JAMELLE BOUIE'S INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP IN AMERICA

I always knew that Donald Trump's second term would be bizarre and horrible, but "Trump will try to pull a Vincenzo Pentangeli on the Supreme Court" was a possibility I hadn't imagined:

President Donald Trump plans to sit in on Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court.

Trump is there to glower at the Supremes in the hopes of intimidating them so they won't rule against him on this, the way Vincenzo Pentangeli was brought in from Sicily to intimidate his brother Frank when Frank was a cooperating congressional witness against crime boss Michael Corleone. This is a classic scene from The Godfather Part II, the sequel to one of Trump's five favorite movies. Frank recants, and later commits suicide.

Trump is having the time of his life these days -- the wars! the ballroom! the library! -- but his 2020 election loss is the wound that won't heal. And while the executive order, if allowed to take effect, won't denaturalize anyone retroactively -- the order itself says it "shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order" -- a victory for Trump will apparently soothe his tender ego, because it will suggest to him that he lost in 2020 only because people who shouldn't have been allowed to vote voted against him, never mind the fact that they were citizens and were legally entitled to vote. (I don't think we have any hard evidence that the election was decided by the votes of undocumented immigrants' children. I doubt that it was.)

I don't think Trump's intimidation is necessary. Immediately after the executive order was issued, I said that I expected the Supreme Court to uphold it. I still believe that. It's possible that the Court will rule that the children of undocumented immigrants aren't citizens, but rule against Trump's attempt to deny citizenship to the children of parents whose presence in America is "lawful but temporary." Nevertheless, I think he'll get a win, and his Godfather act is unnecessary.

*****

Jamelle Bouie's column today is about the birthright citizenship case. It's mostly a review of the history of birthright citizenship in America since the ratification of the 14th Amendment. At the end, Bouie speculates on the Supreme Court's response to the case:

... if the Supreme Court decides in favor of Trump, it will have less to do with law or history than the political power of the president and his movement.

... The revisionist case rests less on new evidence than it does on Trump’s claim to embody the nation and its desires. If he is ascendant, then the people must want a closed, cloistered society.

Prior to publishing the column, Bouie expressed this idea somewhat more clearly in a video:



Bouie says (at 8:23):

This case is about politics, and it's about power. It's, I think, about whether the justices believe that Trump is some kind of avatar of the American people, that Trump does represent some essence of the United States, and that his commands, his wills, his decrees, ought to be written into the Constitution as a kind of sovereign act.

If the Court has that view -- which will never be said explicitly, but I think is sort of implicit in the way that it's treated Trump, and the way that it's treated his claims to executive authority -- then he wins on this. If the Court has at least a little fidelity to the text of the Constitution, then I don't think he does.

And all of this is why it is important to engage in active political contestation of this administration, including mass protests. Mass protests show that the public is not with Trump, that his claims to representing or embodying the public are bunk, are nonsense, and that the Court should probably think twice before it goes and allows him to invalidate a critical piece of our constitutional heritage.

I don't think the Court's Republicans will decide this on the basis of "is Trump popular?" I think they'll decide this the way they decide most cases:

* Is this good for right-wing billionaires?
* Is this good for the electoral prospects of the Republican Party -- or, as in the Dobbs decision, does this help achieve a key goal of one or more Republican interest groups?

Bouie does a fairly thorough job of recounting the history of birthright citizenship since Reconstruction, but he skips over the early 21st century, the pre-Trump era when the George W. Bush administration fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue cases involving (nearly non-existent) voter fraud, and when Fox News and other right-wing media sources darkly insinuated that Democrats commit electoral fraud at every opportunity. Election "experts" such as Hans von Spakovsky -- coauthor of books such as Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (2012) -- made frequent appearances in the right-wing press.

Von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation fellow, published a Fox News opinion piece in 2011 titled "Birthright Citizenship -- A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment." In it, he wrote:

The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.

