IN TEXAS, DEMOCRATS DIDN'T VOTE FOR THE CRAZIEST S.O.B. (D.O.B.) IN THE RACE

You know about the big headline from Texas last night: Not only did highly corrupt extremist and Donald Trump endorsee Ken Paxton beat incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary runoff, he trounced Cornyn, winning by a 64%-36% margin. Paxton appears to have won all but 2 of Texas's 254 counties.

And that's not the only Texas race in which extremism seems to have prevailed. Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo reports:

The Republican primary runoff ran for the open Texas Railroad Commissioner position was too close to call as of Wednesday morning, with extremist candidate Bo French leading the incumbent by less than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press’ unofficial tally of returns....

French waged an eye-popping campaign for the seat on a platform that had little to do with the actual work of the office, supporting the deportation of 100 million people and railing against what he described as the “Islamification” of Texas.

As Kovensky previously reported, French

largely campaigned on culture war intangibles, like cleansing Texas’ oil sector of Islam, fighting DEI, and deporting 100 million people. While chair of the Tarrant County GOP last year, French earned condemnation from fellow Texas Republicans for posting a poll that asked whether Jews or Muslims posed a greater threat to the United States....

He’s called Muslims “savages” and demanded their deportation; he’s said that Texas mosques are “training centers” for an “ideology” of people who “get to rape your wife and daughter.” ...

When the city of Corpus Christi began to run out of water this year, French pinned the blame on a nearby plastics factory, which is majority-owned by the Saudi government. French played that up. In a recent runoff campaign ad, French attacked Wright, accusing his opponent of selling the city’s water to a “Muslim foreign government” and claiming a Delaware court had caught the plastics company trying to “enact Sharia law in America.”

“Do you really want a commissioner who would sell out his own neighbors to a Muslim government? I don’t,” he concluded.

A couple of days ago, I quoted a 2017 observation by Thomas Massie, the libertarian Kentucky congressman who's now a lame duck because he crossed Trump. Massie talked about voters who backed Trump in 2016 after previously supporting him and fellow libertarians Ron and Rand Paul.

"All this time," Massie explained, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."

In yesterday's runoff, Texas Republicans voted for the craziest son of a bitch for both U.S. senator and (apparently) railroad commissioner.

You know who didn't vote for the craziest son of a bitch -- or, rather, daughter of a bitch -- in yesterday runoff? Democratic voters in Texas's 35th congressional district.

Progressive sex therapist Maureen Galindo lost the Democratic runoff for Texas’ 35th District after being accused of antisemitism and facing condemnations from within her own party.

Johnny Garcia’s victory over Galindo on Tuesday has national and Texas Democrats breathing a sigh of relief.

They had moved en masse to disavow Galindo after she said in a recent social media post that she would write legislation to turn a local ICE detention center into a “prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.”

The Instagram post on Galindo's campaign site didn't just call for the imprisonment of Zionists. It said they should be castrated.

Galindo lost the runoff 64%-36% after leading Garcia in the primary by 2 points.

Americans think both parties have an extremism problem. A Pew survey from last year found this:

61% say the phrase “too extreme in its positions” describes the Republican Party very or somewhat well; 57% describe the Democratic Party as too extreme.

But only one party is routinely defined as extreme. In a new Washington Post/ABC poll, respondents were asked to express in their own words what they don't like about the two major parties. For Democrats, the top answer (at 12%) was summarized in the poll as "Too liberal/socialism/race/gender/abortion/crime positions." For Republicans, the top answer was (also at 12%) was "Trump/Loyalty to Trump," while there's no all-encompassing ideological characterization of Republicans. "Lack of concern for ordinary people/cruelty" is at 6%, "Authoritarianism/disregard for rule of law/anti-democracy" and "Racist or anti-diversity politics " are at 4%, but extremism is not front of mind for most voters when they think about Republicans, and there seems to be no Republican equivalent of the W word for Democrats, as used by one survey respondent:

Too woke, focus on issues not central to Americans (economy and jobs).
— California woman, 50s, independent

And there's this:

Gone too far to the left, they are more in line with the communist and socialist parties.
— New York woman, 50s, independent

In reality, hardly any viable Democratic candidates are extreme in the way that Bo French and Ken Paxton are, and Democrats aren't accepting of unrepentant hatemongers, while Republicans increasingly embrace them. But the public still doesn't see that.

