.”

Is an October Surprise Possible?

· Leave a Comment

“Four weeks out from the election, and for most Americans, it’s time for football, foliage and flannel. For politics watchers, all eyes are on an October surprise,” Fox News reports.

“They’ve been game-changers before. In 2008, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which ushered in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, was a turning point in John McCain’s presidential campaign…”

“Surprises have come from home and abroad. In 1980, it was President Jimmy Carter’s inability to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis. Eight years earlier, it was President Richard Nixon’s announcement that ‘peace was at hand’ in Vietnam.”

“Some have more impact than others. It’s not clear that news about George W. Bush’s DUI changed much about the 2000 election, nor that James Comey’s letter to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s email server was the decider in President Trump’s 2016 win.”

“Still, these surprises all have one thing in common: they happened in presidential years.”

Hair Analysis Links Jefferson to Sally Hemings Children

· Leave a Comment

“A strand stuck in glue that Thomas Jefferson used to make a Bible is further confirmation for historians and descendants of the third president and the enslaved woman,” the Washington Post reports.

New · Out September 22, 2026History by a Hair
Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery
by Richard Kurin · Crown
Buy on Amazon
HardcoverKindle
From our partner:

October Surprise! 

For a limited time, sign up for a 90-day free trial to Political Wire. 

 

Former Speaker Dennis Hastert Is Dead

· Leave a Comment

Former Speaker John Dennis Hastert (R-IL) “has died at the age of 84,” NewsNation reports.

“In 2016, Hastert admitted in court that he sexually abused boys while coaching at Yorkville High School. A federal judge sentenced Hastert to 15 months in prison and issued a $250,000 fine. The judge referred to him as a ‘serial child molester.'”

“Hastert became the highest-ranking elected official in U.S. history to serve a prison sentence.”

New York Times: Dennis Hastert, powerful politician disgraced by child sex scandal, dies.

Justice Department Reviews If Nixon Got a Raw Deal

· Leave a Comment

“For nearly two years, the Justice Department has made it a priority to investigate people who previously investigated President Trump. Now it is reaching back in history to consider whether prosecutors mistreated an earlier Republican president: Richard Nixon,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.”

The Lost Descendants of Thomas Jefferson

· Leave a Comment

New Yorker: “America’s longest-running paternity dispute has seemingly come to an end: Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, his enslaved chambermaid, and the Smithsonian has the DNA to prove it.”

“Richard Kurin, a fifty-year veteran of the institution, launched a top-secret study of the question in 2011. Starting with a few hair samples, he and a team of scientists sequenced Jefferson’s genome and compared it with those of Hemings’s descendants, after a sprawling effort that involved everything from compiling genealogies to scouring rural Virginia for a lost grave.”

Trump Revives Willie Horton Campaign Ad

· Leave a Comment

“As President Donald Trump tries to convince voters that Democrats have let crime run amok, he’s digging into the country’s political past to reference one of the most controversial campaign advertisements that relied heavily on racist tropes,” the Associated Press reports.

“During a campaign stop Wednesday in Gastonia, North Carolina, to stump for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley, Trump resurrected a 1988 George H.W. Bush presidential campaign ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of rape and assault after his release through a Massachusetts prison furlough program.”

“A grainy black-and-white prison photo of Horton was used in the ad targeting then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was ahead of Bush in the polls. On Wednesday, Trump evoked the Horton ad in an effort to convince voters Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper, Whatley’s opponent in the Senate race, is soft on crime.”

Bonus Quote of the Day

· Leave a Comment

“I’m interested in politics, but I don’t think it’s helpful for the country to have a former President criticize successors. It’s a hard job to begin with, and I really don’t think it helps to make it any harder.”

— Former President George W. Bush, quoted by the New Yorker, on why he’s stayed mostly silent during the Trump years.