Bouie thinks the meaning of that phrase is incontestable -- to him, to most legal scholars, and to all federal courts since 1898, it refers to "everyone except the children of most Native tribes, the children of ambassadors and any children produced on territory captured by an invading army." But the Heritage/Murdoch right has been contesting it for many years now.

In his column, Bouie lists a number of right-leaning legal scholars who once said the Constitution was clear on birthright citizenship and now aren't so sure:

[Ilan] Wurman, who argued previously that his originalism compelled the traditional reading of the birthright clause, said after the executive order was issued that the meaning of birthright citizenship was less settled than the consensus supposed. The president, he suggested, might be right.

Randy Barnett, a conservative scholar whose previous work on the 14th Amendment emphasized the monumental influence of abolitionists on the birthright clause, also agreed that there was more to the question than traditionally understood, despite coauthoring a book that never challenged the consensus view.

Yet another conservative scholar, Kurt Lash — whose 2021 essay on the subject affirmed the traditional reading and whose edited volume on the Reconstruction amendments contains hundreds of pages of primary sources, not one of which questions it — also made an apparent about-face to insist that there was something to the president’s executive order.

Well, of course -- when those earlier works were published, some people still believed that the Republican Party might someday open its arms to law-abiding undocumented immigrants again, as some Republicans (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, John McCain) tried to do in the past. These scholars have now concluded that Trump is the one and only "avatar" and "essence" of the Republican Party, which is all that matters to them.

I assume it will be all that matters to the six Republicans on the Supreme Court.

HEGSETH IS SIGNALING VICE TO TRUMP AND VIRTUE TO THE BASE

In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols argues that prominent figures in the Trump White House, particularly the secretary of defense, are doing the opposite of virtue signaling.

The term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course....

But Donald Trump and his administration have embraced the Mirror Universe version of virtue signaling. They’ve pioneered the practice of “vice signaling,” or saying insulting or odious things both as attention-seeking behavior and as a way of showcasing their supposedly transgressive political views. They aim to demonstrate strength by being willing to appall other people....

For instance:

... Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ... has long stewed about the fact that women occupy positions of leadership in the U.S. military, and he has hammered on the idea of “merit” as a way of implying that minority officers have been promoted because of their race rather than their talent. He put those beliefs into action almost immediately upon arriving at the Pentagon by pushing for the firing of one Black and several female senior officers who were then replaced with white men.

A few weeks ago, he did it again: According to The New York Times, Hegseth intercepted the Army’s promotion list, which consists mostly of white men, and struck off four officers—two Black men and two women—preventing them from advancing from colonel to brigadier general.

But in Hegseth's curdled Fox News world, is that really vice signaling? Republican base voters believe that only one form of racism is immoral: discrimination against white people. They regard any effort to ensure that people other than whites are rewarded in life as unacceptable. They feel the same way about efforts to promote women in historically all-male areas of endeavor. So to the GOP base, Hegseth is exhibiting the highest morality.

Meanwhile, every time he steps to the podium, Hegseth ... raps out some inane sloganeering rather than offering real information: “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” He says that America will show “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies”—chesty, movie-villain talk....

Hegseth combines this piety with Bible-thumping:

Last week—during Lent, no less—he prayed in much the same way as the jihadists he hates might have: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said, asking God to give American forces “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

The base believes that right-wing Christians (and possibly right-wing Jews) are the only good people on the planet. Everyone else is an enemy -- Muslims in particular -- so it's virtuous to exterminate them. (Remember, these are the folks who keep proclaiming that empathy is sinful and un-Christian.)

But Hegseth's boss is no Christian. He believes that there's no morality -- there's only winning or losing. If you fight a war against an oil-producing state, you should just take the oil. If some recreational drugs are being transported on boats, you should bomb the boats, or boats that look like drug boats. If immigrants are in your country without authorization, it's fine to treat them as military enemies and lock them and their children in concentration camps with no due process, or ship them to a torture prison in El Salvador. Trump knows this is evil, but Trump likes evil. He likes being evil. He thinks virtue is for losers.