THAT CONSENT WON'T MANUFACTURE ITSELF

Paul Krugman struggles to understand the culture of flattery that surrounds President Trump:

On Memorial Day the New York Times published an article with the headline “Trump is the only person who can save America, according to his cabinet.” The article offered a quantitative analysis of senior-official sycophancy. As the article notes, Donald Trump likes to hold long, televised cabinet meetings. In these meetings, according to the Times,

On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

Yeah, you know:

And it continues this morning, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tells us that Trump is the only president who's ever worked the phones on a holiday weekend, and is the only president who can get other world leaders to talk to him over a holiday weekend that actually isn't a holiday weekend in their countries:

Burgum: "It's obviously President Trump two moves ahead of his critics as always. Nothing short of aspiration for peace in the Middle East. I mean, who on a Saturday afternoon over a holiday weekend can pull together all of the world leaders from the gulf state allies, get 'em all on a phone call?"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 26, 2026 at 7:44 AM

Obviously, Trump has an off-the-charts need for praise -- he might be the most emotionally needy person who has ever lived. But as Krugman notes, this exaltation of a Republican president is not unprecedented:

The truth is that the right wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush. Remember this?

And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.

Why do Republicans do this? Sure, Democrats sometimes respond to their political heroes as if they're rock stars: Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton in the 1990s. But it's more that we find them cool and like the job they're doing. At most, it's fandom, not worship. We don't exalt them. We don't imagine them as royalty, or as gods and goddesses.

I think two things are happening with the Republicans. First, they like traditional hierarchies: women subordinate to men, people subordinate to God. It feels natural for them to conclude that an especially favored president belongs near the top of the great chain of being, as a monarch or a god.

But it's also a way for them to manufacture consent for their party leaders' policies. When they tell us that one of their presidents is worthy of worship, they're trying to make us believe that everyone, or at least everyone normal, supports their leader and their party. They might never have fully succeeded in persuading the public that everyone loves Trump (except perhaps in red states), but they sustained Bush's popularity for years after his post-9/11 popularity spike, and they've created an aura around Reagan that persists after his death. (Even some liberal pundits recall him as a unifying president who was very different from the current crop of divisive GOP culture warriors. In reality, he was one of those divisive GOP culture warriors.)

As Bush's popularity faded, his handlers largely abandoned efforts to manufacture exaltation propaganda. By 2007 and 2008, you weren't very likely to see him positioned in such a way that his head would be framed by an apparent halo, as in a 2003 AP photo, or placed in front of Mount Rushmore, as in a photo from 2002.

With Trump, they're still doing it, even though most of America hates him now. (And unless he salvages the Iran surrender deal soon, I guess most of America will continue to hate him.) I suppose it keeps the base on board, so it's not an entirely wasted exercise for the GOP. And if Trump dies in office, it's groundwork for posthumous sanctification efforts of the kind we saw in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's death.

If Trump dies soon, I don't think the general public will respond the way Republicans hope. But the base will never stray. Trump will never be Richard Nixon, a president nearly everyone now agrees was justifiably driven from office. We'll never have universal agreement on Trump's awfulness.

DON'T BE SO SURE THAT TRUMP'S IRAN SURRENDER WILL BE A LOSS FOR HIM

In The Atlantic, David Frum declares that President Trump lost his war with Iran, and lists the reasons why. One reason, Frum writes, is this:

Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.

This got me thinking: Did Trump really fail on January 6?

I don't know what Trump's plan was, but at minimum it was to save face. Trump wanted to be perceived as someone who went down fighting (even though he left the fighting to his followers, the way the owner of a resort might ask the help to tidy up the rose bushes). In that sense, he got what he wanted.

But I think it can be argued that January 6 was a success for Trump -- just not right away. During the "stop the steal" period after the 2020 election, Trump turned an electoral defeat into a Lost Cause. He persuaded millions of Americans that he was the legitimate winner. Then he dodged accountability -- he wasn't arrested, he wasn't convicted after impeachment, and he wasn't successfully prosecuted. Many of his followers went to prison, but he succeeded in making them martyrs -- martyrs whom ordinary Trump admirers found relatable. In the primaries, it's quite possible that he beat Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and other challengers precisely because of January 6 and "stop the steal." What Republican base voters want most of all is to own the libs. Even a vote for DeSantis, a tireless culture warrior, didn't seem as lib-owning as a vote for Trump, who had persuaded the base that the libs stole the presidency from him.

