AlterNet

Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, of Illinois, destroyed President Donald Trump for trying to take credit after other people repair his chaos. “We all knew people like this,” said Walsh on his Friday podcast. “We all knew parents like this. We all knew kids like this. … Parents who would never say ‘no’ to their kid, would never discipline their kid, would never teach their kid. And these kids were just out of f—— control, breaking s——, making messes, can stay up all night. That's what Trump is.

MAGA has made a deal with Donald Trump, and the deal is that “the humiliation is the point,” argues Republican former U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger.

The Trump regime has an “erratic” and “theologically incomprehensible” preferred religion, a “bellicose, nationalist Christianity,” that is organized along various “fiefdoms,” argues Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo.

There are always unanswered questions heading into any election. But usually those questions are more along the lines of “who’s going to win?” and less “will the federal government interfere with the election?” This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

This is not the classic kind of confrontation that Trump has often had with foreign heads of state and government in the past, such as in recent months with the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, whose refusal to fully back the US and Israel in their war against Iran attracted Trump’s ire.

Conservative court watcher Sarah Isgur tells the New York Times that Trump has made a lot of noise but accomplished very little long term in his second term. There’s very little that Donald Trump has done — in fact, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that is wholly unique,” Isgur said on the Times’ “Interesting Times” podcast.

Trump advisers are privately telling Zeto editor Asawin Suebseng that they’re worried President Donald Trump’s liberal use of pardons for allies and financial contributors may not be enough to save then when Democrats nab either one or both houses in November. They “tell me they’ve recommended to the president and other top Republicans that they should try to get creative in concocting ways to preempt lawsuits, or state and local prosecutions of Trump’s staff,” wrote Suebseng.

Republicans are getting worn down by the expectation of serious losses in November, says former Republican strategist Rick Wilson. “The mood from Republicans that I've talked to in the last few weeks is funereal,” said Wilson, a Lincoln Project co-founder who worked for the George H.W. Bush's campaign. “Behind [House Speaker] Mike Johnson's bluster they're running the on a message strategy. But behind that bluster, their rank-and-file members are desperate for Trump to shut up.

The coalition that united to put Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024 is “kaput,” and with a president polling even worse than at this point in his first term, the November midterms are threatening to be “brutal” for Republicans, argue Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic. “A shocking number of the president’s supporters have turned against him,” the columnists write.

As Prime Minister of Hungary for 16 years, Viktor Orbán became a beacon for the right and one of President Donald Trump’s favorite authoritarian role models. A self-described populist, Orbán’s conquest of democracy’s three pillars—the media, institutions of higher education, and the justice system—became Trump’s template. Another Orbán characteristic attracted Trump: His regime consistently ranked No. 1 as the most corrupt country in the European Union.