Trump thinks everybody operates on this principle, and survival depends on being more evil than the other guy. So Hegseth is virtue signaling to voters who have a sick notion of virtue, and vice signaling to Trump, who has a repulsive belief in the value of vice.

REPUBLICANS SCREW THE POOCH AND DEMOCRATS BEAT THEMSELVES UP

Because we have preposterously long presidential campaigns in America, I think it's understable that politicians who want to run for president in 2028 are already campaigning. But please note how a likely Republican candidate is beginning his campaign, and how several Democrats are doing the same thing. Note in particular that the Republican -- who's part of an administration that's failing in every conceivable way, and is massively unpopular as a result -- isn't engaging in self-reflection or self-doubt at all. The candidates who are sniping at their own party are the ones who didn't plunge us into a failed war of choice, aren't presiding over skyrocketing energy prices, aren't defending brutal secret-police tactics in America's streets, and aren't turning airport security into the lowest circle of Hell.

Here's an NBC News story showing us how J.D. Vance is preparing to run for president:

Second lady Usha Vance on Friday ... sat down with NBC News for a 30-minute interview in her new studio ahead of the launch of her podcast, “Storytime With the Second Lady,” which premieres Monday.

And what's the nature of this podcast?

“It’s a podcast that really is just for children. The notion is we will have someone come in — a special reader, we’re calling them — read a fun book, have a very short little conversation about things related to the book, maybe about their career, if they have some sort of interesting background,” Vance said. “And then invite children to pick up books on their own. It’s sort of just an advertisement for reading.”

Usha Vance is a Yale-educated lawyer, but they're positioning her as a tradwife, with three children -- and one on the way! As with most online tradwives, she'll create the illusion that she's focused exclusively on motherly duties, even though podcasting is actually a job. The plan is to make her a warm presence in the lives of voters, especially female voters. Even the labor of creating a podcast is portrayed as housewife-y:

The second lady said her children helped with the design and decor of her podcast studio, where she’ll record episodes of the show.

This is how you run for president as a Republican: Even if most of the country thinks you and your party are failing, you proceed as if millions of people really like you and like your party (which, sadly, is true), and you concentrate on trying to get more people to like you.

That's not how Democrats operate. Ambitious Democrats believe that the key to success is beating up on your own party, even at a moment when we're being ruled by the worst president in American history, a member of the opposition party. So here's Cory Booker:

Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, renewed his calls for new leadership of the Democratic party, saying the party has “failed this moment”.

“As a whole, our party has failed this moment,” Booker said on Sunday. “I’ve called for a generational renewal, because this left-right divide is killing our country and our adversaries know it.” He also said that “purity tests” within the party have led to more division in the US.

During an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Booker also said the Democratic party has “too small of a coalition”, especially as the party seeks to confront “new challenges”, including Trump administration policies and the expansion of artificial intelligence and technology.

Booker was critical of President Trump in that interview -- but at this moment, why should you beat up your own party, too? It's as if Booker has misunderstood the old James Carville line: When your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil. Booker seemingly wants to add: And jump in with one yourself. (To be fair, Carville these days is no better.)

Then we have Elissa Slotkin on Bill Maher's show a couple of days ago:

Elissa Slotkin: You're not going to get me to defend democratic messaging. We can have a whole autopsy about that.

Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, the American people want something different out of their government. Can we have a little bit more alpha energy? pic.twitter.com/h8li6EAbmq

— Blue Georgia (@BlueGeorgia) March 28, 2026

She begins:

You're not going to get me to defend Democratic messaging. That's not going to be ever something that I'm going to defend. That's part of the problem and why we lost the last election. We can have a whole autopsy about that.

I complain about Democratic messaging all the time, but I'm a blogger with a small readership. I'm not a U.S. senator on a nationally televised TV show. This is not the place to agree with Republicans about how much Democrats suck. It's not the place to be a pick-me -- Yes, my party is awful, but I'm not like the other Democrats.