In the way that historians such as Heather Cox Richardson argue that the South ultimately won the Civil War, I think we can argue that Trump won January 6, even if it took four years for him to collect his winnings.

If fall arrives and Trump's Iran surrender has lowered gas prices to an approximation of where they were before the war, while he's persuading gullible rubes that he saved America from an imminent Iranian nuclear attack, then he might ultimately win this time, too. Maybe the outcome would change if Democrats were willing to compare and contrast Trump's deal with the nuclear deal negotiated during Barack Obama's presidency, which cost America nothing in blood and treasure -- but apart from Obama himself, Democrats have never been willing to defend that deal, much less boast about it.

So at the very least, I think Trump will emerge from this debacle in better shape than he's been for the past three months.

TRUMP'S PLAN TO SALVAGE THE MIDTERMS: SURRENDER

In the latest New York Times roundtable, Michelle Cottle says that President Trump doesn't seem to be doing anything to improve his party's standing ahead of the midterms:

... as best I can see, Trump doesn’t even really seem motivated to focus on things that could turn it around. I mean, he’s doing his ballroom and his arch and the Reflecting Pool and his war, and maybe he’s going to invade Cuba, and he’s making statements about how he doesn’t care about Americans’ affordability crisis

What am I missing? What do you guys see that he is aggressively investing in, that suggests he gives two figs about turning this around? Besides rigging the game, of course....

Jamelle Bouie replies:

I don’t think there’s any evidence that this even crosses his mind.

Bouie cites Trump's belief in the Power of Positive Thinking, as well as information flow in the White House, which is designed to feed Trump only good news.

But as the midterms approach, it's clear that Trump does care about the opinions of people who don't like him. So he has a plan to make Republicans' more popular by November:

Surrender in Iran.

On Thursday, Robert Kagan wrote this in The Atlantic:

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis....

In 30 days ... the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.

Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin.... By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat.

And now...

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— George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 (@gtconway.bsky.social) May 23, 2026 at 8:37 PM

Iran was supposed to be scared into submission by Trump's bombing threats. Instead, Trump was scared into submission by this:

Jeff Currie, executive co-chairman at Abaxx Commodity Exchange, said that physical shortages [of oil] could hit Europe “any day now,” and the severity of the ongoing supply crunch is not yet reflected in oil prices....

Speaking with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” ... Currie said that oil supply concerns will intensify as inventories are depleted, adding that once the shortages hit, prices will go “non-linear.”

Currie said the oil market is currently in the midst of its “shoulder months” — traditionally the weakest part of the commodity demand cycle throughout the year, coming out of the heating season and heading into the driving season.

But, with the U.S. Memorial Day and U.K.’s spring bank holidays approaching, demand for diesel, gasoline and oil will rise sharply. “That’s when you’re going to begin to feel it,” Currie said.

Trump is trying to avoid an imminent spike in the global price of oil, and thus for a tank of gas in the U.S. And he appears to have grasped the fact that he needs to act now in order to rein in gas prices before voting starts in the midterms:

SocGen analysts said that even if the Strait [of Hormuz] were to reopen by early June, the complex physical supply chain sequence of getting more oil online — involving tanker transit, discharge, refining and distribution — still means a delay of at least 52 days....

A late June reopening, meanwhile, would bring “deeper and more prolonged stress”, with physical relief pushed back into late August and meaningful normalization not expected until September, according to SocGen.

But an even lengthier delay to reopening could see oil prices pushed toward $150 per barrel and staying elevated for the rest of the year.

So Trump will surrender, and Trump will declare victory, adding this to the absurd list of wars he claims he's ended as president. (He'll say he ended a 47-year war.) At least 30% of Americans will believe whatever he says.

And then it's on to Cuba. Americans oppose the upcoming Cuba war by a 64%-15% margin, but it will undoubtedly be less of a clusterfuck than the Iran war. It's quite possible that it will look like a victory. It won't improve ordinary Americans' lives, but it may serve as a moderately successful distraction if it doesn't make their lives worse.

If all this works, Trump will at least have stopped the bleeding for the GOP. But there's still time for the deal to come apart, and there's a great likelihood that Trump will do something else that's wildly unpopular between now and the fall.