Bush is following his father’s playbook, who refused to attack Bill Clinton despite losing to him in 1992.
Taegan

How 9/11 Sowed the Seeds of America’s Deep Division

· Leave a Comment

“When terrorists attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, they provoked a response that, seen from today’s perspective, seems remarkable: The country immediately united across every political and ideological divide,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Within three days, the House and the Senate approved by a combined vote of 518 to 1 a sweeping measure endorsing the use of force against anyone deemed responsible for the attacks. In a Wall Street Journal poll taken at the time, 82% said they approved of the job being done by President George W. Bush, who hadn’t even won the popular vote in the election that brought him to office just months earlier. Almost three-quarters of Americans said that despite the attacks—or maybe because of the united response to them—the country was on the right track. In many ways, America was at its best.”

“Alas, that 9/11 unity didn’t last.”

“As it turned out, the events of that day also sowed the seeds for much of the discord and disillusionment that have plagued the American political system in the quarter-century since.”

Trump Scrubs Language Critical of Confederacy

· Leave a Comment

“The Trump administration has removed language criticizing a memorial to the Confederacy formerly located in Arlington National Cemetery, part of its ongoing effort to reshape portrayals of the Civil War,” the Washington Post reports.

“The Confederate Memorial, a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914, was removed from the military cemetery in 2023. Its removal followed a congressional mandate to rid U.S. military property of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy and its leaders.”

Gloria Steinem Is Dead

· Leave a Comment

“Gloria Steinem, a pioneering women’s rights activist, has died at age 92,” MS NOW reports.

New York Times: “Calling herself ‘an entrepreneur of social change,’ Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.”

“For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.”

How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History

· Leave a Comment

“In early 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly of a heart attack on a Texas ranch, sending his Supreme Court colleagues into a period of grief and uncertainty. Behind closed doors, they had to contend with another piece of unsettling news,” the New York Times reports.

“Justice Scalia, the leading light of the conservative legal movement, had left no plans for his working papers, according to five people aware of the situation. For a Supreme Court justice, this was the equivalent of dying without a will. With no instructions for creating an archive or opening it to the public, the definitive inside account of his work — and the court’s — could be lost or emerge with uncomfortable speed.”

“So following his death, his colleagues entered into private negotiations to try to head off any such situation in the future.”

Park Service Objects to Trump’s 250-Foot Arch

· Leave a Comment

“President Trump’s proposed 250-foot-tall triumphal arch would change the skyline of Washington to such an extent that it would intrude on views at dozens of historic sites around the capital, according to an assessment by National Park Service staff,” the New York Times reports.

“The assessment of the arch’s impact on surrounding historic properties is a key step the administration must complete before the project can receive final approval by the National Capital Planning Commission, which could come as soon as its next meeting on Sept. 3.”

Leon Panetta Warns of ‘Unwinnable’ Fight with Iran

· Leave a Comment

“Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that the U.S. is ‘locked into an unwinnable war’ with Iran, arguing the conflict risks becoming another prolonged military engagement with no clear end,” The Hill reports.

Said Panetta: “That’s the kind of legacy, frankly, that in the 21st century the United States continues to make. Whether it was Iraq, whether it was Afghanistan, or whether it’s Iran, we are finding ourselves in unwinnable wars that ultimately consume the United States, hurt our economy, and most importantly, I think, make us look weak to the rest of the world.”

Why Are Young Conservatives Posting About Nixon?

· Leave a Comment

Wall Street Journal: “More than half-a-century after Watergate, conservative youth are discovering the aesthetic, and adopting the attitude, of the late Richard Nixon.”

“It’s a vibe. Videos that feature archival footage of the famously square 37th president over rap music from artists such as Drake and Biggie Smalls are going viral on Instagram and YouTube. Influencers sport ball caps, crew necks and fanny packs emblazoned with messages such as ‘Pretty Girls for Nixon’ and ‘Nixon Now More Than Ever.’ Hats stamped with ‘Nixonmaxxing’ sold out in a matter of hours earlier this year.”

Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.

More about Taegan Goddard →