The rest of this plays into throwback stereotypes of masculinity and femininity -- it's essentially saying that other Democrats are big fags and we need some Democrats who aren't:

I think, for me, what is important, going forward, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, is like: the American people, they're telling us something, they want something different out of their government. They want, they want some alpha energy from their leaders. And they certainly — whether you agree with them or not — are getting that from some of the Republicans. And my plea to my own party is, like, can we have a little bit more alpha energy? Punch and believe in what we believe in and show people that we give a shit, and be simple about addressing the needs that they care about the most. And that has been a struggle, and I'm here to be a part of that change.

It's not likely to work. When a woman says that prominent Democrats (who are mostly male) are effeminate, she's reinforcing an ugly idea on the right that Democratic men are effectively women and Democratic women are really men.

And Democrats don't need to do this. Sure, 1992 Bill Clinton and 2008 Barack Obama had bro appeal, but did anyone think they could kick a tough guy's ass? They weren't muscular and aggressive. They persuaded voters that they "give a shit ... about addressing the needs that they care about the most," but that's the opposite of "alpha energy," which is largely about not caring what anyone else wants or needs.

And then we have another pick-me, Rahm Emanuel:



Here's how the clip begins:

IAN BREMMER: If you look ahead to 2028 for a second, if you're the Democrats, what's the most likely way they blow it (Rahm and audience laughing)

RAHM EMANUEL: Being Democrats. (audience laughing and applauding)

Which is shorthand for Democrats are fixated on trans people, even though that isn't true, and even though trans rights weren't a salient issue in last year's gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, which Democrats won in blowouts.

EMANUEL: We spent two years communicating with people that we were worried about bathroom access and locker room access, and we never focused on classroom excellence.

In a Politico profile, Emanuel culturally stereotypes Democrats as if he's working with Greg Gutfeld's writers:

“I’m not into Democrats sitting on the 30th floor of a Manhattan highrise in their Lululemon outfit with their Yeti cup, talking about, ‘We should go to places that we don’t go’ and then never go,” Emanuel told me before embarking on this trip. “So I don’t talk about it, and I’m just gonna go.”

Dude, you are talking about it. (We're later treated to a scene of Emanuel on a factory floor. Apparently he thinks he's the only Democrat in the 21st century who's ever visited one.)

Stop doing this. Stop echoing Republican messaging about Democrats. Don't be Andy Beshear saying,

The Democratic Party at different times has talked at and not to people. It’s even talked down to people, which is wrong. Our words have to have meaning.

If you're pressed to denounce your party, ask whether your interviewer will demand that Vance or Marco Rubio denounce theirs.

It's Republicans who are losing winnable elections now. Reporters should ask them why their party is failing.

IN DEFENSE OF MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE RESISTERS, AND THE WORD "NORMIE"

A Bluesky thread posted in response to yesterday's No Kings rally is getting some attention. It begins:

I keep hearing this word normies. From what I can tell, a normie is a white American that is so self-absorbed and callous, that no amount of suffering or horror experienced by other people can cause them to inconvenience themselves in the slightest. They only act when they themselves feel discomfort

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:44 AM

And Black people can't be normies, apparently. Police violence that causes 20% of the Black population of a city to protest, cannot be described as "normies" protesting. Even if it's the first protest that most of those Black people have ever attended. We're not normal I guess.🤷🏿‍♂️

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:47 AM

I'm supposed to celebrate that even the normies are protesting now. I've heard this many times before. But what am I celebrating? That normies now care about other people? Because that hasn't happened yet. Or that the inconvenience has now reached the normies? Because that has happened before.

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:50 AM

And to be crystal clear, because I know at least a few people will misunderstand this: I'm not criticizing the No Kings protests. I think they're great! I don't tell people how not to fight fascism. Have fun with it! I'm asking folks to think about what they're really saying when they say normies.