THE FUTURE LEADER OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS KEN PAXTON, OR AT LEAST SOMEONE LIKE HIM

Yesterday I tried to answer a question raised by Jamelle Bouie in a video essay:

And so what does the Republican Party do when Trump is gone, when there is now a vacuum? I don't really have an answer to that. I'm mostly curious to see. But that, I think, is the dilemma the Republican Party will face. It doesn't have an identity outside of Trump, and it won't be in a position to even find one until Trump is gone.

I said that the party will organize itself around cultural (specifically, culture war) issues. But who'll lead the party?

For all we know, it could be Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general who's likely to become the GOP's Senate nominee now that he's secured Donald Trump's endorsement. It's likely to be someone who's very much like Paxton, though probably less enmeshed in scandal.

I've just read Elaine Godfrey's new story about Paxton in The Atlantic. Godfrey finds it baffling that Paxton has survived as long as he has in Texas politics, and finds it baffling that Trump would endorse him over the quite conservative incumbent, John Cornyn. Paxton has a closet full of skeletons -- mortgage fraud, securities fraud, multiple infidelities. He was impeached and nearly convicted in a Republican-dominated Texas legislature.

And surely he'll be much easier for the Democratic Senate candidate, James Talarico, to beat, right? All the smart people seem to think so, Godfrey tells us.

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988.

Godfrey thinks Paxton's supporters are delusional.

At least for now, [Paxton supporters] seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns.... “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me ... when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity.... [Supporters] don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

There's just one problem with this: the polls tell us that these "alternate reality" voters are right. Paxton's past doesn't seem to be a handicap in Texas -- in fact, his numbers and Cornyn's are nearly identical in head-to-head matchups with Talarico.

Why wouldn't years of scandals be hurting Paxton in Texas? Because he never stops trying to own the libs. Godfrey writes:

As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms....

Culture war. Always culture war.

Godfrey doesn't really seem to understand this. She writes:

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me.

But the "dynamics of his party" aren't changing -- owning the libs is always in favor. Paxton hasn't "ignored electability as a concern." Boastfully attacking the libs is the source of electability.

This seems like a good place to bring up a 2017 quote from Thomas Massie, the GOP congressman from Kentucky who just lost his primary after challenging Trump on a few issues. Massie regards himself as a libertarian in the mold of Ron and Rand Paul, and recognizes that Trump is not a libertarian. In 2017, after Trump had been sworn in as president, Massie said this to the Washington Examiner:

"I went to Iowa twice and came back with [Ron Paul]. I was with him at every event for the last three days in Iowa," Massie said. "From what I observed, not just in Iowa but also in Kentucky, up close with individuals, was that the people that voted for me in Kentucky, and the people who had voted for [Ron] Paul in Iowa several years before, were now voting for Trump. In fact, the people that voted for Rand in a primary in Kentucky were preferring Trump."

"All this time," Massie explained, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."

Ken Paxton survives scandals because he's always the craziest son of a bitch in the race. "Craziest," in his case, means least self-examining and most lib-owning.

I don't believe every Republican voter prefers the craziest son of a bitch in every instance -- Cornyn did, after all, poll slightly ahead of Paxton in the March 3 primary, though not decisively enough to avoid a runoff. And we know from national politics that many pollsters divide GOP voters into "MAGA" and "non-MAGA." Trump's support among non-MAGA voters is eroding.

But in a typical red-state election, zealots pick the craziest son of a bitch in the race and then less extreme Republican voters rally around that candidate because, gosh, you can't expect them to vote for a Democrat, can you? In red states -- including Texas until maybe, just maybe, this year -- that's all a Republican candidate has needed in recent years: supporters of the crazy SOB plus anyone-but-the-Democrat voters. In purple states, and also nationally, you need more, which is why Trump had to add a few non-white men and young bros to his coalition in 2024.

If the Democratic Party has a future, it will come from persuading some of the moderate-ish voters who don't prefer the crazy SOB that the Republican Party is bad and they should at least consider the Democrat once in a while. But I fear that Democrats will never grasp the need to do this, so the GOP will continue to be the party of crazy SOBs, who'll fire up the base and win the less-crazy GOP leaners, and maybe flip just enough swing voters to win nationwide.