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 7:55 AM

At the most basic level, we apply the word "normies" to white people because America is still a majority-white country -- 58% of the country is white.

And I think whites have the privilege of being apolitical if we choose, in a way that Americans of color don't. The system generally doesn't eye us with suspicion -- thus, it politicizes people of color in a way that it doesn't politicize us, especially if we're economically comfortable and heterosexual.

I understand why it would be appropriate to use the word "normie" to describe Black people who came out to protest in 2020 after leading apolitcal lives. But even so, the most normie normies will be white, purely on the basis of demographics.

Now I want to defend angry normie whites in the Trump era. I don't think it's correct to argue that we're incapable of responding to the pain of others.

The protesters are denouncing brutal treatment of immigrants that we aren't subject to. Those of us who are old are denouncing a war we won't be asked to fight in. We're denouncing a cover-up of sex crimes that didn't happen to us.

A mostly young cohort of protesters has been denouncing genocide in Gaza for years, even though it's happening thousands of miles away. Many of these protesters are white. Some are Jewish. Isn't this empathy?

Do whites fully understand what's happening? No. I've been to the "Say Their Names" memorial in Minneapolis's George Floyd Square and realized I only recognized a small portion of the names.

We memorialize Renee Good and Alex Pretti -- two normie whites who died because they weren't self-absorbed or callous -- but we don't know the names of others who've died in conforntations with ICE, or those who've died in federal immigration custody since Donald Trump was reinaugurated (the total is 46, according to a story just published by The New York Times).

We're trying. It's not pure self-interest. Maybe some demonstrators yesterday were motivated by high gas prices, but there were an estimated 350,000 in the streets of Manhattan, where most people don't even drive.

And there's nothing wrong with marching out of self-interest. There's nothing wrong with Black people taking to the streets to protest police brutality against Blacks. There's nothing wrong with young people denouncing a pointless war that they fear they might be conscripted to fight.

Ultimately, though, I agree with Okereke about this:

This hell ends, when 50% of the white people in the US, push in the same direction as 90% of the Black people in the US. This hell would never have started, if 50% of the white people in the US, had pushed in the same direction as 90% of the Black people in the US.

— Mekka Okereke (@mekka.mekka-tech.com) March 29, 2026 at 8:14 AM

Pew says 83% of Black voters chose Harris -- not quite 90%, but still an overwhelmingly high percentage (92% voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and 91% voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016). The white vote in 2024 was appalling: 55% Trump, 43% Harris. (That matched the 2020 white vote for Trump and Biden; in 2016, Hillary Clinton got only 39% of the white vote, while Trump got 54%.)

Democrats haven't won the white vote in a presidential election since 1964. It's the result of racism, plus many other hatreds layered on top of that (hippies and war protesters starting in the Nixon era, sexual minorities and feminists from then until now, plus "cultural elitists" and non-Christians). By now I think voting GOP is just a habit for many heartland whites. It seems like the default way to vote.

I say that because, over the years, whites expressed less open racial animus, less discomfort with gay people, and some support for undocumented immigrants (at least pre-Trump) and still kept voting GOP.

Okereke might argue that these whites tell pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, and I can't disprove that. But I think at least a certain percentage of white Republicans could be shaken out of their complacency. One argument would be pure self-interest: You say you're dissatisfied with the way things are going in America. Have you tried not voting for the same party that's in been in power where you live for decades? And maybe some of these whites can see that a party rallying around a president who's indifferent to their needs can see the party's callousness toward others. Or maybe I'm just too naive, and white complacency is an insurmountable obstacle. I hope yesterday was a sign that that's not true.

HERE'S WHY OLD TRUMP DOUBTERS WILL STAY LOYAL TO THE GOP AND YOUNG TRUMP DOUBTERS WON'T

On Thursday, former congressman and almost attorney general Matt Gaetz denounced the war in Iran in a speech at CPAC. Raw Story reports:

... although he didn't directly criticize Trump, Gaetz took issue with those backing the military strikes.

"I come from the wing of the Republican Party that is only loyal to one nation, and that is the United States of America," Gaetz said.

One sentence in Gaetz's speech really stands out. In this sentence, Gaetz attacks Israel without mentioning the country's name.

"And so while I may not agree with the likes of Mark Levin or Ben Shapiro or Mike Huckabee that we have some sort of near slavish loyalty to a country in a far away land, I would walk across hot coals arm in arm with those individuals to stop the Democrats turning America into a more transsexual version of Venezuela.”

Gaetz is attacking two Jewish Iran hawks and a Christian Zionist Iran hawk. Shots fired, as they used to say.

But notice something else here. Gaetz says he'll make common cause with these hawks to fight the real enemy -- Democrats. I suspect that this makes a lot of sense to older Republicans, even the ones who might not think the war is a good idea. That's because they started drinking the Fox/talk radio Kool-Aid a couple of decades ago and they're certain that no matter what they might think about Donald Trump's wars (or his tariffs or gas prices or any other disappointment they've felt in the past year), it's obvious to them that Democrats are worse. Democrats are evil! Democrats want them to tolerate the presence of un-American freaks and weirdos (trans people, Muslims, immigrants who aren't from European countries). Democrats want to take their guns and turn this country into a communist Sharia hellhole, for the sheer joy of making real Americans suffer.

That's what their favorite broadcasters have told them every hour of every day for many, many years. They believe it. They'll remain loyal Republicans no matter what Trump does, and no matter how deep a quagmire he's getting us into in Iran.

("A more transsexual version of Venezuela" is cleverly concise, in a malignant way. It's a bit like "acid, amnesty, and abortion," the catchphrase that was used against George McGovern in the 1972 reelection campaign of Richard Nixon -- a phrase that means "supportive of everything that repulses you.")

But the media diet of the young males who rallied to Trump in 2024 doesn't work the same way. Many bro podcasters and short-clip influencers are sexist, bigoted, and anti-"woke," but most of them didn't get the memo that Democrats are Enemy #1. Charlie Kirk knew that, and the Daily Wire podcasters know that, but other modern influencers don't. Some are actually willing to agree with Democratic or Democratic-affiliated politicians on liberal or progressive policy ideas.



Matt Gaetz is 43. He reads as a young man, but he's had a couple of decades to marinade in the Old Right media's anti-Democratic absolutism. Young 2024 Trump voters haven't. Gaetz won't get through to them. Hell, they might also like Zohran Mamdani. They want a better economy, a better job market, a better housing market, and an end to the fear that they might be drafted to die in World War III. They're still not sure who can deliver on that agenda, if anyone. They're not like the exurban and rural Boomers and Gen Xers who have homes and have (or have retired from) decent jobs, and who just want government to punish the people they hate. Most of them will turn up at the polls this November and vote GOP, because the GOP hates the people they hate.

Most of the young won't. Their indoctrination isn't sufficiently thorough.

SCHUMER SCORES A PARTIAL WIN, AND REPUBLICAN BASE VOTERS SEEM DEMORALIZED

It's not clear whether the House will agree, but the Senate has voted to end the impasse over DHS funding.

The Senate voted early Friday to fund the Department of Homeland Security except for its immigration enforcement and deportation operations, raising the prospect of an end to a weekslong partial shutdown that has strained federal workers and caused long waits at airports.

The measure does not include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Border Patrol, reflecting a proposal that Democrats had offered for weeks as they refused to fund federal immigration enforcement operations without adding new restrictions on agents.

I'm quoting from the New York Times story. The Times stresses what Democrats failed to achieve:

The measure that the Senate approved contains modest provisions that lawmakers had already agreed to in January, including money for body cameras for immigration enforcement officers.