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE NASCAR

At the end of his most recent video, which is about Donald Trump's dwindling popularity and cult of personality, Jamelle Bouie says:

What makes a Republican now is whether or not you align with Donald Trump, whether you support his efforts to make himself something like king of America. If you do, then you're a Republican. If you don't, then you're not. And so what does the Republican Party do when Trump is gone, when there is now a vacuum? I don't really have an answer to that. I'm mostly curious to see. But that, I think, is the dilemma the Republican Party will face. It doesn't have an identity outside of Trump, and it won't be in a position to even find one until Trump is gone. Until then, it is his party as long as he wants it.

Bouie is right about Trump's status as the undisputed leader of the GOP -- a status he probably won't relinquish as long as he lives. But I don't agree that the party has no identity independent of Trump. It has a cultural identity -- or, perhaps, a culture-war identity. That predates Trump, and will persist once he's gone.

I screenshotted the front page of FoxNews.com late this morning. It hinted at a severe case of Trump fatigue in Murdochistan. The front page barely focused on politics. Here's the top of the page:

Lead story: A NASCAR driver who recently died at the age of 41. Lower right: A hero bystander prevents a crazed criminal from attacking a helpless woman. To the left of that: A celebrity exposes some flesh in a photo; readers are invited to gawk, and decide whether the celebrity is too thin. Next to this apolitical supermarket-checkout gossip is the lone story about Trump at the top of the page, and the clickbait headline conceals the fact that the "yearly vice" our manly hero is fighting is daylight saving time.

Further down the page, there's surprisingly little political ragebait, or even pro-GOP propaganda. Some is just booga-booga crime news: A town in New Jersey deploys law enforcement against "teen takeovers." Some is cultural: The founder of the "anti-woke" Black Rifle Coffee company drops a country music video in honor of veterans; a pro wrestler declares victory after a fight; a hero cop catches a baby dropped from the window of a building that's on fire.

And, of course, there's fraud in blue America and there are trans people who want to play sports. The mayor of New York exists and must be the subject of negative coverage.

But it's the cultural coverage that hints at the GOP's future when Trump is gone.

This coverage is all about aspects of American life that Republican base voters believe are their property: NASCAR, pro wrestling, the military, crimefighting. It envisions a world where cops are always good and crime is always lurking. Democrats are socialist, trans, and generally weird. Republicans are the guarantors of good old-fashioned normality.

As I said last month, Republicans in the post-Trump era could be like Republicans in 1988: a party trying to carry on in the absence of a twice-elected leader who is worshipped by the base. Before the George H.W. Bush campaign found the secret to defeating Mike Dukakis (racist scare ads about Black criminals), Bush played the GOP culture card. He talked about enjoying pork rinds. He campaigned with country music legend Loretta Lynn (who said of Dukakis, "Why, I can't even pronounce his name!"). He toured a flag factory (at a time when his campaign was floating rumors that Dukakis's wife, in her youth, had burned an American flag).

Republicans don't really care about the needs of NASCAR fans who eat pork rinds. But it's effective branding, and it will keep the GOP going once Trump is gone.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A PLATONIC HONEY TRAP? ASKING FOR A PENNSYLVANIA SENATOR.

A New York magazine story published this morning tells us about David "Dovi" Safier, a Long Island-born resident of East Jersusalem who has become a near-constant companion to Senator John Fetterman, despite the fact that he has no official position that would explain his close access to the senator.

Safier, a writer of Jewish history and fundraiser for Orthodox causes, has no public background in government or counseling politicians on Capitol Hill. He is not an official staffer or paid outside adviser. A few years ago, he “just kind of appeared” in the senator’s orbit, one former Fetterman staffer remembers. And then, suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere. Staffers would walk into Fetterman’s office, only to find Safier sitting in the room. When the senator went to Israel in 2025, Safier joined him on the trip; when Fetterman filmed Real Time With Bill Maher, Safier met up with him in Los Angeles. The two are constantly texting and talking, according to multiple former Fetterman staffers, and Safier has unofficially operated as a top campaign fundraiser and senior adviser. He has even set up and attended sensitive meetings with foreign officials; in some cases, he is the only person staffing those meetings, I’ve been told.

Fetterman, of course, is now the Democratic senator who is most uncompromisingly pro-Israel.