But the legislation falls short of the restrictions that Democrats demanded after federal immigration officers killed two American citizens in Minneapolis in January. It does not include provisions barring ICE agents from wearing masks or requiring that they obtain judicial warrants to enter private homes.

And the deal does not reflect narrow concessions that the White House agreed to last week, including requirements that officers display visible identification and limits on immigration enforcement at “sensitive areas” like hospitals and schools.

Or you could say:

Unpopular opinion alert: Chuck Schumer deserves credit for keeping his caucus in line until Republicans folded.

[image or embed]

— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) March 27, 2026 at 7:26 AM

You know who agrees that Republicans were the losers here? A significant percentage of the people in right-wing comments sections. These Fox News commenters aren't happy:

The Republicans never do carry through with what they start, lifelong Republican here and I’m getting fed up with these pathetic excuses for republican Senators, the Democrats hold the Republicans feet to the fire and always Back the Republicans down

****

It appears Trump is a party of one , his fellow Republicans do not possess the testicular fortitude to lead or fight for American citizens , they always seem to quit rather than fight.

****

Lifetime Republican and Im old, first time I’ve ever said I’m embarrassed by Republican leadership. Absolutely spineless and gutless.

****

Well, once again Republicans cave. Democrats let all these criminals walk into our country, and now they are condemning the very people who can remove them? And republicans cave into their outrageous idiotic demands? We need republicans that have a backbone. That can get out there and tell the truth.

****

Cowards. That's how the republicans in office will be remembered. Cowards, who caved to democrat whining, gave them what they wanted and got nothing of value in return.

****

GOP caves again to the left…which is how the country was crippled in the first place. The president is the only republican with a spine

And in the comments to this Breitbart story:

Can you stop being useless for once and act like the majority in power party. Congress is one grifter after another. The things they care about passing are bills that pad their bank accounts.

****

Thune, McConnell, Tillis. Names that just make me sick.

****

RACO: RINOs always chicken out.

****

Primary out, and if not, then let them be defeated by the Dems. Lots of pain, but then vote in correct blood. I'm sorry, but this is the only way unless apathetic voters wake up

****

Thune hurts Trump more than Schumer.

****

Trump hurts Trump more than Schumer by continually supporting RINOs. John Thune should never have been the Majority Leader with Trump still singing Thune's praises. Get the damn Save Act Passed.

Republicans have a tiny majority in the House and are still preserving the filibuster in the Senate, and yet President Trump and the right-wing media are raising the base's expectations of what the GOP can accomplish. Now GOP voters expect DHS and ICE funding with no concessions (which can happen in a reconciliation bill, because a reconciliation bill can pass the Senate by a simple majority)and they expect passage of the maximal version of the SAVE Act, with all the extraneous anti-trans provisions Trump wants to attach to it (the Senate parliamentarian probably won't allow them to put every SAVE Act provision in a reconciliation bill, which must be budget-oriented).

Trump has ensured that anything less than 100% of this looks, to the base, like failure on the part of congressional Republicans -- months before the midterms.

Genius plan to demoralize your voters, Donnie. Have a nice November.

LEAKERS: "IT WASN'T ME"

Yesterday I told you about an NBC report that President Trump's primary source of information about the war in Iran is a daily good-news-only highlight reel that's prepared for him by CENTCOM.

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

... the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

Emily Horne, a former National Security Council and State Department official told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that she has a theory about this leak:

I’m going to tell you my little conspiracy theory about this story. I think this story is a White House plant....

You’ve got multiple sources, both current and former, who are all singing from the same sheet of music—which says to me, again, this is coordinated. This is a plan. So what does that tell us? That tells us that even though this is a story that on a casual read looks kind of embarrassing for the president—and is, I think, being treated as such on social media, like the president of the United States needs a greatest-hits compilation of CENTCOM strikes in order to understand how the war is going—I understand that reaction.

But to be clear, there’s a deeper message that I think they want planted in people’s minds, which is that this White House is now creating excuses for why the war is not going well and why the American people do not approve of this war. And one of the excuses that they are creating is, well, the president of the United States is not being fed good information by his military.

That is what they are trying to plant with this story, if—as I suspect—this is a planted story. They’re trying to create a paper trail and a narrative that says this is going badly not because Donald Trump made terrible decisions, but because his military leadership is not being honest with him about what is happening.

I think it's an attempt to shift blame, but I don't think it's necessarily President Trump and his inner circle trying to shift blame to the Pentagon. The leakers are likely to understand that while this might make the Pentagon look bad, it absolutely makes Trump look bad. Anyone who's paid attention to Trump's presidencies knows that he likes to be fed good news and he likes briefings that don't require him to read a lot of words. Here's an Atlantic story from January 2018:

Before [his first] inauguration, Trump told Axios, “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.” In February, The New York Times reported that National Security Council members had been instructed to keep policy papers to a single page and include lots of graphics and maps....

In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention.

I think the leakers are people who expect this story to make Trump and the Pentagon -- or at least the current Pentagon leadership -- look bad. Their purpose is to say, Don't blame us. Who might want to send that message? I'm not sure. Maybe Vice President Vance, who formerly positioned himself as an opponent of miltary adventurism? Maybe Marco Rubio, who's frustrated that the Iran war has postponed the overthrow of the Cuban government he longs for? Maybe Pentagon careerists who don't like Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense?

*****

I don't think Trump himself is setting Hegseth up as the fall guy. Zeteo's Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez write:

Trump has seemed eager to shift some credit (or blame, depending on who you ask) for his disastrous war in Iran to Hegseth. Earlier this week, the president said, “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Trump blames Hegseth for the war: "Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, 'Let's do it.'" pic.twitter.com/QBGeFuhM1M

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 23, 2026

But Trump's remark, in a Memphis speech on Monday, doesn't seem like blame to me. In fact, he portrays himself as the person who wanted to do something about Iran:

You know, our economy was fantastic. We had a Dow at 50,000. They say it couldn't happen in four years, it wouldn't happen during my term, but if I got anywhere close, it would be a great success. Well, in my first year, we hit 50,000. And with the S&P, they said -- even more difficult. They said it would be impossible to hit 7,000 on the S&P, and we hit that in our first term.

And then, unfortunately, I came -- I called Pete, I called General Caine, I called a lot of our great people. We have great people. And I said, let's talk. We got a problem in the Middle East. We have a country known as Iran that for 47 years has been just a purveyor of terror, and they're very close to having a nuclear weapon.

We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55,000 and 60,000. There's no end. Or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem. And, uh, Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up and you said, let's do it, because you can't let them have a nuclear weapon.

To me that's Trump saying, I, in my infinite wisdom, astutely recognized the threat from Iran, and Pete agreed that we needed to act.

Then I look at that Zeteo story, and I see this:

Donald Trump’s so-called “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has earned himself a new nickname, current and former US officials tell us. Among various staffers and officials working within the august confines of the Pentagon and Department of Defense, the former ‘Fox & Friends’ co-host and “death and destruction”-obsessed Trump acolyte is known as “Dumb McNamara.”

This is, of course, a reference to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, an architect of American military escalation in Vietnam who, despite his disastrous record, maintained a reputation as a brilliant, shrewd thinker. It is exceedingly hard to find anyone in the corridors of Washington power – or anywhere on the planet – who would label Hegseth a brilliant mind.

However, the nickname “Dumb McNamara” has spread within the US government due to Hegseth’s cheerleading of the war and bombing blitzes – overzealous bloodlust and enthusiasm for military fiasco that reminds American officials of, well, a very stupid version of Robert McNamara.

I suspect that there might be overlap between the "current and former US officials" who are leaking the words of "various staffers and officials" in the Pentagon and Defense Department to Zeteo and the "three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official" who are leaking to NBC. I think Defense careerists and/or disgruntled civilians in the White House are doing the leaking, not Trump loyalists.