Safier met Fetterman in 2023 and "worked his way into the senator’s inner circle." He befriended Fetterman and later arranged a four-day trip to Israel, during which he traveled with Fetterman. He regularly appears in Fetterman's office.

When he is on Capitol Hill, Safier will “hang out and sit in Fetterman’s office all day or walk with him to the floor,” a former staffer says. After their conversations, Fetterman would appear “far more radicalized,” the former staffer remembers. The chatter around the office is usually: “Oh God, Safier is here, and now John’s not gonna go to any of his meetings.”

We're told that Safier has become Fetterman's best bud at a time when he otherwise seems socially withdrawn:

The senator has isolated himself from many of his Senate colleagues and members of his own party. There are few who Fetterman seems to trust beyond his dad and brother, who are conservative; Bobby Maggio, his 2022 campaign manager; and now Safier, who has become arguably the senator’s closest confidant.

But a recent Politico story about a possible Fetterman party switch tells us that Fetterman has some friends in the Senate -- two Republican senators and their spouses -- although he seems isolated otherwise:

If Fetterman does flip, according to officials who were given anonymity to talk about sensitive matters, it will be thanks in large part to his deepening friendship with a pair of senators and their high-profile spouses: Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and his wife Dina, and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), and her husband, Wesley....

As he’s drifted from the party line, Fetterman has become increasingly isolated ... those who previously worked for him say he spends much of his time on social media....

The former aides and Pennsylvania Democrats say he rarely participates in the unglamorous work of a senator: showing up for ribbon-cuttings around his home state or racing between committee hearings in Washington.... He has a cool relationship with Gov. Josh Shapiro and barely interacts with the state’s Democratic congressional delegation.

He does, though, spend considerable time with Republicans, particularly the affable Britts and McCormicks, who’ve all but adopted Fetterman and his wife, Gisele.

These sound as if they might be genuine friendships. On the other hand, President Trump and Senator Majority Leader John Thune would love to flip Fetterman. We're told that Thune has good relations with Fetterman, but he "has largely let Britt and McCormick handle the Keystone account."

Safier and the McCormicks and Britts might be true friends, but they're also manipulating Fetterman for political reasons. And it seems easy for them to do that because Fetterman is not in a healthy state of mind.

It's not just the stroke Fetterman suffered while campaigning in 2022. As a 2025 New York magazine story noted, in early 2023, shortly after he was sworn in as a senator, Fetterman had six weeks of inpatient care for clinical depression. Subsequently, he appeared to stop following his treatment plan.

... by mid-March [2024], his aides were again worried that he hadn’t been getting regular checkups. No one I spoke to for this article could be sure about whether Fetterman stayed on his medication during this period, but five different people said they heard comments from the senator that suggested he was not.... Two aides told me they frequently heard him talk about how he felt so great that he didn’t “need” medication. One person told me Fetterman said he “didn’t like the way” his medication “made” him feel — made, past tense.

He alienates people:

One staffer told me there would be entire days when they couldn’t let anyone outside the office be around him because he was in “some sort of state” and might say “really fucked-up shit to constituents.” Sometimes he would just “shut down,” according to one former staffer. He was saying “unhinged shit,” according to one text, and spending more time on social media. [Eric] Stern [a Fetterman consultant] wrote to the group that it seemed to him like Fetterman was “spiraling” and that his constant “doomscrolling” — “I think he’s on essentially all day now?” — would only make things worse.

Many men are in a very bad place right now. They have trouble maintaining personal relationships and lose themselves on the internet. Some of this is the culture; some is their own damn fault. I think Fetterman is an unhappy, unwell man -- if there's a male loneliness epidemic, he has a bad case. It's compounded by his medical history, his discomfort with his treatment plan, and possibly the fact that he's in a commuter marriage, and doing a job he seems to hate. It also seems to be compounded by the fact that he likes alienating people.

We all know about "honey trapping" -- "the use of romantic or sexual relationships for interpersonal, political (including state espionage), or monetary purpose." David Safier's friendship with Fetterman seems like a platonic honey trap -- Safier became Fetterman's friend in order to encourage him to be more and more pro-Israel. The McCormicks and Britts also seem as if they're honey trapping Fetterman on behalf of the GOP. I'm sorry Fetterman is a senator. Because of his difficulties with people, he seems extremely vulnerable to this, and thus far too easy to influence.